Talk:Sigurdur Thorarinsson

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[edit] Name

I propose we move this page to Sigurður Þórarinsson.

Let me argue my case and at the same time respond to the discussion at my talk page.

The fundamental reason for my proposed move is that Sigurður Þórarinsson is the name of this person, written in the Latin alphabet, so this fits very well with the guidelines on WP:NC(UE). Sigurður was Icelandic, he lived and worked in Iceland for most of his life, a large part of his research concerned the geology of Iceland and he was very active in Icelandic society in general. It therefore stands to reason that many readers of this article will be interested in several topics related to Iceland.

Beyond that, Sigurður was a highly respected geologist the world over, and good academic libraries will have several of his books. The library catalogue where I am lists 14 of his works and his entry is under his name, Sigurður Þórarninssson, it is indexed in the alphabetical order in the region of "tho". I went to the section of the library in the Geology building here and found three book on the list, two of which gave his name as Þórarinsson and one as Thorarinsson, also a couple of articles which were in books close by referenced his work under the name "Thorarinsson, S". It is thus certainly not the case that everybody outside of Iceland thinks his last name starts with a T but people may choose to write is as Thorarinsson for various reasons, perhaps the typewriters they had access to didn't contain a Þ or they worried that people might not recognise it.

Now, what should we do here on Wikipedia? Well, we don't have to worry about the typewriter problem, Wikipedia is written in UTF-8 which certainly contains a Þ, an ð and an ó and whatnot, for display considerations I would add that they are in WGL4 which we should safely be allowed to assume as standard. We also have a template {{foreignchar}} which introduces the characters which may be unfamiliar to some readers.

I don't have his PhD thesis in front of me and I am quite happy to agree that when a publication of his has "Thorarinsson" as the listed author then it should stay that way. I changed it for the thesis because I assumed that there must have been a mistake in the rendering of that since it said Pjórsárdalur. I stand corrected (not on the Pjórsárdalur issue of course).

Finally, I would like to reiterate that other articles on Icelandic scholars use Þ and ð as appropriate. Stefán 21:39, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

I checked on the thesis and the Hekla book and both list his name without diacritics (in a context where the names of some other Icelanders are rendered with diacritics). There's certainly a thorn in Þjórsárdalur so I changed that back. Haukur 22:35, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Stefán, I think we need to address several issues here. First of all, the Latin alphabet refers primarily to the ISO basic Latin alphabet (see Latin alphabet#Latin alphabet and international standards), not including ð and Þ nor any other characters in any other languages which extend the basic set. So your argument above that "Sigurður Þórarinsson is the name of this person, written in the Latin alphabet, so this fits very well with the guidelines on WP:NC(UE)" implies a basic misunderstanding of what the Latin alphabet is.

Second, I have always agreed that Sigurður Þórarinsson is the correct spelling, which is why I footnoted it in the original article and set up the proper redirect. The real question is whether that spelling is appropriate to use in the title and body of articles in the English wikipedia. There is definitely a cultural divide here; you were raised with ð and Þ and other Icelandic characters, but there are only 300,000 Icelanders who are familiar with those. There are over 3 billion people using Latin alphabets worldwide (as first or second languages) which do not include those characters, so you are in the 0.01% minority on this issue. 99.99% of people who understand the Latin alphabet have no idea what ð and Þ are.

Third, and even more important is the issue I raised about accessibility, which I will repeat here: The biggest problem is that the characters "ð" and "Þ" do not render properly in older browsers. For testing my own website, I use many browsers including an old 2002 version of Internet Explorer, since many people around the world continue to use older computers and outdated software out of necessity or poverty, and it is important to support them. The characters "ð" and "Þ" look horrible in those older browsers, and the page becomes so ugly that it is difficult and highly unpleasant to read. After Sigurdur Thorarinsson had been renamed and altered, it was a complete mess in older browsers due to those changes (see this screenshot I have temporarily uploaded). WGL4 is not a minimum standard, it is about the best support one can hope for on the newest Windows machines. Why do you choose to ignore those people forced to use older hardware (perhaps donated to poor inner-city schools or third-world countries)?

