Archived from the Pub:

There are pages on Central, North, South, East, but there is no West page. Can someone create the page? What about northwest, southwest, southeast, northeast?

What the hell was this about? — (WT-en) Ravikiran 06:43, 16 February 2007 (EST)

If no one can remember what this was about, I will just remove this rather than archive something without any context. — (WT-en) Ravikiran 12:55, 23 March 2007 (EDT)

If I were more paranoid, I would guess that this is someone trying to drive me insane. The existence of pages called "Central", "North", etc. annoys me to no end, because they are not actual place names and thereby ignore our naming conventions. - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 18:42, 25 March 2007 (EDT)

Archived from the Pub:

I have an article Ai-Ais/Richtersveld Transfrontier Park that contains a / as part of the official name. Is there any way to escape that / so the name is treated as one rather than Ai-Ais with subarticle Richtersveld Transfrontier Park? --(WT-en) NJR_ZA 09:37, 5 March 2007 (EST)

You might be able to use <nowiki>xxx</nowiki>, not sure thought, try it out :-) --(WT-en) MiddleEastern 16:39, 5 March 2007 (EST)

Swept in from the pub:

I'm working on Ciénaga_de_Zapata_and_the_Bahia_de_Cochinos_(Bay_of_Pigs). (WT-en) cacahuate ^talk correctly pointed out that I didn't name the article correctly, but I'm uncertain what the correct name should be. I looked at Project:Article_naming_conventions but didn't find an answer. (WT-en) cacahuate ^talk suggested "Ciénaga de Zapata National Park." But the name of the national park is "Parque Nacional Ciénaga de Zapata." Maybe the title should be "Parque Nacional Ciénaga de Zapata (National Park)." To make matters more complicated, this national park was the site of the most important battle of the communist era, and well-known to many Americans. So I added "and the Bahia de Cochinos" plus the English translation "(Bay of Pigs)." So the title that seems best to me is "Parque Nacional Ciénaga de Zapata (National Park) and the Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs)." But that is a long title! Any suggestions?--(WT-en) Chapayev 13:24, 29 June 2008 (EDT)

I think "Ciénaga de Zapata National Park" is the answer. That gets 900+ google hits to the 607 that "Parque Nacional Ciénaga de Zapata" gets, and we use the most common English name, rather than official names on Wikivoyage. I think a redirect page for Ciénaga de Zapata National Park would be wise. And since the Bay of Pigs is an event rather than a destination (or am I wrong?), it should not get a redirect, but you can indicate that the park was the site of the botched invasion in the park article itself, as well as one-liner descriptions of the park in the "other destinations" section of its parent region. Also, we use names in parentheses in article titles only for disambiguation purposes. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 14:25, 29 June 2008 (EDT)

This afternoon I did a bunch of work on the Pinar_del_Rio_(province) page, including creating three new pages for national parks. What looks right to me is to use the official name as the article name, then when you link to the page add in parentheses the English translation. For example: Parque Nacional de Viñales (Viñales National Park). Adding extra names on the right side of the pipe is easy. Following this style produces: Parque Nacional Ciénaga de Zapata (Ciénaga de Zapata National Park, and the Bahia de Cochinos or Bay of Pigs). Does that look acceptable to everyone? P.S. the Bay of Pigs is a place, the Bay of Pigs Invasion was the event. And when we settle on the name for this page, let's add a list of national parks to Cuba.--(WT-en) Chapayev 19:20, 29 June 2008 (EDT)

Swept in from pub:

I ask as I've noticed there is a merge candidate named Free wifi in Brighton & Hove but when I click on the link I get taken to "Free wifi in Brighton". I've tried a couple of things to get around this, and tried it in both Firefox and IE, but have found no way of getting to the real article. Is there a trick to this, or can an admin move the page, or does it need a more brute force method to get the page to be viewable? (WT-en) Nrms 23:56, 10 May 2009 (EDT)

Short answer is "yes", ampersands cause problems. Long answer is I remember coming across another article with the same problem but I don't remember if I was able to do anything about it. (WT-en) LtPowers 08:02, 11 May 2009 (EDT)

Okay, I was able to move the page (and its talk page) to Free wifi in Brighton and Hove. I deleted the original page and its talk page. The trick is, when you go to the delete page, the URL says "http://en.wikivoyage.org/w/index.php?action=delete&title=Free_wifi_in_Brighton". I had to change that to "http://en.wikivoyage.org/w/index.php?action=delete&title=Free_wifi_in_Brighton_%26_Hove", and it worked. Similar trick with the move operation. (WT-en) LtPowers 08:07, 11 May 2009 (EDT)

Does anyone mind if I move this article to just Project:Naming conventions? I've found myself referencing the "most common English name" bit a lot to deal with names other than article titles. Like calling the Sears Tower the Sears Tower, rather than the obscure, but official, Willis Tower. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 19:20, 19 July 2009 (EDT)

Go ahead. (WT-en) Jpatokal 01:22, 20 July 2009 (EDT)

I'd like to change the following bit of our district naming policy:

don't repeat the name of the city. Los Angeles/East is as clear as and much shorter than "Los Angeles/East Los Angeles

For several reasons, I think we should stick to the simple policy of using the most common name for the place. For LA, for example, I would assume people say "Eastside," not "East." We used to use names like those being recommended here for non-districts, but have moved away from that practice (e.g., Southwest (Colorado) → Southwestern Colorado), to both do away with the need for ridiculous disambiguations like East and to better match the way people speak. Another reason to avoid districts called X/North or X/Southwest is because it creates a conflict with our RDF goals.

Also, the first clause of the same sentence advises to keep district names as short as possible. That conflicts with our now standard procedure for districts that amalgamate important neighborhoods, e.g., Chicago/Bridgeport-Chinatown, Washington, D.C./Adams Morgan-Columbia Heights, San Francisco/Union Square-Financial District, etc.

I'd like to just delete the sentence. Objections? --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 21:20, 14 October 2009 (EDT)

As long as it's only for districts, I'm cool with that. Otherwise, I think it's a good advice. --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^Talk 21:49, 14 October 2009 (EDT)

I like the plan. As a bonus, it makes it easier to tell when a district has a commonly-used name that's worth knowing, versus when we're just using a directional for lack of any better specifier. - (WT-en) Dguillaime 22:48, 14 October 2009 (EDT)

I'm going to mostly object here. Of course commonly used names should be used, and I agree that LA/East should be moved to LA/Eastside if that's what it's called. However, I still think it looks really dopey to have districts with completely duplicated names like "Los Angeles/South Central Los Angeles", and I'm not really all that keen on jawbreaker districts like "Washington, D.C./Adams Morgan-Columbia Heights" either.

The way I see it, article titles are a technical artifact and not a part of the guide itself. They should be kept short so they're easy to link to, and the "actual" name should be spelled out at the beginning of the article. (WT-en) Jpatokal 09:54, 15 October 2009 (EDT)

Related to the above, on my lovely island Zealand there are now three subregions; South Zealand, West Zealand and... Nordsjælland - which was started by User:(WT-en) Elgaard back in 2007. So, I've asked a bunch of locals here if they would use Nordsjælland or North Zealand in English (Nord=North, Sjælland=Zealand) and there was a slight skew towards Nordsjælland, 6 to 4.

To a Dane who speaks both languages it just looks silly to mix the two languages, so ...

• should we go with democracy at name them Nordsjælland, Vestsjælland and Sydsjælland
• should we hail Kim Jung Ill for a moment and name them North Zealand, West Zealand and South Zealand (and get rid of the æ)
• Keep them, which I really don't like, but it might all look different to non native speaker.

--(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^Talk 21:49, 14 October 2009 (EDT)

Make it North Zealand. We should only use other languages when there is no readily available English term. In this case, there is. (WT-en) LtPowers 23:32, 14 October 2009 (EDT)

Agree with LtPowers. Plus most English speakers wouldn't know how to type an "æ" anyway. (WT-en) Texugo 01:58, 15 October 2009 (EDT)

The question that should be asked of the locals is what would the traveler call this place? To me, as a potenial traveler to those fair shores, I would also prefer North Zealand over Nordsjælland because North Zealand is an English name, while Nordsjælland is clearly Danish. However, by all means create a redirect article for Nordsjælland linking to North Zealand. However, I must not forget my cultural bias in relation to Zealand, as I come from New Zealand, so North Zealand fits better than Nordsjælland in my mind. -- (WT-en) Huttite 16:55, 20 November 2009 (EST)

Seems like we have a consensus then, you're always welcome to come around if the potential turns into something real btw, I'll be happy to show you around North Zealand :) --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^talk 17:01, 20 November 2009 (EST)

The places of the Netherlands all use Dutch names, but I am not sure what we should do.

