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Talk:Brussels-Capital Region/NamingArchive3

< Talk:Brussels-Capital Region
Latest comment: 17 years ago by Markussep in topic Names survey
See also earlier requested moves & discussions about titles for the municipalities of the Brussels-Capital Region:

— SomeHuman 1 Feb2007 22:27 (UTC)

Names survey

Latest comment: 17 years ago121 comments18 people in discussion

This is a survey for which names the articles for the municipalities in the region of Brussels should have. The region is officially bilingual, French-Dutch, and several of the municipalities have different names in French and Dutch. The articles in question are given below, with their present title.

This survey handles the issue whether both names should be in the article title, if so, how, and if not, which one. The first question is whether both names names should be in the title. The second question depends on the result of the first question: if the result is "one name", which one, and if it's "two names", which name comes first, and what separator ("-", " - ", "/", " / ", " or ", etc. etc.) is used. Because of the holidays I'd propose to let this survey run for a month, and use the first two weeks (until 6 January) for the first question. --Markussep 11:37, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

The first part of this survey has resulted in a clear majority for one name for the municipalities in the Brussels region. In the second part of the survey, the single article names will be discussed. Most contributors to the discussion are in favour of following common English usage, in conformity with the Wikipedia naming conventions. Everyone is invited to give their opinions on how common English usage should be determined. See the sections #If one name, which one and #English usage statistics. I propose to use the coming week (until 13 January) to answer these two questions:

  1. #What one name to use for the municipality article titles. Dutch only, French only, alternating Dutch and French, English usage, other?
  2. #Criteria for English usage: if “English usage” is chosen in Question 1, what would be the method to determine this, what is considered “decisive” and what would the fallback position be in case of “indecisiveness?”

The second part of this survey has resulted in a clear majority for English usage for the municipalities in the Brussels region. The results of Google searches by LVan and Markussep regarding the English usage show a significant lead for the French names for 10 municipalities, and undecided for Sint-Agatha-Berchem and Molenbeek-Saint-Jean (see #Revised Google test). Add your comments, e.g. what name to choose for the two undecided municipalities, under #Discussion and conclusion. Markussep 18:59, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

The final result of the survey is that:

This naming scheme requires the following moves:

Markussep 19:53, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

One name or two names in the title

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was one name (71% of the votes). Markussep 14:54, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Add  * '''One'''  or  * '''Two'''  on a new line followed by a brief explanation, then sign your opinion using ~~~~.
  • One for clarity, see discussion below. Markussep 11:50, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
  • One as Markussep said, choice should be for the single name most commonly used in english, redirect pages for alternative uses etc. Long names are at best confusing.--Caranorn 13:42, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
  • One for several reasons: clarity (title and article), consistency with similar decisions elsewhere (South Tyrol, Finland…), and because two names don’t get rid of the problem (which one comes first?). LVan 14:56, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
  • One per above.--Steven Fruitsmaak (Reply) 16:16, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
  • One. Surely we do not have to repeat the whole South Tyrol discussion? -- Eugène van der Pijll 16:23, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Two. The region is equally bilingual, there are no English names, the Dutch names are the original ones, there are more French-speaking (45-50%) than Dutch-speaking (10-15%) people but many people speak neither French nor Dutch (30%) or speak both languages (10%), so for this exceptional case both names should be used. Diemietrie 17:23, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Two. As these municipalities all belong to the Brussels-Capital agglomeration, the mayors and council are elected by their own inhabitants but the municipalities are all well-known by nearly all Belgians of which 59% speak Dutch and only 40% speak French, and visited by so many of them (e.g. getting a visum at an Embassy, to work in the IT offices, at NATO, to walk or drive in the touristy Sonian Forest which expands over several of the municipalities, etc). It is not acceptable for Wikipedia to upset the inhabitants of the officially bilingual municipalities or the citizens of their country, or to get envolved in the French/Dutch controversies that are very much alive and politically exploited by both language groups, by enforcing either one language upon speakers of English: none except for the City of Brussels (which keeps that name on Wikipedia) has a common or usual English name, thus any single language name as article title is bound to be a WP:POV. A single name does not add to 'clarity', especially as these municipalities are most often talked about with respect to their bilingual status, which is thus most notable, or for some municipalities with respect to their majorities of non-European origin. — SomeHuman 24 Dec2006 02:43 (UTC)
  • One No more South Tyrols; here we cannot even fall back on the language of the country as some tried to do in the South Tyrol.. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 00:10, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
  • One. Per Caranorn. Trying to appease only the natives is not consistent with most naming conventions nor NPOV and is extremely unwiely. Flemings aren't supposed to have an encyclopedic monopoly on how to write about all things Flemish. Same goes for their immediate neighbors. / Peter Isotalo 16:08, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Two, if there both official there must both mentioned.--Westermarck 00:44, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Two: cf. "I want to bring on the German solution: de:Saint-Gilles/Sint-Gillis.--81.241.217.246 01:02, 28 December 2006 (UTC)" (created as separate section and moved by Markussep to 'If two names, how', then obviously to be counted as a such vote and therefore mentioned here by Somehuman).
Comment: who is User:81.241.217.246? His/her only contribution to English wikipedia was this. Markussep 10:25, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
  • One. Wikipedia is not an arm of the Belgian authorities and its not required to use the official formulation du jour. Two would be a total mess. —  AjaxSmack  06:09, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
  • One, it's a lot easier that way. Fram 13:15, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Two, in format French-oblique stroke-Dutch, e.g. Saint-Gilles/Sint-Gillis. Having read through the voluminous debate here, it seems the fairest way to balance consistency, intelligibility, respect for current English usage, inhabitants' usage and history. We should also have redirects from the names in each language alone. If this requires an exception to article naming rules, then let's argue for one.TobyJ 12:32, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • One. It's simpler and clearer. --David Edgar 17:25, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

