Talk:Mikado

"The company was taken over in the 1960s from Arabia that was also taken over from the Julius Meinl company and the label "Mikado" was removed because the name was broadly associated with the pick-up sticks game."

If someone else happens to see this, please attempt to fix this sentence on the original page. I don't get the "taken over from Arabia" thing. -- StellarFury 22:44 12 Jul 2004

Adding information in disambiguation context

I've added the following caveat paragraph from a 1903 scholarly source, but I'm uncertain about its utility in this specific context.

"We purposely avoid, in spite of its wide usage in foreign literature, the misleading term Mikado. If it be not for the natural curiosity of the races, which always seeks something novel and loves to call foreign things by foreign names, it is hard to understand why this obsolete and ambiguous word should so sedulously be retained. It originally meant not only the Sovereign, but also his house, the court, and even the State, and its use in historical writings causes many difficulties which it is unnecessary to discuss here in detail. The native Japanese employ the term neither in speech nor in writing. It might as well be dismissed with great advantage from sober literature as it has been for the official documents." -- Asakawa, Kan'ichi. (1903). The Early Institutional Life of Japan, Tokyo: Shueisha [New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corp., 1963], p. 25 n.1.

I wonder ...? This obviously becomes an invitation for comment ...? --Ooperhoofd 14:25 & :30, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

First, the 2nd most rigid thing in the main ("article") namespace is a Dab page, since (to paraphrase Lenin) "the purpose of a disambiguation page is to disambiguate". Complete sentences on Dab pages are very rare, and the paragraph cannot stay on the accompanying one.

That being said, the paragraph is extremely valuable on this talk page, and it may be important to paraphrase it in at least one article. If we can confirm its basic point (which i think is likely), with sources lacking its "voice crying in the wilderness" tone (which raises the slight possibility that this scholar is the only one concerned about this usage issue), we probably need several entries at least vaguely like

• Mikado, ancient term for Emperor of Japan
• Mikado, ancient term for Empire of Japan

--Jerzy•t 17:21, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Renaming

I find in Google tests:

about 5,910,000 for Mikado

about 722,000 for Mikado -titipu -gilbert -Sullivan -savoy

I was about to conclude that about 88% of Web uses are for the Savoy opera, subtitled "or, The Town of Titipu", by W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. I was about to move the accompanying Dab page to Mikado (disambiguation), to make room for Mikado to be a Rdr to The Mikado. For good or ill, i then found

about 671,000 for "The Mikado"

about 2,170,000 for Mikado -"The Mikado" -titipu -gilbert -Sullivan -savoy

I don't understand those results, so i leave the matter for further discussion.
--Jerzy•t 17:48, 19 February 2008 (UTC)