User talk:Iricigor/UE

Opening remark
Our goal is simple: to change WP:UE in a way that guarantees preservation of diacritic characters of Latin-based scripts in article titles and elsewhere in article text. This chiefly applies (but is not limited to) personal names and toponyms.

Main arguments for this are the following:
 * 1) An encylopedia, as a reference work, should prefer correctness over familiarity or convenience - up to a point, of course. Diacritics are not disproportionately problematic in this respect.
 * 2) As Iricigor correctly notes, this is already de facto Wikipedia standard.
 * 3) Other reference works indeed formally mandate such practice.

Arguments will not be enough: if necessary, we should mobilize other Wikipedia editors who might have an interest in this. These are all who use Latin-based alphabets - at the very least, these are virtually all non-English-speaking Europeans.

I'll move now to more concrete suggestions...

If you haven't seen it, please take a look at the National Geographic Style Manual. I believe it presents a very powerful case: National Geographic is just a magazine (albeit a respected one), not a reference work, yet it prints diacritic characters from Latin-based scripts as a matter of policy.

Note that NG says "anglicized version" - I think this is more precise than "English version" from the proposal. (This means "Venice" rather than "Venezia", etc.)

The list of languages NG provides is perhaps too narrow. I'd say "all Latin-based alphabets" - plain and simple.

The issue is a complex one, there are still many details to be addressed... GregorB (talk) 18:54, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Some additional remarks
Britannica's style guide regarding diacritics appears to be similar to that of the NGS. This is a very powerful argument, since Wikipedia looks up to Britannica in many respects.

I've seen arguments that diacritics make searching difficult. I suspect this is made up: when I search, I mostly use the no-diacritics title of article I'm looking form, and I don't remember that this has ever failed (Google search or Wikipedia search, doesn't matter). If diacritics create searching problems, this needs to be demonstrated with an example; I suspect this is going to be difficult. GregorB (talk) 15:03, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Support
This seems a solid and clear addition to the guideline, and one I would support. Translations of different alphabets (e.g. Russian, Arabic, Hebrew) are non-problematic here, as the transliteration is often its own pronunciation guide and so long as English language sources agree, we can use what they say. With Latin alphabet languages (and I include Serbian in its Latin form here as one) there's no good reason not to use it, especially for proper and place names. As for diacritics and searching, I do it all the time on Google - it seems to have some internal translation mechanism which picks them up and tries different versions. Let me know if this proposal goes somewhere - I don't regularly watch the area. I'd also be happy to provide copyediting of any proposal to the wider community, as I'm a native English speaker (Anglo-Australian) with real-world editing experience. Orderinchaos 13:46, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Support from me too - looks a sensible proposal--Matilda talk 01:56, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Good idea
A good idea and well done, but it leaves a gray area with letters like Đ/Dj. Admiral Norton (talk) 12:20, 27 July 2008 (UTC)