What one name

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was Follow English usage (88% of the votes). Markussep 13:23, 13 January 2007 (UTC)


The current options are: All Dutch, All French, Dutch and French alternating and Follow English usage. The details of Follow English usage are discussed at #Criteria for English usage. If you have another suggestion, make it here. You are invited to give your opinion about #Criteria for English usage system, also if you didn't vote for that option. There is more room for discussion at #If one name, which one.

All Dutch

  •  

All French

  •  

Dutch and French alternating

Note: Other ways of alternating may well be considered; voting hereunder does not mean agreeing with this mere suggestion by SomeHuman
All 'Saint'/'Sint' are abbreviated (as common and correct in French and Dutch as it is in English and correct for Wikipedia Naming convention); word-order is consistenly in English style. This brings only one of the more populated municipalities necessarily in Dutch language, leaving the 3 other most populated their French name for the total to reasonably reflect the larger number of natively French-speakers.
St-Pieters-Woluwe (38,232 - Dutch; name of saint pronounced identically and as a whole identical meaning as St Peters Woluwe)
St-Agatha-Berchem (20,078 - Dutch; name of saint by English pronounced between French and Dutch but for both as recognizable, and as a whole identical meaning as St Agathas Berchem; only the Dutch allows 'St' for female [French is 'Ste'])
St-Lambrechts-Woluwe (47,952 - Dutch; avoids false suggestion of other history/origin/meaning than St-Pieters-Woluwe, which a non-English but French word-order would; though Woluwe-St-Lambert would render English name for Dutch saint hardly known in English)
St-Jans-Molenbeek (79,877 - Dutch; name of saint ressembles his name in English, an English speaker who does not know how to pronounce French 'Jean' comes closer to the French and to Dutch with his pronunciation of 'Jans' than typical English 'Jean' would, and respects English word-order of St Johns Molenbeek)
St-Josse-ten-Noode (23,557 - French name of saint seems more possible as if an English name, the word-order is the original Dutch as is the English word-order; pronunciation of the Dutch St-Joost-ten-Node would however render 'Node' better)
St-Gilles (44,265 - French; name of saint ressembles his name St Giles in English slightly better than the Dutch St-Gillis, which would never be pronounced by English speakers in a Dutch manner but also closer to French anyway)
Uccle (75,954 - French, more like spelling of many English words than Dutch Ukkel would be, a typical English pronunciation is good enough for French and especially Dutch speakers)
Vorst (47,719 - Dutch; else ambiguous 'Forest' shows as title Forest, Belgium, pronunciation as English forest is equally unrecognizable for French speakers because their stress is on rest; consequently French 'Forest' is only in writing recognizable to English-speakers, thereby however perhaps more common [could not be verified])
Ixelles (77,511 French; more common in English usage by a higher ratio than for other municipalities [by most though not all checks]; Dutch name even less likely to become pronounced well by English-speakers)
Watermaal-Bosvoorde (24,056 - Dutch; the French is etymologically difficult to explain; apart from Ixelles the largest difference between Dutch and French in pronunciation by English speakers, hence here balancing choice for French Ixelles; mainstream pronunciation of 'Boitsfort' by English speakers is unrecognizable for French and for Dutch speakers; both can understand an attempt by English to pronounce 'Bosvoorde')
Schaerbeek (111,946 - French, pronunciation will be closer to French anyway because Dutch-origin 'sch' cannot be pronounced well by English or by French speakers; highest populated of these municipalities and mainly by speakers of French as second language, relatively few local speakers of Dutch)
Auderghem (29,552 - French, 'au' might become pronounced more correctly by English speakers than 'ou' is likely to be; 'ghe' in 'ghem' ressembles English name 'Ghent' in Flanders, for a same sound)
  • Support. It is unacceptable to let American English prevail systematically over British English although it is always the majority usage (for identical things, as is the case here). As ratios of American/English speakers match ratios in English language texts of French-name/Dutch-name being used, any 'one name' in always the same language of origin while for each municipality clearly both names are used in English language is equally unacceptable, largely for the same reasons, as not accepting only American titles. Two names would have avoided the problem that is now put to the voters, as how to ascertain which name to choose ('always the same language', not being acceptable) while any choice about 'this municipality French' and 'that municipality Dutch' will be arbitrary and based on disputable facts and POVs. How long would e.g. 2/3 French names and 1/3 Dutch names be maintained? It would continously become "improved" to whatever a future reader thinks best. Thus Dutch for one alternating with French for another municipality (e.g. suggestion above), may prevent this, it fullfills the arguments for clarity and simplicity that many used to choose 'one name', and still avoids discriminating against 1/3 of English speakers who use the other origin, as well as it avoids violating NPOV towards Flemish/Walloon controversies, and even respects the Belgian constitution and local official status that holds each name at equal basis without forcing anyone to use a particular name. — SomeHuman 7 Jan2007 03:12 (UTC) [moved here at 05:22 from other section]
    These argument have been mentioned before. But the NPOV part is very flaky. What about the Brusselers who speak the local dialect of Brussels? Should we take that into account too since looking at ratios is POV? Anyway, alternating is a reasonable option but not less POV. If we choose this option we'll have to be make sure contributors understand the issue and our solution. --moyogo 17:26, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
Everyone's arguments have been mentioned before. The only local dialect of Brussels is a dialect of Dutch (as comprehensively mentioned before), but is irrelevant [included in local inhabitants, not rarely as French-speaking because that is the only standard language some speakers know and can write, and some might well say Saint-Josse in the dialect as it has many French loanwords]. —inserted 18:26 A few minutes ago, the VRT-news showed a today's mass at Jette being celebrated in the dialect, which is very close to my own (see my user page).—
