Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Norse mythology)/Archive 3

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Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Contents

Proposal

See the project page.

Archives

Old poll

Support

This poll is over. Please express your thoughts outside the framework of a vote.

  1. Support. This is a workable and satisfactory compromise which will ensure that all representations of the names are accessible in the articles and that common English names like Thor and Odin are used where they exist. The guideline is explicitly based on and fully compliant with Use English. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 18:55, 17 November 2005 (UTC)
  2. Support, I think this is a good policy which is possible to follow. I'd also like to point out that there isn't anything else on the table except the horrible mishmash we have currently. Insisting that the mismash is better than a policy puts an unacceptable burden on the people who actually work on the articles. Settling this with a support vote is the only way forward. Stefán Ingi 19:58, 17 November 2005 (UTC)
  3. Support. This only elaborates further on the current Use English policy, Old Norse is obviously a Latin-alphabet language in the sense of that policy. --Bjarki 21:27, 17 November 2005 (UTC)
  4. Support. The situation is fairly simple, it seems to me: Old Norse is quite closely related to Old English. Modern scholarship considers Old English to be an earlier phase of English more than a distinct language (hence the name) and its spellings are used in the OED and other standard references. Old Norse spellings--unless there's a clearly standard modern English spelling as with Thor--should be used for the same reason. The proposed policy does not contradict existing policy at all, because the proposed spellings are, in fact, acceptable within English. Chick Bowen 01:25, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  5. Support, and I would add that it's perfectly OK to use œ in article titles (being part of WGL4 it will display on all modern Windows systems, and Macs and Linux as well). The use of œ as a ligature in French guarantees its wide availability in standard fonts on nearly all computer systems; in fact, historically it was originally intended to be part of Latin-1 (in the spots currently occupied by multiplication and division symbols) but was removed in the late stages on the grounds that it was a ligature in French rather than a letter. The technical limitations preventing its use in Wikipedia titles were removed in June (the transition from Latin-1 to Unicode). Today there is no such technical limitation. -- Curps 01:47, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
    It is not a technical issue it is a cultural issue "œ" is not usually used in English "oe" is, I do not understand why you wish to force unusual constructs into this encyclopedia. Philip Baird Shearer
    Yes, most of it is a cultural issue, but some of it is a technical issue. Curps is probably referring to a line in our old guideline which dated from the pre-unicode days. At that time it was indeed problematic to use œ in article titles but that's not so anymore, as he notes. - Haukur Þorgeirsson
  6. Strong support, the important thing is that we use characters that display on everyones system, and which are the ones most commonly used to represent the subject. That way w have the least confusion on the part of the readers. When in doubt, I'd rather we erred using the actual characters, rather than some bastardi-- anglicization ;) Sam Spade 06:48, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  7. Support. As the guide now includes specifications for all versions of the name to appear in the article and the most common Anglicized versions on the first line of the article, I can support this convention. However as there is not going to be a consensus on this convention, perhaps as a compromise the name of the article should use the same naming scheme, ("Old Norse spelling") but the article be named using the "simple transliteration scheme for determining this privileged anglicized form" (Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Norse mythology)/Archive 2#Philip's changes) with the "Old Norse spelling" letters as the first alternative on the first line of the article. If this compromise is attractive to anyone (else), I suggest that poll is turned into an approval vote with that as an option. --Philip Baird Shearer 10:31, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
    It's a tad problematic to set up an approval vote once 12 people have already voted, there's no guarantee that they'll be willing to come again to look at more options so that unfairly privileges the original option. Let's keep this running for a few days and if it fails we can set up a new vote with new options, is that okay with you? - Haukur Þorgeirsson
  8. Support, proposed policy is entirely in keeping with current Wikipedia policy: use English when an English name exists (Odin, Thor), use the native name where no English name exists (Veðrfölnir). The only thing I'm not thrilled about is replacing the ǫ with ö, as doing so is simply replacing Old Norse orthography with Modern Icelandic orthography. I'd much rather Veðrfölnir was at Veðrfǫlnir. --User:Angr/talk 11:12, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
    In an ideal world I'd like that too. Maybe in a few years when ǫ is better supported... At any rate there should be a redirect, creating it now. - Haukur
    I don't think that, "use English when an English name exists (Odin, Thor), use the native name where no English name exists (Veðrfölnir)," accurately reflects what this guideline proposes. As it stands now, it says something more like: if more than one Anglicized form exists, use the native name (Hǫðr, Baldr)
    Hmm... That was not what I intended it to mean. Certainly multiple Anglicized forms exist for many names - you see "Odinn", "Othin", "Óthin" etc. sometimes - but "Odin" is overwhelmingly most common. On the other hand "Balder", "Baldur" and "Baldr" are fairly close in usage statistics. When I manhandle Google, anyhow :) - Haukur Þorgeirsson 21:14, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
  9. very sensible, but I don't see why a vote is even necessary, since it is pretty much an application of existing policy to the case of Norse names. If I hear much more talk of "English vs. non-English characters" (English is a language, Chrissake, not a character set, and Norse names are not English, and won't be even if you spell them in purely English futhorc)I'm going to throw a fit, so I'll leave this discussion to others. dab (ᛏ) 12:49, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
    And yet somehow that article is not at ᚠᚢᚦᚩᚱᚳ... perhaps it needs correction? --Tabor 14:39, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  10. Support: I was reluctant at first, given a misleading comment on my User Talk page, as I thought this "Old Icelandic spelling" idea would apply to all articles, even for well-known things like Odin and Thor, but it does seem quite reasonable. I don't understand the argument that there are standard English spellings, as only five or six seem to be consistently spelt - beyond Odian and Thor, I can think of Asgard, Midgard, Valhalla, Tyr and some that are the same as in Old Norse anyway... elvenscout742 13:26, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  11. Support Seems like a workable compromise Fornadan (t) 17:58, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  12. Support. This proposal simply codifies existing naming conventions, and it boggles the mind why some people are getting so upset about it.--Sean|Black 20:00, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  13. Support, simple as that... --Sterio 20:58, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  14. Support: English does not mean ignorant. --Lysy (talk) 23:57, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  15. Support, we need a standard, and we can't make everyone happy.--Wiglaf 02:10, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
  16. Support, makes perfect sense to me. Articles will be locatable whether you use English or Norse spellings. dramatic 02:25, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
  17. Support, though I'm not sure why we need a guideline on this. I will bow to the editors who actually work on these artcles: if they think it's necessary, I can't see that it does any harm. Physchim62 (talk) 11:27, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
  18. Support, we need a standard. Introgressive 13:09, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
  19. Support: as long as we create redirects from all common transliterations and mention them on the first line, I think this works well. —Matthew Brown (T:C) 20:49, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
    Definitely - David Gerard 13:29, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
  20. Support - this also matches current convention for other Latin-alphabet languages with some letters not found in English (e.g. Polish). Try getting them to change - David Gerard 13:29, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
  21. Support per Morven. As long as all transliterations are redirected I have no problem with this. Follows naming conventions. - Mgm|(talk) 13:35, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
  22. Support — a good, clear, workable standard, and redirects can be created for those who prefer to avoid using heathen unAmerican characters ➥the Epopt 14:01, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
  23. Support I agree with many of the reasons provided by the oppose voters, but with the use of redirects this whole matter almost becomes a non-issue. I support having a redirect from every possible transliteration. Carbonite | Talk 14:22, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
  24. What Carbonite and Mgm said. Besides, it just makes sense. Johnleemk | Talk 14:26, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
  25. Support. I would probably err on the side of using English names where any reasonable one exists (even if it is not 100% standardized), but I agree with the general outline of the policy as stated. --Delirium 17:48, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
  26. Support of course I understand that this is an "english" Wikipedia of course. However, the usage of non-english words is common use here. Or would anyone for example propose to get rid of the Umlauts ä, as well, or the accents like é? I don't read Runes or know how to properly pronounce those funky Nordic words, but I think a redirect would be just fine. No one is proposing to use natives names for all the articles, or to use Chinese or Arabic script, but I think this exception is not only feasible, but desirable. I support it, and hope that users would open their minds up more to learn new things such scripts. I am certainly keen on it. Gryffindor 18:41, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
  27. Support! It would be nice to see þis letter returnéd to its proper use in English, anyhow! --FOo 07:17, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
  28. Support per Haukur. u p p l a n d 09:20, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
  29. Support with one exception The o-ogonek-character comes in two flavours, with or without an acute accent. The distinction disappeared relatively early, but the two varieties have different origins, and in very old poetry that matters. o-ogonek eventually became ö and o-ogonek with an accent merged with á, it is true, but why not keep them as in the standardized Old Norse spelling? Computers will catch up, sooner than later, as has already happened with æ and œ. Unicode will take over eventually, and we are not talking about a very long time here, so why not let Wikipedia be prepared for that, instead of having to overhaul the whole thing, when most people can see the characters? Articles regarding matters involving non-western concepts already use the correct spelling in the appropriate alphabet, although not as the dictionary form, but Old Icelandic is represented in toto in the ISO-Western something or other. So let's stick to the standardized versions. All the best. Io 20:00, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
  30. Support I like Þ :) Arndisdunja 20:08, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Oppose