How do we name Friesland? An English word for the province is Frisia, but that's also the name of a wider region in Northwestern Europe (including parts of North-Holland, Northern Netherlands, Germany and Denmark). So then the name West Frisia could be used, as it is the mid-western part of that region (as also used in West Frisian Islands), but this makes matters complex, as there is also a West-Friesland/West-Frisia in North-Holland that means exactly the same and is even more at the west. Then, as we do now, we could use the Dutch name Friesland, but this is not the official name of the province, the only official name is Fryslân. And it might sound like Dutch imperialism or something as Friesland is used by the Dutch, while the Frisians use Fryslân. I also doubt Friesland is the most common name in English, but maybe it is, I really don't know.

Also, the towns have two names, a Dutch one and a Frisian one. Which one to use? In Frisia, both are sign-posted in both Dutch and (West-)Frisian. But in the rest of the country, only the Dutch name is used. Again, I'm not sure on the most common English name.

Then we got some other ones. These places have an English name, but I'm not sure if it's commonly used (as these are very small towns and villages, you don't see these English names anywhere sign-posted):

• Hoek van Holland has the English name Hook of Holland.
• Vlissingen has the English name Flushing.
• Haarlem has the English name Harlem.

Some other provinces with English names:

• Gelderland has the English name Guelders.
• Zeeland has the English name Zealand. (New Zealand is named after it).

I have no idea which of these are the "most common English name". To be honest, I feel most of them could better just use the Dutch name, as they are sign-posted (and I think their English equivalents are not used much). But I am not sure on how much the English names are used outside of the Netherlands. (WT-en) globe-trotter 17:54, 3 January 2010 (EST)

Unsure, but Zealand also happens to be the island I live on --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^talk 18:31, 3 January 2010 (EST)

Yes, it's also a province of the Netherlands :P But we could use Zeeland for clarity, so the Danish Zealand stays Zealand (though I think a link at the top of the page would be useful to avoid confusion).

Anyway, I found this map , which uses the following convention and for now I'm going to follow it:

• Small towns and villages use the Dutch name
• Large cities get the English name (such as The Hague).
• Provinces use the Dutch names (but even Noord-Holland and Zuid-Holland? Should we change these provinces into those? I thought North-Holland and South-Holland would be more logical.
• The province Friesland gets the Dutch name, but this is problematic: as the map is from 1987 (it even still says Federal Republic of Germany!!!), at that time the name Friesland was the official name. Now Fryslân is the official name. So now I still don't know what to do here. But for now, I'll just keep the Dutch names.

So should I rename North-Holland, South-Holland and North-Brabant to Noord-Holland, etc.?

(WT-en) globe-trotter 20:19, 3 January 2010 (EST)

In general, where there is an English name, it should be used. It's true that such names won't be widely used in the country in question, but that's the rule. I see no reason to use "Noord" instead of "North"; it's no different than having "New York" listed in Spanish articles as "Nueva York" (which it always is). (Another rule of thumb is to check the English Wikipedia; they've usually had such arguments long before we get to a particular location's article.) (WT-en) LtPowers 08:29, 4 January 2010 (EST)

I have read most of the discussion above but I am still at a loss as to why it became convention to put brackets around a country name when it is used for a region, eg: North (Vietnam). Why does that make sense and why is it a good thing? It has a horrible effect on the displayed article name: "North travel guide". What is wrong with North Vietnam or Northern Vietnam? --(WT-en) Burmesedays 08:14, 8 January 2010 (EST)

Nothing's wrong with those names if they're commonly used. But take an example like South (United States of America). It's always called "The South", and calling it "Southern United States" is an artificial construction. I don't know if the situation in Vietnam is similar. (WT-en) LtPowers 09:06, 8 January 2010 (EST)

Good points. But why the brackets around the country? I think this is what causes articles to be very confusingly called (as in my example) "North travel guide"? In your example, why not South United States rather than South (United States)? As aside, a huge number of our region names are artificial constructions. Artificial but logical might be better than artificial and confusing. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 09:55, 8 January 2010 (EST)

Because no one ever calls it "South United States"; it's just "the South". We need the parenthetical for disambiguation. (WT-en) LtPowers 13:24, 8 January 2010 (EST)

Agreed, and I'm quite sure that North (Vietnam) would be better as North Vietnam, as that is such a common name. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 16:59, 8 January 2010 (EST)

I wouldn't know myself, but it's certainly possible. (WT-en) LtPowers 21:33, 8 January 2010 (EST)

For this US example I guess an article called South travel guide is OK then. I cannot think of many other examples though where that makes any sense and parethenses appear all over our region articles. Can we take it that unless there is a very particular reason to use them, this is not desirable? --(WT-en) Burmesedays 23:04, 8 January 2010 (EST)

I think I would agree. Whenever possible, it is nice to avoid the parentheticals. The Vietnam War has made "North Vietnam" a very well-known region, so that case definitely makes sense to change the name. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 23:15, 8 January 2010 (EST)

Ah, I just discovered the problem. The "North" region of Vietnam as defined in our Vietnam article covers much less area than the historical "North Vietnam", which extended south to 17 degrees north latitude. There might, thus, be some confusion if we were to use the title "North Vietnam". I would guess that that is the reason the region was named as it was. (WT-en) LtPowers 10:39, 9 January 2010 (EST)

Yes, North Vietnam doesn't actually cover the whole area of the former country of North Vietnam. A few months ago, I already changed the "South", "North", etc. into Southern Thailand, Northern Thailand and Eastern Thailand. So I agree with Burmesedays, better use those names if they are better. We also have lots of these regions in China, which maybe could be adapted. --(WT-en) globe-trotter 10:43, 9 January 2010 (EST)

Then call it Northern Vietnam. Anything is better than the current name of "North". This is a general point by the way, not specific to that one example I gave. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 11:38, 9 January 2010 (EST)

We currently have the following rule:

"As an exception, if one place is so much more famous than others with the same name that the disambiguation is a hindrance rather than a help, leave it without a disambiguator on the end. This is rare, and if you even have to think about which place is "more famous", go back to rule 1."

I think this is way too harshly applied, like when I look at the discussion at Talk:Saint Petersburg. Is this sentence really meant in a way that a city as huge as Saint Petersburg needs thought over? I really don't even have to think about which city is "more famous", it's clearly the Russian one.

Maybe there is a way we can "objectivity" this rule for hard cases? Such as that national capitals (see the discussion about Panama City (Florida) and Panama City (Panama) and that large metropoles of a country get preference? --(WT-en) globe-trotter 14:50, 11 January 2010 (EST)

I think the basic rule of thumb is that a city of international prominence—one that is a household name around the world—should be the direct target, with a disambiguatory link at the top. When there is a case of one city being significantly more important than another, but neither are all that widely known, then it is better to just send readers straight to the disambiguation page. I'm not sure a truly objective measure is possible, but your suggestions are good rules of thumb. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 15:51, 11 January 2010 (EST)

Per discussions such as this one, this one, this one, and I'm sure numerous others, there is immense confusion about what constitutes a "Latin character with or without accents/diacritics". Could someone who knows more about this subject than I do expand the Romanization section of this guideline with a few more examples and (hopefully) a list or link to a list of valid characters? For those of us with character-impaired keyboards it would be helpful to have this called out explicitly so we could easily figure out if a character is valid or not, and hopefully avoid future confusion. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 01:40, 9 February 2010 (EST)

You missed a big discussion in the Traveller's Pub. Here is a list of latin letters, including ones with diacritics. I've never seen about 2/3rds of those letters until I saw that page. As for "character-impaired keyboards", Wikivoyage policy is that a page without the diacritics be made a redirect so this shouldn't be a major problem (when editing text, simply use copy/paste). While many places may not use the diacritics that are used in their native languages, there are many places where the diacritic/accent seems to follow into use in English. Examples: Malé, Maldives; São Tomé and Príncipe; São Paulo; Meroë, Sudan; Medellín, Colombia; Kraków, Poland; many Icelandic & Scandinavian places; lots of Arabic & Vietnamese transliterations...there are even some cities in the US which use the tilde in their official names! (WT-en) AHeneen 03:36, 9 February 2010 (EST)

The logic behind the argument to have diacritics and illegible characters is silly. Is there something wrong with using English in the English Wikivoyage? Online, Meroe, Krakow, Sao Paulo, etc. are still moreoften unaccented. Probably because of the inconvenience of using characters not used in the English language. And people who do use them are often just copying the native language use, to be cool or whatever. That European cities discussion actually shows nearly total support for Stefan's proposal of "English unless there is none" than for using strange characters. That is also much clearer. Cities just look out-of-place, like the example used in the discussion Chişinău. Chisinau has an English name, so it seems silly that we would not use it and then tell our users to "copy and paste" the name everytime they want to refer to the city. A lot of wasted time, in my opinion.