Do you think it is a good idea that so many of the Iceland-related articles on WP (i.e. those which have been fully Icelandified) have thus been mangled for many users throughout the world? No one is going to want to read an article that looks like that screenshot, and so information about your country and its culture is less accessible to the masses. This is probably not the outcome that Icelanders on WP intended when they undertook to Icelandify so many articles. Stefán, is this really the face you want Iceland to put forth to the world? Having unreadable articles which produce hideous problems in older browsers does not reflect well on you or your country. You may know what ð and Þ are (as have I for at least 10 years), but to the rest of the world they are unintelligible even if they are rendered properly on the newest browsers.

The fourth point: he is known worldwide (outside Iceland) as only Sigurdur Thorarinsson, and his notability for inclusion in WP is based largely on that worldwide renown. Again, it is certain that 99+% of all Google searches looking for him will search for the spelling "Sigurdur Thorarinsson". Your library catalog may list him as "Sigurður Þórarninssson", but that is only a single data point compared to the 1000s of libraries worldwide which hold his works, the vast majority of which list him as "Sigurdur Thorarinsson" in their catalogs (perhaps due to technical limitations). I do agree that more and more libraries worldwide are improving their support for non-ISO Latin characters in catalog entries (including my own UW library catalog here in Seattle), but this has barely started.

Again, please look at this screenshot. Is this really what you and other Icelanders want to present to a significant fraction of the world's computer users who continue to operate older machines? I cannot believe you want to continue to do this, on some self-righteous grounds that the Icelandic spelling is the correct one and therefore must be enforced, even to the detriment of Wikipedia and the overwhelming majority of its users worldwide. The correct spelling is not necessarily the best one or most appropriate to use on the World Wide Web or in the title of Wikipedia articles. --Seattle Skier (talk) 23:26, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

The worst part of this experience for me is that your (Stefán's) rude and uncivil unilateral actions have taken the joy out of working on this article for me. I looked forward to expanding it substantially, and was in the process of getting as many of Sigurdur Thorarinsson's books as I could from the libraries (I even have 4 inter-library loans pending for his books not in my own university library). I was also planning to photocopy many of his most significant articles, to read them and sythesize into useful paragaphs about his scientific work. But now I think, why bother doing this? Why spend my own money making copies of his papers, just to work on a WP article which others view as some kind of nationalistic Icelandic ownership. I have already wasted 3-4 hours of my time, writing on your talk page and Haukur's and above, and discussing an issue which if it ever comes to a renaming vote, I am certain to lose. Obviously, you'll rally plenty of your supporters to make it look like a 90% majority in favor of renaming, irrespective of whether the renaming is benficial for WP or its users or whether the vote represents a true consensus.

I have no desire for conflict on WP. If I had known you (and other Icelanders) would behave in this manner, I would not have started an article on Sigurdur Thorarinsson. There are 100s (even 1000s) of other articles I could start or spend my precious time working on, including over 1500 within the scope of Wikipedia:WikiProject Volcanoes which I launched a few days ago. I hope you are proud of yourself for needlessly upsetting a good and hard-working editor. Everyone loses in this case. --Seattle Skier (talk) 23:59, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Look, I am sorry I caused all this stress, I didn't mean to. I would be thrilled if you would expand the article, I am prepared to either leave it completely alone or to offer help with expanding the article in some non-geology related directions. Stefán 04:10, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your conciliatory words. I don't think you need to completely leave the article alone (obviously I don't WP:OWN it), but I am planning to leave it aside for a few days. I'm no longer upset over the situation, although in re-reading my words above, I think I was a bit too emotional as I wrote the last 2 paragraphs--sorry about that. But I would prefer to spend my wiki time working in other areas where rapid progress can be made without contention, and I have other things pending in real-life also.