This poll is over. Please express your thoughts outside the framework of a vote.

  1. I strongly object to calling this policy. It contradicts existing policy, and the concerns of those who think we should keep that policy of naming things in the English alphabet on the English Wikipedia are still being ignored here. - CDThieme 01:07, 17 November 2005 (UTC)
    STRONGLY oppose also, per Winston Churchill, despite Haukurth's misreading of existing guidelines and misunderstanding as to what is and is not part of the modern English alphabet. No Account 18:12, 17 November 2005 (UTC) Alleged sockpuppet of User:CDThieme, removing from count.
  2. Oppose. There's much less reason to standardize on 13th century Icelandic spelling than to standardize on 13th century English spelling (which wasn't standardized anyway) on articles dealing with England. Furthermore, this page is much too cluttered with statements and promises contrary to the actual proposal for this to be a truly valid vote in any case. Gene Nygaard 02:02, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
    Haukur Þorgeirsson has pointed out to me that what we are voting on is not what used to appear on this page under the header proposal, but rather the entire project page. He's also made that much clearer here. My vote stands for the time being. There should be more clarification of what is found in the archives (is it only the last one that deals mostly with the current incarnation of the proposal, for example?). I don't like the idea of specifying "Odin" and "Thor" as if they are the only ones with English spellings. No matter what the rest of the detailed explanation says, that's what the extremists are going to latch onto.Gene Nygaard 02:40, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
    Yeah, sorry about that. This was indeed completely confusing. The youngest archive contains discussion surrounding the current proposal. It also contains some ideas from me on where to draw the line - I would include not only Thor and Odin but also at least Valhalla, Asgard and Midgard under those anglicized forms. We will still probably end up arguing about where exactly to draw the line but I think this convention would be better than nothing. - Haukur Þorgeirsson
  3. STRONG oppose here, as the policy goes against all Wikipedia policies on naming conventions (claims that "there are no standrad English forms" are completely bogus) and forces the ENGLISH language Wikipedia to adopt foreign language words for article names when perfectly good English language ones exist. Furthermore, I find this whole process rather troubling, the page is cluttered and insane to follow, and frankly WIKIPEDIA ALREADY HAS A NAMING POLICY IN EFFECT, SO WE SHOULD USE IT INSTEAD OF COMING UP WITH SOME CONTRARION POLICY OUT OF NOWHERE. This is freaking absurd, and the people who came up with it should be told in no uncertain terms that they can;t pull stunts like this. DreamGuy 02:18, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  4. Oppose. I do not think that article names in an English language encyclopedia should ever use non-English letters. An encyclopedia is by its nature a work intended for a general audience. Dsmdgold 02:52, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  5. Strong oppose. This is the English Wikipedia, and this proposal flies in the face of long-established English Wikipedia policy. If you want to name things by Norse names, go to the Norse language Wikipedias, but the English Wikipedia uses English names when they exist. User:Zoe|(talk) 03:17, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  6. Oppose. The page is plainly bad writing, makes unfounded assumptions ("Wikipedia=Academic resource"?), doesn't make clear where *exactly* it proposes exceptions to the use English principle, lacks practicality (for those who aren't already scholar on the subject before arriving here), etc... I vote for changing the content of this page to "#redirect wikipedia:naming conventions (use English)" --Francis Schonken 12:26, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  7. STRONG oppose, as per Dsmdgold. Marco79 14:31, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
    Account created today, apparently to vote on WP:RM issues. Normally we only accept votes from established users. - Haukur Þorgeirsson
  8. Oppose. The proposal states, and seems to be based on the idea, that "Wikipedia is intended to be an academic resource" this is a misconception, Wikipedia is meant to be a resource accessible to all. - SimonP 16:08, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  9. Oppose. Use English says use the Latin Alphabet, which says [the characters in question] are no longer a part of the Latin alphabet as used in English. The article name should be a transliteration (Philip's proposal looks reasonable), and the article body should include the original spelling in the first line (original spelling should also exist as a redirect). -- Rick Block (talk) 17:53, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  10. Srongly Oppose the use of exotic non-English characters as if they were a normal part of the alphabet. older≠wiser 00:08, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
  11. Oppose: While I appreciate that Haukur would like to standardize these things and I appreciate the work he has done, the most common usage in English is not something that can be determined by rules from other languages and not something that should be overridden in choosing names of articles. Even setting aside the issue of non-English characters, having read the discussion pages here it seems this proposal would precipitate lots of moves from fairly common English names, including moving Balder yet again, and this is just not something I can support. Where an English name exists, let's use it, as per current guidelines. Jonathunder 15:40, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
    Srongly oppose mandating moving articles like Balder to non-English titles. Tree&Leaf 23:34, 21 November 2005 (UTC) Alleged sockpuppet of User:CDThieme, removing from count.
  12. Strongesest oppose we shouldn't use the characters that have a high chance of not being displayed properly in the titles of articles.  Grue  15:54, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
  13. Oppose for the reason stated above; this is an English language wikipedia. Redirects from the Norse to the English would make sense to me, to facilitate both searches; this seems common enough elsewhere in WP. Colonel Tom 02:17, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
  14. Oppose My view is that the general english reader will not wish to learn to read a new set of characters from the outset of an article. I believe it would be very off-putting. On that basis, while it is important that the standardised Norse orthography is recorded in articles, and possibly even explained, article titles should not use unfamiliar letter forms that are not easily decipherable into known components. A pity, since I like characters like eth and thorn. WLD 14:54, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
    Oppose English names are not subject to standardisation--that's not how English works--and we should title articles in English when possible. Longboat Alleged sockpuppet of User:CDThieme, removing from count.
    Oppose mandating an Old Norse spelling for an article name in cases where an English one is more common. Quintusdecimus 00:08, 26 November 2005 (UTC) Alleged sockpuppet of User:CDThieme, removing from count.
  15. Oppose. Use English names and English letters in English Wikipedia. --Henrygb 17:57, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Neutral

