Wikipedia:WikiProject Scouting/Article names

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 This page details a process used within WikiProject Scouting.
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Over a protracted period at the beginning of 2007, there was debate to mediate disagreement about the naming of articles for Scouting organizations in non-English speaking countries. That debate is archived at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Scouting/Translations and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Scouting/Translations mediation. The result formed a consensus as below.

WikiProject Scouting
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[edit] Standards

[edit] Guidelines

This same guideline says to use the Roman alphabet and standard English spelling (ie, Vienna not Wien). It also says to use the original spelling and alphabet in the first line of the article. Only use the foreign name if it meets this standard: If there is no commonly used English name, use an accepted transliteration of the name in the original language. Latin-alphabet languages, like Spanish or French, should need no transliteration, but Chinese names can use Pinyin, for example.

There should be redirects from common versions of an association's title to what version is in use for the article title. This applies to English and non-English versions of the title. At a minimum, there should be a redirect to the alternative version used in the lead sentence of an article.

[edit] Main points

  1. For naming articles on Scout organisations/associations, we use an English name if the organisation itself verifiably uses a unique English name in its own documents (if we can not find such a name, we ask the organisation for a name and a source for its use).
  2. If no official English name becomes available, we seek consensus on whether there is one clear translation to English of the organisation's name and use that. If there are several translations that differ only trivially, we seek consensus on whether one of them can be used. By trivial, we mean different prepositions (e.g. "in" or "of") or word order ("Scout Association" or "Association of Scouts")
  3. If no consensus is reached on point (2), we seek consensus whether the "Scouting in XXX" proposal (see below) can be used to write a complete article on all aspects of Scouting in a particular country to replace the article with a contentious title.
  4. Failing resolution of an English name from points (1) - (3), we use the official non-English name.

[edit] Related points

Separate from these key proposals we note:

  1. We use the now completed "Scouting in XXX" proposal to give English names for readers to find articles about Scouting in all countries, whether English speaking or not, and without having to know the name of the Scout organisation in the country. These can be redirects, disambiguation pages or articles. In some cases we should also create "Guiding in XXX" or "Scouting and Guiding in XXX" links in the same way as above.
  2. We will be extremely liberal in the use of redirects both to the "Scouting in XXX" articles (e.g. "Scouting in USA") and to the individual articles of organisations (almost any plausible translation - redirects are cheap).

[edit] Summary

We try to find whether the organisation uses an official English name. Failing that we see whether there is an obvious translation. If that is not unique, are the different translations trivial in the sense that they translate back to the same name. We use Scouting in XXX, for all countries XXX including English-speaking countries, as a redirect, a disambiguation page or a brief article. If the first two points do not resolve the name, we consider using Scouting in XXX to cover ALL aspects of Scouting in the country. If that is not acceptable, due perhaps to there being many Scout organisations and the argument is only about the name of one of them, we use the non-English name used by the organisation itself. We then use any English translation as a redirect to the non-English title. Note, if this summary conflicts with the points above, it needs to be corrected as the points above are the agreed wording.

[edit] Disambiguation titles

When an article name is disambiguated by a phrase in parenthesis, that phrase should be spelled out and not abbreviated. For example, use History of merit badges (Boy Scouts of America), not History of merit badges (BSA).

[edit] Issues and discussion

If the article title has been the subject of debate, it may be appropriate to use a message box on the talk page to indicate the resolution and any references. For example:

Notice Name style: The name Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell is the proper name and title for this article, and is the consensus of many editors. For past dialog on this subject, please refer to the archived discussions.

(edit this section to see haw this is done)