Talk:Ronde van Vlaanderen
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[edit] Improper move
The article was moved (technical term on Wikipedia that practically means 'renamed') from 'Tour of Flanders' to 'Ronde van Vlaanderen'. The opening sentence now starts as: "The Ronde van Vlaanderen (English: Tour of Flanders)". This is not according to Wikipedia guidelines, the article should have its English name whenever that name is more common for speakers of English than the native name is to them. In this case, 82,000 'Tour of Flanders' Google hits against 36,000 for the native name – and the latter often hitting a secondary mentioning like "The Tour of Flanders (De Ronde Van Vlaanderen) 2006" – in English language pages prove the only correct title for the English language Wikipedia to be 'Tour of Flanders'. So, Mk3severo, please move the article back and invert its opening sentence; then replace 'Ronde van Vlaanderen' with 'Tour of Flanders', as it stood before, in all the articles that link to this article. I really feel sorry for your time (I know how it feels), but the specific Wikipedia:Naming conventions guideline is quite clear on this matter. — SomeHuman 6 Dec 2006 21:30 (UTC)
- Thanks for your input here. The move came about due to a few reasons so I'll first explain them and why some moving and renaming was necessary. WikiProject Cycling has an item on its to-do list to cleanup and consolidate racing related pages with a particular emphasis on the languages and spellings used for races. This highlighted some evident confusion, for example the Tour of Flanders main page used the English spelling, whereas the pages for the 2005 and 2006 editions were titled in the native language. Likewise, both names were used through biographical articles, indeed some articles used both names without alluding to that it is the same race. This situation was unacceptable as it caused confusion to casual readers, especially those who know little about cycling. For this reason, I felt changes were necessary. The Ronde van Vlaanderen/Tour of Flanders was not the worst at this: for the Vuelta al País Vasco, I counted eight different forms used.
- The titles Ronde van Vlaanderen and Tour of Flanders are both used in English, at least the UK English with which I am familiar. Searching for the exact term, in the English language with the caveat of excluding results which include the term Wikipedia, the Tour of Flanders gives 68,000 results of which 499 of the first 1000 are unique, and the Ronde van Vlaanderen gives 35,300 results of which 342 of the first 1000 are unique. Whilst as you mention the latter contain the native term as a secondary one, the former contains many that are based upon Wikipedia. As per the example given at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)#Borderline cases, I decided that such a result was not decisive, so intended to use judgement. Two reliable and independent sources, namely [1] and [2], both refer to the race as the Ronde van Vlaanderen. As such, I believe that a user would find the article title of Ronde van Vlaanderen least surprising and so I chose to go with that name.
- These are my reasons, which I maintain. Mk3severo 00:19, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