This poll is over. Please express your thoughts outside the framework of a vote.

  1. Neutral Because somewhat opposed to the assertion that alternate English spellings, even when in common general use, mean that the Old Norse name must be used. (In particular the wording "When one particular Anglicized form for a name is overwhelmingly most common" and "no particular Anglicized form can be said to be in common use in everyday English".) Further comments in discussion below. --Tabor 14:10, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
  2. Neutral The proposed standard will muddle what potentially could be a case that sets a precedent for other articles in the English Wikipidia that deal with non-English topics. I would prefer to see a proposal that goes to one extreme or another: use either the standard conventions used by scholars to properly write Old West Norse/Old Icelandic terms in English, or use *one* set of English transliterations for all of those terms, and then set up as many redirects as is feasible for other known variants.--P.MacUidhir (t) (c) 15:58, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Polls are evil

This evil poll is over but please feel free to express your opinion.

  1. Don't vote on issues that obviously haven't been settled. Any suggestion that has this little support is a compromise in name only. Hell, if it was a proper compromise it wouldn't have to be voted on in the first place. / Peter Isotalo 14:14, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Discussion

Transliteration in article titles?

As there is not going to be a consensus on this convention, perhaps as a compromise the name of the article should use the same naming scheme, ("Old Norse spelling") but the article be named using the "simple transliteration scheme for determining this privileged anglicized form" (Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Norse mythology)/Archive 2#Philip's changes) with the "Old Norse spelling" letters as the first alternative on the first line of the article. If this compromise is attractive to anyone (else), I suggest that poll is turned into an approval vote with that as an option. --Philip Baird Shearer 10:31, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

To make this change I think only the last section of the convention needs to be changed to this:

For the names of relatively obscure characters, places or artifacts it is usually the case that no particular Anglicized form can be said to be in common use in everyday English, while English speaking scholars will use the standardized Old Norse spelling. For example Veðrfölnir is not familiar to the general English speaking public or even casual readers of mythology. The name can be Anglicized a number of ways (Vethrfolnir, Vedhrfolnir etc.) and no particular form is likely to be considered familiar. In which case the standardized Old Norse spelling of names will be used for the page name with the following transliteration:
  • á > a
  • é > e
  • í > i
  • ó > o
  • ú > u
  • ý > y
  • ð > d
  • þ > th
  • œ > oe
  • æ > ae
  • ö > o
In these cases the Old Norse spelling of the name should appear on the first line of the article.

Although some other paragraphs may need to be tweaked I think this gives a good indication of how a compromise might be constructed --Philip Baird Shearer 11:07, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

This "compromise" might only possibly be acceptable if it was limited to:

  • ð > d
  • þ > th

But even here it would be preferable to use these in the titles, which seems to be the majority (if not unanimous) opinion, using redirects and possibly {{foreignchar}}.

Regarding letters with diacritics and œ, æ, there is no reason at all not to use them as-is in the title. The use of diacritics in article titles is well-established and longstanding, particularly for Latin-1 diacritics which have been available for years (since the start of Wikipedia). The only non-Latin-1 diacritic in the list is œ, but since this is in WGL4 it is very widely available on Windows, Mac and Linux.

I put "compromise" in quotation marks, because this is simply your original position that you have held all along: you wish to eliminate all "foreign squiggles" from article titles. So I don't understand on what grounds you label this a "compromise". -- Curps 21:24, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

