Talk:Đồng Tâm Base Camp

Proper diacritical marks
'''It doesn't look like the title of this article has the correct diacritical marks? Please fix it.''' Branlon 15:43, 2 December 2017 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Branlon (talk • contribs)
 * I have no idea what you mean. Please make your change to the page. Mztourist (talk) 07:29, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

OK, as I write this, the article about Dong Tam Base Camp appears in the Wikipedia app on my Apple iPad one way and differently on my Windows 10 desktop with Google's browser. That's a software problem.

But, as can be easily verified, there are several other issues at play here. Some Vietnamese words in the English Wikipedia appear without diacritical marks and some appear with diacritical marks, correctly and incorrectly. That's an on-going encyclopedia problem, not just with this article about Dong Tam.

And then there's the "timeframe" issue about the fact that fifty years ago in documents produced by the US military, the Vietnamese diacritical marks were not used because they weren't available on US typewriters. Place names were Americanized. So, should place names like "Dong Tam Base Camp", which no longer exist, appear today with diacritical marks or not?

By the way, there is currently a rural commune called Đồng Tâm (with diacritical marks in the Wikipedia article) located about 35 kilometers south of Hà Nội, Việt Nam. Branlon 14:59, 5 December 2017 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Branlon (talk • contribs)
 * While the US military may have called it Dong Tam Base Camp this was presumably because the Vietnamese spelling wasn't available on typewriters at the time or it was just too difficult to say it and so it was anglicized to Dong Tam Base Camp. My understanding is that we should use the proper Vietnamese spelling on Wikipedia, but I'm willing to be corrected on that. Yes there are many villages and hamlets that have the same name across Vietnam. Mztourist (talk) 03:14, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

Since the Dong Tam Base Camp, built by and named by the US military, was abandoned after the war and no longer exists, its name should remain the same forever, without diacritical marks.

I'm not going to change the Wikipedia name to Dong Tam Base Camp because the use of diacritics in Wikipedia is not consistent. For example, see Wikipedia pages for US military base camps and airfields in Vietnam, like Cu Chi, Bien Hoa, Long Binh, and Vung Tau. Branlon 00:39, 7 December 2017 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Branlon (talk • contribs)

Picture
The picture is reversed, i.e., mirror image. The Kinh (canal) Xang that disappears at the top flows basically north/south (~335 degrees). The entrance to the basin from the canal is actually on the east side of the canal not the "west" as it appears. Source: Satellite view in Google maps. Riverpilot (talk) 19:39, 24 February 2023 (UTC)