Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Swedish)

lots of info
I'm OK with adding "lots of info", but don't make it "messy", please. --Francis Schonken 14:51, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
 * OK, not sure how to go about making a convention, and I'm not easily offended so please make suggestions. But I think we should try to do the arguing first and then have consensus when we do voting, so I'm trying to put up arguments and resoning in the main page now, I'm expecting it to be trimmed down later, e.g. when you confirm the EB does use 'non english' letters. Maybe we should have a todo list on the talk page instead??
 * Don't worry, we're doing fine making this a convention. My remark was about adding diverse remarks under the "See also" section; and about inserting Google searches that were not really according to established wikipedia standards. But I tried to deal with these problems, among others by moving part of the questions to this talk page.
 * Please feel free to improve/ammend the guideline proposal. --Francis Schonken 07:52, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Discussion
Remarks by Stefan, moved here by Francis:

To consider:
 * Both online Encyclopædia Britannica and Encarta list Swedish peopple with their original spelling. (someone please check e.g. Dag Hammarskjöld and Selma Lagerlöf in a paper encyclopedia and see how it is done there, also check if the names is listed with ö if it is sorted as o?)
 * Dag Hammarskjöld (and Hjalmar Hammarskjöld) in Britannica, 1984 printed edition, also Pär Lagerkvist and Selma Lagerlöf. Note that Britannica also puts in alphabetical order as described by me in Village pump (policy) (e.g. the Nordic river "Lågen" before "lagena" and "lager beer" - å is ordered as if it were a plain "a", but written "å") --Francis Schonken 16:15, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
 * So the question is do we let 'most common' argument win, or do we use the 'real' spelling and do we do as other encyclopedia does? and what is most common?
 * How do we handle the fact that IMHO wikipedia is not a encyclopedia for people in english speaking countries, it is a encyclopedia for everyone written in english. If that is accepted the argument to spell words correctly should have higher precedence than most common. Stefan sometime 22 February

Further, I don't know what is meant by the "Old Norse" exception (which I put in Naming conventions (Swedish) and reformulated) - even after reformulating I don't know exactly what it is meant to signify. --Francis Schonken 15:57, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
 * There is a Naming conventions (Norse mythology) which basically states use english letter, BUT the rational for this is because this have been done in literature for a long time so that Naming convention can not be used as and argument against this (proposed convention). Not sure if that made sense, just trying to put in text in teh proposal so that it is hard to argue against. Stefan 03:39, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Norse mythology NC is only about Norse mythology - Being no Swede myself I have no idea if there is any Swedish mythology, and if there is, whether there would be any correlation of that mythology to Norse mythology. If that is not the case I wouldn't worry about the Norse mythology NC, it has no effect whatsoever on the Swedish NC we're building now.
 * Another question is whether in Swedish any other characters outside the A-Z/a-z range, apart from Å / å, Ä / ä, and Ö / ö are used? For instance if the thorn character (Þ/þ) is used in (old/modern) Swedish, also the Norse mythology NC doesn't apply, rather look at that other NC proposal I'm working on: naming conventions (thorn). --Francis Schonken 07:52, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
 * No, no other characters are used. The reson I bring Norse Mythology up is that I want to make it clear WHY it does not apply so that people can not vote against or argue using it as an example, there really is no overlap, I'm just afraid that poeple would use it as a reson to say no to this proposal. See Old_Norse_language first sentense "Old Norse is the Germanic language once spoken by the inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300." So it is basically old Swedish, or what have evolved into all the scandinavian languages today (except finnish which is a totally different beast), so I do not want anyone using that policy to argue that this should use the same, since it is not the same, Old Norse is not written like that today while swedish is using its 'funny' chracters, and therefore that policy should be separate from this. Stefan 10:11, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks very much for the additional info (and sorry for my ignorance on [Old] Norse/Swedish/Finnish topics). Wouldn't be too difficult to put that in the guideline proposal in a way that others who, like me, are not very accustomed to the finer points of these languages are not led astray. --Francis Schonken 10:35, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
 * A minor addition: Swedish uses some accents – I can only think of "é" in armé for the moment – they are rare and exists only in words borrowed from French and some family names. These are not counted as a part of the Swedish alphabet unlike å, ä and ö. Jeltz talk  23:48, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

How about the somewhat known surname Klüft? Should it be Klüft, Kluft or Klyft? Hdw 13:23, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Pronounciation
The suggested convention is probably good, as it seems to follow what is common practise. However one thing has to be kept in mind, namely that it will give the reader the erroneous impression that names/words with ö/ø is pronounced as o, ä as a etc. (at least that is my impression of how English read Scandinavian names). It would therefore probably be a good idea to add something stating the importance to write out the phonetics to the guideline. Gunnar Larsson 18:21, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Pronunciation info in the article text is no object of the naming conventions series of guidelines, see Manual of Style (pronunciation) instead - if you think that Swedish names should in this respect be treated differently than e.g. Spanish names, please voice your suggestions on the talk page of that MoS guideline. --Francis Schonken 19:21, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Move up to Naming Convention
I suppose there are no further problems to move this up from proposed to wikipedia subcat guideline. --Francis Schonken 07:58, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

