MTC

MTC is the screen-name of Matthew Cutler^[1], born on July 20, 1988, living in Milton Keynes.

Wikipedia-specific

~~common~~
official

This user wants to abolish the common names policy in favor of official names.

About me

36Y

This Wikipedian was born on 20 July 1988 and is 36 years, 4 months, and 1 days old.

en	This user is a native speaker of English.

This user lives in the United Kingdom.

Genealogy

This user is a Genealogist and contributes to collaborative genealogy websites.

Video games

This user is a gamer.

This user makes use of Steam under the name of m132t003c.

Other games

This user is a chess player.

Sport

This user is interested in motor racing, but now only follows electric motorsport.

Other

A.S.

This user has
Asperger syndrome.

e^{\pi i}

This user is a mathematician.

<html>

This user can write HTML.

This user scored 748.7544709082532 on the Wikipediholic test (revision 69342008).

(I’m switching to first person now.)

Other websites I may be found on

Apparently controversial opinions on Wikipedia policies

I have several opinions on how Wikipedia’s policies badly need changing. I consider most of these obvious, yet somehow others don’t agree (as evidenced by the existence of the current policies).

Common names

I see no good reason to name articles after the name that most English-speakers (most of whom do not know or care one way or the other) refer to them as, rather than their official name.

Dialects of English

Choosing between British and American English:

Go with the less ambiguous one.
- In the US, “pavement” seems to refer to the tarmac on the road, while in the UK, the pavement is the walkway to the side of the road, which Americans call a sidewalk. So my preference is to avoid the word “pavement” completely and use “sidewalk”.
- For the same reason, the word “pants” should always be avoided. Americans think it refers to trousers, while Brits think it means underwear. Use trousers, jeans, or underwear. Never use “pants”, it’s just annoying to read and try to work out which is meant.
- One last example of the above that I will mention here is the word “football”. Much as I’d like to teach myself to refer to the most popular sport in the world as “soccer”, I am unable to do so without being told off by fellow Europeans… so I restrict myself to using it only when the context would make “football” ambiguous. On Wikipedia, my opinion is that wherever confusion may occur, avoid using “football” on its own, always replace it with soccer or prefix it with “association”, “American”, “Australian”, etc. depending on the context. Never use the awful construct “football (soccer)”.
Where the above doesn’t give an answer, go with the more logical one. For example, in words like realize/realise, the second-to-last letter is always, regardless of the dialect, pronounced like a “z”, so use “-ize”, not “-ise”.

Some people like to refer to “British” or “American” punctuation. Some Americans may notice me using what they think is “British punctuation”. I don’t, I use logical punctuation, which is neither British nor American, and may or may not be Wikipedia’s definition of logical punctuation.

Disambiguation

I dislike the idea that terms needing disambiguation that have a “primary topic” have the “primary topic” at the term without disambiguation, rather than the far more obvious and definable approach of just disambiguating everything that needs it. In addition, there are some clearly incorrectly chosen “primary topics”: When I search for avatar, I expect to see a disambiguation page or, with the primary topic policy as it is, I would expect to see either the computing definition of the term or the film. The religious definition is a tertiary or lower topic, so why on Earth does it get to be the “avatar” article?

Where possible, a longer official name should be chosen rather than disambiguation brackets, but that should not be considered to allow another topic to take over the short name.

Typography

Wikipedia has surprisingly good typography policies, but they don’t go far enough. Wikipedia asks for en and em dashes to be used whenever it is correct to use one and incorrect to use a hyphen (though there are still debated points over which cases this covers). That is fine, however…

If we can correctly use dashes, why can’t we correctly use quotes? It’s exactly the same thing, characters which don’t appear normally on most people’s keyboards but are nonetheless correct. You may notice that I always use typographically correct quotes on this page, rather than the Wikipedia-prescribed typewriter quotes. Typographically correct quotes are not only more correct, but useful. Wikicode makes use of typewriter apostrophes for bold and italic text. When italicizing or bolding text with apostrophes, workarounds often have to be used to avoid the conflict that extra typewriter apostrophes cause. If typographically correct ones were used, italicizing these terms’ apostrophes would be much easier.

The keyboard argument, which is also used in an attempt to remove diacritics, should be easily defeated by distributing improved keyboard layouts for those who wish to type more easily, rather than having to use the character palette below the edit window or memorize Alt codes. With my personal keyboard layout I can type these characters quickly and easily.

I can also add ellipses (…) to this argument, and should also note that the existing policy correctly prescribes the use of multiplication signs (×).

Non-English names

So this is a far more controversial one and I don’t really expect any support on this:

My absolute preference would be for any article that clearly has a primary language to be named by the Wikipedia in its primary language and for every other Wikipedia to simply use that title.
My compromised preference is for this name to be romanized. This does not mean “anglicized”, when something is romanized, it is rewritten in the Latin alphabet and not adapted to any specific Latin-alphabet language. This also means that any article whose primary language uses the Latin alphabet should obviously remain as it is in the original, rather than being “adapted to the specific target language”, which most monoglot English editors consider to mean “strip away all the diacritics”.
My further compromised preference: same as the previous, but with some words translated into English. Acceptable only for certain types of article, like country names.