I, too, see no need to render something like Skírnismál or Bifröst without the diacritical marks. I'll agree that there's a somewhat better case for transliterating 'þ' (and maybe 'ð'). We discussed doing something like that way back in the archives above but it ends up as one of those compromises that everyone hates. The basic problem is that we'd get bastardized forms like 'Hödr' which still look foreign and "squiggly" to people who want to use only the English alphabet and still look inaccurate and annoying to people who want to see the original forms. Still, forms like that do see some usage - Britannica, for example, has its entry under "Höd". - Haukur Þorgeirsson 22:34, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Curps. This convention is not only to do with the characters used to spell the name it is also to do with the type of spelling to use: "Old Norse spelling". This compromise keeps the spelling but with full transliteration so that "those who think we should keep that policy of naming things in the English alphabet on the English Wikipedia are still being ignored here" (CDThieme) are accommodated. Personally providing the most common 26 letter English name appears on the first line of the article and there is a redirect with that spelling I do not mind which spelling is used for the article name. this is already in the convention, which is why I can support it. I would have hoped that the clause "with the "Old Norse spelling" letters as the first alternative on the first line of the article" would cover your desire to have the word appear in Old Norse, which I happen to think is a useful and educational, and so desirable. As it stands at the moment either a compromise has to be found or this convention will not get a consensus worth the name. Are you so wedded to diacritics in the name of the article, that you would rather this convention is not implemented rather than compromise? --Philip Baird Shearer 08:51, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Your idea is perfectly reasonable, Philip, but I doubt it would gather a larger majority in favor of it than the present proposal. The present proposal is already too much of a compromise for Pádraic who wants to use Old Norse forms throughout (see our exchange on our talk pages). And I doubt Curps, Stefán Ingi and others would support moving Völuspá (the form Britannica uses) to Voluspa. Your suggestion also has the disadvantage that it is very far removed from the present situation and would involve a large number of moves - many of which would require administrator assistance. The present proposal, on the other hand, is a rough description of the facts on the ground as they are - most of the work involved in implementing it will be in consistently inserting Anglicized forms in the article leads.
I personally agree more and more with you, Philip, on the importance of listing all representations of a title. After all the whole idea behind using common names is that "[t]his makes it easy to find, and easy to compare information with other sources." (WP:UE). I just tried a little experiment. Go to britannica.com and search for "seid". You'll get nothing. Try "seidr" too. Again, nothing. Seith? Seith? Goose egg. Only by searching for the standardized Old Norse form "seiðr" will you get to their information on the subject. This sucks. We want to make sure that people searching for any of those forms on Wikipedia will find what they're looking for. I've already inserted information on different Anglicizations into our article but we still need to create redirects - (and, yes, I would also like to move the article to the standardized Old Norse spelling, I'm not trying to hide that). - Haukur Þorgeirsson 10:05, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

The rendering of 'æ' in Britannica's name

By the way, I have spotted an article which egregiously violates your compromise above: Encyclopædia Britannica. There is even an illustration at that article which clearly indicates that the correct spelling is "Encyclopaedia Britannica"! Philip, can we count on you to vigorously pursue this matter at Wikipedia:Requested moves? -- Curps 21:28, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

I am only half kidding by the way. Actually, no, I'm not kidding at all. I fully expect you to exert at least the same effort to "correct" Encyclopædia Britannica as you have expended here and at other articles, if not more. After all, the Britannica page is much higher-profile than obscure Norse mythology pages, so your campaign to stamp out non-ASCII letters should begin there, as it's a much higher priority. And I would certainly hope and expect many of the other naysayers will join you in the Britannica renaming campaign. If you fail to do so, we'd have to draw some unfortunate conclusions. -- Curps 21:37, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
I understand your frustration. I, too, feel like we keep going back to square one in this argument. But I think you're being a bit too critical of Philip here. If you check the archives you'll see that he's been participating reasonably and productively in the discussion here. He even wrote part of the current proposal. While I think he would, in the end, prefer a convention which mandated English-alphabet-without-diacritics renderings for all article titles he's been gracious enough to work on a compromise here and support the current proposal - not least because it will ensure prominent English alphabet renderings of titles with non-English (non-ASCII) characters, something he's been seeking for some time at WP:UE and elsewhere. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 22:34, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
He's on record as firmly opposing "æ" and has proposed a compromise that would change it to "ae". Fair enough. This principle equally applies to non-foreign topics as well, since his agenda is purely linguistic and orthographic and in no way anti-foreign. I believe he will make a sincere, good-faith and tenacious effort to "correct" Encyclopædia Britannica (which I will naturally oppose, my views on this are well known). By his usual standands, this will involve writing many thousands of words and spending weeks if not months to pursue this. We should expect no less. -- Curps 23:24, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
facade --Philip Baird Shearer 08:18, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
Indeed - I'm more used to the ç-spelling but since it is a common noun and not a name I don't care one way or another what the title of that article is. A more interesting example might be Façade (Interactive Story) - the title of a project recently developed in the United States by native English speakers which still has a diacritical mark in its name. I would oppose a move to Facade (Interactive Story). - Haukur Þorgeirsson 13:47, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

First of all, Philip, you failed to address the main point. If you can live with "æ" in Britannica, why not in Norse names? Answer that or drop your opposition.

Regarding facade/façade, that's not a proper noun or official name of something, it's merely a dictionary word; however, where used as part of a proper noun or official name of something (as pointed out in Haukur's example) we need to respect the official spelling.

However note that the dictionary lists "outré" and "soupçon" as English words, and here (according to m-w.com (Merriam-Webster) and the Random House dictionary and the American Heritage dictionary as per dictionary.com), the spelling with diacritics is the only spelling. Any letter that is used to spell English words must be part of the English alphabet, and thus we can conclude that "ç" and "é" are not "foreign squiggles" at all, but part of the family.

And regarding use of "ö" in Norse names, please note that this very character can be seen in the somewhat old-fashioned but still perfectly valid spelling variant "coöperation". Note that this "ö" is a purely English letter: the original French is coopération, with plain "o". Again, if this letter can validly be used in a purely English spelling, why not in Norse names?

-- Curps 06:23, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Yes, the ö is indeed English, but this ö is different than the Norse ö. (The Unicode Consortium failed to make the distinction, btw.)
In English, as in French, the diacritic above the o is a diaeresis (or tréma in French), not an umlaut. It indicates that the vowel letter with this diacritic is to be pronounced separately from the preceding vowel letter. The diaeresis can, of course, go above any vowel letter, not just "o", provided that there is another vowel letter immediately preceding it. For example, "reënter" would also be a valid use of the diaeresis.
As for the English "coöperation" vs French "coopération", French does not have an "oo" diphthong/vowel, so "oo" would be two vowels in French; there is no ambiguity and so no tréma is needed. In contrast, English has an "oo"; to indicate that this is "o" followed by another "o" (instead of the "oo" sound everyone would expect), either a diaeresis or a hyphen is (or was) used to separate the two "o"'s.—Gniw (Wing) 07:31, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
Of course I'm aware of that, but the Unicode consortium made the right call. Otherwise we'd have umlaut-ö, diaeresis-ö and separate-letter-ö (Swedish/Finnish/etc) as distinct code points, with very little likelihood that users would bother to distinguish them. It's the same letter, just used differently. -- Curps 09:17, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

I tried to keep my answer to one word! Now one link Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (use English)#The English alphabet includes diacritics --Philip Baird Shearer 10:26, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