Alternating is not POV because it equally reflects each of two PsOV without letting one prevail. Hence NPOV: "All Wikipedia articles must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), representing fairly and without bias all significant views that have been published by a reliable source." Flaky?
Any reader who would ever want to "improve" an article title is aware of the bilingual status of each municipality and is likely to check other articles. To be really sure, each talk page could have a box at top with all municipalities' article titles mentioned as a choice by consensus. As explained elsewhere as well, a 'follow established English usage' support is a false choice as it was never contested, but 'follow English usage that is not established', as for these municipalities, finally ends up here (or at the bilingual titles), or brutally violates Wikipedia guidelines. — SomeHuman 7 Jan2007 18:00 (UTC)
PS: Proven not to be a luxury:
Merriam-Webster: to establish: to make firm or stable, to cause to grow and multiply, to put on a firm basis, to put into a favorable position, to gain full recognition or acceptance, to put beyond doubt
Oxford A. L. Dictionary: established: respected or given official status because it has existed or been used for a long time
(citing only the possibly relevant options) makes clear that each of the two names is established, or that none is - depending the precise meaning, and that for no municipality at hand only one particular name is established in English usage. — SomeHuman 7 Jan2007 19:20 (UTC)
All I’m saying is whatever article names we choose, be it official bilingual or largest English usage, it will always be POV, by your reasoning. You’re forgetting that official names in French and Dutch are not NPOV but are just official names. Choosing to display only those in the title is as POV as one, because the official point of view is exactly that, a point of view. For example Schoerebeik is what Schaerbeek is called in local dialect. Schaerbeek is the spelling in French and in Dutch (for those who disagree with the spelling reform), etc... Therefore we must take a stand, make a choice, yours is to go bilingual (only official languages) and that of others is to go with what seems to be established usage in English. Either way, you’re right, we should leave notices in each article talk page so newcomers know where the article naming comes from. --moyogo 23:00, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
Please read again "Alternating is not POV because it equally reflects each of two PsOV without letting one prevail. Hence NPOV" (and the paragraph above): That was my comment signed as 18:00 UTC that Markussep at 21:02 UTC had interrupted as if those paragraphs could be his (though with extra indent): [2]. So I assume your comment about my reasoning was a mistake caused by his highly intolerable behaviour not showing you what I had clearly demonstrated.
Users of a particular language may disagree with a spelling reform, not users of a completely separate language. The Dutch spelling of schaar instead of schaer (meaning scissors) was absorbed a very long time ago. Sjchoer(e)beik [and not 'Sch'] belongs in a Brussels Wikipedia if you want to create one (after creating spelling rules for Brussels) ;-)
I'm afraid you make your own mistake when you state "that of others is to go with what seems to be established usage in English": as I'm trying to tell for months, that is my position as well. But some of my opponents do not appear to me as understanding the full meaning of established: that has not yet happened to the usage in English for these municipalities. At best we did some original research trying to find out whether a particular name has as yet been established, but for each municipality we found that both the names occur in a ratio that makes those equally correct and commonly accepted, just like other things may have two correct names in English usage without one clearly being the commonly accepted one, enough as to let Wikipedia present it in a favorable position compared to the other. Especially for in English rarely used names, nothing else was to be expected. I have no complaints about the title of the Donation article, which is clearly from French-language donation as thousands of terms in English: those are established at least as well as "Brussels" and "City of Brussels" are. Only if English usage still needs to be determined by a consecutive series (how? what sources or Internet domains? what ratio's and by what probability? do other arguments as showing preference for one language or another play?...) of personal points of view that a number of others disagree with, such is WP:POV. If we would have found a 10:1 ratio looking through large numbers of closely scrutinized, and by all considered as representative, English texts using one particular name, it could hardly have been argued not to have been 'established' usage and that would have been our title. It simply was not the case at all. — SomeHuman 7 Jan2007 23:15-00:42 (UTC)
Moved Markussep's intervention outside of SomeHuman's comment signed at 18:00 where it had misled Moyogo as Markusseps signature appeared to sign SomeHuman's first two paragraphs as well as the one here following:
The NPOV policy refers to article content, not the title! Nobody is suggesting to remove the Dutch names or Flemish aspects from the articles. What we have here is a Wikipedia:Naming conflict, you'd better read that, especially the first paragraph. Markussep 21:02, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
Nonsense Markussep, a properly chosen title can be about a POV, and thus contain or be a POV term or name. But here the municipalities are no POV topic as such, for which an inappropriately POV title does violate NPOV policy. — SomeHuman 7 Jan2007 23:03 (UTC)
I apologise for my "intervention", it was not my intention to usurp your statement or to mislead anyone. Anyhow, I think Moyogo knew who wrote the first half of your comment. Could you please write more concisely, and repeat yourself less? I (and I'm probably not the only one) have trouble finding the essence in your posts. Markussep 11:51, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Follow English usage