I do think the overall issue of using extra non-ISO Latin characters (not just diacritic marks) in article titles needs to be addressed consistently throughout WP, since in addition to ð and Þ there is the much larger issue of ß in German-related articles (which is used / not used very inconsistently in article titles and text). I will look through the talk page at WP:NC(UE) at some point, so that I am more familiar with all of the past discussions of this issue. It would be nice to have a consistent policy which represents a true consenus and also the best interests of the whole WP project.

I may come back and work on this article in a few days or later. By then my inter-library loans for his books will have arrived anyway, so maybe I will again feel more enthusiastic about working on it. Thanks. --Seattle Skier (talk) 18:27, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

It would be nice to have a consistent policy which represents a true consensus - It would be nice but it's probably not going to happen. Opinions are about evenly divided on the issue and megabytes of discussion have not brought a consensus any closer. This issue is a huge time sink with very little rewards. Having been there I don't recommend confronting the issue. Haukur 20:11, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Dropping the proper Diacritics

I don't think it wise to drop the proper diaterics, when they are viewable on nearly any computer. Nearly all other decent articles with diaterics in the title (Gerhard Schröder, Eva Perón, to name two) have the official pages with diaterics but have redirect pages (Eva Peron, Gerhard Schroder) linking to the properly titled articles. I can't for the hep of me understand why Icelandic should buck this trend.

I really think, both for correctness and for uniformity, this page should be moved back to Sigurður Þórarinsson (but there should be an IPA showing how the name is pronounced, which I will be happy to provide)... and there should be a page with this name, as a redirect. Or shall we start taking down all the diaterics off Wikipedia? --It's-is-not-a-genitive 19:14, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment. Although this is obviously an awkward time for me to be dealing with this issue again, and I would prefer that it wait until next week, I will attempt to provide a detailed response.

First of all, diacritics (i.e. accented characters) are not the issue here. I have no problem with diacritics being used in article titles, as they are readily viewed on almost all computers which are internet-capable and currently in operation. However, eth and thorn (the characters in question here) are not accented versions of other English characters, they are entirely separate characters of their own, with no un-accented version. So bringing up diacritics is a red herring.

The issue here is that eth and thorn are not viewable on all (or even 80% of) internet-capable computers. And I'm not referring to some old 486 from 1993 -- they are not viewable on many 4-5 year old, GHz-class machines which remain in very common use worldwide. Please look at this screenshot (same as above) which is taken using IE 5.2 running on a current machine for test purposes.

And the article as it currently stands follows policy at WP:NAME exactly. I see no reason to ignore the policy in this particular instance. Therefore I remain opposed to the rename.

But even that misses the most important point of all: We should be working to improve this article, not arguing about renaming it. I have found lots of additional material with which I am planning to expand the article. I have copies of several of Sigurdur Thorarinsson's papers, along with an obituary which provides a wealth of detailed biographical info. There is easily enough material to develop this into a Good Article, and I will do so regardless of whether it is eventually renamed. But I hope that you and the other editors will join me in improving the article to GA status, instead of worrying about its name. In the long term (several years), I am not opposed to the article being renamed to Sigurður Þórarinsson, because by then the issue of whether those characters are viewable will have largely resolved itself through the ongoing obsolescence and replacement of older computers.

Please consider helping out with this article. Thanks. --Seattle Skier (talk) 03:04, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

• Hi, Seattle:

Well, that seems a reasonable enough line of argument. I found it a bit strange to misname someone just because of how it comes out on a few computers (the thing that got me the most was that ð sounds like the, not like 'd'), but I suppose that we should stick with whatever is more accesible. Besides, as you say, the priority is actually building up the article, to which I shall certainly try to lend a hand. I can get some books out from the British library, the next time that I'm in London, to help with the research.

Regards,

--It's-is-not-a-genitive 11:52, 9 May 2007 (UTC)