Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Macedonia/evidence

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English usage of the word Macedonia
In English language the word Macedonia has a long history of use to refer to: the ancient kingdom, the region and the Greek part and since 1992 the country. See Britannica

Britannica
In Britannica, all four Macedonias have the same title (impossible in Wikipedia) "Macedonia", "Macedonia", "Macedonia" and "Macedonia". Furthermore, Britannica student's edition lists three (no subtitles whatsoever): "Macedonia", "Macedonia" and "Macedonia"

Internet users
With new legitimate tools we can determine context around internet searches. A Google tool lists "Macedonia" search terms
 * In the US, in Australia, in Canada.


 * See also: "Macedonia" places (represented by cities) by Google (zoom in/out,click update)

literature about antiquity
In almost all literature & history books, "Macedonia" is used for the ancient kingdom and the word ancient is not even added in the name (examples:,,,, , , ) not "Macedon", not even "Ancient Macedonia" in all the above examples


 * Net usage about antiquity (lang=en)
 * Macedonia +ancient -Macedon: 2,270,000
 * Macedon +ancient -Macedonia: 184,000

Books & Wikipedia
Another Google tool digs into archives to find the temporal context, i.e. the time period around various citations the word "Macedonia". They show that the Macedonia in antiquity(a big bulk of the citations) and Pre-Balkan wars Macedonia region (spike in 1912) are common uses of "Macedonia". Therefore the non-country citations are more
 * "Macedonia" timeline, Wikipedia
 * "Macedonia" timeline, Google Books
 * Google help: see How do you create the timelines?

Official sources

 * Usage by neutral official parties suggest F.Y.R.O.M. term (expanded) is more common (verified by Fut.Perf)

Maps

 * Usage in online interactive maps:
 * "FYROM" (4): Microsoft,Google,Multimap,Mapquest.
 * "Macedonia" (2): Infoplease, Yahoo


 * Usage in widely used maps that are issued by organizations
 * NATO maps, UN maps use F.Y.R.O.M (expanded)


 * Usage in printed maps, however respectable, are inconsistent affected by political decisions
 * University of Texas collection (CIA maps).George Bush 1st term:"F.Y.R.O.M.". George Bush 2nd term:"Macedonia".
 * Usage in printed maps
 * by major US maps publishers "Macedonia" (2), National Geographic, Rand McNalley.
 * "FYROM" (1), Hammond
 * All minor publishers use "Macedonia" (after 2003?)
 * (data by User:Taivo)

How Wikipedia treats other conflicts
There is no debate on Luxembourg no name is disputed and no regional conflicts. In all other conflict areas except Azerbaijan the main page is never about a country:

Note that Republic of Macedonia is also partially recognized with that name. The above suggest the compromise of making Macedonia (region) main topic at Macedonia and move back Republic of Macedonia to its previous location. Reminder: there is also Macedonia (ancient kingdom)

Library of Congress
see User:SQRT5P1D2/LOCMAC

LOC in its naming conventions uses "Macedonia (Republic)", "Macedonia (Greece)", "Macedonia (Bulgaria)" to label the works that are related to those specific contexts. The plain "Macedonia" is reserved for the region and the ancient history of the region (that includes the kingdom of Macedonia).

Google Books also uses Macedonia (Greece) and Macedonia (Republic) to disambiguate the two contexts.

General usage of the word Macedonia in geographical contexts
For example, the Merriam-Webster's geographical dictionary has multiple occurrences of the word "Macedonia". Under numerous entries for cities, lakes, regions or any other geographic entity the word appears with various meanings. It is fairly easy to notice that Merriam-Webster uses "Republic of Macedonia" in every single occasion when referring to the modern country to disambiguate from other Macedonias. Routinely throughout the book "Macedonia" alone is used (along with "Thrace", "Thessaly" etc) either for the region of ancient Greece or the modern Greek region (link for verification:Google Books preview, query for "Macedonia", click on View all).

General usage of the word Macedonia in historical contexts
The different meanings of "Macedonia" under varied geopolitical discussions illustrates that there is significant ambiguity of the word when used in history books. Here is a perfect example of that ambiguity in The Kingfisher History Encyclopedia:
 * Macedonia used in text under the title "Classical Greece" and also in the section titled "Alexander the Great"
 * Macedonia in the section titled "The Balkan Wars"
 * Macedonia in the section titled "Breakup of Yugoslavia"

The name "Macedonia" is most often used to refer to the country rather than other entities

 * see User:Future Perfect at Sunrise/MOSMAC2 (and subsequent section on corpus search)

This claim goes for present-day usage in common English practice across a wide range of topic domains. The Google Books results indicate that the picture is naturally different in collections of academic literature including older works.

