Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (hockey)/Archive 1

OK, team, it's simple. This is en-wiki. We don't have non-English characters on our keyboards, and people likely to come to en-wiki are mostly going to have ISO-EN keyboards, whether they're US, UK, or Aussie (to name a few) it doesn't matter. I set up a page at User:RasputinAXP/DMRwT for double move redirects with twist and started in on the Czech players that need to be reanglicized. There's a justification on that page, but to repeat:

DMRwT is the term I use to describe when a page has been redirected and has a history on both the redirecting and redirected page. As an example, Petr Prucha started there, was moved to Petr Průcha, causing a redirect at Petr Prucha; after reviewing WP:HOCKEY policy (specifically use of diacritics and non-English), the article needed to be moved back to Petr Prucha with a redirect at Petr Průcha but couldn't because both the article and redirect were extant.

I asked User:Wiki_alf to help me out, as many of the Czech players have been shuffled around and he obliged me by performing a Double Move-Redirect with Twist on Petr Prucha.

As such, this is a fluid list of NHL players that need to be juggled as above. Please add players to the "needing" list as you see fit.

Thanks, and PLAY ON! RasputinAXP _{talk contribs} 15:36, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

:I object to this conclusion. Previous debate clearly proved, that there is no clear consensus about using or not using diacritics. You should not be doing any mass renaming and mass moving. At this moment both variants are considered to be right by wikipedians (or both wrong - depending whether you are optimist ore pessimist). --Jan Smolik 11:18, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

::Jan, I understand you're upset. Let's settle things on the Village Pump before you go changing WP:HOCKEY policy. If both variants are considered right, and there's no clear consensus, then we have the right to go about doing things based on how our consensus has been reached in our particular project. RasputinAXP _{talk contribs} 15:39, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

::: RasputinAPX, I am not upset. I just see that WP:HOCKEY policy does not reflect clear consensus so I just want to fix it so that does not confuse anyone. Simply, it is POV. For example admin User:Wiki_alf took it as a clear guideline for renaming. I will not do any other editing of the policy today, but tomorrow I will add following warning to the start of the section: "This section does not reflect a clear consensus. Before applying these recommendations, please see objections on the talk page". I think it is neutral. You can improve this warning if you want to.

:::The diacritics section of WP:HOCKEY was added by Masterhatch on 19 January 2006. It is quite new and it should not be treated as set-in-stone rules. Anyway prior this additions users Hazelorb on January 15and Elrith January 16 objected to not using diacritics. On January 24 you summarized the discussion with words "OK, team, it's simple". Again not reflecting the objections and asked User:Wiki_alf to change naming based on the project policy. You did not add the "policy" is 5 days old and that there were objections to it.

:::I would not say a world if using diacritics on Wikipedia was not common or was forbidden. Czech people are quite used not to use it on Internet or in SMS messages as for a long time there was no single encoding table for Czech characters. But when I arrived to Wikipedia, I saw that diacritics is commonly used and thus I am also using it. Most names of Czech people is written with diacritics. I see it as a consensus.

:::I am glad you were bold and went on with proposal you thought is right. But as there are clearly expressed objections to this proposal you should not start edit war with mass renaming. For my person I can promise you I will not go to the ice hockey articles only for reason of renaming players. But if I write hockey article or add substantial part to it I will probably use diacritics as it is normal on Wikipedia. In the conclusion I repeat this is international project written in English and not project of Britons and Americans. --Jan Smolik 20:31, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

::::I'm not touching another hockey article until this is over, and I'm not edit warring over it; We let the proposal sit for a while before we did it, and now that there's something to deal with we've stopped. I'm goign to stick to turning Wayne Gretzky into a FAC and then I'll probably leave WP:HOCKEY; I'll keep an eyeball on New York Rangers and their players and leave it at that. RasputinAXP _{talk contribs} 21:10, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Whatever happens though, it should be important that the non-diacratical version gets redirected into the diacratical version of the article. That is my only objection either way... the version many people are used to, myself included, has to redirect into the actual name (with diacratics, accents or whatever). This was not happening in a few cases which amounted to confusion. 25px Croat Canuck 25px 03:12, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

:That is for sure. --Jan Smolik 12:06, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

More discussion here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village%20pump%20%28policy%29&oldid=42317255#Using_diacritics_.28or_national_alphabet.29_in_the_name_of_the_article Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Using diacritics (or national alphabet) in the name of the article]. ccwaters 03:56, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

