Talk:William Sears (Baháʼí)

Untitled

In response to

context of "religion" suffices & avoids relatively obscure foreign word with diacritics as a reason for changing it from

William Sears (Bahá'í)

to

William Sears (religion)

he reverses that name change with the "reason" that the "Bahá'í" version gives a

much better title

Period.

Quality of titles is not a reason, it's part of our standards that go without saying. Let me illustrate this by some examples of reasons:

• Bahá'í is a religious movement or denomination. (It stems from the days of the Ottoman Empire in, IIRC, Mesopotamia. It's got a prophet (whose name i'd probably misspell) said to have been martyred by firing squad, and it appeals to a lot of people, not all adherants, as a modern and inclusive apporach to religion.) But it is a relatively small and poorly known group. I asked a professional writer who successfully communicates with a cross-section of Americans "What is Baha'i?", eliciting no recollection whatsoever. "How about 'Baha'i World Faith'?" The response was not "oh, yeah", but "What's that, some kind of cult?" (which i consider, based on the Baha'i i have known, evidence not just of complete ignorance but of).
• Its name (which i would have spelled from memory with the same 5 letters but neither the two diacritical marks nor the apostrophe) is alien to English. I presume it comes either from Arabic or from Farsi thru Arabic. (I think of it as having two syllables, but that may be because i speak only Germanic languages, and i may have a hard time hearing the third syllable, or realizing it when i am hearing even English diphthongs.) For whatever reason, it's a hard word for native English speakers to take on board, starting with looking like it should have three syllables and sounding to them like it has two. I assume the diacritics are official among the Baha'i, and that they capture nuances of its pronunciation in some language of SW Asia, but they nevertheless are a further barrier to comprehension and source of confusion for nearly all English-speakers.
• The purpose of Dab'd title is to help readers distinguish articles that are contenders for the same title. A good dab'd title is one that clarifies the difference between its topic and the other contenders while minimizing the knowledge and thot required by the process.

I happen to think that some knowledge is better than others, and that knowledge of facts about Baha'i is probably better than average among facts. But they should not be conveyed in article titles (or on Dab pages) to the detriment of WP's NPoV goals. I've given a bunch of reasons why the "Bahá'í" title interferes with Dab'n, and we've seen that the advocate for it sees no need to muster any more "reason" than a personal preference.
--Jerzy•t 02:57, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

I assumed you were editing in good faith, and I still do. But some of your arguments do not hold water. The diacritics are a standard for Arabic transliteration that are used across the board, when rendering an unfamiliar word into English. There is a lazy way of not putting the diacritics, and therefore writing Baha'i, but for professional or academic purposes it's pretty standard to use them. Not to mention, they're used on all Baha'i related articles on wikipedia.

As to the recognition of Baha'i, an official survey in 2000 showed that 1 in every 3 (31%) Americans know about the Baha'i Faith. That's up from 2% in 1980, and I would guess it's much higher now in 2006, considering the intensive campaigns happening across the country. This is rather irrelevant, since anyone reading this page will almost surely be familiar with the religion, and link here from other Baha'i pages.

The other issue is standardization, and most of the Baha'i pages use that form of disambiguation. See George Townshend (Bahá'í), Pioneering (Bahá'í), and Infallibility (Bahá'í). See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (people)#Qualifier between brackets or parentheses, which has examples of (delegate), (chemist), (classicist), (congressman), (actor), (cyclist), and (artist). According to this, the correct disambiguation would be (religionist). The qualifier of (Baha'i) would be the appropriate adjective. If this page is changed then several others need to be changed, and I don't see any policy stating that it must be.

I'm going to restore it to William Sears (Bahá'í). Cuñado - Talk 06:34, 17 March 2006 (UTC)