Wikipedia talk:Use diacritics

Motivation

A clear policy statement on this issue seems to be necessary, to avoid continuous repetitions of the type of discussion exemplified at WP:Requested moves/Tennis. This is only a stub of a proposal so far; I hope others will help develop it (or I will sometime when I'm wider awake). I believe the proposed statement actually reflects current practice, and certainly should continue be the practice, since a serious reference work exists to provide serious information.

Discussion (no votes yet please!!)

• This proposal doesn't really change much; see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English) for the use of diacritics or special characters. Ironholds 05:15, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
  • Though people seem to quote WP:UE as an argument against diacritics. Whatever the present situation is, it seems that a more explicit statement is required (see WP:Requested moves/Tennis for an example of the confusion as to what current policy is).--Kotniski (talk) 05:20, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
    • Your policy doesnt seem to really be specific, though. it comes out as you either can or cant use diacritics, although we prefer you do. there's no hard yes/no, its optional, and in a world where diacritics in a querty keyboard require fiddling with the alt key and numerical pad for hours on end i can't see it being taken up on a large scale. That being said, i think it's a nice idea, although it could be quite difficult, i.e irish names with 4/5 diacritics in the full thing. You'd also have to (most likely) have redirects for most of the articles with this policy in place so user's dont have to type it all out when searching, although i'm sure that already exists for many articles.Ironholds 05:25, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
• I think instead that the current version of conventions, Wikipedia:Naming conflicts - see the section on proper nouns, where it is written that "If a native name has a common English-language equivalent, the English version takes precedence", should be adopted as policy. Following this, it should then be clear when to use diacritics or not: They are used in article names if the subject is commonly described with diacritics in English, and not if they are not (and, of course, in any article lead, the original spelling is provided). This appears suitable for this place, the English wikipedia. --HJensen, talk 06:38, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
  • The point is that pretty much all diacriticed words can appear without diacritics in English. There are some sources (including many good ones) that simply don't use diacritics, or use only a small subset of them. There will also always be plenty of good sources that do use diacritics. So to say that one or other form is correct and the other incorrect (or "not English") is generally going to be unsupportable. We are perfectly entitled to decide which of these styles is appropriate to WP. (Of course, we don't want to punish anyone for using either form, but in order to avoid pointless edit wars and things like the tennis-player debate, we should have it set down explicitly which style is preferred.)--Kotniski (talk) 08:02, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
    • I do not purport that one or other form is "correct." The keyword in the quoted text is "common", which is completely different. And a common English-language equivalent can then be determined from case to case. --HJensen, talk 13:14, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
      • But the "equivalents" are just the names without the diacritics, not actual English names. And shouldn't Wikipedia be consistent with/without diacritic use? BalkanFever 13:33, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Use them when the person is not known/is known with diacritics in the English world. Don't use them when the person is widely known in English without them. It doesn't seem that complex to me when you remove the WP:IDHT from it. Narson (talk) 13:39, 8 June 2008 (UTC) (Dedent) This page/policy needs to have two sections, Article Name and Name usage. For the name usage both the Diacriticed word and the English equivalent need to be listed in bold in the article introduction. The rest of the article will use the page name. For the page name either the Diacriticed word or the English equivalent should be the page name, the other should redirect to the proper page. --Lemmey talk 13:44, 8 June 2008 (UTC)