This proposed guideline cuts across a lot of project areas and other guidelines. I strongly object to it becoming a guideline without consensus to do so. I see no indication there that there is a widespread community consensus on this isue. I think you need to advertise this widely and run a strawpoll before you change it into a guideline. The page has had only 1 editor and that is hardly enough of a consensus to create a guidline which had an impact on a number of artcles in different areas of en.wikipedia. --Philip Baird Shearer 10:06, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Before this can be put up as a guideline it would surely be a good idea it there was shown to be some sort of a consensus for it. That's more or less what the text of the guideline template says. Stefán Ingi 14:14, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
 * What's the point of having a special guideline for Swedish, and Swedish people only? Why not make it, say, a convention for nordic names (names using ä, ö, å, etc). This way we wouldn't need to make a new convention for Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, and Icelandic people. All of these use ä, ö and å in their alphabets as letters (not diacritics). --HJV 22:19, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Agree, but since I do not speak either of those, I did not dare to give examples in the debate that was very heated, therefore I wrote only about Swedish in my comment, please add rationale for all nordic languages. Stefan 02:30, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
 * This convention applies very well to Finnish names as well. I am not aware of any high quality textbook that leaves the letters ä, ö and å out when writing about Finnish names. --Jannex 16:06, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
 * It should apply for Finnish, Danish and Norwegian, but since I do not speak any of those I do not want to write about them, if you do, please add to the Rationale section with you equivalent comparisons. Although if so we should rename the page ... nevermind do that later. Stefan 02:27, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
 * And it also applies very well to Norwegian. I would like to refer to my rant at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (use English) for some views on the topic. As for the common name principle referenced on this project page, I will again use Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson as my example. With the Ø's, there are 113,000 Google hits, with O's instead you're down to almost 1\3 of that - 40,600. English pages only, -wikipedia -other variant yields 15,900 with Ø's, 13,300 with O's.--TVPR 17:37, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

I support this proposal. As an English speaker who has studied Swedish, I would consider it wrong to spell a name without the proper letters, and I would be confused. In Swedish, a and å are separate letters despite their similarity, like O and Q. Obviously, where an established English transliteration exists, that should be preferred (eg., Gothenburg for Göteborg), but this is rare. I think it ought to include the rest of the Scandinavian languages, too. OneVeryBadMan 10:39, 23 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I disagree with this proposal for a number of reasons.
 * 1. It directly contradicts a policy found here Naming conventions "Name your pages in English and place the native transliteration on the first line of the article unless the native form is more commonly used in English than the English form." In the vast majority of cases, diacritics are the least common form in English.
 * 2. It directly contradicts a guideline found here Naming conventions (use English) "If you are talking about a person, country, town, movie or book, use the most commonly used English version of the name for the article, as you would find it in other encyclopedias and reference works." Again, the most common form (in the vast majority of English publications) does not include diacritics.
 * 3. It directly contradicts two other proposals Naming conventions (standard letters with diacritics) and WikiProject Ice Hockey/Player pages format


 * To me, at least, it makes sense to use the most common form in English. There are cases in English that the most common form includes accents and diacritics, but most of the time, they are omitted. I would agree with this proposed naming convention if it were reworded to say that when, in English, the most common form of a name (or place or whatever) includes the use of diacritics, then wikipedia will reflect that for swedish names. I don't have a problem for a separate naming convention for Swedish, as there are other languages that have their own naming conventions, but it can't contradict other policies and guidelines and it definately can't contradict what is most common in English (as this is the English language section of wikipedia and not the Swedish or international section). Masterhatch 18:18, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

Even if I'm a native Swede and abhors the 'broken' look of Lidstrom, Naslund and Norstrom there is good reason to use the 'ugly' names. The native spelling should of course be noted at the top of the article but the english spelling should be used so people can find what they look for (and there should of course be a redirect page from the native spelling).

The problem really is that Ö isn't an O with funny dots, it's an O-E ligature, from OE to Œ to Ø (and in swedish to Ö). So 'proper translitteration should be Lidstroem, Naeslund and Norstroem. However, since this isn't used, and many regard Malmoe to be as ugly as Malmo we are stuck with stripping 'the funny dots and rings.

I grudgingly and under protest accept the idea that a english speaking user using the english language wiki should be able to search, both in the wiki and on pages, for 'Lidstrom' and expect to find it. Hdw 13:44, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Further discussion
The debate has continued here Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Finnish). Masterhatch 16:57, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

No longer needed and confirmed in WP:UE
Since the addition of "If you are talking about a person, country, town, movie or book, use the most commonly used English version of the name for the article, as you would find it in other encyclopedias and reference works." in WP:UE this conventions seams to be confirmed (and not needed any more). Stefan 21:32, 23 December 2006 (UTC)