On Sunday 09 February 2003 02:34 pm, Erik Moeller wrote:
No, because that name is used neither by scholars nor
the public. As I
wrote, I am not opposed to anglicization, and anglicization is by itself
not unscientific. (There are reasonable arguments that can be made against
it in the case of European languages, but I do not subscribe to those
arguments.) If there exist two different English terms, however, the one
which is correct should in most cases be used, provided it has already been
adopted by scholars.
Anglicization is the process by which foreign words are altered and enter into
common usage by English speakers. If you support this form of common usage
then why do you not support common usage when presented with two words which
are already in English?
I think we need to change our naming convention to use
the more correct
article title if everybody who knows the history of the term in question
agrees that it is correct; that is, if everybody who has a coherent POV on
the matter shares the same opinion. In other words, we should use
academically correct titles, not those which Google prefers.
Examples:
1) Ockham's Razor should not reside at Occam's Razor (Occam is the
latinization of the town name Ockham; the town still exists today).
2) Pennsylvania Dutch should be at Pennsylvania German (it is not Dutch at
all; the word is merely a corruption of "Deutsch" or "Dütsch").
.....
Hm. "more correct article title" Correct to whom? OIC to a small group of
people. That is hardly NPOV. Titles are /nominative/ - and that is their only
role. And as such, they should reflect what most people who are at all
familiar with the subject call it (unless the term is unreasonably
ambiguous).
Academics are harmed the least by this since they most definitely already know
what the common name of subjects are that they are experts on. But the
non-academic isn't going to necessarily know what that academics call the
subject. By extending the logic you propose all animals in Wikipedia should
be under their scientific names, [[Mark Twain]] would be under [[Samuel
Langhorn Clemens]], [[Linda Lovelace]] under [[Linda Boreman]], [[Billy the
Kid]] under [[William Henry Bonney]], [[Eva Peron]] under [[María Evita
Durante de Peron]], [[Marilyn Monroe]] under [[Norma Jeane Mortenson]].
It is also more academically correct to use somebody's real name, right? And
it is even /more/ academically correct to use their entire name, isn't it? Oh
yeah, it is also misleading to call an orca a killer whale since they are not
whales and the term "sea lion" is also misleading since these animals have
nothing to do with lions. Rubbish!
Academics also disagree -- which ones do we listen to? Many also prefer
foreign language forms. Should we use those because some academics think so?
Getting rid of the common usage naming convention opens the floodgates to
these type of arguments. By contrast trying to determine common usage is far
easier in most cases.
Abandoning common usage would make it more difficult to directly link to
articles and find them. Above all else the name we choose should be the one
that will attract the largest number of eyes and fill the largest number of
edit links -- without having to deal with redirects.
We are not writing an encyclopedia for academics and specialists, we are
witting an encyclopedia for use by the masses. As such the subjects they look
for should be at page titles that are recognizable by the largest number of
people (with a reasonable minimum amount of ambiguity). But after a title has
served its /one and only/ purpose (to get a person to the correct article),
/then/ we can explain why academics think why the page title is not correct
and then procede, where appropriate, to use what the academics in that field
think is the best term. So in the [[Linda Lovelace]] article her real last
name 'Boreman' is used, and in the [[Billy the Kid]] article 'Bonney' is
used
(although it is not certain whether that is correct though), and in [[Occam's
razor]] we use Ockham's razor.
Page titles should reflect common usage in order to ensure our content is
exposed to the largest possible audience. But once the person has the article
in front of them /then/ we educate them as to why some academics think the
common usage is not correct along with whatever else the article has to say.
So instead of hitting people over the head that are wrong by placing the
article at the academically correct title (giving them a jolt of surprise
when they are redirected from a title they know to a title they don't), we
allow them to land at the page title they know and then gently explain why
academics think the commonly used form is incorrect.
We are also not working with a static set of articles here and each article's
title serves as an example of our naming conventions to newbies. And one
thing I've noticed is that, in general, newbies don't know about or care to
use redirects.
So how about we support the naming convention, that if followed by reading the
naming convention or looking at examples, /naturally/ is the one that a new
contributor is most likely to use when creating a new page? People look for
things by the titles they already know - let's continue to follow this
natural tendency and not work against it, shall we?
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
WikiKarma:
[[February 3]] and all year pages linked from there and many of the other
articles.