Wikipedia talk:Writing better articles/Use other languages sparingly

Supporters of this rule include:

• MichaelTinkler,
• JHK (Ok non-English titles I can think of are pietas, hubris, and possibly basileus and strategos),
• 24 (those are now considered English)

Opponents include:

• Anders Torlind (nota bene only in cases where not supplying foreign article names violates the "Useful for readers" rule. Example: People searching for the Swedish kings are very likely to be Swedes, and so a redirect from the swedish name--or to it, doesn't matter--would be appropriate)
• Eclecticology (By making the original title the principal entry, with appropriate redirects, you can avoid ambiguities. e.g. Camus' novel "L'Étranger" has two common translations of the title.
• The bellman
  • There can often be more than one correct translation of a word/phrase eg. Bokmål - Standard Norwegian, book language, Dano-norwegian. This makes linking harder, and also means that one wikipedia article could mention dano-norwegian, whilst another could mention standard norwegian, and the average reader reader wouldnt have a clue that the two were the same
  • Sometimes an english translation could cover two seperate concepts in the native language and lead to ambiguity.
  • Often due to historical legacy and other reasons, the accepted english "translation" is not in fact a translation. eg. Bokmål translates as book language, however the most common english "translation" is Dano-norwegian.

Acronyms with Foregin Language Etymology

I discovered that Omegatron is changing Latin phrases and acronyms he comes across in wikipedia to English expressions. He interprets the Use Foregin Languages Sparingly subsection as support for this. I, personally, am of a different opinion concerning the acronyms that are sprung from a Latin phrase (such as i.e.) because they are so widespread, and have been so for such long time, that they are part of the English language. This policy does not cover these special cases at all, are they covered somewhere else? If not, I would like to see a discussion on this issue (and maybe, if consensus can be reached, a policy). --Probell 20:51, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

tagging foreign words with lang property

In addition, you might want to use HTML to mark other languages as being other languages. For example, in Mozilla, if you right-click nota bene and choose Properties, you can see that it's in Latin because I have marked it up as <i lang="la">nota bene</i>. (Or would that be a bad thing on Wikipedia?) --Damian Yerrick

Not entirely unreasonable. The lang attribute is probably most useful for two things: speech interfaces for blind users which could (in theory, at least) make an attempt at switching to appropriate pronunciation; and selecting the correct glyphs for characters that can differ between languages (for instance, selecting the Japanese or Chinese form of a kanji/hanzi character, which sometimes share the same Unicode code point despite differing somewhat in form). Brion VIBBER

Good idea, but your suggestion failed to get support for the past two years simply because it is too cumbersome to write. However, if wiki programmers would supply a macro to allow easy entry, then it may be adopted. For example, {{la|nota bene}} can generate <i lang="la">nota bene</i> automatically. Kowloonese 20:42, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Format for terms in other languages

(from the village pump)

I haven't been able to find an answer yet. When it's important to provide translation of words in another language (German: Sprache), what is the standard?

As far as I know, there's no official standard, but "Englishword (Other: Foreignword)" is a widely used de facto standard. I'd suggest using that unless it's awkward in the particular context. Less standardized is how to deal with foreign words that are not in a Latin-type character set, where it might be helpful to provide both the original word and a Latin-alphabet transliteration. One method of doing this is "Athens (Greek: Αθήνα, Athina)". A CS person would do "Athens (Greek: Αθήνα (Athina))", but nested parentheses are generally a no-no in writing. --Delirium 07:28, Feb 8, 2004 (UTC)

But brackets work fine there: "Athens (Greek: Αθήνα [Athina])" Jor 15:53, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, that's the format that I've been using. Except what is the rationale for hyperlinking the language name. To me, it ruins the flow and is an unnecessary link (unless the language is one that most ppl don't know about).Bwood 15:17, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Proposal to consolidate advice on writing better articles

At present there are many articles in the Wikipedia namespace that seek to give guidance on how to write better articles. I propose consolidating these into a much smaller number. On User:Jongarrettuk/Better writing guide I propose how these could be consolidated. The proposal is not to change advice, just to consolidate it. If I have inadvertently moved what you consider to be good advice that is currently in the Wikipedia namespace, please re-add it. I'm hope that the proposal to merge all these articles, in principle, will be welcomed. Of course, it may be preferred to have 2, 3 or 4 inter-connected articles than just one and would welcome advice on how this could be done. (In particular, perhaps all the guidance on layout should be spun off into one consolidated article on layout.) I'm also aware that putting lots of different bits of advice together may throw up anomalies or bits that people now disagree with (including bits that I myself disagree with:) ). I ask for support for the consolidation. Once the consolidation has happened, the advice can be changed in the normal way. Please feel free to improve on the current draft consolidation, but don't remove or add advice that is not currently on the Wikipedia namespace. If all goes well, I'll add a new Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles page on the 19th, though maybe some bits of the new article will need to be phased in over a longer period. I'll also take care to preserve all the archived discussion in one place. jguk 19:57, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)