Here is a table to further illustrate this, as the text I’ve written may confuse. Choosing just one of the first three columns would be consistent and acceptable, while if you actually support anything in the fourth column with the situation as it was at this section’s last update… well, WP:NPA prevents me from finishing this sentence.

Original (with translated disambiguators where appropriate)	Romanized	Reasonably anglicized	Mutilated (i.e. any name ever used on this Wikipedia that is actually worse than “reasonably anglicized”)	Further notes
Α.Ε.Κ. Αθηνών ~~(ποδόσφαιρο)~~ (soccer)	A.E.K. Athinon (soccer)	AEK Athinon (soccer)	AEK Athens F.C.	The part in brackets in the original can be translated into “(soccer)”. It’s a disambiguator, not a part of the name, so it can freely be translated, even if the rest is left as is. The mutilation: Why add “F.C.”, complete with the same type of abbreviation dots that are removed in AEK? It does need to be made clear that it’s a soccer club, so put “(soccer)” or “(soccer club)” at the end of the name, don’t change the name. Also, I have used soccer because it’s the shortest unambiguous way to refer to the sport. If someone can prove that Α.Ε.Κ. prefer “football” over “soccer”, I would replace it with “football” (Α.Ε.Κ. don’t play any of the other sports called football).
نادي الأهلي (الإمارات)‏	Nadi al-Ahli (al-Amarat)	Nadi al-Ahli (UAE)	Al-Ahli Dubai	There are several romanization systems for Arabic. I’ve used the Latin spelling that appears on the club’s logo and approximated how it would transliterate the other words. I don’t claim to be an expert on Arabic and would defer to another spelling if a better one is proposed. Remember though that my idea of a romanization is a spelling not that is supposed to target English specifically, but be appropriate for any Latin‐alphabet language. The disambiguator is left as is in the local name column here, as it is a variant on the country name, rather than a language‐neutral disambiguator, so it gets the same treatment as any other proper noun in that column.
Côte d’Ivoire	Côte d’Ivoire	Côte d’Ivoire	Ivory Coast	Obviously typewriter apostrophes would have to be used instead with the policy as it is…
ФК Црвена звезда	FK Crvena zvezda	FK Crvena zvezda	Red Star Belgrade	Where to start with this mutilation? Everything is wrong. It removes the FK prefix, it translates rather than transliterations parts of a name, and it adds a city name where none belongs… On another note, some editors, some of whom are Serbians, have proposed “FK Crvena Zvezda” with an uppercase Z. I’d be interested to hear why, since I can’t really see a reason to capitalize it.
Fußball-Bundesliga	Fußball-Bundesliga	Fußball-Bundesliga	Bundesliga (men)	The “Fußball-” prefix in the German and former English name of this article is because multiple sports have a Bundesliga, making “Bundesliga (men)” even more ludicrous than it may first appear.
メガドライブ	~~Mega Doraibu~~ Mega Drive	Mega Drive	“Sega Genesis and Mega Drive”	Sega is a Japanese company, it seems the intended name of the console was “Mega Drive”, which they then transliterated into Japanese. So this is one of those annoying cases where the original language actually isn’t the original language of the words used for the object. Still, the fact that Sega named their console “Mega Drive” means that’s where the English-language article should be. The fact that they had to rename it to release it in the United States is irrelevant, especially so when the console was released under its original name in other English-speaking countries. In any case, “Sega Genesis and Mega Drive” is a terrible article name, this is a single console with two names, not two different things, as that title implies. “Genesis (Sega Mega Drive)” is also hideous, it implies that the article is about the “Genesis, which is a type of Sega Mega Drive” or similar misrepresentation; it’s just as bad as “football (soccer)”.
မြန်မာပြည်	(Unknown to me)	Myanmar	Burma	If anyone knows what the correct romanization of မြန်မာပြည် is, let me know. Wiktionary doesn’t have it and nor does Wikipedia. All I can tell is that it’s meant to be Myanmar, not Burma.
Новак Ђоковић	Novak Đoković	Novak Đoković	Novak Djokovic	Serbian has its own Latin alphabet, with direct replacements for every Cyrillic letter. There is absolutely no excuse for rendering this name in Latin as anything other than Novak Đoković.
中华人民共和国	Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó	People’s Republic of China	China	This article about the most populous country in the world was correctly named People’s Republic of China (well, except with a typewriter apostrophe) until recently… there was no good reason whatsoever to move it. This name is bad for disambiguation as well as the obvious inconsistency with the Chinese Wikipedia.

Further points

/Article names is where I shall put my opinions on naming disputes that are too long to place here.

Notes

^ MTC is nothing to do with this person.

[1] MTC is nothing to do with this person.

[1]

MTC