The country is most often referred to as "Macedonia" rather than other names

 * see same evidence section as above

The page move to Macedonia has not negatively affected readership of the other articles

 * see User:Future Perfect at Sunrise/MOSMAC2

Macedonia does not "accept" or "use" the UN appellation itself even in contexts like the EU or UN
It is not true, as has been claimed in discussion, that the republic "formally uses the provisional reference, without referring to its constitutional name, in all of its relations with the UN and other international organizations". The country signs documents under the UN appellation only where they are authored in common with other countries, such as treaties or common declarations like the one here. However, whenever it addresses the United Nations alone, in any document authored by itself, it will invariably use the constitutional name. See multiple documents here, e.g., , , , ,. Here we see the same on the bilateral level: a bilateral exchange of notes with another country that uses the UN appellation, filed with the UN registry, where the editorial frontmatter added by the UN uses the "f.Y.R." term, the other country also addresses Macedonia as "f.Y.R." in the text ("[...] presents its compliments to the Embassy of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia [...]"), but the Macedonian embassy in its own letter refers to its country as "Republic of Macedonia" throughout. In the EU, it even registers a formal objection as a matter of routine every time it is officially referred to by the UN appellation (here; multiple similar documents here).

Survey of affected page titles
Just some statistics to provide some idea about the scope of the rules to be decided here.

There are currently 355 article pages that are part of Category:Macedonia or its subcategories (i.e. related to any of the Balkan "Macedonias") and whose page titles contain the string "Macedonia(n)".

Of these, 10 are the top-level main articles (4 competing articles about "Macedonia" as geographical/political units, 4 about "Macedonians" as ethnic groups, and 2 about "Macedonian" as a language name).

In 135 pages, the term "Macedonia" is part of a larger proper name, and as such not subject to disambiguating modifications.

The remaining 210 pages are "sub-articles" in the sense to be covered by this guideline.

They are distributed as follows:
 * 5 articles dealing with the ancient kingdom
 * 4 articles dealing with the geographical region
 * 3 articles dealing with Greek M.
 * 19 articles dealing with the modern Macedonian language
 * 29 articles dealing with (Slavic) Macedonians as an ethnic group
 * 112 articles dealing with the country
 * 38 articles where the name of the country is itself used as a disambiguating qualifier (e.g. placenames of the format "X, Macedonia")

Among the latter two groups (i.e. titles referring to the country), the current naming practices are as follows:
 * 1 article using fully spelled-out "former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" (Accession of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to the European Union)
 * 8 articles using "FYR Macedonia" (I suspect there are more, perhaps they are not all covered by the cateogry hierarchy under Category:Macedonia)
 * 39 articles using plain "Macedonia"
 * 103 articles using "Republic of Macedonia"

Of the pages that use a complex term for the country ("Republic of" or some variant of "f.Y..."), 42 already have a redirect from the simple page title using plain "M."

Of the 210 articles, only 8 belong to sets of directly competing names that need disambiguation from each other (such as Flag of the Republic of Macedonia vs. Flag of Macedonia (Greece)).

This is true even though there are as many as 29 Macedonia-related disambiguation pages, in addition to the 2 main ones. But most of these deal with ambiguities that aren't primarily due to the ambiguity of "M." itself, and of the remaining ones, many entries don't actually go to matching articles but to redirects or section links of quite differently named articles.

Evidence copied from MACEDONIA2 Arbitration
The term "former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" is the one most commonly used by international organizations as evidenced by:

UN  EU , NATO , WTO , IMF , WHO , ICC , Council of Europe , WIPO , WMO , IOM , Interpol .

Google search also verifies this result:

Most recent data as of --Radjenef (talk) 10:33, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Self-identification
The Republic self-identifies in two ways. One is de jure self-identification, whereby according to the Republic's constitution it is called "Republic of Macedonia". The other is de facto self-identification, whereby the Republic signs official UN documents as "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" (i.e. ). The Republic's current President, Gjorge Ivanov, has mentioned that his country's UN appellation constitutes a name : "So we were forced to take the name "FYROM" (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia)". While it has been argued by other users that the Republic uses its constitutional name in the context of the UN, the evidence that were provided were mostly bilateral correspondence (letters between countries) and speeches, not actual formal UN documents. Also, while it may be true that the Republic sometimes "protests" when its constitutional name is not used within the context of the EU, its EU candidacy is under the UN provisional reference. If that were not the case, then the Republic would have been acting in violation of the 1995 interim accord and Greece would be allowed to veto the membership. That is clearly not the case here. To sum up, self-identification is a fuzzy area because the Republic doesn't always use the same way of identifying itself. The term of plain "Macedonia" does not appear to be a formal name of the Republic.

