Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (use English-language sources)

Archives

This page has archives. Sections older than 30 days may be automatically archived by when more than 4 sections are present.

Deletions of names

Perhaps someone experienced can chime in here? Regarding deletion of names other than English names. Thanks.--2604:2000:E010:1100:5459:345F:8577:54B2 (talk) 18:41, 16 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

RfC: Tiebreaker for native vs. translated name

WP:USEENGLISH says that we should use the name which is mostly commonly found in English-language sources. Sometimes, as with the Technical University of Berlin / Technische Universität Berlin, both the native name and a translation are widely used in English sources and it is impossible to tell which one is more common. In these cases, what should the tiebreaker be?

Give the edge to the WP:OFFICIALNAME, i.e. what the subject would prefer to be known as in English, which could be the native name or the translation.
Give the edge to the English translation. Note that WP:USEENGLISH does not currently say that we prefer names in English, but rather names which are most commonly used in English sources.
Keep the long-standing title, per WP:TITLECHANGES. This is the general default option when there is no specific guidance to do something different.

King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 05:08, 31 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: Thank you for the well-written (neutrally phrased) RfC. This particular combination of circumstances seems unlikely to arise very often, so I'm not sure we need a general rule for it. Perhaps you meant to refer to WP:TITLECHANGES rather than MOS:RETAIN. I don't think MOS:RETAIN applies, since that is about different variations of English, whereas here we have a question of English versus non-English. In the absence of a consensus in an RM discussion, I suggest that the article title should not be changed (and that is what happened in this example case). I tend to put very little weight on an institution's own preference, in the interest of maintaining Wikipedia as an independent source (e.g., in the spirit of MOS:TM / WP:TITLETM / MOS:ALLCAPS). When choosing between a title that is not very understandable/recognizable in English and one that is, I would tend somewhat toward the English-language title. Not very strongly, but somewhat preferring English. —BarrelProof (talk) 19:40, 31 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Good catch, I've updated MOS:RETAIN to WP:TITLECHANGES, thanks. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 03:26, 1 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I would definitely oppose #1, as the article title should be based on secondary, not primary sources. #2 seems like a good rule of thumb for editors when initially creating an article, but I fully support the interpretation of #3 that WP:TITLECHANGES would be the governing policy without a clear preference in English language sources for either the translated or native name. Van Isaac_WS^cont 03:40, 1 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It's difficult to argue for WP:TITLECHANGES when WP:NAMECHANGES also apply.SFBB (talk) 15:47, 4 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
None of the above – borderline cases, like Technical University of Berlin vs. Technische Universität Berlin, obviously need to be sorted on a case-by-case basis. Talk:Technical University of Berlin has several RMs spanning more than a decade – although the idea is laudable to get it sorted once and for all via a guideline update, that won't work: the solution hardcoded in guidance may then work for this particular case (because of being tailored to that case), but not for other cases. --Francis Schonken (talk) 05:22, 1 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I assume you mean option 3 then; that is the status quo which applies if there is no guideline update. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 05:37, 1 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
No, I didn't mean #3 – I meant this was another ill-prepared RfC, not even listing the most obvious choice (was just trying to convey that message as politely as possible). --Francis Schonken (talk) 10:01, 1 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
And the case-by-case basis failed here, and there was no consensus. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 13:16, 1 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
"failed"? – I don't see any failure whatsoever in the events leading up to this RfC, and certainly not against the WP:CONSENSUS policy. The RfC has, however, again, written failure all over it, while not following the simple recommendations of WP:RFC – again, the RfC was not well prepared in contravention of that guidance. --Francis Schonken (talk) 07:53, 3 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
By "failed" I don't mean a failure in process - I simply mean that the discussion failed to reach a consensus. None of the other participants seem to have any trouble with this RfC, so if you're having trouble understanding my words I don't think it's my problem. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 17:45, 3 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Use English should be given preference. It's already common practice. Renata (talk) 04:37, 4 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The WP:USEENGLISH criteria do not provide any help in cases when both names seem to widely used in English sources. WP:USEENGLISH is about the most widely used used in English sources and not about using English words.SFBB (talk) 15:19, 4 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

When two names are widely used in English sources (i.e. the main criteria in WP:USEENGLISH does not apply), I believe (for consistency purposes) that the edge should be given to the WP:OFFICIALNAME, as it is the case in Mumbai, Nur-Sultan, Eswatini, or Kolkata, among many others. Furthermore, and especially when the name has changed and in line with both WP:DIVIDEDUSE and WP:NAMECHANGES, it is important to take into account the evolution of the naming in English sources and the date of the references.SFBB (talk) 15:28, 4 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
In the particular case at hands, there has been a change in the official position of the university towards its English name in 2014, which comes to be like name change. Hence, it is difficual to argue for WP:TITLECHANGES in this case.SFBB (talk) 15:39, 4 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Give the edge to the common native name (which is not necessarily the official name, any more than it is in English-speaking countries). Translating for the sake of it is never a good idea. WP:UE should only apply if an English translation is overwhelmingly used in English-language sources. It may surprise some, but there are many of us native English-speakers who can handle names in other languages with perfect ease and regard slavish (and often poor) translation without evidence of common usage as ignorant and unnecessary. We are probably the same people who prefer foreign-languages films to be subtitled rather than dubbed! Incidentally, I am dubious about "what the subject would prefer to be known as in English", as I have seen some translations into very poor English on official websites and also misguided assumptions that native English speakers can't handle furrin and need to have everything translated. -- Necrothesp (talk) 10:27, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