  • Support. It's the naming convention, and what the reader expects.Markussep 23:19, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Support. For the same reasons. LVan 23:35, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Support. For the same reasons.--Caranorn 13:08, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Support. Users are smart enough to read the article and understand what the names are in other languages. There exists a preferred English usage. --moyogo 17:26, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
    Not a preferred English usage at all! No more than American English is a preferred English usage. Any such preference on Wikipedia is a clear WP:POV. Your confounding of preferred with rather prevailing, is exactly why unilingual titles do not guarantee users to be smart enough for a correct NPOV interpretation. — SomeHuman 7 Jan2007 18:44 (UTC)
    I'm afraid that this betrays an unfamiliarity with English usage: a word that "prevails" is "preferred"; we have no Academy or standard other than usage in English. Like Wikipedia, the minority is free to go on arguing; like WP, eventually they will be ignored. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:55, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
    Neither unfamiliar, nor mistaken: 'prevailing usage' = 'most occurring, dominant usage'; 'preffered' = 'more desirable usage'. Often this goes together and one could use one for the other (though even then it is sometimes inaccurately or uncarefully used), but in this case the different meanings are not at all interchangable. Do you see anyone on Wikipedia state that American English is a preferred English usage? It may well prevail though. — SomeHuman 7 Jan2007 22:52 (UTC)
    And if American English does prevail, it will be "preferred", correct English, having the same status in the world that Oxbridge does in Great Britain; the reason for the present policy is that it hasn't. However, when English results come down 11:1, as with Ixelles, the national dialects of English agree, whether because one has prevailed or because they never differed; this is a false analogy. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 03:20, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
    With 2× as many speakers of American English, it hasn't prevailed? Do you think Americans to be that much underproductive on Wikipedia? And if it by your standards would prevail, by whom would it than be preferred? To my standards, and I believe these to be Wikipedia's, either is correct English. The Ixelles/Elsene ratio of 11:1 is by another count, more carefully pointed on proper English usage and with inspection of data, 1.8:1 - the most likely ratio appeared 2.8:1 (LVan's figures of usage on American Internet domains and on British domains weighted at 2:1 (which assumes Australian etc to have the high ratios of British sites) and only for that municipality a ratio above American/non-American English being spoken world-wide, was established. — SomeHuman 9 Jan2007 04:25 (UTC)
  • Support as above; Compromise where possible. (That is, use "Molenbeek"). Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:55, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Support, as above. -- Eugène van der Pijll 17:57, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Support as above and use Molenbeek (there is no policy or guideline I could find that says that we have to use the official name(s) when there is a more commonly used colloquial one, and in this case it seems to be the easiest solution and acceptable for all languages (French, Dutch and English)) Fram 13:56, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
    Please go with facts and not voters' subjective assumption: Google English language search for 'Molenbeek' excluding 'Jean' and 'Jans' and otherwise as search in the table 'all but .com', shows 52 sites (with 60 pages) to find mentioning only this colloquial name acceptable, against [not quite versus 63 (80) for the full official usage as 42 (51) French + 23 (29) Dutch because a few pages might be in each for having both languages, but against its difference from identical search without excluding 'Jean' or 'Jans' [110 (127) thus 110-52 and 127-60 ] 58 sites (with 67 pages) that find it necessary to show the full name, proves the short name (as if it were the 'common' name) not to 'follow English usage' and thus to be equally unacceptable for the Wikipedia article title, especially since some sites of those 52 use only 'Molenbeek' for the brook that also flows elsewhere without even noting the municipality at hand (e.g. one on the "municipality of Merchtem": "watermills were built on the river Molenbeek (lit., the mills' river)"[3] – "Realization sand catchment 'Molenbeek'"[4], etc). — SomeHuman 12 Jan2007 01:49 (UTC)