Currently, it seems that we have an ambiguous "Use diacritics/accents sparingly" policy that people disregard or abide by at random, no? (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 04:02, 9 February 2010 (EST)

I think there is a danger that this discussion is taking place in many different WT places. If someone felt like sweeping all of the relevant discussion here, it would be helpful. Unsurprisingly, I am in full agreement with ChubbyWimbus here. The only possible benefit I can see of accents and diacritics is as an aide to pronunciation. That can be dealt with by putting the name with such embellishments in brackets in the article. It should have no influence on the title of the article, which I believe should be written in plain English characters wherever possible (i.e. nearly always). --(WT-en) Burmesedays 04:23, 9 February 2010 (EST)

I didn't mean to debate whether we should or should not use all Latin characters in names - current policy is clear that we should. What I'm suggesting is that someone should update the policy page to make it more explicit what that means. However, since there seems to be ongoing discussion about whether or not we should use accents in names, my opinion is that as long as there is a redirect from the non-accent/diacritic name then it doesn't hurt to use the local name, and can actually have benefits - as Jani pointed out, some words will have very different meanings without accent/diacritic, and from my own experience traveling in Iceland, if our guide had been "Thingvellir National Park" instead of Þingvellir National Park I probably would not have immediately recognized that they were the same place, so there are clear benefits to using the (Latin character) name that is in common usage rather than always trying to re-write to match what's on a US keyboard. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 10:56, 9 February 2010 (EST)

I don't understand how there can be any possible confusion about this. Like the rule says, the Latin letters are A to Z; add any squigglies, dots, dashes and smiley faces you want, or even squish a couple together, and they're still Latin letters. Case by case:

• Ærø should be right where it is, at Ærø, with lots of redirects.
• The Þ (thorn) of Þingvellir is not in the A-Z range, but it's arguably Latin anyway. No relevance to places outside Iceland though, so it's a debate for Talk:Iceland as far as I'm concerned.
• It's perfectly clear that São Paulo is a permissible name, the debate is about whether the city is more commonly known in English as "Sao Paulo" without the tilde.

The thing that you two don't seem to understand is that, while those squigglies look annoying and useless from your diacriticless American/Indonesian point of view, they are critical to pronunciation and understanding in the countries that use them. If I näin somebody in Finnish, I saw them; if I nain them instead, I fucked them. The traveller comes first -- it may be a hassle for us editors to input them sometimes, but it's to the traveler's advantage that we use them. (WT-en) Jpatokal 08:50, 9 February 2010 (EST)

And just to reiterate what I've said elsewhere; I've no strong opinion on São Paulo - though that's easy to type on a Danish keyboard, it's just Alt+~followed by S, not sure why this is not the case for US keyboards, especially with such a large Spanish speaking population.

My main concern with following a strict A-Z policy, is that it's more ambiguous for a number of full-fleged non English letters. Å (which is not an accent, but a letter) is both commonly transliterated as (double) 'aa' and (single) 'a' while Ø/Ö is written as both both 'o' and 'oe'. And then we have a case like Seyðisfjörður where people unfamiliar with the ð would propbably think it's a weird d (which it historically also was), while it's really more like 'th' in modern Icelandic - and tooadd to the confusion - in Faroese it's now purely a tonal indicator - so do we omit it article names then?

As it might show, introducing a strict english A-Z policy, will force us to make a complex set of transliteration rules for a large number of letters, which most contributors are not going to read anyway, increasing the janitorial burden even further. I'm much more in favour of the current status quo of just making redirects when needed.

I think there is a bit of a perception gap, between those who see English wikivoyage as the Wikivoyage for English speakers, and those (like me) who see it as the global/international Wikivoyage, in the lingua franca of the online world. Maybe that's the issue that really needs to be resolved. --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^talk 09:22, 9 February 2010 (EST)

A Jani rant :) Trust the Finns to cause confusion on that front. More seriously, I do understand all that, really I do. And that's precisely why I supported the idea of putting the name with squigglies in the article in brackets as a pronunciation aid. What I still don't understand is why they appear in article titles at English Wikivoyage when there are widely used English names, and thereby cause all this debate. I would not go to Finnish Wikivoyage (or wherever) and suggest the sguigglies are all removed. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 09:24, 9 February 2010 (EST)

I'm also confused on this issue. I thought "use the most common name in English" was our guiding principle—rather than simply "use Latin, transliterate other alphabets." "Ærø Denmark" gets fewer hits than "Aero Denmark," but more than "Aeroe Denmark" when a google search is limited to English language results. Wouldn't that mean we use Aero? --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 14:19, 9 February 2010 (EST)

After many years contributing here, I'm of the opinion that the "most common name" guideline may have been a bad one as it tends to lead to arguments with no clear answer, such as Ærø, Aero or Aeroe, or some of the "Death Valley" or "Death Valley National Park" discussions above. It seems like a better rule might be "Use the most common English name. In cases where there is not an obviously "most common" name, use the name that travelers to the destination are likely to see in common usage at the destination, provided Romanization is not required." That would mean Ærø, São Paulo, and Death Valley National Park, and eliminate a lot of confusion. It would also prevent usage of burdensome "official" names such as "City and County of San Francisco", which was part of the impetus behind Project:Why Wikivoyage doesn't use official names. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 15:09, 9 February 2010 (EST)

I made a similar argument here, although in that case it was that we should use "least ambiguous" names when there were multiple English names for a place, such as "Death Valley" and "Death Valley National Park"; integrating that idea into the naming conventions is one that I would still be in favor of. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 15:15, 9 February 2010 (EST)

I still agree with Burmesedays. Pronunciation is not aided at all by using Ærø over Aero; If anything, it makes it more difficult. Seyðisfjörður which I would read as: Say-yois-fyor-or (and would be wrong!) could just as easily be Seydisfjordur with the Icelandic name listed in the article, like we do with all foreign names. The pronunciation argument still doesn't really pass, as someone mentioned; Cyrillics works better for Russian, kana for Japanese, but we don't name our articles in those scripts. I feel like there is a hidden worry that we will offend or confuse non-native speakers if we use too much English, but I don't see why we should feel guilty for using English in the English version of the site?

If it were decided that there is no good way to write Icelandic names (for example) in English, then I suppose we could just say, "Use English names, except for Icelandic cities", but I still think most cities will have an English name. The naming convention right now is basically a policy of "whoever creates it first chooses how it will be written" (or whoever is clever enough to redirect the current name to their desired name and make all alternatives redirects in order to make reversion impossible can decide, as seems to have been the case with Sao Paulo). (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 21:03, 9 February 2010 (EST)

I'd venture most cities don't have an English name, only large international cities does - it's just that in most countries you only use the A-Z part of the alphabet, or there is a officially defined transliteration of foreign alphabets. I really feel strongly against renaming Ærø to Aro, Aeroe or Aroe. If you look past the first 20 pages of google results for Aero in English, where the majority (some 70-80%) of the results are about the island, the rest of the hits are all about Aeroflot offices in Denmark, the Jean Michelle Jarre concert of the same name held here a couple of years back, aerotech companies, airlines, danish .aero domain registrars and what not, of course it will have many hits when Aero is a real English word.

If we go for Aro instead - the first google hits is about the island of Årø, an entirely unrelated island to the west, which can also be written as both Aro, Aaroe and Aaro. And there will be many other cases as the letter Ø, also in fact is a word, it means island - hence nearly all the 800 islands of Denmark ends on a 'Ø' in their names... Ærø, Samsø, Fanø, Rømø (Roemoe really looks horrible btw) etc.

Casual users who see the names Ærø, Bågø or Rømø, will probably search for Aero, Bago or Romo, but really, seriously, no one here would connect those names with the islands. I'd personally take them for foreign names if that was put before me in writing. Pronunciation wise, and according to the most widely used transliteration standards, these should really be called Aeroe, Baagoe and Roemoe - Am I making your head spin yet? And it's not just limited to Denmark; Ö (which is also a seperate letter, with the same transliteration issues) is also the Swedish name for an island, and were some to start an article on Gränsö we would have the whole problem with Granso, Graensoe or Gransoe all over again, same goes for Norwegian.

Hence we'll end up with a whole bunch of redirects anyway, so I really don't see why we then shouldn't just redirect to the real official unambiguous name, instead of redirecting searches for the real name to a "stopgap name", which is only there because Æ,Ø and Å is not on English keyboards. There just is no official names in English to go for. --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^talk 02:48, 10 February 2010 (EST)

Stefan and Jani are making similar arguments. I think explicitly stating "if there isn't an English name that is obviously the most common, use the local name" is probably a safe rule of thumb. It's clear, we don't have to argue about nuances of Google hits, and provided redirects are setup it does not decrease usability in any way. Additionally, for someone like me, I won't need to wonder if the Wikivoyage guide I'm reading about "Aeroe" is the same place as the destination listed as "Ærø" that I see on the local map/train station directory/etc. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 11:10, 10 February 2010 (EST)

I like the "If there isn't an English name that is obviously the most common, use the local name" idea, although "obviously the most common" will still have some debate. Along with that general policy, we could just add languages that we think people may struggle with to the Romanization list. They have similarities to Vietnamese in their use of diacritics, and we have a rule for writing Vietnamese [. Just looking at the "List of cities in (country)" on Wikipedia, Icelandic cities could probably benefit by having this policy, while Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese/Brazilian, Moldovan cities could easily be all English letters with the official names at the top of the page. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 23:14, 10 February 2010 (EST)

I'm quite fine with Ryan's rule of thumb, although I was under the impression that it was the rule all along, and I agree with Chubby that while "obviously" raises the bar a little higher, it's not going to "solve" this problem.