La Comédie humaine or The Human Comedy

A discussion regarding which title form is more appropriate at Talk:La Comédie humaine#Requested move 3 June 2020 may be of interest. —Roman Spinner (talk • contribs) 22:33, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Russian names

I find it unacceptable that we're using different ways of romanizing Russian, depending on what's the most common name in English-language reputable sources. We should choose one romanization and stick to it on the entirety of Wikipedia. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was a Russian, and in Russian you currently spell the name Пётр Ильич Чайковский. That's Cyrillic last time I checked, an alphabet that isn't used for writing English. Any romanization is a means to an end, a way of representing Пётр Ильич Чайковский, so who cares how it's spelled? On Dutch Wikipedia, he's called Pjotr Iljitsj Tsjaikovski, and I'm pretty sure that they're using the same romanization everywhere.

According to Wikipedia:Romanization of Russian, we should spell his name Pyotr Ilyich Chaykovsky (Ilyich with a y, right? It's sounded as a consonant after all), without the useless t at the beginning of the surname, and with i representing only the close front unrounded vowel (or the close central unrounded vowel, when immediately following the hard /r/), rather than both that and a postvocalic palatal approximant.

English spelling is a pile of illogical and unnecessary rules and we don't have to add to it by using fifty different romanizations just because they're the most common spelling in the English literature. In Russia certainly, people stick to one romanization in any given context (an encyclopedia is "one context", no?) and I don't think that they have any emotional reaction to their name being transliterated differently. English readers, on the other hand, might react to Chaykovsky with "oh my god, you can't spell!", which is not only not true (the surname is spelled Чайковский in Russian, in a different alphabet altogether) but not our problem anyway. We should treat our readers as adults, not as children who need to be catered to to that extent. People accusing others of not being able to spell should know that this isn't an English word and that there are multiple ways of transcribing Russian names. Plus, Chaykovsky, Perm Krai is spelled "Chaykovsky" and the discrepancy is infuriating to me. It's the same word! Not only that, the town was named after Tchaikovsky himself! Argh! This is so stupid.

I'm not advocating for using any particular romanization (though WP:RUS is more than fine in my opinion) but for consistency, also in the case of other languages that aren't written in the Latin alphabet. The current situation is ridiculous, especially given the fact how easy it is to create a redirect.

So, long story short, let's use one type of romanization of Russian on Wikipedia, create redirects for those names that are at odds with the romanization of our choice (whatever it'll end up to be) and mention those names in the lede. The English Wikipedia is, AFAICS, alone (at least among major Wikipedias) in how it deals with Russian names and it's time to stop this practice.

If a name of a certain scientific phenomenon was mostly spelled in British English (because of who's written the papers describing it), would we be forced to use the British spelling of the name despite everything? That's the level of unreasonableness we're dealing with here. Sol505000 (talk) 15:11, 27 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

For names which have an established translation / transliteration into English, IMHO we should use that, regardless of what some systematic transliteration of Russian would give. For instance, when talking about the capital of Russia, we should name it Moscow, not Moskva. Similarly Saint-Petersburg, not Sankt-Peterburg. The same applies to people's names: Ivan the Terrible, not Ivan Groznyy; Peter the Great, not Pyotr Velikiy or Pyotr Pyervyy.

Under Tchaikovsky (disambiguation) that surname is written mostly Tchaikovsky but also Chaikovskij, Tschaikowsky and Chaykovsky; under Tchaikovsky (surname) there are more spellings, but also the following paragraphs at top explaining how they came about:

Tchaikovsky and its feminine variant Tchaikovskaya is a common transliteration (via French language) of the Russian language surname Чайковский. The surname itself is a Russian-language variant of the Polish surname Czajkowski, see this page for name origin.
Transliterated spellings in various languages include Tschaikowski (German), Ciajkovskij (Italian), Tsjaikovski (Dutch), Csajkovszkij (Hungarian), Chaikovski (Spanish), Tjajkovskij (Swedish), Tsjajkovskij (Norwegian), Čaikovskis (Latvian and Lithuanian), Tchaikovski (Portuguese), Txaikovski (Catalan) and Tšaikovski (Estonian and Finnish).
It has also been rendered as Tchaikovski, Chaikovsky, Chaykovsky, Chaikovskiy, Chaykovskiy, and Chaikovskii. Among Slavic languages which use the Latin alphabet, it frequently occurs in its Polish version, Czajkowski, or as Čajkovskij (Czech and Slovak) and Čajkovski (Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian).
The surname as transliterated into other languages may refer to the following persons. For the original, Polish spelling, see Czajkowski (surname).

The composer is probably known in English-speaking media with a certain spelling, which we should respect; the town in the Perm region probably isn't, even if it was named to honour the composer, so we can, and IMHO we should, transliterate its name directly from Cyrillic. — Tonymec (talk) 22:14, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with @Tonymec. It may be maddening to people who speak Russian, but English's spelling has always been horribly inconsistent, and it's better to follow the sources, which means following the consistent uses in the sources. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:34, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]