Funny, I just Google-tested for Molenbeek (see #Revised Google test), and saw many more hits for Molenbeek (clearly referring to the municipality) than for the Dutch and French names. In general I'd prefer not to use a colloquial abbreviation as an article title (like "Den Bosch" for "'s-Hertogenbosch"), but Molenbeek might be a good exception, since French and Dutch are a draw. Markussep 16:20, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
While I haven't followed your (plural) quite complicated search methods, I did not make a "subjective assumption" as you were so quick to assume. Looking for Molenbeek -Jean -Jans -.com (English language) gives more than 32,000 pages[5], across a wide range of topics. This shows that the local people as well almost always use Molenbeek (name of the soccer team, name of the tennis club, and as I earlier indicated, main usage on the community website). Excluding .be as well (since we don't want the local usage, but the international one), I still get 22,000 pages[6]. Looking for Molenbeek-Saint-Jean with the same method gives 297 hits[7], looking for Sint-Jans-Molenbeek gives only 29 Google hits[8]. Now, I don't care how you decide which webistes are acceptable and which aren't, but these "subjective assumptions" Google returns show me that in common usage, in English, outside Belgium / Belgian pages, Molenbeek is by far the most common name: add to that that there is no policy or guideline that indicates that we should use the official name instead of the most common one, and I don't see what you are complaining about. Fram 21:27, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.
Fram, one does not exclude the .com domain by putting ".com" on the line of terms to exclude, but by putting it in its own field of Google advanced search: your method excludes pages that have a link to the .com domain but not pages on the .com domain. That is why we cannot exclude 2 domains simultaneously (as you tried for .com and .be), nor limit a test to a set of domains (very unfortunately). I do not see why you tried to exclude the .be domain either, we are not testing 'English usage everywhere except in Belgium'; the only choices that make sense are accepting 'English usage anywhere' (including more contributions by non-native speakers of the language regardless their capacities and foreign influences) or picking only domains from countries mainly speaking English (so as to hopefully considerably eliminate the bias that comes from habits in other languages when using the name in English). Also the gross figure of 'nnn hits' is hardly usable: if you run through consecutive result pages (better put your number of hits shown per page higher first), you find that you do not get to see that many pages at all, and even less sites. We do not know anything about how these gross figures are generated by Google; inspection of data is absolutely impossible. Run through the results and you will find no more than about 503 pages, even less sites, instead of the (commercially) impressive 32,400 whatever (probably multiple hits per page, and more importantly including those on backup or mirror sites and especially on archived consecutive versions of the really shown pages — think of the 'Wayback Machine').
Markussep and especially Fram, for 'Molenbeek' one must scrutinize pages: not just FC Molenbeek or RWDM but names of clubs and teams in general, always have simply "Molenbeek" even in their full official names - it would be hard to imagine junior league results like "F.C. Molenbeek-Saint-Jean - Saint-Josse-ten-Noode FC : 2 - 2". We are not discussing what title to use for the football team article. As there are far fewer pages mentioning the municipality than other 'Molenbeek' pages, it makes no sense to simply count a number of hits regardless what selection one can automate. I had taken care about that by requesting 'municipality' or 'municipalities' to be in a text and then had to do far less scrutinizing, but it would be even better not to eliminate these terms but only (-Jean -Jans - wiki -wikipedia -wikimedia -wikimiki) and to check the shown pages 1, 4, 7, 11, 14, 17, etc (if there are too many) and exclude each of those that can neither be established as indeed referring to the municipality [e.g. a text mentioning "discharge rates at Mere station in the Molenbeek catchment" might appear to be about the municipality but context makes clear it is at the Molenbeek brook (153 hits with this rare term 'catchment' alone)] nor to be part of an obviously fixed name [club, team, organization, street,...], since a similar test with Jean or Jans does that elimitation [almost] automatically (though here too will be a few off-hits and scrutinizing is still required), and also because such fixed names are not English usage at all. It is not a comparison between 1) Molenbeek, 2) Molenbeek-S[ain]t-Jean, 3) S[in]t-Jans-Molenbeek, but between 1) and 2)+3) that determines whether Molenbeek is generally seen to be sufficient for the municipality, or not.