Last and least, I've raised the issue of eth and thorn on Talk:Iceland. It's tricky, but it's also irrelevant to the rest of the world outside Iceland and the Faroes and -- no matter what we decide -- doesn't need more than a footnote on a global policy level. (WT-en) Jpatokal 03:55, 11 February 2010 (EST)

Support from me for Ryan's suggested rule of thumb as well. What about existing article names? There are stacks of them with squiggly names, when there is a commonly used English name. Should those be changed, or do we only apply this to new articles that we see? --(WT-en) Burmesedays 04:21, 11 February 2010 (EST)

Also support, but it seems to me from the discussion above that there is not a common understanding of "an English name that is obviously the most common". It seems that Burmesedays and also others expect this to imply that the majority of names will be without diacritics and stuff whereas Jpatokal and others expect the majority to be with. Maybe I am wrong, but I think it would be nice if eg Burmesedays could give examples of existing articles with names that should be changes according to this "obviously" rule, to see if there is a common understanding or not, (WT-en) ClausHansen 06:20, 11 February 2010 (EST)

Sure. Just a few: São Paulo, Iguaçu Falls, Braşov, Ölüdeniz, Malmö.--(WT-en) Burmesedays 07:10, 11 February 2010 (EST)

We may need to be clearer about "obviously the most common" then - I assumed the bar would be as high as our current rules for when not to disambiguate ("if a place is so much more famous that disambiguation would be a hindrance"). In that case, place like São Paulo (see for example http://www.google.com/search?q=sao+paulo) and Iguaçu Falls (also referred to as Iguazu and Iguacu) that are referenced with a mix of names would use the local name, but we would use Geneva instead of Genève since the former is ALWAYS used on English maps and references. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 12:19, 11 February 2010 (EST)

Malmö's official name in English is Malmö, and should it be renamed to Malmo or Malmoe? The first google results says it all "Malmo - Malmö - Malmoe - Malmø - City Guide", again I really don't see the point of not using the official, unambiguous name if we are going to have to make 4 redirects anyway. --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^talk 12:27, 11 February 2010 (EST)

I was under the impression that Iguazu Falls would be Iguazu Falls and Sao Paulo would also be without the diacritics. With Malmö, I don't see how writing it "Malmo" is ambiguous. An English-speaker would easily know that Malmo is Malmo (I had actually not known the city had diacritics in the name. lol). I really don't think Swedish names are particularly ambiguous without the diacritics. I though the idea was to limit the use of diacritics as much as possible to only use them when absolutely necessary. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 21:02, 11 February 2010 (EST)

I think this is where the disconnect is for me - I don't understand the reason for wanting to limit the use of accents and diacritics in article names as long as a redirect is in place. If someone could spell out the reasoning behind that idea I think it would make it easier to formulate a consistent policy. I have a similar issue with arguments made about using shorter article names ("Death Valley" vs. "Death Valley National Park") - it seems like as long as there are redirects in place for the shorter names, the ultimate name of the article doesn't matter that much and we might as well go with whatever is likely to cause the least confusion/ambiguity. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 21:17, 11 February 2010 (EST)

Actually, I wouldn't immediately make the connection to the city if I saw "Malmo," whereas I would with Malmö. I think I am of one mind with Jani—the traveler comes first, and it's more useful than not to have the diacritics, partly for pronunciation help, but more importantly for reading street signs. We could use the format "Name ([[Language phrasebook|Language]]: name with diacritics (SOO-doh phuh-NEH-tih-sih-zay-shuhn)," but it would be more concise to just put the diacritics in the name itself and only pronunciation in the parentheses. I agree with Ryan in that I don't really see any reason, from a reader's perspective, to avoid diacritics, or even Latin characters that do not appear in the English language, so long as pronunciation follows the article title in parentheses, and that redirects are set up.

I don't want to throw off the consensus work being done, but here's just a suggestion of a relatively simple solution: Names using Latin characters should appear as they do in their own language, except when there is a different more commonly used English name. That's a simple, categorical rule, which would leave us with São Paolo and Malmö, but not Genève. I see the former two in English language writing often, so this doesn't seem too radical to me. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 22:29, 11 February 2010 (EST)

I think this is getting more and more muddled. How would the decison about a different, more commonly English name be made? Is Iguaza Falls a more commonly used different English spelling than the squiggled Iguaçu Falls? I would never dream of writing Malmö, and I doubt whether many native English speakers would, bar the linguistically interested and those with Scandinavian connections. The simple solution ("write in English, dont use diacritics and accents except where there is no common English name") is clearly not very popular --(WT-en) Burmesedays 23:08, 11 February 2010 (EST)

In my mind the decision process would be the same as when we try to figure out whether or not to disambiguate an article:

1. Are there different versions of the name? If no, we're done.
2. If there are different versions of the name, is one so much more common than the others that NOT using it would be a hindrance? If so, use it and we're done. An example: Geneva.
3. Otherwise there are multiple versions of the name, and one is not clearly correct, so use the local name.

My opposition to "always use the no accent/diacritic name" is twofold: one, we still end up with confusion (Aero? Aeroe?) and two, I don't think it's a benefit to a traveler standing in a bus station to make them translate a non-diacritic name into what they see on the schedule. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 23:27, 11 February 2010 (EST)

But once again, the traveller at the bus station would still have the native name on the guide, clearly visible, just like those with non-Latin scripts can do. The idea that the accents help the traveller to pronounce names, in my opinion is just not true. It's rare for an English speaker to know anything about Swedish, so I don't see it as particularly useful in that way (once again, the accented name would still be there). If these accents are so helpful, then why do we have a strict policy for Vietnamese against all diacritics? The diacritics in Vietnamese mark tones, in which a lack of using tones makes speech incomprehensible. People seem so passionate about Scandinavian languages (probably in part because we have Scandinavians here) yet our Vietnamese policy strictly forbids it. I'm sure there are signs in Vietnam that are written in Vietnamese, but no one seems bothered by the lack of diacritics in Vietnamese. I'd prefer making Swedish cities (for example) like the Vietnamese; no diacritics. If Wikivoyageers are okay in Vietnam, I imagine Malmo will not be too traumatic either. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 00:20, 12 February 2010 (EST)

It may be rare for the average English speaker to know anything about Swedish pronunciation, but probably pretty common for the average English speaking traveler visiting Sweden and traveling independently (and this is to whom our guides are geared). They just need to take a look at Swedish phrasebook to get an idea of what that umlaut means. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 12:32, 12 February 2010 (EST)

But the Swedish and Icelandic Ö, is not an accented O, its a separate unrelated letter, which like the Danish Ø, is ambiguous because many people write it as 'oe' on foreign keyboards, exactly to differentiate it from 'O', same goes for the Swedish Ä (the swedish version of Æ) which is also a separate ligature transliterated as 'ae' to differentiate the letter from 'a'. I'm very much in favour of Peters proposal above. Florence, Copenhagen and Moscow, but not Malmo or Aeroe. --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^talk 05:23, 12 February 2010 (EST)

I think I'd have less objection to diacritics if redirects didn't screw up our RDF features. (WT-en) LtPowers 07:49, 12 February 2010 (EST)

Along with "they are hard to type" (which is solved with redirects), this seems to be the only other concrete argument that has been made against using accents/diacritics in names, unless I've missed something in the discussion above. The breadcrumb trail for São Paulo and Ærø both look OK, so could you clarify what breaks? Maybe this is something that can be addressed. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 12:41, 12 February 2010 (EST)

If you navigate to São Paulo via the redirect at Sao Paolo, all RDF features will break. This is true of all redirects, and is a tech issue independent of using diacritics. I think it's generally best, though, not to tailor our policies to deal with outstanding tech issues, in the hopes that we will eventually resolve them. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 12:47, 12 February 2010 (EST)

I'm just saying that redirects don't solve the problem entirely. (WT-en) LtPowers 15:31, 12 February 2010 (EST)

The main argument is not just that its "hard to type". The pronunciation arguments are running in circles, because the proper name will be visible regardless of which way we write it. I think out of an attempt to establish a more concrete naming rule, the real debate is "What is English?". Also, because it seemed that there was a desire to avoid diacritics, and there are rules in place against them, the issue of conformity and consistency was brought up. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 01:52, 13 February 2010 (EST)

I guess I'm still having trouble figuring out what the advantages of NOT using accents/diacritics are - you list rebuttals to arguments made in favor of using diacritics. Reviewing what's above, the cases made for using accents/diacritics are:

• There are pronunciation advantages (Jani, Stefan)
• Not using accents/diacritics can change the meaning significantly for local speakers (Jani)
• It is less ambiguous if we create a rule that says "when in doubt, use the local name" (myself, Peter)
• It is less confusing for travelers if the name used on Wikivoyage article matches what they see on maps, bus stations, etc. (Jani, myself)

We've been able to discuss these arguments at length, and might even be moving towards some level of agreement. Similarly, here are the arguments that seem to be made for NOT using accents/diacritics:

• They are hard to type.
• If we rely on redirects then breadcrumb navigation doesn't display.