On the status-quo
The current state of the Republic's article was brought about due to some edits that were made prior to ARBMAC2. The user who made them was sanctioned by ArbCom as a result of those edits ,. Ever since, as the result of an ArbCom injunction, the article's name has been locked until after the community comes to a solution for the naming dispute. Note that this doesn't imply an endorsement of the status-quo in any way. In fact, the longest standing "status quo" (even though it was not a consensus) was the one described in.

JSTOR Search
In most of the existing academic literature as well as in older English usage, the name is more often used in other meanings, especially that of the ancient kingdom. To be more precise, I have broken up the search into two time periods: up until 1995 and from 1995 onwards.

Articles up until 1995
The link for searching for all articles mentioning the word "Macedonia", limiting the results to only those articles published up until 1995 is, yielding a total of 10612 articles. Roughly checking the first 50 results, yielded 6 articles that used the word "Macedonia" to refer to either the Republic or the former Yugoslavian Province:, , , , ,.

Articles from 1995 onwards
The link for searching for all articles mentioning the word "Macedonia", limiting the results to only those articles published from 1995 onwards is, yielding a total of 3245 articles. Roughly checking the first 50 results, yielded 22 articles that used the word "Macedonia" to refer to the Republic:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,.

Even though these 22 articles do use the word "Macedonia" while referring to the Republic, it should be noted that some of them refer to it as "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" (yes, with a capital "F").

Response to criticism of evidence
The results having to do with Joseph Macedonia are 7, not 5. That doesn't mean that these articles should not be counted, it simply means that J.M. Macedonia is one of the meanings of the term. Out of the three references Taivo mentioned for the country, I can confirm that one of them was a miscount on my part, so that makes 23. The other two, weren't in my listing of the first 50 references, though it could be the case that JSTOR moves things around quite often. In any case, if you look at the way I've used the JSTOR evidence, you'll see that I have only used it to prove that the country is not the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. The evidence clearly shows that the country is not "much more used" than the other topics.

Other evidence
Evidence in favour of "former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia"

Britannica uses "Macedonia" to refer to the country
This is counter-evidence to the claims about Britannica by Shadowmorph above.

If you search for "Macedonia" on the online version of Britannica, you are presented with a list of articles containing "Macedonia" somewhere in the title, such as:


 * Macedonia - the top result, refers to the country with the formal name Republic of Macedonia
 * Macedonia (region, Europe) - refers to the general historical area that is split among the above country, Greece, Bulgaria and Albania
 * Macedonia (ancient kingdom, Europe) - refers to the ancient kingdom of Macedon
 * Macedonia (region, Greece) - refers to the region in Greece that is called Macedonia
 * ... etc.

Note: this listing of results is in no way specific to searches for Macedonia, it does the exact same thing if you search for Germany, France, etc. It's not the same as a disambiguation page in Wikipedia.

Main observation here is that Britannica uses just "Macedonia" to refer to the country. It adds additional parenthesised qualifiers for the other meanings. If there was any ambiguity as to what the single word "Macedonia" refers to in a general context, one would think that they would have also clarified the country article with "Macedonia (country, Europe)" or something similar, but they have not.

Regarding the actual text of the articles, if you click on any of the search results above you will see that Britannica puts the parenthesised qualifier in a subtitle on the article page (except of course for the "Macedonia" article where there is no such qualifier, hence no subtitle).

For example, the article Macedonia (region, Europe) begins with:

Macedonia region, Europe Bulgarian Makedoniya, Modern Greek Makedhonía, Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian Makedonija ... etc.

There is the main title, the subtitle "region, Europe", and list of alternate/local names.

Compare this with the article for Macedonia, which begins with:

Macedonia Macedonian Makedonija, officially Republic of Macedonia, Macedonian Republika Makedonija ... etc.

As you can see, there is the main title and the alternate/local names, but no subtitle this time.

Wikipedia's status quo is in fact consistent with Britannica, i.e. it uses plain unadorned "Macedonia" to refer to the country, and additional qualifiers for the other meanings. Therefore, Britannica cannot be used as an argument against the status quo, i.e. that "Macedonia" alone should stop referring to the country.

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