:Alright Jan, I've been watching the olympics and noticed that the Czech and Slovak uniforms drop the diacritics on the back of the jerseys. ccwaters 17:10, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

::It was mentioned earlier that oficial IIHF documents do not use diacritics and jerseys only reflect that. But it does not mean that it is the correct spelling. I personally think that avoiding of diacritics is historicaly done from technical reasons. With Unicode these reasons are not valid anymore. On the other hand I also drop diacritics from my Wikipedia signiture (it should state Smolík). So I am not completely against avoiding diacritics, especially when the first line includes original spelling. But troughout WP I saw many articles that use diacritics even in the title. And they were in more important languages than in Czech. However, I feel that for encyclopedia it is more acurate to use diacritics. But there was an important argument (I think it was yours) that we should follow habits in the real world, rather than coining new ways of doing thinkgs. BTW: I checked Czech encyclopedias and they generaly try to use diacritics (non-czech one) but are very inconsistent.

::Today I added "No consensus warning" to the diacritics section of Wikiproject Ice-Hockey. It is not to fight but to say that anybody using this policy will soon run into dispute. --Jan Smolik 17:53, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

::: That's only fair; plainly it's a contentious subject and likely to remain so. RGTraynor 21:01, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

:So let's start moving the featured articles Karl Dönitz, IFK Göteborg and Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius to "Karl Donitz", "IFK Goteborg" and "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", eh? Might as well move Åland to "Aland". Once we're at it, we could translate Antero Niitymäki into "Andrew Fieldhill" (compare Wien->Vienna, United States->Yhdysvallat, Sverige->Sweden). Just "kidding". Anyway, my point is, that we should try to continue using the style that most similar articles use in Wikipedia.

:To me, the most commonly used style appears to be using ä, ö and ü in the article name. However, I only say this after looking around at categories about Finnish, Swedish, German, etc people, so I might not be entirely correct. Here's a few examples: Eemil Nestor Setälä, Anneli Jäätteenmäki, Kyösti Kallio, Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg, Franz Gürtner, Andreas von Bülow, Melanie Oßwald, István Széchenyi, Zoltán Böszörmény, Leni Björklund (OK, enough, I think you can see the point...).

:I think that the dots on 'em letters should be present in either all wikipedia biograpical articles or none (at present, both styles are used, which makes things even more confusing). Anyway, if it is decided that the ä's and ö's should go, then put the 'official' (ie passport) way of spelling the name in brackets in the first sentence. If, in turn, the 'real' (with ä, ö, ü) way of spelling is chosen, then have the 'American' spelling (ie Teemu Selanne way) redirect into the 'correctly' spelled article (ie Teemu Selänne). --HJV 03:02, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

::I agree. I have just received a "No consensus warning" so I have stopped rewriting hockey players' names into their correct diacritical forms, but I do not understand the point. I was doing so for the same reason, which was already mentioned above: Non-hockey articles usually respect the diacritical spelling of personal names (places, cities ...). Why should names of hockey players be treated differently, especially when redirects solve the problem in a very simple way which can be acceptable for everybody, no matter what sort of keyboards they use? Nobody has answered this question. And if somebody wants to start a new article and they do not want to bother with the diacritics, they can omit it. If the diacritics needs correction, somebody will do it.

::I do not think that writing "Rucinsky" instead of "Ručínský" is an "English spelling" of his name, it is just omitting the diacritics in his Czech name. Despite the fact that non-Czech speaking people won't know how to pronounce his name correctly written both with or without diacritics, unless they have already heard it, for people who know the Czech alfabet it makes a difference.

::Omitting the diacritics in the Slovak name "Šatan" may cause some amusement, but an encyclopedia should prefer accuracy. English ommitting the diacritics in the name of Croatian football player "Dado Pršo" used to cause even more amusement to Czech people, as the result meant "a tit" in Czech language (and, as far as I know, the same Croatian word is spelled also very similar). By the way, Dado Pršo is spelled correctly in Wikipedia, using the non-diacritical spelling as a redirect.

