Talk:Atitlán

Atitlán or Atitlan for English-language Wikipedia articles
(I am unsure where to put this discussion because it affects many English-language articles. This page seemed like the most logical location despite my belief that disambiguation pages rarely have useful Talk pages.)

Editor StonePeter wrote on the talk page of Lake Atitlán that in English, Atitlán has been fully Anglicized to Atitlan, so the diacritic, á, in the English-language version of the article is improper. I agree, and I added some statistics and links from Google's nGram tool to support the fact that, in English, Atitlan is spelled without a diacritic.

I was just reading the English-language article titled Santiago Atitlán, and that article prompted me to write this talk page section. In that very short article, the spelling of Atitlan vacillates between Atitlán and Atitlan but without any obvious pattern or reason(s). The lack of consistent usage creates ambiguity (is "Lake Atitlan" the same as "Lago de Atitlán"?) and, of course, a quality encyclopedia avoids ambiguity, which is why, for example this disambiguation page exists.

For what it is worth, I am writing this from Panajachel, on the shores of Lake Atitlan. I have been here for approximately four weeks. Signs written in English by people who speak English as a first language (of which, there are many) strongly tend towards Atitlan, without the diacritic. Spanish-language writing tends to use the diacritic, but a noticeable minority of signs do not have the diacritic.

I firmly believe that for accuracy and to reduce ambiguity, Wikipedia should use Atitlan when writing in English and in English-language articles, use Atitlán when explicitly using the Spanish name, and of course italicize the word to indicate that it is the foreign spelling.

Because multiple pages, especially page names, currently use the diacritic, I believe that the most efficient way to correct all of the uses of Atitlan is by script. I do not have the skill to create such a script, however. hunterhogan 18:55, 16 April 2015 (UTC)