User:MTC

MTC is the screen-name of Matthew Cutler, born on July 20, 1988, living in Milton Keynes.



(I’m switching to first person now.)

Genealogy
WikiTree (my profile, English Wikipedia article) Geni (my profile, English Wikipedia article)

Gaming
Cyberscore (my profile, forum, my forum profile, English Wikipedia article) – I am an admin and a developer of Cyberscore. VGR (my profile, English Wikipedia article, Wikipedia article (fr))

Board games
Brainking (my profile, English Wikipedia article) Chess.com (my profile, English Wikipedia article) lichess (lichess, English Wikipedia article)

Apparently controversial opinions on Wikipedia policies
I have several opinions on how Wikipedia’s policies badly need changing. I consider most of these obvious, yet somehow others don’t agree (as evidenced by the existence of the current policies).

Common names
I see no good reason to name articles after the name that most English-speakers (most of whom do not know or care one way or the other) refer to them as, rather than their official name.

Dialects of English
Choosing between British and American English:
 * Go with the less ambiguous one.
 * In the US, “pavement” seems to refer to the tarmac on the road, while in the UK, the pavement is the walkway to the side of the road, which Americans call a sidewalk. So my preference is to avoid the word “pavement” completely and use “sidewalk”.
 * For the same reason, the word “pants” should always be avoided. Americans think it refers to trousers, while Brits think it means underwear. Use trousers, jeans, or underwear. Never use “pants”, it’s just annoying to read and try to work out which is meant.
 * One last example of the above that I will mention here is the word “football”. Much as I’d like to teach myself to refer to the most popular sport in the world as “soccer”, I am unable to do so without being told off by fellow Europeans… so I restrict myself to using it only when the context would make “football” ambiguous. On Wikipedia, my opinion is that wherever confusion may occur, avoid using “football” on its own, always replace it with soccer or prefix it with “association”, “American”, “Australian”, etc. depending on the context. Never use the awful construct “football (soccer)”.
 * Where the above doesn’t give an answer, go with the more logical one. For example, in words like realize/realise, the second-to-last letter is always, regardless of the dialect, pronounced like a “z”, so use “-ize”, not “-ise”.

Some people like to refer to “British” or “American” punctuation. Some Americans may notice me using what they think is “British punctuation”. I don’t, I use logical punctuation, which is neither British nor American, and may or may not be Wikipedia’s definition of logical punctuation.

Disambiguation
I dislike the idea that terms needing disambiguation that have a “primary topic” have the “primary topic” at the term without disambiguation, rather than the far more obvious and definable approach of just disambiguating everything that needs it. In addition, there are some clearly incorrectly chosen “primary topics”: When I search for avatar, I expect to see a disambiguation page or, with the primary topic policy as it is, I would expect to see either the computing definition of the term or the film. The religious definition is a tertiary or lower topic, so why on Earth does it get to be the “avatar” article?

Where possible, a longer official name should be chosen rather than disambiguation brackets, but that should not be considered to allow another topic to take over the short name.

Typography
Wikipedia has surprisingly good typography policies, but they don’t go far enough. Wikipedia asks for en and em dashes to be used whenever it is correct to use one and incorrect to use a hyphen (though there are still debated points over which cases this covers). That is fine, however…

If we can correctly use dashes, why can’t we correctly use quotes? It’s exactly the same thing, characters which don’t appear normally on most people’s keyboards but are nonetheless correct. You may notice that I always use typographically correct quotes on this page, rather than the Wikipedia-prescribed typewriter quotes. Typographically correct quotes are not only more correct, but useful. Wikicode makes use of typewriter apostrophes for bold and italic text. When italicizing or bolding text with apostrophes, workarounds often have to be used to avoid the conflict that extra typewriter apostrophes cause. If typographically correct ones were used, italicizing these terms’ apostrophes would be much easier.

The keyboard argument, which is also used in an attempt to remove diacritics, should be easily defeated by distributing improved keyboard layouts for those who wish to type more easily, rather than having to use the character palette below the edit window or memorize Alt codes. With my personal keyboard layout I can type these characters quickly and easily.

I can also add ellipses (…) to this argument, and should also note that the existing policy correctly prescribes the use of multiplication signs (×).

Non-English names
So this is a far more controversial one and I don’t really expect any support on this:
 * 1) My absolute preference would be for any article that clearly has a primary language to be named by the Wikipedia in its primary language and for every other Wikipedia to simply use that title.
 * 2) My compromised preference is for this name to be romanized. This does not mean “anglicized”, when something is romanized, it is rewritten in the Latin alphabet and not adapted to any specific Latin-alphabet language. This also means that any article whose primary language uses the Latin alphabet should obviously remain as it is in the original, rather than being “adapted to the specific target language”, which most monoglot English editors consider to mean “strip away all the diacritics”.
 * 3) My further compromised preference: same as the previous, but with some words translated into English. Acceptable only for certain types of article, like country names.

Here is a table to further illustrate this, as the text I’ve written may confuse. Choosing just one of the first three columns would be consistent and acceptable, while if you actually support anything in the fourth column with the situation as it was at this section’s last update… well, WP:NPA prevents me from finishing this sentence.

Further points
/Article names is where I shall put my opinions on naming disputes that are too long to place here.