User talk:OsamaK/March 2008

User:OKBot
I reverted your bot taking out a lot of interwikis at once. Thought you might want to know. Grand master  ka  03:20, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Transliteration of "a" vs "al"
I see you're going through and renaming a lot of pages on Wikipedia. Has there been any discussion somewhere on Wikipedia about this transliteration change? Bhimaji (talk) 08:50, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

I know that Wikipedia is open and boldness is encouraged. The reason I asked if there had been discussion is because I wanted to know if I should disagree somewhere specific. I do think that mass-renaming of pages is something that should be discussed first. That's especially true when the change you are making is one that is *not* generally accepted. I understand that it is your opinion that "al" is an incorrect transliteration. However, it is the transliteration that is commonly accepted. In the .kw domain, for example, "A-Sabah" is used 4 times. "Al-Sabah" is used 12,100 times. Clearly, the government of Kuwait seems quite happy with the traditional transliteration.

Do you have a source you can cite for your alternative transliteration?

Transliteration is always annoying, and is rarely accurate. Representing Arabic text in the latin alphabet is imperfect; that's why people transliterate to "7alas" instead of "khalas", for example.

I think that consistency of transliteration is extremely important. For example, google shows:

So many different transliterations make searching very frustrating and annoying. Will a more accurate translation *really* make the average English speaker more likely to get Arabic pronunciation right? In my opinion, as long as the transliteration is reasonably acceptable, consistency is more important than perfection. I'm going to do a mediocre job pronouncing the kh in "khalas" no matter how how you write it. Bhimaji (talk) 12:38, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Sacramento
The OKBot is putting the tag bpy:সাকরামেনটো in the Sacramento page. There a quite a few bots that are doing this. The tag belongs to a South American state, not the capitol of California.-DevinCook (talk) 09:16, 30 March 2008 (UTC)