Did I miss anything? I'm not sure what you mean by "it seemed that there was a desire to avoid diacritics, and there are rules in place against them" - the current naming convention states "Use only the characters of the Latin alphabet for all article names (not just place names). Latin characters are the letters A through Z, capitalized or not, with or without accents/diacritics, and including ligatures (such as æ, Æ)."

The initial point of this discussion was to include a few more examples in the guidelines to clarify our naming conventions (inspired partly by the current discussion of how the São Paulo article should be named), but since it has turned into a debate about when/if we should use accents/diacritics it seems important to understand both the pros and cons. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 14:49, 14 February 2010 (EST)

There are pronunciation advantages to using characters that English-speakers can read, as well, as most people do not want to bother trying to decode place names. I still don't necessarily think that people who want to travel to Sweden will bother to learn much of the language or how to pronouce Swedish. People don't do that much with China, Japan, even Mexico (maybe most non-English countries). And the arguments about pronunciation, meaning changes, and matching bus/train stops are rather mute when we have an anti-diacritic position on Vietnamese, which could "benefit" from all of the same arguments (and once again, the correct name would be on the page no matter what). I tried to look it up, but I couldn't find any reason as to why it is strictly forbidden in Vietnamese when it uses the Latin alphabet with diacritics. The anti-diacritic policy however, makes Vietnamese naming very clear, so we don't have diacritic arguments about it.

I'm not sure what level of agreement we are moving to, because I feel like aside from leading to a discussion about how to name Icelandic cities, the discussion has not moved towards anything, at least in terms of making the policy clearer. Perhaps it sounds good to say that any article without a clear English name should be given its native name, but as the above discussion has shown, what one person thinks is the clear and obvious English name may still be contested. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 17:11, 14 February 2010 (EST)

I don't know why I'm not getting any response to my points about æäøöåð (and i'm sure there is others) being inheritable ambiguous letters, that can be transliterated in 2-3 different ways - and should we choose a strict A-Z approach, will be an ongoing issue with Scandinavian, German, Austrian and Swiss articles, as there are no one transliteration that is overwhelmingly more popular than the others locally, hence you introduce ambiguity in the article title when not using the original letters. And another point; my German isn't particularly good, but if I wanted to search for Göttingen, that is what I would search for; not Gottingen or Goettingen, since I come from a not insignificant minority of more than a billion people that uses accented letters and ligatures on a daily basis, and don't view them as some unwieldy foreign concept (and many of us reads English just fine) --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^talk 20:58, 14 February 2010 (EST)

The fact that Danish people have these characters on their keyboards is irrelevant to the discussion. But it's good that you brought us back to more meaningful discussion about the specific characters/languages. I'd prefer not to use diacritics for Portuguese or Spanish (where the Sao Paulo debate stemmed from). They do not render the names incomprehensible to native speakers or English speakers, and that's always the way most English users would type them and also how I think they are typically written in English.

As for the Scandinavian/German/etc. characters æäøöåð, I have honestly not seen them used in English. Wikipedia uses them, and I think has influenced a lot of online sites... Just to see what all of the options could be, and to make it easier to review, could someone who is familiar with these languages please show how each is or can be romanized? There are examples above only with a couple of them. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 23:52, 14 February 2010 (EST)

They are roman letters :p

• • • æ - 'a' + 'ae' (Ærø, Aeroe, Aroe, Aero Aro)
    • ä - 'a' + 'ae' + 'e' (Gränsö, Granso, Graensoe) Gräns = border; ö = island
    • ø - 'o' + 'oe' (Gransø. Granso, Gransoe) Gran = (pinales); sø = lake
    • ö - 'o' + 'oe' + 'oo' (Brännögård, Branogard, Braennoegaard, Braenogard, Branoegard, Branogaard etc.)
    • å - 'a' + 'aa' (Årø, Aaroe, Aro)
    • ð - 'd' + 'th' (Seyðisfjörður, Seythisfjorthur, Seythisfjoerthur, Seydisfjordur, Seydisfjoerdur)

And to counterpoint the "visitors would still have the native name on the guide, clearly visible..."; well yes, but nearly all of our guides also have name, region and country available in the opening paragraph for easy reference --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^talk 07:26, 15 February 2010 (EST)

I have decided it is all Wikipedia's fault :) and no more of my energy will flow in the direction of this discussion. Best of luck with a şølütĭöñ and please make sure the guideline is updated!--(WT-en) Burmesedays 09:24, 15 February 2010 (EST)

I'm strongly for keeping diacritics. I have always taken the "use English" policy to refer to cases where there is a clear, unique, established English name for the place, i.e. Mexico City, not Ciudad de México. All the examples given there are of this type, and I agree with that. However, most places don't have an English name, and simply dropping the diacritics often creates a very poor English representation of the word. Are we going to ban the Spanish "ñ" in favor of a standard one, "Puerto Penasco" instead of "Puerto Peñasco"? And are we really suggesting that a name like Iguaçu Falls be renamed to Iguacu Falls? "No, the standard English spelling is Iguassu", you might say. But does that mean a transliteration of "ss" should be proscribed for the hundreds of other placenames which have never been written this way? I think not. The Spanish and Portuguese characters ç, ã, ô, etc. are typically preserved in any profession English writing I have seen, and I would venture that in writing São Paulo is far more common with than without the til. "Sao Paulo" is not really an "English version" of the name the same way Naples is an English version of Napoli. It's just laziness or lack of know-how in typing the til. Frankly, it hurts my eyes to see Spanish or Portuguese placenames written with the diacritics dropped because it just seems misleading and unprofessional. As for Scandinavian and other languages where I don't necessarily even know the pronunciation of special characters, I would still rather see the original placename up top than be redirected to an arbitrarily-chosen transliteration. Redirecting to the original placename allows us to use redirects for any number of transliteration systems without having to endorse one. (WT-en) Texugo 23:19, 15 February 2010 (EST)

Also for keeping, per Texugo and others – (WT-en) cacahuate ^talk 00:50, 16 February 2010 (EST)

After reading all the arguments, I am convinced that we should keep the original placenames except in the rare cases when there is a clear, unique, established English name. As I see it, this is really not too far away from what the policy has been all the way, but it has not been described sufficiently clearly in our policy, (WT-en) ClausHansen 01:08, 16 February 2010 (EST)

Re: Sao Paulo, if it's good enough for Starfleet, it's good enough for me. =) (WT-en) LtPowers 08:35, 16 February 2010 (EST)

Its interesting to see so many opinions. Personally, I'm neutral because for an electronic guide the use of redirects, etc, makes the actual name largely irrelevant. You could rename all the articles as numbers sequentially from 1 to 55,000 and I wouldn't care, as long as all the possible names were in the text, and the appropriate redirects are in place. (Although I'm sure we could still disagree on where to put the comma in the number). However, we all seem to accept that trying to maintain the local names worldwide is a hopeless cause. We have so many character sets, translation methods, names that cannot even be uniquely mapped. What we in effect actually deciding here that we are accepting some European characters that are not English characters, just because the words also contain some characters which map onto the standard English character set. --(WT-en) inas 18:15, 16 February 2010 (EST)

That's about right Inas. How will this relate I wonder to the use of pronounciation aids in the romanisation of non-European languages (eg Vietnam's 29 letter alphabet)? Or are the arguments only relevant for European languages?--(WT-en) Burmesedays 20:02, 16 February 2010 (EST)

Personally I'm in favour of any incarnation of the latin alphabet, including Vietnamese, although thanks to Hollywood and LBJ, i'd venture many Vietnamese cities have a commonly used English name, Da Nang for example, over Đà Nẵng, Hue, but Buôn Ma Thuột over Buon Ma Thuot, although a separate consensus for Vietnam seems to have been reached, and I don't feel as strongly about that, as I do against renaming places in my own backyard to names I couldn't figure out was related, without clicking through to the article. Ö may look like an O, but it is not an O, any more than it is a A, E, U or Y. To me, changing Ærø to Aero, is like changing Hull to Hall --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^talk

I can understand why Stefan and it was exactly those type of diacritics and ligatures that I was in favour of keeping right at the beginning of this discussion, although I later made a mistake when citing Malmo. It is the mostly pronounciation mark-up that I see as totally unneccesary and unrelated to the language that this Wiki is written in. But whatever the majority view is, I wil go with that, no matter how illogical I might find it. As an aside don't you think that a traveller at a bus station who can't figure out that São Paulo is the same place as Sao Paulo, actually deserves to get lost? :)--(WT-en) Burmesedays 21:02, 16 February 2010 (EST)

Stefan is right, of course, but dropping diacritics rates fairly low on the scale of offences the English Language has committed against foreign place names.