It so rarely happens that you are at a loss for words that an unkind person would wonder why.
Please answer the question. -- Curps 17:03, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
I have to say that I find this last message very unhelpful and would much prefer if the question of who supports which method of writing a particular Latin word would be dropped from the discussion of Norse mythology names. We are trying to build a consensus about a particular issue, that is much more likely to happen if we try stick to the point and don't drag everything and their š into it. :) Stefán Ingi 19:26, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Competing Anglicizations

I wish to comment on the standard of "When one particular Anglicized form for a name is overwhelmingly most common and well known". This has in the past been applied to mean that if there are alternate spellings in English, even when two or more variants are quite common in English, that this means the Old Norse form need be used. I tend to disagree with this. Consider a related example: a city in Belgium, that is in English commonly referred to as Bruges or Brugge. I would not take the fact that there are two forms in English as a strong reason to put the article at the Old Norse form Bryggje, the source of the city's name. I tend to see names from mythology in the same way. The fact that there may be more than one spelling in general use in English is not in itself cause to place an entry in the Old Norse orthography. --Tabor 13:56, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

A reasonable opinion, to be sure. Importantly the Old Norse word is never used for the city nowadays whereas the Old Norse forms of mythology names are used in English scholarship and sometimes elsewhere. I personally like the idea of using the original form when there is no common Anglicized form or when there is no dominant English form. For example the old Anglicized form Balder, the original Old Norse Baldr and the modern Icelandic form Baldur are all widely used in English (see Talk:Balder for some Google games). In that case I preferred to use the Old Norse name. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 14:08, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
This idea is fundamentally flawed... The existence of more than one English spelling shows that the old archaic Icelandic version is not the most commonly supported... What you are trying to argue is that since the names sometimes vary that we should use the version you want. You can;t make up the rules like that, it's insane. We need to pick the most common English-language version, per Wikipedia naming convenetions and COMMON SENSE. The fact that you come from Iceland and prefer your old versions does not mean you get to overrule the entire English language. The entire concept of what you are trying to do goes completely against everything this encyclopedia stands for. DreamGuy 18:03, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
DreamGuy, your words are quite hostile in tone and form. Insinuations and accusations are inappropriate conduct here. Haukur Þorgeirsson's personal preferences as well as his national origin are not relevant to this discussion, and you references to such are rather close to ad hominem attacks. As for "making up rules"- of course he is. That is the entire nature of this debate: developing conventions used to edit articles. Any rule governing the organisation and/or formatting of information is an artificial construct, and Haukur is trying to propose one that might make editing easier. He can and will make up rules just like every other human being does. Whether those rules have any validity outside of one person's life or perceptions is what is being discussed here. If the proposal fails, fine. We will make a different one that has a broader base of consensus. The proposal is not necessarily what Haukur wants. It is a rough compromise between the standard scholarly conventions used for Old West Norse/Old Icelandic spellings in modern works and concessions made to make relevant articles more accessible to uneducated users of Wikipedia. P.MacUidhir (t) (c) 22:06, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Academic resource

Hmm... Didn't remember writing that "academic resource" part which two people have taken objection to - but clearly I did! You're quite right, that's a rather weird thing to say without at least qualifying it somehow or explaining what it's supposed to mean. I'm slightly reluctant to change the wording while the voting is going on but this could do with some revision. I'm going to sleep on it. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 02:58, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

I just changed it to "educational resource" which is hopefully uncontroversial and is closer to what I meant anyhow (though not quite it either). - Haukur Þorgeirsson 01:33, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
  1. No, without knowing what you actually meant, the text as you now propose it still makes an unsupported extrapolation of WP:NOT/wikipedia:what wikipedia is. E.g. "Wikipedia is not a tutorial" is contained in Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not#Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information: this section indicates that if you want to contribute to an "educational resource", Wikibooks is the place to be, and not "Wikipedia".
    • Okay, what wording would be acceptable to you? "Since Wikipedia is a place where people come to find out about stuff etc."? - Haukur Þorgeirsson
    • Really, I have no idea what you actually meant, so how could I find a wording for it? If pressed to express what I think you probably actually meant, then I suppose I think you wanted to express something that is a questionable foundation for a guideline anyway. So I suppose that paragraph should better be removed, which, then, shows that the rationale of the guideline is not as firm as it is presented now. --Francis Schonken 13:28, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
    What I wanted to say is basically that we want Wikipedia to be a place where people can come for reliable, well-sourced information based on up-to-date scholarship - not inaccurate unsourced crap based on popularizations like you can find at Encyclopedia Mythica. The wording "academic resource" was not well chosen to express that. - Haukur Þorgeirsson
  2. As for the letter "Þ"/"þ", that's the one I think most problematic - it fails Wikipedia:Naming conventions, as it has very low "recognisability"; "ð" is more recognisable to me as it resembles the Greek letter "δ", but since "δ" is too "unrecognisable" to figure in page names (except for redirects), I don't see why we should put up with "ð". "þ"/"Þ" is completely out of the question as far as I'm concerned: the fact that it is used in one of the "ancestors" of the English language is not really an argument that stands: the basic Naming conventions principle, as I quote it from the "official policy" page is:

    Generally, article naming should give priority to what the majority of English speakers would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature.

