Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (geographic names)/Archives/2009/June

Odd passage at WP:Naming conflict

There's a section at WP:Naming conflict (an apparently little-watched guideline) about "self-identifying terms" (see WP:Naming conflict#Types of entities) that seems at odds with the principles of this page. Discussion (such as it is; basically I removed most of it some time ago and someone's just put it back) can be found at WT:Naming conflict#About self-identifying names. Input welcome.--Kotniski (talk) 09:15, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Province of Bolzano-Bozen

Over the last years quite a number of straw polls and moving requests have been instigated by 2 users (user:Icsunonove & user:Supparluca) to move locations in the province to Italian names by claiming these names to be the most common used English names. There were suspicions that those two users were actually one person, as user:Icsunonove or as he was also known user:Taalo had already been caught using socks to manipulate discussions [1] After being checked in his rude behaviour in February by admins and thus going on a "permanent sabbatical" Icsunonove disappeared along with Supparluca. In my view this throws in doubt all discussions and debates that have been going on regarding the names of the Province of Bolzano-Bozen, as i.e. there are other suspicious coincidences: i.e. user:Ian Spackman was registered the same day as all the socks in the aforementioned checkuser report,...
I do not take issue with the rule, that cities and communities in the province be names according to the majority of the population; but I am suspicious that the both: the village of Ortisei and the city of Merano have been moved to their current names by manipulation of google search results by the aforementioned 2 "users". i.e. a google search today for both Meran and Merano, resulted in 100,000s of false positives: there is a shoe company names Allen-Edmonds Merano, a Violin Model named Merano, a Norwegian circus named Merano, a place named San Merano near Palm Beach,... a Hotel Meran in Prague, a family named Meran, a technology company named Meran, a chess opening named Meran,... trying to get these false positives out I get the results that Meran is twice as common in English as Merano. As most other searches have been arbitrarily manipulated too (i.e. the google books searches in the discussions were made to exclude all material published before 1957, in other searches the word Italy was added as a word that must be found) I suggest to scrap google search in the case of finding the "right" name and to remove the line "There appears to be sufficient evidence that Merano is more common in English, however." as in my view it is impossible to establish a commonly used name in English for both: Ortisei and Merano. Subsequently I suggest to move the 2 communes to the name of the majority of the population to keep in line with the naming convention for the Province of Bolzano-Bozen and allow no more exceptions or debates regarding the names of villages, communes or cities in said province, but follow vigorously the rule: "those articles are placed according to the language of the linguistic majority." --noclador (talk) 12:07, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Not sure whether all three were all one person, but user:Icsunonove had demonstrably a veritable park of socket puppets. For Meran, the case seems to be fairly clear as far as Google is concerned:

• GOOGLE (English pages)
  • Meran 322,000 hits
  • Merano 281,000
• GOOGLE BOOKS (English pages)
  • Meran 1,980
  • Merano 1,679

Since there is also a slight German-speaking majority in town ("South Tyrol in Figures 2008", Provincial Statistics Institute of the Autonomous Province of South Tyrol, Bozen/Bolzano 2007, p. 17, table 10), the naming convention points to Meran. Gun Powder Ma (talk) 12:55, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Doh! I just had proposed: no more google searches! as they are unreliable and therefore I suggest to stick with the linguistic majority rule only - so, your google search results are a bit of the mark here... --noclador (talk) 14:52, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Well, we can't discount the possibility of the existence of an established English name, which of course should be used when it exists, taking precedence over any other rules. But an established English name is much more than just a name borrowed from another language and used slightly more often in English texts than other names borrowed from other languages. I'm pretty sure that a Google test can establish that an established English name exists, but only if the results of the test are overwhelming. Results of 322–281 and 1980–1679 are certainly not overwhelming; they are narrow, as is anything below a 2:1 ratio, I would say. So I'm with Noclador on these specific cases: definitely use the local-majority rule here as per WP:UE#No established usage (and remove the clearly flawed "sufficient evidence" sentence). Just don't let the rule override WP:UE. —JAO • T • C 15:08, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Go with User:Noclador’s proposal. Gryffindor (talk) 13:13, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

• Please try reading what this page says about raw Google searches.
• I find it a curious choice for Gun Powder Ma to be using the Spanish Google Books while searching for English hits; but there is a depressing incidence of false positives: The book on the sixteenth century, the five books published before the First World War, and The Count of Monte Cristo (with Mme. de Saint-Meran). Septentrionalis PMAnderson 02:36, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Question: as there are currently no arguments against my proposal to remove google searches from the naming convention piece about South Tyrol and using only the language majority of a location to determine its article name, can I change the naming convention about South Tyrol in this way:

a) by removing the sentence: "Exception: The population of Merano is almost evenly divided, with a slight German-speaking majority; and Meran is quite often used for it in English. There appears to be sufficient evidence that Merano is more common in English, however."

b) and by changing the last sentence in this way: "Therefore articles about locations in the province of Bolzano-Bozen are placed according to the language of the linguistic majority."

is this acceptable? --noclador (talk) 14:44, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

I'd support these changes as well. --Mai-Sachme (talk) 13:23, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Reverted. A discussion here (among users of one nationality and one point of view) does not represent consensus. This page describes what Wikipedia actually does - and we do not, and on the present evidence should not, call the article Meran. The solution is providing more evidence, not forming a cabal in project space. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:45, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

"of one nationality"... Could you please stop with your silly defamations? Noclador is a former member of the Italian army and I can find the following inscription in big letters on my passport: Repubblica Italiana. --Mai-Sachme (talk) 23:11, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Talking of silly defamations, spot this above from user:Noclador:

‘there are other suspicious coincidences: i.e. user:Ian Spackman was registered the same day as all the socks in the aforementioned checkuser report,...’

I regard this as a perfectly absurd attack. You can check my edit history to see how long it took me to enter into tryrolean territory. (My recollection is that it was when I was working on the list of Italian cheeses—or perhaps on one of the lists of Italian wines—that I strolled over to see what the conventions were for naming things in that area of Italy. What I found was a stupid battlefield: some sort of attempt to re-enact the first world war, with a lot of idiots, as well as some reasonable people, on both sides of the dispute.) As well well as absurd, I regard it as a disgraceful, snide and personal attack—one which I would not have expected from that editor, who has made many valuable contributions to the encyclopedia. I request that he strike it immediately and make an appropriate retraction and apology here, on the page where the accusation was made. Alternatively I would request that someone asks for a checkuser. Then he or she can grovel even more deeply when the result is forthcoming. Yours in anger, [Apology made and accepted.] Ian Spackman (talk) 09:30, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

I don't know if I count as a participant, but for what it's worth I'm Swedish. I like Bejnar's revision, clarifying that WP:UE takes precedence without going into examples of cases where WP:UE does give guidance (and especially without labeling such cases "exceptions", which they are clearly not). This guideline does not need to go into detail on which communities are guided by WP:UE and which ones have to be solved by other methods: that's a question for Talk:Merano and the likes. —JAO • T • C 05:32, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

I agree with Jao that Bejnar's revision clearly improves things! as it is now it is a clearly defined rule without any exceptions and I think we should let it stand like that. --noclador (talk) 07:23, 29 June 2009 (UTC)