If there is any reasoning that could be applied to using Malmö that doesn't apply to Hà Nội, then I must be missing something. You'll see it in the bus station, etc.. --(WT-en) inas 21:09, 16 February 2010 (EST)

I don't know the full history behind naming conventions for Vietnamese places, but in the example you cite I think Stefan's point about the westernized version of Vietnamese place names meeting the "so much more common" threshold (the "Geneva instead of Genève" exception) is valid, although for smaller Vietnamese villages without an obviously correct westernized name I wouldn't be opposed to changing policy to using the local name, unless there is a some good reason for doing otherwise that applies specifically to Vietnamese. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 21:21, 16 February 2010 (EST)

Do we have any reason to doubt the reasoning stated in the guideline, that is that the diacritics get in the way? --(WT-en) inas 21:40, 16 February 2010 (EST)

The example cited in the guideline is "Hà Nội" which is always referred to in the US (and I assume other English-speaking countries) as "Hanoi", so in that instance the diacritics would get in the way to the majority of English speakers, who know it as "Hanoi". While I don't know for certain, this guideline may be a remnant from very early days of Wikivoyage when the focus was still very much on major travel destinations and we didn't yet have to wrestle with the hard cases such as how to name a small village that doesn't have an "obviously correct" English name. (WT-en) Jani wrote that section so he should be able to provide some insight. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 22:17, 16 February 2010 (EST)

The Vietnamese policy was laid out in 2005, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and many browsers were incapable of displaying Vietnamese accented characters, and we figured that "Con Dao" was a lesser evil than some users getting "C□n □□o". (Technical aside: most European accents are in ISO 8859-1 and show up perfectly well even on old PCs, and the rest in the 8859-x's are also OK, but Vietnamese is entirely outside the ISO system and didn't really work at all [outside Vietnamese PCs running VISCII] until Unicode came along.) I don't think this is the case anymore though, and I'd be quite open to switching Vietnamese article titles to use diacritics as well, as long as the list of exceptions in the guideline -- Dalat, Danang, Hanoi, Saigon and Vietnam -- is maintained. (And I wouldn't object too loudly to Dalat and Danang being dropped off that list, as long as the final 3 stay.) (WT-en) Jpatokal 00:03, 17 February 2010 (EST)

Interestingly, I see that Wikipedia seems to use diacritics by routine in an European language context, rather like Wikivoyage. In the Vietnam pages though, they appear only sparingly and without any logical pattern that I can determine. The reasons may well be technical as Jani explains above. Either that, or nobody can be arsed to change everything :). I am sure there are other cases, not just Vietnamese. Certainly Lao. The sound of worms crawling out of cans.--(WT-en) Burmesedays 00:14, 17 February 2010 (EST)

Vietnamese is actually a special case, since it's written locally in a Latin script, while Lao, Thai, Chinese etc are just romanizations. I'm not aware of any other Latin script that's nearly as encrusted with diacritics (Vietnamese often has two on a single character!), although there are a couple of obscure languages like Azeri that incorporate borderline chars like Ə. (WT-en) Jpatokal 09:17, 17 February 2010 (EST)

Ah! I didn't bring up Vietnamese to change it to diacritics! lol. I've been thinking about this, though, and perhaps on the Scandinavian languages we should leave the diacritics. Although many of the arguments can go either way on eliminating vs keeping diacrtics, for me, I think that the fact that in those languages they are separate letters that are often greatly different in pronunciation than the regular letter (without diacritics) is the most reasonable/convincing argument. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 00:42, 17 February 2010 (EST)

This is true for every language that employs diacritics. (Did you seriously think those funny foreigners like to decorate their alphabet just the hell of it?) (WT-en) Jpatokal 09:33, 17 February 2010 (EST)

Depends on the diacritic. In Spanish, "ñ" is a different letter than "n", and pronounced differently, but accents over vowels signify only syllabic stress and do not change the sound of the character underneath. (WT-en) LtPowers 09:34, 17 February 2010 (EST)

Stress is lexical in Spanish: cómo (where?) is not the same as como (I eat). If it wasn't, there would be no need to write it! (WT-en) Jpatokal 10:55, 17 February 2010 (EST)

I realize that (although that's a bad example since both are pronounced the same with the same stress), but ChubbyWimbus was talking about diacritics that change the pronunciation of a letter. (WT-en) LtPowers 11:00, 17 February 2010 (EST) (P.S. cómo is "how?" not "where?" =) )

I still don't think that applies to Spanish or Portuguese names, though (the romanization of Iguaçu Falls is not Iguacu Falls, though, it's Iguazu Falls. Interestingly, although Wikipedia seems to revel in diacritics in European languages, they use the English for the falls . I hate to sound cynical, but I think Wikipedians are less likely to complain about Vietnamese lack of diacritics because less English-speakers are familiar with it, probably less Vietnamese are there (or were there) to affect the policy than Europeans/Hispanics for their cities, and a lot of English-speakers have such an ingrained belief that Asian languages are incomprehensible that even when they see an Asian language written with English characters, they act like it's all Chinese. The diacritics would add to that sense. Regardless of their reasons, I would prefer our Vietnamese guides to remain the same (no diacritics). Does this sound reasonable and consistent? Having a policy should eliminate most naming questions, but we need to make sure that our policy doesn't come down to the fact that there is some bias arbitrary bias in favor of certain languages and against others... (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 00:42, 17 February 2010 (EST)

Actually "Iguazu" is the Spanish name for it, just as valid as the Portuguese one since the area is shared with Paraguay and Argentina. (The anglified version is actually "Iguassu".) The nearby city of Foz de Iguaçu, however, is not. It would be very strange to replace the spelling with the Spanish or English version, I think, and we'd still be stuck with "Iguacu" if we drop the diacritics. (WT-en) Texugo 09:44, 17 February 2010 (EST)

I know I said I would stay out of this discussion, but after a few glasses of excellent vintage Barollo this evening, here is an example of what really bothers me. I have just logged in and one of the articles I see for patrolling is called Ústí nad Orlicí District. No redirect in place for the English spelling (I took the trouble to create that myself). The only paragraph of text in that article reads:

• Česká Třebová, Ústí nad Orlicí, Brandýs and Orlicí and Choceň lie on the main corridor line connecting Prague, Brno, Wienna and Ostrava. However, most modern and fast IC and EC towns stop in Česká Třebová only. In Ústí nad Orlicí and Choceň most of rychlík trains stop. In Ústí nad Orlicí you can switch to trains going further to Letohrad. In Choceň you change for Vysoké Mýto and Litomyšl railway.

I would love to wikilink that paragraph, but I am scared. Are we really so intent on making life so difficult?--(WT-en) Burmesedays 12:31, 17 February 2010 (EST)

I fail to see much difference between putting brackets around [[Česká Třebová]] and [[Ceska Trebova]], or why it's any more difficult than [[Manchester]], I mean all you really do in any of those cases is type four brackets. Maybe I'm missing something, or maybe that Barollo is impairing your logic? :) --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^talk 02:05, 18 February 2010 (EST)

I cannot deny some impaired logic :). The point is though, if I wikilinked all those place names and they came up in red, what does that mean? That no articles exist? That the articles do exist but the titles are written in English? Should I then go and check for English spellings and put re-directs in place? We are creating unnecessary complexity and confusion. Additionally, your average English speaking and writing Wikivoyager would never in a month of sundays think to put Česká Třebová into a search box (or even know how to compose the accented letters) when he or she is searching for Ceska Trebova. Until the re-direct was put in place by myself yesterday, the search return for Ceska Trebova was empty, despite the article existing. AS face value, Wikivoyage apparently did not have the article the user was looking for. How is that best serving the traveller? You might say this is taken care of by a redirect. Yes it is, but there wasn't one and you cannot rely on this - a common state of play here. A right old mess which would not be the case if we insisted that article names are written in English in the first place (with exceptions as previously suggested). --(WT-en) Burmesedays 02:47, 18 February 2010 (EST)

I think the same problem applies in the reverse. If you wikilink Ceska Trebova and it comes up red, you might be missing an already created Česká Třebová article. Ironically, it's actually easier to double check whether a diacritic-less article exists for the visible "diacriticized" version, as it's easy to remove the diacritics, but hard to add them as a redirect for editors less familiar with the local language. I don't think "Česká Třebová" is a "non-English" name—diacritics are perfectly acceptable in English, and used most often for foreign place names... as well as loan words like piñata (pinata looks ridiculous).