Note that it is not evident to accept 'Molenbeek' in an address (it must be the municipality and not the football team, hence the shortname suffices) or even where context shows it has to be that particular municipality in the Brussels-Capital region: one far more often uses shortnames within a clearly localized context, than when such context is not present. We are discussing the municipality on the region's talk page but the article title is not in context: it is stated within the article but the title can be searched for for an entirely different reason (football) or linked from anywhere. In fact, in football it is more notable than the municipality (definitely in English language, see hereunder), and thus the shortname 'Molenbeek' will sooner or later have to become a disambiguation page instead of a redirect or an article title.
Note that my 52 shortname/58 full name ratio was determined even without scrutinizing results (as already clear enough: scrutinizing would further eliminate shortnames). As our ratios deviate strongly, one must critisize the methods being used to obtain my and Fram's figures; as the methods are documented —Marcussep's googling had another purpose and is for the shortname not at all documented nor does it show a figure— we can verify correctness of each other's figures as well as find flaws in methodology - it is not my word against yours. Here above, I pointed out where your method fails to reflect the name of the topic of the article: the club referred to as 'Football Club Molenbeek' aka 'F.C. Molenbeek' or 'FC Molenbeek' aka 'Molenbeek' or the official street name 'Steenweg op Molenbeek' (even if that name would be translated to 'Molenbeek Road') or the brook after which the municipality was named, are other topics that might have their own articles if sufficiently notable. A search on the abbreviated names of the football clubs alone with Fram's method delivers 140 sites (or 179 shown pages or 896 whatever) for "FC Molenbeek" (incl. F.C. Molenbeek Brussels Strombeek that now includes RWDM, with stadion at Molenbeek) + 50 sites (or 75 shown pages or 302 whatever) for former or new "RWD Molenbeek", or 254 shown distinct sports club pages without any doubt having been counted in Fram's 'test', while those names are more often shortened to 'Molenbeek' [it would be unreasonable to assume this not to occur in football and thus that figure may need to be about doubled, or about 508 thereto accountable pages in Fram's test], prove that his 'test' (447 sites or actually only 503 shown pages or 32,400 whatever) was mainly about that one topic, (not to mention several other topics), instead of about a municipality. Thus so far, "Molenbeek" is not the common name for the municipality in English usage, let alone it being the more Encyclopaedical one. — SomeHuman 14 Jan2007 22:04 and 15 Jan2007 07:41 (UTC)
Let me just say that "Run through the results and you will find no more than about 503 pages" shows that you don't really know how Google searches work either... Google only shows the distinct results from the first 1,000 returned pages, not for all 32,000 (or 1 million or whatever) pages. Search for "Wikipedia" or "Microsoft" and go through the results: they will also stop after a few 100[9]. Anyway, from the first 100 pages of this search(http://www.google.be/search?q=molenbeek+community+-jean+-jans+-watershed+-FC+-R.W.D+-valley&hl=nl&lr=lang_en&as_qdr=all&start=90&sa=N), about 90 are clearly about the community and in English, and refer to it simply by Molenbeek (like "The mayor of Molenbeek" or "1080 Molenbeek" (the postal code) and so on. It is obvious from such searches that Molenbeek is commonly used in English as the only name for Saint-Jean / Sint-Jans, and that people sem to know well enough what is intended. Fram 09:14, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Stop misleading readers. Everyone can read your search to exclude full names and to exclude most terms depicting other meanings for Molenbeek, but generally skip that technical part and continue to read your misleading conclusion as 90 out of 100 being about the municipality and simply saying Molenbeek. You say you checked 90 out of the first 100 and suggest there a few hundred up to 1000 pages, but fail to say that there are only 120 pages and thus never more than 110 