    I really don't see how that principle could be stretched to include "Þ"/"þ".
    • We're already using Þþ consistently for Icelandic names (browse the Icelandic people categories). While thorn is not recognized by a high percentage of the English speaking population as a whole it is recognized by a much higher percentage of those who care about Icelandic or Old Norse topics. Exactly what the percentage is I do not know but it's clear that a significant number of the readers of those articles will not be familiar with the letter. That's why I think we need transliterated versions and Anglicized versions in the lead of the articles and why I think it's a good idea to include the same in parentheses in other articles where the name is quoted. Transliterating "þ" and "ð" and not "ö", "á" etc. is a proposal which we have discussed but very few people like it. Incidentally, what are your opinions on ß in article titles - as in Straße des 17. Juni? - Haukur Þorgeirsson
    • Don't deform the official policy: the official policy is to have the best recognisable version as article title, and the less recognisable alternative mentioned in the first paragraph. Please, there's no "consensus" to do otherwise. If this proposal is a "back door" procedure to get approval for an exception to "Naming conventions" for Icelandic names in general, this only proves my next point: the proposal is too vague: it's not clear about its real objectives.
    I don't really see there is much point in arguing what the official policy is. I think the situation regarding that is perhaps best described by pointing out that both sides of the argument claim they have the baking of the policy. Let me just say that this standard is only about Norse mythology, it is not intended for use on anything else, in particular it will not be used to claim anything, one way or another, about the titles of articles relating to modern day Iceland. My feeling is that it is mostly being proposed because Haukur doesn't like working in the vacuum of not knowing which titles to put on articles. I can very much sympathise with that feeling although I don't share it exactly. I do however feel very much inclined to support the position of the people who have the most history of working on the articles so we can let them keep on making our Wikipedia great. Stefán Ingi 14:53, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
  3. Further, my basic objection to the proposal remains that the text of the proposed guideline is a very unclear piece of prose: there's no practical guideline about what to do when, e.g. no How to discern "established" names from non-established ones - there's so much vagueness, that it seems like signing a cheque for which the amount is not yet defined. Please, I didn't see a real reply to that objection yet. I think that as long as this guideline proposal fails clarity and practicality, it should not be adopted. --Francis Schonken 11:31, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
    • Yes, it's a bit vague. This was intentional, the thing was intended as a guideline rather than a fixed-in-stone device to answer every question. I thought that a slightly vague convention would have a better chance of getting support than a very precise one. Personally I feel that WP:UE is extremely vague and verges on being meaningless. It tells us to use the most common English name where one exists but tells us nothing about how common a name must be to qualify for this. See the Talk:Úbeda page for a long-standing débâcle on this. Philip argued (per WP:UE) that we should use the most common English form - which he argued (convincingly, if not absolutely irrefutably) was without the accent. Others argued (per WP:UE) that no transliteration is needed for Latin alphabet names. Since WP:UE can't answer a simple straightforward question like that I don't see how redirecting to it will solve our vagueness problems here. Thanks for discussing this with us. - Haukur Þorgeirsson
    • On the point of "getting more support" I can only agree that that seems to work (that is: as far as the voting now proceeds). I have another criterion: how much "problematic areas" does it solve? If it isn't a real solution to any problem, I might suggest rather to include it in the "Wikipedia essays" category. Some of these in the end appear to contribute to the solving of problematic areas, for example, the wikipedia:content forking essay is currently proceding to be merged with an existing guideline.
    • Re. WP:UE - I have often felt the urge to start rewriting that guideline: it has the gaps you mention. However, since I'm not a native English speaker I'm sure it would be very odd if I did a major rewrite of that guideline. Surely there are enough native English speakers at English wikipedia who could do that? Anyway, if nothing happens, I'll post an invitation to wikipedia:village pump (policy) to that effect soon!
    • Don't confuse "practicality" with "fixed in stone": the latter is rather an indication of a "prescriptive" guideline: that doesn't work all that well for wikipedia policies and guidelines, see Wikipedia:How to create policy#Guidelines for creating policies and guidelines - the art of writing wikipedia guidelines involves the art of being able to write "flexible" guidelines - yet, practical guidelines.
    • True. I do think that the proposal is reasonably practical and that most people will interpret it to mean approximately the same thing. At any rate my most vehement critics here seem to put the same meaning into it as I do. If it was a completely impractical, quasi-meaningless, wishy-washy non-convention it wouldn't have generated this sort of opposition. - Haukur Þorgeirsson
    • Here's a practical suggestion, to improve this if you want to make it a guideline: use examples, lots of examples - and explain how these relate to the guideline principles, so that if someone encounters a name that is not in the examples list, the judiciously chosen examples make nonetheless clear to that person how the new case should be handled. --Francis Schonken 13:28, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
    • If you look in the archives you'll see that I suggested a quantitative test to quickly determine whether a "common English name" existed. I would have very much liked to add that to the proposal but no-one commented on it so I didn't. You're right that examples would be good, the only thing that worried me about that is that the discussion would get bogged down in discussing some particular example rather than the general idea. Here are some examples of article titles from my interpretation of the convention: Thor, Odin, Asgard, Midgard, Valhalla, Valkyrie, Loki, Frigg, Freyja, Freyr, Ragnarök, Völuspá, Skírnismál, Eikþyrnir, Bifröst, Veðrfölnir, Höðr, Lóðurr, Þrymskviða, Hávamál, Gleipnir, Litr, Hel, Jötunheimr, Brísingamen, Hœnir, Ægir, Gjallarhorn. Just about all of those articles are already where the convention (or my interpretation of it) says they should be. There's some work to do, however, in liberally adding redirects and prominently listing alternative Anglicizations in the articles as the convention calls for. - Haukur Þorgeirsson
    • predetermined size for a "quantitative test" is a bad idea for a convention. It opens up a whole new area to argue over and anyone who disagrees would not be inclined to be bound by it. --Philip Baird Shearer 15:45, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Let's not muck with Loki

Just don't muck with Loki. I know you are not planning to, but in any case he's one guy not to muck with any way you look at it. He also, by the way - or someone with his name - piloted a TWA Lockheed with me aboard in a terrible snowstorm, Dec 1959, (they had bumped about half the passengers off to reduce take-off weight in Philadelphia.) I didn't mess with Loki, and he took us on a safe trip, with co-pilot Copher and stewardesses (as they were called in 1959) Dolan and Teboe. Carrionluggage 01:20, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't plan on mucking with him - in fact I added a nice illustration of him holding his net on his article. The standardized Old Norse spelling of the name is "Loki" and that's the most common English rendering too. Some old English works use "Loke" but you don't see that a lot nowadays. Glad you made it through the storm :) - Haukur Þorgeirsson 01:24, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Some clarifications - please consider reading this if you're voting

Okay, as discussed above I think there's something to what Francis is saying about the proposed convention being vague. I don't want to mislead anyone and I don't want anyone to vote on false premises so here are some clarifications.

  • The convention does propose to keep using the characters þ, ð, œ, æ, ö, á, é, í, ú, ó and ý in article titles like Þrymskviða, Veðrfölnir, Skírnismál and Eikþyrnir. If you don't like this you should consider not supporting the proposal.
  • It does propose to use standard Old Norse spelling in some cases where a Google search might yield more hits for some Anglicized form. For example I get 592 English Google hits for Þrymskviða and 911 English Google hits for Thrymskvida. If you would prefer to go by the more popular (on Google) form in cases like this you should probably not be supporting the proposal.

Personally I think that using 'þ', even though it is unfamiliar to many readers, will not cause significant problems because redirects will always be used and the reader will always be immediately presented with a transliterated and/or Anglicized form as well. However, if you would strongly prefer always to transliterate 'þ' you should consider voting against this proposal.