I don't see any significant disadvantages to including diacritics, only advantages, other than the "hard to type" argument, which conflicts with Project:The traveller comes first. I'll add another argument pro: as an international site for travelers, I think we should tend towards the international than to the parochial, especially as our site is not at all geared only towards native English speakers (I actually get the impression that our site is better known and more popular among continental Europeans than Americans, who in my experience mostly haven't heard of us). And naming articles like Montañita Montanita looks simply incorrect, not to mention confusing. Ñ and n are different letters for Ecuadorian place names, just as much as o and ö are for Swedish place names.

In any rate, our policy already states what seems to be the majority opinion here (and I should have read the article more carefully before my earlier comments): Use only the characters of the Latin alphabet for all article names (not just place names). Latin characters are the letters A through Z, capitalized or not, with or without accents/diacritics, and including ligatures (such as æ, Æ). Latin characters are much, much easier for English-speaking readers and contributors to "sound out" or to type (say, for the search tool) than non-Latin characters. If using accents/diacritics and/or ligatures, please also create redirects without (eg. the article named Ærø should have redirects named Aero and Aeroe). I think this discussion, while interesting, is thus moot. Actually, I think the policy states what I was suggesting above ;)

Lastly, I think just about every OS offers a compose key for easy typing of non-standard characters (for English anyway), e.g., Alt+n+~ for ñ in Ubuntu. Copy-pasting also works well. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 16:44, 18 February 2010 (EST)

If the discussion is then "moot", could someone go back to the question that started it and add additional examples to the policy so that we can hopefully avoid future confusion :-) Having now spent a couple of weeks debating this I suspect I actually understand things well enough to take the plunge myself, but didn't want to do so without letting this discussion run its course. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 17:11, 18 February 2010 (EST)

Moot indeed :). I think that the only concrete things that have come out of this long dicussion are that a small number of users think widespread use of squigglies is confusing and unneccesary, and much more importantly, that Vietnamese squigglies should no longer be disallowed.--(WT-en) Burmesedays 19:41, 18 February 2010 (EST)

As an aside to Peter's comment: In my experience, people familiar with the site versus those who are not coincide more with our coverage of their places of interest than nationality. Many people interested in travel to Japan know and use this site, because our coverage of it is pretty good. Americans who are interested in travel to Japan often wind up here at some point in their searches. I think that's how I found it, actually. I could be wrong, but who comes and how they find this site is interesting... (but not using diacritics could get those European users to focus on the bettering articles in their native language versions, which would benefit the site and help prevent their languages from dying. lol)

More on-topic: since the discussion sprung off of Sao Paulo, what is the decision on that? Because it is a well-known destination without diacritics, it seems to qualify as a "no diacritics" city. A decision was reached on the city's talk page, and some people here seem to agree, but since the discussion was generalized, results are inconclusive. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 02:36, 19 February 2010 (EST)

Ah, OK, I see what we have left to figure out. Your contention is that Sao Paulo is the English name for São Paulo. I would disagree and say that diacritics ≠ non-English. That is, the English name is Sao Paulo or São Paulo, depending on whether you are bothering to type the diacritic. On the other hand, it would be weird to use the name México instead of Mexico (which unlike Sao Paulo is universally written without an accent in English), so where do we draw this line? --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 15:02, 19 February 2010 (EST)

That is why I was hoping to bring out of this discussion something more concrete than "most common English name" but perhaps that is the best we can do? I have always seen Sao Paulo, and I don't think it is simply a matter of "diacritics ≠ non-English" in this case; I honestly think that's the "English" way of writing it. As I pointed out above, I really think Wikipedia's use of diacritics has affected other online sources in using them, but with Sao Paulo, there are actually still many websites that do not use the diacritics. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 15:16, 19 February 2010 (EST)

The best way to handle this might be to simply accept that while the existing policy clearly favors Česká Třebová over Ceska Trebova (or Cheskaa Tzhrebovaa or whatever) and Moscow over Moskva/Москва, there will be borderline cases. My suggested policy rewording way up in this discussion would get rid of those borderline cases, but would mean that we'd rename Mexico -> México, which I don't think we want.

When we have a borderline case like Sao Paulo v. São Paulo, under the existing policy, I think we'd need to debate the outcome on the talk page, which is also not ideal. We could establish external points of reference to keep ourselves from wasting/duplicating time that other sites have already done. Thus, we could default to Wikipedia's approach when in doubt to save us time and possibly impossible consensus building on what ultimately is a fairly trivial issue. FWIW, Wikipedia chose São Paulo after having a meaningful discussion, which referenced the fact that Encarta, Encyclopædia Britannica, and the U.S. Consulate to São Paulo all include the diacritic. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 20:00, 19 February 2010 (EST)

I've stated my case for a "when there isn't an obviously correct name, use the local name and create the necessary redirects" rule above, implemented in the same way as our current disambiguation rules, and will hereafter cease lobbying :-) Such a rule would, however, provide an unambiguous guideline for us to follow for cases such as São Paulo (use the local version since it's not obvious which is the correct name) without affecting articles like Mexico or Geneva (in both cases, the local name is never used by English speakers). -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 22:19, 19 February 2010 (EST)

I'm with Ryan here. São Paulo has no obvious, incontestible English name since there is definitely contention on the matter, so we should go with the local name. (WT-en) Texugo 00:12, 20 February 2010 (EST)

I can wholeheartedly support that. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 00:45, 20 February 2010 (EST)

Me four. (WT-en) Jpatokal 01:05, 20 February 2010 (EST)

Me five (through gritted teeth) :). If the policy is not to change, then this seems like the only workable guideline to me. Well done Ryan. As an aside, would anyone object if we made checking names with diacritics for an English re-direct a routine housekeeping job? I have starting checking each one I see on the recent changes screen, and find a lot with no redirects in place. I think that's the only way we can stop misleading negative search returns.--(WT-en) Burmesedays 01:34, 20 February 2010 (EST)

Since we probably can't come up with a more definitive rule, I'll concede. However, if a debate arose about a city, I hope that the fact that there was a debate would not automatically mean to use diacritics. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 02:28, 20 February 2010 (EST)

With our disambiguation rules, debate hasn't always automatically meant disambiguation (see Talk:Ontario for an example) and I assume that this guideline should be the same. It should, however, allow us to avoid debate in the vast majority of cases and focus on more important things than squigglies. Provided there isn't any further objection in the next 24 hours or so I'll update the policy page to reflect the current consensus, and then we can move on to debating some other obscure nuance of travel guide creation :-) -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 12:27, 20 February 2010 (EST)

Coincidentally I just started a new thread about the much less trivial issue of IB's latest response on the tech issues on Google wave; would be a productive place for y'all to spend some energy :) --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^talk 14:17, 20 February 2010 (EST)

I also agree with Ryan's thoughts :) --(WT-en) globe-trotter 12:00, 21 February 2010 (EST)

The guidelines on article naming have now been updated per this discussion, and with a number of additional examples to hopefully clarify things. I didn't touch the Vietnamese section of Project:Romanization since it wasn't entirely clear that we're going to change that, but if someone else feels like updating it I would be in full support. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 12:24, 21 February 2010 (EST)

I've just moved Albany (city, Western Australia) to Albany (Western Australia), because Albany (region, Western Australia) redirected to it. Since we don't have a region called Albany (Western Australia), we don't need to disambiguate between the city and the region.

Sadly, that means our classic example on the Naming Conventions page is defunct. Are there any other names that have double disambiguators?

-- (WT-en) LtPowers 21:25, 17 May 2010 (EDT)

Albany as a region disappeared in the recent re-organisation of Western Australia. The Canadian Durhams are quite a good example of a double I think:

• Durham (region, Ontario) - a region in the Greater Toronto Area of Ontario
• Durham (town, Ontario) - a town in Grey County, Ontario --(WT-en) Burmesedays 23:41, 17 May 2010 (EDT)

Is Albany the lowest subdivision down from Western Australia? We don't have a Venango County article, yet Franklin (Venango County) was given the county addition because there is another in the state (although I really don't think there is anything there). If there is a subdivision that distinguishes it, then I guess you can use it, regardless of whether or not we have an article for it. It would look better than the (city, Western Australia) thing. (WT-en) ChubbyWimbus 02:11, 18 May 2010 (EDT)

Albany isn't a subdivision of Western Australia at all. It's a city in South West (Western Australia). Durham's a good find, Buremesedays. I'll update the page. (WT-en) LtPowers 08:51, 18 May 2010 (EDT)

I'm continually thinking about subdividing Finger Lakes into subregions. The clear choice for one of the subregions encompasses Monroe County (Rochester's county) and the town/village of Victor. Victor is almost always considered a suburb of Rochester, like all the other towns in Monroe County, but it's in Ontario County.

