Template talk:R from title without diacritics

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This template survived a request for deletion. The result of the discussion was keep.

Courtland 21:18, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

Contents 1 Request 2 Better description 3 "Unprintworthy"? 4 False statement "The correct spelling is given by the target of the redirect."

[edit] Request

Can

<noinclude>[[Category:Disambiguation and Redirection templates|{{PAGENAME}}]]</noinclude>

be added? —Mark Adler (markles) 01:30, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Docu just put it in the correct category, but there's another problem, currently puts every thing in blank, should be:

<includeonly>
[[Category:Redirects from title without diacritics]]
[[Category:Unprintworthy redirects]]
<!-- This is because, IMHO, this type of redirect wouldn't be useful in a paper Wikipedia.-->
</includeonly>
<noinclude>
[[Category:Redirect templates|Diacritics]]
[[Category:Unprintworthy redirects| ]]
</noinclude>

[edit] Better description

Would it be possible to edit this template to include a better description of what a diacritic is, or at least link the word diacritic to it's article? As it stands, anyone brousing through Wikipedia:Template messages/Redirect pages who does not know what a diacritic is would just see "This is a redirect to the article title with diacritics." and would probably end up using {{R from alternate language}} or {{R from ASCII}} when they should be using this template instead. I would have done it myself, but the redirect appears to be locked. Ae-a 14:00, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

I've unprotected the template. Edit sparingly since it is in thousands of articles. -Splash^talk 01:50, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

In concert with the descriptions on related templates, I've added a short bit about what to do with the link, and a simple "For more information, follow the category link." That's where all the other templates keep the details, and avoids extensive churning edits on the template itself. (However, since the job queue has been implemented, template edits are not the concern that they were in the past.)

--William Allen Simpson 11:23, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for that. I've also Wikified the word diacritics so it links to the relevant artice, and also added "(such as accents, umlauts, etc.)" to the description. If we all agree that no further work needs to be done, the template can be protected again.

Incidentally, I've noticed that when browsing through Category:Redirects from titles with ASCII, most of the redirects that use {{R from ASCII}} should really use this template instead. Hopefully, the new descriptions will make it easier to notice when chosing a template. Ae-a 18:35, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm going to un-link the word diacritics. There's simply no need for the diacritic page to have thousands of "What Links Here" references to redirects that are not about diacritics (by definition). Anybody that's confused about the meaning of the word can easily look at the category page. Same for "See also".

--William Allen Simpson 11:12, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Unprintworthy"?

Given that there is no clear consensus on Wikipedia as to how we handle cases where a name has diacritics, but the name is usually written in English without diacritics, it's not appropriate for this category to be included in Category:Unprintworthy redirects. That category's description says: Redirects in this category have been deemed unsuitable for inclusion in a printed Paper Wikipedia. While they may help in online navigation, they wouldn't be of much use in a hard-copy book. With Wikipedia policy unclear on this issue, it's by no means certain that a printed Wikipedia would consistently include names with diacritics and leave out English spellings of those names with no diacritics. --Tkynerd (talk) 00:53, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

I agree. It should not be in the category "Unprintworthy redirects". Gene Nygaard (talk) 11:25, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] False statement "The correct spelling is given by the target of the redirect."

Somebody needs to clean up this description to remove the false statement that "The correct spelling is given by the target of the redirect."

There is no "correctness" implied in our naming conventions. Or, more importantly, there is no implication that any other spelling is incorrect. But this statement is implying that in a redirect in which the template appears, the spelling there is incorrect. That is totally false.

Consider, for example, Wikipedia:Naming conventions:

• "The purpose of an article's title is to enable that article to be found by interested readers, and nothing more. In particular, the current title of a page does not imply either a preference for that name, or that any alternative name is discouraged in the text of articles. Generally, an article's title should not be used as a precedent for the naming of any other articles." (emphasis in original)

Consider also this specific example Wikipedia:Naming conventions (geographic names):

• "Meissen or Meißen? Meißen is the local (German) name; but Meissen is the single widely accepted English spelling. The argument that this is a "spelling mistake" has been proposed at the talk page; but has never been accepted."
  

No error. Nothing incorrect; it is not a spelling mistake as the text of this template page implies. Note that despite this, User:Charles has added this template with the false statement to that redirect. In an even broader sense, there is generally nothing whatsoever "incorrect" about using the English alphabet when writing in English. Our use of Romania in general, as well as its use as the article's name in Wikipedia, is absolutely correct. Notwithstanding the fact that in the Romanian language it is normally spelled România:

Would you argue that in the case of the redirect from România, "The correct spelling is given by the target of the redirect"? I have a real strong suspicion, without even looking to see who did it, that whoever added that statement to this template page would apply a double standard here.

There are also a great many cases on Wikipedia, of course, where what is involved are two different alphabets. Some of these redirects "from titles without diacritics" are, in fact, two different "official" names differing only in the presence or absence of some or all of the diacritics in two different languages, whether or not one of the is English is pretty much irrelevant—something not distinguished by this template, and something for which there is no reason for it to make any distinction.

Furthermore, in a great many cases, what is a "correct" name, no matter how that vague term is defined, will change over time. In other words, in many cases, the spelling in the redirect is more correct than the one in the target, at least for some periods of time.

We need to choose one of them to occupy the slot for the slot for an article's name. That does not mean any alternatives are incorrect; at most, if discussion and a reasoned choice has been made, it means that it was chosen as the best one to use for the name of the Wikipedia article. In most cases, we don't even have that; we have no dicussion, no implication whatsoever of incorrectness.

That false statement should be removed from this template. Gene Nygaard (talk) 12:01, 18 April 2008 (UTC)