for 'Molenbeek' short for the municipality. You only proved (assuming you checked correctly) that there exist 90 pages that mention the municipality as 'Molenbeek', nothing about how many full names (over 300 by your own earlier search), nothing about how many pages with 'Molenbeek' about football. My figures on your earlier search method prove that short 'Molenbeek' is more often used for a football club/team than for a municipality. That means that the title 'Molenbeek' cannot serve for the municipality regardless of your, my, or other voters' desires: the title goes to the clearly most common topic or to a disambiguation page (here it should be the latter, as it should link to several articles some of which already exist, and as both the football club and the municipality are quite common). You cannot disprove my earlier ratio of maximum 52 shortname versus 58 full name mentionings of the municipality, so accept facts. About Google: You merely confirm what I stated, we do not know how Google gets its gross number of hits. We only know the ones being shown and those are the only ones that are verifiable by WP:verifiability or any other standards. — SomeHuman 15 Jan2007 12:00 (UTC)
120 pages? I see 263 distinct pages[10] in the first 1,000 results with my previous search. I'll "stop misleading readers" now, and I'ld appreciate if you could start being WP:CIVIL. Fram 12:13, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
My mistake; indeed 263 shortnames, which does not change the true conclusion that it is less than for the full names. 'Misleading' referred mainly to your conclusion reading as if 90 out of 100 would use the shortname, and such with an edit comment "Final reply to SomeHuman" ..."everyone" ... "can judge for themselves". Not exactly very WP:CIVIL compared with my tone earlier this morning. You did not even acknowledge the correct criticism on your search method but contrarily started picking on me by "that you don't really know how Google searches work either..." about the aspect that I had stated not to be known, but you abused these Google secrets to blow mist around no more than about 503 pages being verifiable. — SomeHuman 15 Jan2007 12:50 (UTC)
It was intended to be my final reply to you in this discussion, since it as fairly obvious that we couldn't reach an agreement, and that all arguments where given. I don't see how stating that it was intended to be my final reply is uncivil, not how stating that "everyone can judge for themselves" is uncivil. If all arguments are given, nothing needs to be said anymore, and everyone can judge for themselves. I don't see the problem. Furthermore, I did acknowledge your criticism, since I said (as you just quoted) that "you don't really know [...] either". The "either" would be meaningless unless I meant that I was wrong, but you were wrong as well. If I had stopped there, it would have been unfair picking on you: since I did indicate what aspect you didn't know, it was just a correction to your statement, just like you corrected mine. However, saying that someone is "misleading readers" is uncivil, and I clearly stated that 90 of the first 100 gave that result, not necessarily 90 out of 100 overall. I don't see where that is misleading. And replying to a complaint of WP:CIVIL by saying that someone is "abusing" Google secrets and "blowing mist" is perhaps not the best thing to do as well. It was exactly to avoid that the discussion would drag into such rather useless discussions that I had intended my second-to-last post to be my last in this discussion with you, but since you then gave clearly inaccurate results in your reply, I felt it necessary to rectify that. I'll not make that mistake again, so since all major arguments wrt this minor point have in my view been made, this is my last reply to you in this discussion. Fram 13:21, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
SomeHuman, in response to your comment "Marcussep's [sic] googling had another purpose and is for the shortname not at all documented nor does it show a figure": my Google test is documented at #Revised Google test, see the underlined numbers in the table. Of course I rejected everything only referring to RWDM or a stream called Molenbeek etc. etc. There's loads of references to "the mayor of Molenbeek" and "the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek". For the domains .uk, .edu, .gov and .org combined I saw 12 valid hits for the French name, 12 for the Dutch name, and 53 for the short name. I call that decisive. But I don't automatically imply that the article should carry that name, that's to be discussed. Markussep 13:35, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Criteria for English usage