So I don't know what I'd call this hypothetical article were I to create it. Calling it Monroe County is misleading because Victor isn't in Monroe County. But there's no other name in common use; "Greater Rochester" encompasses much more than just one county (in fact, five or seven counties are included, two of which aren't even in the Finger Lakes region), "Suburban Rochester" would seem to exclude the city itself, "Rochester and its suburbs" seems too long-winded.

Worse still would be a second subregion I'd want to create, which would be bounded by Monroe County in the west, Lake Ontario to the north, Central New York to the east, and I-90 to the south. I have no idea what to call that, none whatsoever.

Are there any precedents to which I might refer? Any suggestions for how to name regions-without-names?

-- (WT-en) LtPowers 14:22, 26 May 2010 (EDT)

The regions you defined pretty much looked "Northwestern Finger Lakes" and "Northeastern Finger Lakes" to me. Yes, directional names are boring and sometimes confusing but they are always an option when every other alternative fails. No better suggestion from me at the moment. – (WT-en) Vidimian 15:47, 26 May 2010 (EDT)

I've thought about that but the main problem is that there are no Finger Lakes in either of those two subregions. =) (WT-en) LtPowers 19:14, 26 May 2010 (EDT)

Standard colonial rules state that when a place isn't named then the discoverer gets to choose one. While I'd suggest something other than "East and West Powersland", anything you come up with that seems appropriate is likely to be fine :) -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 19:35, 26 May 2010 (EDT)

Swept in from the pub

In countries like Poland and Romania, they use very unfamiliar characters in their city names. What do we do with a city like Łódź? Move it to Lodz and Chişinău? The problem is that the article name Lodz is already taken as a redirection, so a quick move is not possible. --(WT-en) globe-trotter 14:02, 18 January 2010 (EST)

This may have been beaten to death in naming discussions which long pre-date my involvement here, but I struggle to see why we allow these characters at all on English Wikivoyage? No benefit that I can see; only downside as GT has identified. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 21:25, 19 January 2010 (EST)

Project:Naming_conventions is a good starting point, and per those we do allow ligatures and accents if there is no Anglicized version of the city name - but I'm not sure if that is the case for Lodz. --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^talk 23:36, 19 January 2010 (EST)

Thanks Stefan. If I understand correctly, edits like this one should be rolled back then?--(WT-en) Burmesedays 09:58, 20 January 2010 (EST)

This is an important question, also because a number of new articles are being established in Romania these days both with and without these characters. As I understand the policy, we should allow diacritics if the city does not have an English name. Does that not mean that cities like Łódź and Chişinău should be spelled like this? Not that we need to do it the same way as Wikipedia, but over there they use the local spelling. Further, with a very limited knowledge of the languages, the local spelling will help you understand how it is pronounced. What is considered to be the problem with using the local spelling? I think, we need to decide how to do this and then state the naming policy more precisely.

Maybe we could do like this: Name the article without diacritics and state the name in the article without, but then just after the name in the beginning of the article show the name with diacritics in ()? If we do this, we will have to change the naming policy, (WT-en) ClausHansen 10:37, 20 January 2010 (EST)

A very large reason why these characters should not be used is that searches will not work unless the user composes the (probably) unfamiliar characters. I cannot imagine many English language speakers people typing in Chişinău when they are searching for Chisinau. That means you need to set up a redirect page every single time one of these characters is used. That seems both clumsy and unnecessary when the English name is widely known. I think the policy is to use these characters by exception when there is no anglicised version. Emminently sensible I think, but not monitored it seems.--(WT-en) Burmesedays 10:46, 20 January 2010 (EST)

This is a difficult issue. On the one hand, it's not desirable to have special characters in the article title, because that makes it difficult to link to. But on the other hand, wherever the name is used outside of links, it is better written with the diacritics to help the reader with pronunciation. Łódź and Lodz are very far apart in pronunciation. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 11:17, 20 January 2010 (EST)

I like Claus's idea. A guideline of the name with diacritics in brackets within the article but not as part of the article name. Deals with the issue neatly. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 11:25, 20 January 2010 (EST)

I don't like the concept of renaming Tromsø to Tromso or Tromsoe, or Ærø to Aeroe or Aro, they really are not the same letters, it looks stupid, and there is no clear standard for transliteration - i.e. "Øø/Öö" can be transliterated as both o and oe, while "Åå" can be both a single and double "a". The original letters are unambiguous. --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^talk 11:54, 20 January 2010 (EST)

If there is no standard English name, then I agree Stefan. Those are the cases when diacritics could be used, redirect put in place etc. Otherwise, let's make life easy and remember that this is an English language Wiki. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 12:04, 20 January 2010 (EST)

I think we have to distinguish between litagurs (like Æ, Ø and Å), which are seperate letters, and diacritics (like in Chişinău), which just give further information on how to pronounce a letter. Maybe we could use litagurs in the names but diacritics only in the text? If we only use the criteria of whether there is a standard English name, then most cities will have to be named with the diacritics, so we should avoid using that criteria alone, (WT-en) ClausHansen 13:12, 20 January 2010 (EST)

That's the thing though, according to Wikipedia, Łł is a ligature, so should we then write Łodz instead? And while ş and ă also gives me trouble, diacritics like à,á,ä,â and ã is easily written on a keyboard, so I don't really see a reason not to call Sao Paulo, São Paulo. --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) ^talk 18:22, 20 January 2010 (EST)

"ã" is definitely not easily written on English keyboards. And Sao Paulo is rarely written with the diacritic in English. (WT-en) LtPowers 18:50, 20 January 2010 (EST)

We are so not opening this can of worms again -- this led to endless debates before the current policy was imposed. Wikivoyage is written for the comfort of its readers, not its writers, so if you need to use cut-n-paste to add in diacritics, too bad. (And for lazy writers who don't, it's editors' job to clean up afterward.) For the reader, the diacritics do no harm and may do a little good (some people know how to pronounce them!) as long as all the appropriate redirects are in place, so whenever in doubt, keep 'em. (WT-en) Jpatokal 03:44, 21 January 2010 (EST)

Couldn't the same argument be used in favor of naming Russian articles using the Cyrillic alphabet? (WT-en) LtPowers 10:19, 21 January 2010 (EST)

No, because the average reader can't understand Cyrillic. (WT-en) Jpatokal 00:59, 26 January 2010 (EST)

But the average reader doesn't know what the various diacritics do to the pronunciation either. (WT-en) LtPowers 07:03, 26 January 2010 (EST)

So we can all understand, where is that documented please Jani? Project:Naming_conventions does not seem to say that. As an aside, I am finding a complete pickle related to this; two articles existing for the same location, one with a diacritics name and one without, lack of redirects etc. A clear policy that everyone can be directed to (not least, me!) would help. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 10:20, 21 January 2010 (EST)

The second sentence of Project:Naming_conventions#Romanization says "Latin characters are the letters A through Z, capitalized or not, with or without accents/diacritics, and including ligatures (such as æ, Æ).".—(WT-en) Vidimian 19:27, 25 January 2010 (EST)

Ah. Reading it again that is very clear (sadly). I can only plead for everyone to be careful when naming articles and wikilinking. Putting the re-directs in place is most important to make sure that searches work for the huge majority of English language users, who will not type names with diacritics. Internal wikilinking is another matter and we will just have to accept that mistakes will happen. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 21:17, 25 January 2010 (EST)

As long as the redirects are in place (and I agree they are very important), navigation will still work fine even if the wikilink is to the accentless version. But maybe we should import Wikipedia's redirect-straightening bot over here as well... (WT-en) Jpatokal 00:59, 26 January 2010 (EST)

Wikipedia's redirect policy explicitly warns against "fixing" redirects that aren't broken. Do they really have a bot that does exactly that? (Of course, we do have a mitigating situation -- that our RDF features, in particular breadcrumbs, don't work with redirects.) (WT-en) LtPowers 07:03, 26 January 2010 (EST)

Single redirects are fine, but double redirects should be straightened out since they confuse newbies, and there are bots for this. See wikipedia:Wikipedia:Double redirects. (WT-en) Jpatokal 09:03, 9 February 2010 (EST)

swept from pub:

I have been a little reluctant to post this request as I do not wish to appear obsessed by this issue :). When we had the latest sguigglies or no sguigglies debate, I made a request for all patrollers to please look out for place names with diacritics/accents etc that did not have simple character re-directs. This does not seem to be happening as I have been finding lots on the recent changes list that don't. One unanimous conclusion (perhaps the only one) from that discussion was that we must get the redirects in place to maintain the relevance of our search function. So another plea for this please. And an especially pretty please to those who were so in favour of encouraging widespread use diacritics. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 22:52, 1 April 2010 (EDT)

I've been catching quite a few of them, so you're not the only one! (WT-en) Texugo 23:20, 1 April 2010 (EDT)

Great. Please keep it up. --(WT-en) Burmesedays 05:25, 2 April 2010 (EDT)