Talk:Beyrouth

Discussion from WP:RfD:


 * Beyrouth &rarr; Beirut This redirection is useless since the redirect name is juste "Beirut" written in french. Instead, I'll put a link to the french translation of the "Beirut" article. User:500LL (talk) 19:41, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC) 19:38, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * A link to a page in French isn't very useful for someone who only speaks/read English, right? I thought about leaving it pointing to Beirut, and adding something to the top of that page about how its name in French is "Beyrouth", but... where does that stop? Do we have to add the name of "Berlin" in every language known to man to the Berlin article? On the other hand, leaving it pointing to Beirut with no explanation isn't good either. Putting in some text of the form "Beyrouth is the name of Beirut in French" would be OK, but.... Do we then do the same for Londres and all the other foreign-language names of various cities? Sigh, no easy answer that I see, at least off the top of my head. Noel (talk) 20:08, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * I vote to keep the redirect as it is. Beirut was under French rule for several decades. The French spelling, AFAIK, is still the most common spelling of the name used in Lebanon itslef (on road signs, etc.). So French is not an arbitrary language in this context (as, say, Spanish is to London). Keeping this redirect doesn't hurt. -- uriber 20:27, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Leave the redir alone - it catches a bunch of old refs, for instance from 1911EB articles. The "Beirut" spelling has only been common for a few decades. Similarly, many towns in Europe have redirs from their ancient Roman and Greek names, to catch refs from articles about ancient times. The rule for redefs in place names is easy - if it was ever commonly-used in English writing, plus a redir for each of the inhabitants' common languages - thus Milano but not (Lithuanian) Milanas. Stan 21:18, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Fair enough, makes good sense. (If I run across the appropriate policy page, I'll add it.) But what about the "articles ought to explain redirects" rule - I assume that means we should add mention to the article that "Beyrouth" was the name in French (and thus commonly used, e.g. during the period of the French mandate)? Noel (talk) 22:18, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Yep - I try to do that myself. Someday it would be cool to write a script that makes note of redirs not mentioned in an article (after pruning out the orthography-motivated redirs of course). Stan 01:30, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)