Luis Guerra

Moved discussion here

I've moved the below discussion here to ease any communication.--A bit iffy (talk) 11:55, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Removal of accents

Hi. I couldn't see why you removed accents from characters in the Hydro-Québec and Lac-Mégantic derailment, and I can't think of a reason why they should be removed, so I've reinstated them. If you still think they should be removed, please give reasons why on the Talk pages for those articles — thanks.--A bit iffy (talk) 14:08, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Answer

If you are to put accents in the English language, making exceptions such as the example of Lac-Mégantic, Hydro-Québec, etc. you might as well do the same for the rest since either you go by the letter or you don`t at all. Examples where you should have had put accents: Québec, Montréal, Trois-Rivières, and the list goes on and on. In Canada, it's a bilingual Country; we have the English names and French names, usually in naming places where there is a French name such as Montreal, Quebec, etc. Canadians never use the accents in the words to make it English unless there is an English name as they used to in history such as Trois-Rivières in French that they used to have Three Rivers until the French became the majority in Quebec. As for I, I don`t feel like arguing stuff that I read and find it with bugs such as accents. Either one applies the rules to the rest, or you simply don't apply it, and any professor, teacher, etc. would state the same reply. Case closed, I'm off.

Answer

I'm doing corrections, removing the accents where applied since in the English language, there are no accents, unless specified in another language with translations. I will keep removing the accents in the English section unless written in French or any other language where accents are used.

Actually, there are accents in English (not many, but there are) — see English terms with diacritical marks.

Anyway, the current Manual of Style for Wikipedia states Foreign proper names written in languages which use the Latin alphabet can include characters with diacritics, ligatures and others that are not commonly used in present-day English. Wikipedia normally retains these special characters, except where there is a well-established English spelling that replaces them with English standard letters. (Source: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Proper names#Diacritics.)

So that is what you generally should abide by unless there's a really good reason not to. In the example of Lac-Mégantic and Quebec, there seems to be an established English spelling as per this news article whereby there's an accent in Lac-Mégantic but not in Quebec, and this is reflected in the Lac-Mégantic, Quebec Wikipedia article.

There is however a debate about accents at here. If you thnk the current plactice is wrong, please involve yourself in the debate instead of going against current practice.

--A bit iffy (talk) 09:41, 12 July 2013 (UTC)