I also think that a few thousand Google hits do not establish the existence of a "commonly used English name". Thor and Odin get hundreds of thousands of Google hits, even when the search is restricted to pages containing the word "mythology". Those are definitely commonly used English names. So are Valhalla, Asgard and Midgard in my opinion. I know that people can legitimately disagree about this.

All the articles I've mentioned so far are actually already where I think they should be according to the proposed convention. Discussing pages which I would like to move might be more helpful, so here are some potentially controversial ones:

  • seid > seiðr (see discussion above)
  • Balder > Baldr (see Talk:Balder for some debate)
  • Freya > Freyja (see Talk:Freyja for some reasoning)
  • Heimdall > Heimdallr
  • Tyr > Týr

If you disagree with me about those proposed moves you may want to consider opposing the proposal. You may also want to consider supporting it with the reservation that you do not think it implies that these moves should be made and that you reserve the right to oppose them.

In any case I don't have plans to go on a massive moving spree even if this proposal continues to enjoy healthy support. For the moment I'm more interested in consistently creating redirects and ensuring that Anglicized forms are represented in a standard way. I mostly want to move pages once I'm working on them anyhow so it's a relatively slow process.

In any case I'm grateful that all you people have taken the time to come here and express your opinions on this relatively small and obscure piece of Wikipedia. Thank you all. This really is a nice community. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 22:57, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

I think it's easy to see that the real sticking points here are thorn and eth. While there's some historical use of those in Old English, they're not really part of the modern English alphabet. As such, they're quite foreign to English speakers without specialized knowledge, and people don't even know what to substitute for them mentally. Ligatures and diacritics, on the other hand, are generally recognizable as variants of familiar letters. --Michael Snow 06:01, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
This is reasonably stated, Michael, but I think a point of clarification is required. You say "some historical use"—þ and ð were used near-universally in English until about 1300, and continued to be used extensively well into the 15th century, particularly outside of London. Chaucer, in not using them, was the exception (he also uses more French words than most Anglophone English poets at the time). In the early 15th century, there were texts being written in a language that, grammatically, could essentially be considered modern English but that use those characters (see the translation from Luke at Middle English for a good example). So the characters are certainly not limited to Old English. It is on this basis that the OED has treated the characters as part of the language: it would be impossible to make a clear distinction between an English that uses them and an English that doesn't. Thus the fact that scholars continue to use them is organic--the same scholars might write both Achilles and Hroðgar, on the grounds that Hroðgar would be considered English but Αχιλευς wouldn't. Many in this debate have stated that the scholarly use is not relevant here, and though I disagree, if they feel that way, fine. But I do think we should be clear about what the historical situation really is. Chick Bowen 15:41, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
Just to be clear, I meant the second Luke passage at Middle English (under "c.1400"), not the first. :) Chick Bowen 16:29, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
The additional historical background is interesting, but I don't see that it changes the basic point. Thorn and eth as letters are simply not part of modern English. They're tied to Old English, which is what I was trying to indicate, and 15th-century use is not a guide to how we should write a 21st-century encyclopedia.
I'm not sure what you mean by saying the OED treats the characters as part of the language. If the OED uses them in order to faithfully cite uses of particular words in their original form, that's consistent with good scholarly practice, but that doesn't make those characters part of the present English alphabet. The OED aims to document both past and present variants of English words, so they include past variants that would no longer be possible in modern English. Also, there is at least a fairly clear distinction between an English that uses thorn and eth and an English that doesn't — William Caxton's printing press. --Michael Snow 17:57, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Result - proposal does not become policy

Okay, the poll has run for exactly a week now. I don't want this to become a never-ending poll like the one at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (use English) so I think we might as well say that it's over now. Anyone arriving late is of course free to express her opinion but I don't think that the framework of a tallied vote is the best one for a long-term discussion.

As you probably all know there are strict requirements on Wikipedia for creating a new policy. Wikipedia:How_to_create_policy says that if a poll is held on a policy proposal a supermajority of 70% is required for the policy to be adopted. The current vote does not reach that level of support and I doubt it would even if it were held open longer. I could, of course, try to get out some backwoodsmen from, say, the Scandinavian wikiprojects or arbitrarily contact individual users who I think might be likely to support this proposal - but that wouldn't really give a fair representation of community views.

I did - as you know - advertise this vote widely, including on the wikien mailing list, on IRC, on naming convention pages and on Norse mythology pages. I also contacted users who had commented on related issues in the past, including people who had disagreed with me. I encouraged others to do the same and User:DreamGuy, at least, also contacted some users. I'm grateful for all the attention this matter has got and for the many thoughtful comments left here.

And now, even though the proposal did not achieve 70% or higher consensus support it did - discounting the vote of the user who was only active for half an hour - achieve a two thirds majority support. It does accurately represent what many of us feel is a good approach and I think it will be a useful reference in the future - though it will hopefully improve and advance as time goes by. So, I'm slapping the "guideline" template on it. That means that the page represents views "which many editors agree with in principle. However, it is not policy."

Thanks, everyone, for participating in the poll and the discussion. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 20:50, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Okay, this is slightly confusing to me but I've done some checking and it seems that some naming conventions are policy (Wikipedia:Naming conventions (categories)) while others are guidelines (Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Mormonism))). There's also a more specific "guideline" tag especially for naming conventions so I guess we should use that.
I'd also like to note that User:Marco79 has returned and says he is the same Mark who has been contributing via a set of IPs for some time. His vote is fine then as far as I'm concerned. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 15:27, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

Rejected by the community

2/3 support apparently equals rejection by the community. Since users who have little interest in Norse mythology apparently are intent on stating that it is rejection, I see little reason to pursue this matter any further. I suggest that the users who are interested in the matter keep using Old Norse orthography and ask people who object file requested moves instead. This will end up with articles named in quite a similar way to what was intended with the convention.--Wiglaf 20:41, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

For anyone who found Wiglaf's comments criptic here is list of the history of the edits to the article from the time the poll was closd up to his comment, and one further history entry after that:

  1. (cur) (last) 20:52, 24 November 2005 Haukurth (Replacing proposal tag with guideline tag (but not a policy tag))
  2. (cur) (last) 15:34, 25 November 2005 Haukurth (Standardizing template (though I personally like the other wording))
  3. (cur) (last) 18:26, 25 November 2005 CDThieme (most definately NOT adopted as policy or guideline)
  4. (cur) (last) 19:00, 25 November 2005 Wiglaf m (Reverted edits by CDThieme to last version by Haukurth)
  5. (cur) (last) 19:08, 25 November 2005 Jonathunder (this was not adopted, so calling it a "current guideline" is not correct)
  6. (cur) (last) 20:04, 25 November 2005 Wiglaf m (it garnered 2/3 support, so it is only "rejected" in your dreams)
  7. (cur) (last) 20:15, 25 November 2005 No Account (sarcastic summaries are not helpful, so please stop. consensus is consensus, and this didn't get it)

