Wikipedia: Fucking Amal/Talk

I strongly suggest, that you change this title, pronto !!!!

Not to disagree, as we so often say just before we disagree, but IMHO Fucking Amal except for the double caps. is a fine title. It uses the meaningless intensive to great effect, both in meaning and in marketing. Look at all the play it gets. Maybe we could cross-post this and get slash-dotted again.

Amal is the name of the town. What's the problem with double caps? --KQ

--- For the same reason that we write Pokemon in Romaji rather than Katakana, we should write 'Amal' as 'Amal' rather than with fancy Swedish letters that don't exist in English.

But we should include the Katakana in the text of the article, even though we title it in Romaji. Also, "a with ring" is a standard ISO-8859 character, not an exotic Unicode thing, so including it is no more odd than getting the Umlaut right on Kurt Gödel. For characters outside the normal ISO set, I agree that we might Anglicize even in the internal text (for example, as some of the Turkish-related articles have). --LDC

I would guess that the reason we don't write Pokemon in Katakana is that the vast majority of our readers wouldn't have any clue how to pronounce it. That's not the case with Å -- it's still an "A", after all.

I suppose it's worth mentioning that these letters do actually exist in English anyway, in a few cases where we've ripped a word steaming from the chest cavity of another European language. I grant you that they're rare -- Noël is the only common one I can think of -- but they do exist. -- Paul Drye

I disagree very strongly. We should not include Katakana in the text of any articles, except perhaps an article on Katakana. Katakana is completely unreadable to people who have not studied Japanese. Browsers don't consistently render any versions of it of which I'm aware, either.

In this particular case, the Amal "a with ring" was written in some way that actually broke the link (at least on this machine, my home pink iMac? using Netscape 4.7 or something like that).

I suppose it could be a matter of some controversy as to whether Noel (see, I don't even know how to type 'e with two dots') exists in English. English is a mongrel language, without even the pretense of central authority as found with, for example, French. English is as English does. My perspective is that if I don't see it on my keyboard, and if I didn't sing it in the alphabet song, it's 'fancy' and therefore should be avoided.

Try searching on the net for Gödel -- it's not a good thing. Try either Godel or Goedel, both common Anglicizations, and you're good to go.

 --Jimbo Wales

: This loops back to another discussion I was in a few days ago. If one's concern is getting a hit from a search engine, don't avoid variant spellings. It's not a case of Godel or G&oumldel, it's a case of Godel and G&oumldel. Designate one as the name you're going to use in the article, but be liberal about listing useful variants. It helps both machine searches, and reassures the reader that he's on the right page even if he approached it with an unusual spelling in mind. Hence the title of this article being non-accented English, and the first sentence giving us rings and the "translated non-controversial" title. We've got all the bases covered. -- Paul Drye

: I find this argument completely and overwhelmingly compelling, and I withdraw all objections to placing as many variants as deemed necessary within articles, so long as they are renderable by most browsers. --Jimbo Wales

Yes, titles must not use characters that are not legal in URLs, and that precludes any non-7bit-ASCII. But we're talking about the body text of the article here. Whether or not one chooses to use diacritical marks in standard English borrowings (in words like coördinate, naïve, résumé, etc.) is a separate issue. I generally leave them out; CMS is non-committal. But when the word in question is not a borrowed one, but actually a foreign one used as such, I think it's important to get it correct in the body of the article at least in the initial sentence. If it requires non-ISO characters, then the Anglicization used for the title can also be used for the rest of the article. This has been discussed in a lot of diverse places; we should probably have a policy article that consolidates them. --LDC

But Amal is not being used as a foreign word is it? No more so than, for example, Junichiro Koizumi, Prime Minister of Japan. Shall we write Osama Bin Laden in Arabic? Amal is a name, like those.

Even foreign words used as foreign words need to be fully Anglicized, I think. Perestroika. Glasnost. Writing those in Russian characters would render the article unusable to English speakers.

Obviously, my examples don't fully address the issue. The important distinction between Japanese and Arabic names and Swedish names is that Swedish names are 'borrowable' in the sense that I can at least still read it.

Also, see above, where I agree completely with Paul Drye's reasoning, and so withdraw all these objections.

--Jimbo Wales

Also, p.s., take a look at Junichiro Koizumi. Someone has placed something fancy after his name, which I assume would render it in perfect Japanese. Perhaps this will draw Japanese speakers to wikipedia, I don't know, but that would be a good thing. But in my browser, all I see is some question marks. :-( That doesn't strike me as a good thing.

Yes, that's Kanji. But why is it a bad thing? If you ever decided to install the fonts, you'd see them. If you don't, they don't get in your way. What's the problem?

Yes, I anglicize everything. The article is Venice, not Venezia. All I'm trying to say is that the first sentence of the article on Venice should include "Venzeia", just as the first sentence of the article on Ang Lee should include 李安. Within the article itself, we obviously have to use the English version of Ang Lee, and I rather favor Venice as well, since it's a commonly used English name. If "Amal" is the common English name of the town referenced here, then I'll agree that the description of the movie's plot should use that term. But the movie title itself should be spelled properly at least once.

I also think there is a definite distinction to be made between ISO-8859-1 characters and truly foreign ones. I don't see a problem with having "Gödel" everywhere in the text of that article. --LDC

The Katakana (or Kanji) thing is an interesting question. Koizumi's name does render correctly for me so perhaps I'm more forgiving, but one thing I do think is important is that the characters for his name does represent useful information to some people. A small set of people (people who can read Katakana using browsers that can show it), yes. A small piece of information ("these are the characters he would use to write his name"), yes. But one thing I have been doing whenever I can in Wikipedia is include all these juicy little tidbits that one doesn't normally find in your run-of-the-mill potted history. Most encyclopedias hit the high points, and are distressingly similar to one another in their failure to dig deep. Wikipedia can be be more interesting than that (and would be if I could figure out how to clone myself).

An example...ever see anywhere but comprehensive biographies that Charles Darwin had the financial freedom to write his theories because he was the grandson of Josiah Wedgwood? I'm guessing not. It's not common knowledge at all, because it's really not that important. But it gives a little insight into how he did what he did. The Japanese characters come under this general category. Trivial information, OK, but we're here for information. -- Paul Drye

This amal fellow, does he live in Åmål? ;-)