::The fact, that players themselves drop the diacritics on their jerseys, is not an argument. They play hockey, that is what matters to them, they do not bother about spelling accuracy. But we write encyclopedia. Jan.Kamenicek 22:54, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

:::yes, we are writing an encyclopaedia, but guess what! this encyclopaedia reflects the current, most common forms of the English language. in english media and other publications, the removal of diacritics is the most common way of writing. Masterhatch 02:15, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

:::: Its "Jagr" and "Hasek" in worldbook.com, encarta.msn.com, and britannica.com. That's the 3 currently produced encyclopedias that I know of. I'm not sure why a Croatian surname translating to "tit" in Czech is any concern for an English publication?. There's Fucking, Austria, Nevermind the natively named Dick Trickle. ccwaters 02:41, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

::::: I've decided to anglicize the names in the articles I've put together or made significant contributions to, something I now realize I should've done in the first place. The thought came to me recently when someone replaced "Selanne" with "Selänne" in the 1992-93 NHL season article. That gave me the idea to search for "Selanne" in the article, which returned zero results. And that tells me that the article is broken.

::::: Wikipedia is an electronic resource, and one of the major benefits of that is that it is searchable. And if I'm prevented from finding any instances of a name I'm looking for because I didn't use characters my keyboard doesn't have, the article is broken. I don't care what the "ä" in his name is, because whether it's an a with an umlaut or a completely separate character, my keyboard doesn't have it, and nor do the keyboards of the overwhelming majority of native english speakers. And I can't be expected to remember every single diacritic/non-latin character in every language out there just so I can locate info at an english encyclopedia.

::::: The place for "Selänne" is fi.wikipedia.org. Here, we speak and type in english. Aottley 01:58, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

:::::: So why should Selänne be treated differently from Gerhard Schröder who has his name spelled correctly in Wikipedia? You might wanna look at Category:Finnish_people, Category:German_people, Category:Swedish_people, Category:Estonian_people, for a start. If you do, you'll notice that pretty much 99% have their named spelled properly, as they are spelled in their passport. I bet if you counted, a large majority would have their names written with the ä's and the ö's (I did mention this up there already). Try searching for, say "Gerhard Schroder". It'll take you to the article, even though you replaced the ö with an o. The same goes for all the other similar articles, as long as there's a redirect from the umlautless version to the actual article. Therefore your argument that, say, Selänne couldn't be found by searching for "Selanne" is false. I repeat, you can find the article using search regardless of what characters your keyboard has as long as a redirect spelled without the umlauts exists (assuming your keyboard is not chinese or something). Type in Selanne in the box to the left and press search. His article is the first result on that page.

:::::: Some people say we need to misspell the names because that's how other publications spell them. If the common belief in the world was that the earth is flat, should we write that in wikipedia, even if we know that it's not flat but round. No, we should write that the world is round. One reason to the very existance of encyclopedias is to broaden people's view of the world. Not to narrow it, which we would be doing by telling them to spell the name in an incorrect way. --HJV 04:47, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

::::::: You clearly misunderstand what I mean by search. I mean search within the page using a browser's text search, i.e. ctrl-f. In fact, I made that quite clear by using the words "in the article". If someone is at the 1983 NHL Entry Draft article, knowing that Dominik Hasek was drafted that year and wants to know which selection Hasek was, he might press ctrl-f and type "Hasek" into the text box that appears. As the article is now, those perfectly logical steps would result in him successfully finding the info he wanted. But if the article spelled his name "Hašek", the find would be unsuccessful and the person would be left mistakenly believing that either he was wrong about Hasek's draft year or that the article was incomplete or incorrect, all because of a diacritic that isn't on his keyboard and that he probably has never even heard of.

::::::: So no, my argument is not at all false. The diacritics and non-english characters in the article titles are less concerning to me what with redirects and all, but those in the article bodies themselves are an impediment to text searching for people whose keyboards lack those letters. That so many articles have them is irrelevant. It doesn't necessarily make them right. And what's that about broadening people's views? There's nothing wrong with having the person's native spelling pointed out right at the beginning of a person's article (see Sergei Fedorov for one of a great many examples), so there's your broadening right there. But once every instance of a name everywhere on wikipedia gets replaced with something I can't easily type, then wikipedia articles become more difficult for me to search and therefore less useful.

::::::: Oh, and who are you to say that the names are being misspelled? By all means, show me some reference of authority that says that "Selänne" is the proper english spelling of his name. By the way, I don't see any explanation of "Antero Niitymakiho" as mentioned above. It's not exactly as his name is spelled in Finnish, so it must be incorrect, right? Someone misspelled Владисла́в Алекса́ндрович Третья́к as "Vladislav Tretiak". Should something be done about that? I eagerly await your answer.

::::::: Stop with this "incorrect" nonsense. Finnish is not English is not Czech is not Russian and so on, and peoples' names often look different between different languages. Aottley 07:17, 4 March 2006 (UTC)