And this one:

  1. (cur) (last) 20:56, 25 November 2005 Edinborgarstefan (please don't make fun of the community -- 2/3 support is a lot more than is needed for something to become a guidelin)

--Philip Baird Shearer 21:31, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Naming conventions: "If you wish to propose a new naming convention, do so on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions, whilst also publicising the proposal at Requests for comment and the Village Pump, as well as at any related pages. Once a strong consensus has formed, it can be adopted as a naming convention and listed" on that page.
This does not have "strong consensus". Jonathunder 21:37, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
This convention was extremely well advertised by Haukur and others. 60% is the required consensus for each move, thus 2/3 consensus is a strong consensus. Nobody who has been making sounds against it today has had anything productive to say in this discussion. Stefán Ingi 21:50, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
Let's cool the rhetoric a bit, please, and try not to attack the contributions of others. Saying that other people's thoughts are not "productive" is not the way to reach real consensus. And please read the relevant pages more closely. New naming conventions are not decided by bare majorities or weak consensus, they need something a little stonger if they are to reflect the will of the community in guiding many page names. As even the proposer said, this draft is very bold. It challenges existing understandings. As Peter said, if it were really a compromise, we wouldn't be voting. This should not be "gaveled through". Jonathunder 22:04, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
I would posit that a vote where 2/3 of the voters have one view and 1/3 of the voters have another view is indisputable evidence that we do not have a consensus. My understanding of 'consensus' is that it is a position agreeable to and agreed by all parties, which seems to concur with the Wiktionary definition here [1]. Perhaps this is just hand-waving semantics, but I would say that we don't have a consensus, so there is no mandate to generate either a guideline or a policy. I'm told that Wikipedia is not a democracy, so votes are really most useful in demonstrating how polarised opinion is. It is possible to use votes in a consensual way: gain agreement from the electorate before the vote that they will abide by the results of the vote. Unfortunately, the electorate is potentially all registered Wikipedia accounts, which would make that process cumbersome, to say the least. For the record, I voted against the proposal. I sincerely hope that Wikipedia does not succumb to the 'tyranny of the majority'. WLD 23:52, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

Please explain how 30-18 is 2/3 support. User:Zoe|(talk) 01:08, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

When I closed the vote it stood at 30-15 by my count. Counting Mark's vote it stood at 30-16. I'm not saying that the opinions of those who arrive late shouldn't count, though. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 01:12, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

I don't recalling saying that the convention is bold and I certainly don't think that it challenges existing understanding. It did not get the required support for a policy but calling it a guideline is fine. It's something a lot of users agree with but it's not policy. The typical naming convention around here has had less discussion and I doubt they'd generally garner more support in a vote like this. Take for example Wikipedia:Naming conventions (identity) which has a nonexistent talk page. It's also badly written and I disagree with it. Or take the Wikipedia:Naming conventions (operas) guideline. It says that the names of operas should generally be in the original language and if you look at the opera wikiproject you'll see that they mean that diacritics should be used. Or take the WP:MUSIC guideline - if you think that's not disputed you're kidding yourself. But it's still useful to have it as a guideline. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 01:12, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

Okay, if it offends you so to see this page called a guideline - i.e. something which many editors agree with but is not policy - then I'm not going to war over it. Let's just keep the page untagged, then. I've also removed it from Wikipedia:Naming conventions. For the record I think many current guidelines would not fare any better than this one if put to a vote and some are actively contested.

As the archives show I've spent a lot of time trying to discuss the issue with the aim of building a consensus. A previous guideline Wiglaf and I had put together stood unchallenged for quite some time simply because those who were actually editing the articles in question did not object to it.

I honestly don't see any proposal on the issue achieving more support than this one has. It is already too much of a compromise away from Old Norse forms for some people to be able to support it. On the other end there are those who've said they never want any non-English characters to be used in page titles. With those positions in mind I don't see have any proposal could achieve consensus.

While drafting and discussing the current page I decided not to make any page moves relevant to it so as not to prejudice the discussion. From now on I will, in this area as in any other, again make any moves which I think will improve the encyclopedia and which I think are in accordance with our existing policies and general opinion of Wikipedia editors.

Thank you all for contributing. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 02:42, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

I would like to thank Haukur for wading through all this. A 65% majority is not enough to make policy, but I'd certainly accept this as a 'guideline', especially since all the people who actually write articles on Old Norse topics seem to be supportive; I would like to remind the "style warriors" of the fact that without the expertise of the people writing the articles, you wouldn't have anything to war over. This being a "guideline" still means that individual cases might have to be beaten out one by one, but at least this can now be done in a more unified way, since pointing to this page will save us making the same basic points over and over again. The {{guideline}} template is there exacly for cases such as this one, i.e. when there is a majority but no consensus. It even is stated explicitly there that the page may be expanded further, provided that the changes get same sort of support (clear majority, not necessarily universal consensus). Otherwise we'd need yet another 'semi-guideline' "clear majority, but some people have the gut feeling that it is not quite sufficient for being called a 'guideline'" template, which would just be byzantine instruction creep. dab (ᛏ) 12:31, 12 December 2005 (UTC)


I think it's more to the point that the people who "actually write articles on Old Norse topics" have their own niche view of the way things out to be done and other people who could and would contribute to the articles in question know not to bother when they make such incredibly screwed up decisions on a regular basis. At some point you have to cut your losses and not bother trying to deal with people who make sockpuppets, totally misinterpret rules and so forth to try to get their way? You can;t win against organizaed groups of people stuck on stupid ideas. Archaic Icelandic as the default spellings, that's just so freaking absurd that it's obvious -- at least to all but the person actually from Iceland out to try to change the English language to fit his view of the way things should be. This really screwed up decission should not at all be considered a guideline -- 65% is absolutley nothing when you take into account who they have single issue voters mobilized on the topic and the vast majority of the people who disagree can't be bothered to fight with the sockpuppets and ignorance on display here. Once again a small group of people gaming the system prevail and bring the encyclopedia down in the process. DreamGuy 04:07, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
See my (vaguely related) comment here: Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (common names)#Names of US politicians --Francis Schonken 12:16, 13 December 2005 (UTC)