Points for discussion:

  • what tools do we use to determine common English usage (Google, encyclopedias, polls)
  • how do we prevent bias in our data
  • what is a clear lead in English usage (51/49, 60/40, 70/30, etc.)
  • what if it is undecided, or difficult to determine (e.g. Forest/Vorst)?

See also the discussions and investigations under #English usage statistics.

My suggestion for Google testing: search for both names simultaneously, English language, restricted domains (.uk, .edu, .gov, .org), no wikipedia, for instance [11]. Reject the hits that:

  • were obviously not written in English
  • had the name only in an address
  • were very similar to another hit, e.g. from the same site, or mirrors
  • had the name only in combinations, e.g. Hallen van Schaarbeek, Cercle Philatélique de Berchem-Sainte-Agathe
  • had the name only as a motorway exit (part of the ring around Brussels is in Flanders, and has only Dutch road signs)

Categorise the others in Dutch, French, and mixed. If the French name is used once, and the Dutch name several times, I call it Dutch, and vice versa.

My preference for the undecided cases would be going with the local majority, see #Facts. Markussep 23:32, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

  • I also vote to go with Google, which is probably more representative of current usage than any other source. I agree with the sampling method proposed above by Markussep (restrictive but fair). I vote to adopt the p-value as a “decisiveness” criterion rather than a set ratio (the p-value requires a larger ratio for scarce data but smaller ratios for abundant data). Given the manual check of all hits one-by-one, cases like Forest/Vorst and Sint-Gillis/Saint-Gilles should no longer be more difficult to determine. Finally, in case the p-value comes out to be larger than 0.05 (i.e. indecisive), I would agree to go with the local majority, hoping that this would be easier to determine. In case we are really stuck, I would go with the two names. LVan 00:35, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
Using the p-value is OK with me, and 0.05 (95% confidence) also. Markussep 09:13, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
It only means that we can be 95% sure that name A is used more often than name B (which just confirms the undisputed expectation of French being more often used than Dutch) but this decisiveness by p-value does not mean that the ratio of usage of A is 20×, 10×, 2× or just 1.01× more often than B. I hold that if we can trust [with 95% probability] one name being used 10× more often than the other, such is an "established English name" (as City of Brussels) and if this name happens to coincide with the French name, so be it. But if we can trust [with 95% probability] that one name is used only 2× as often than the other, it is established that both names are being used in English though there is no "established usage in English" that allows making an NPOV definite choice between the two names used in English. I suggest that being 90% sure of a ratio of 5× more often usage is valid, but the p-value being used here says: 95% sure (so even better) of at least 1.000001× more often (worthless as breaching NPOV by choosing for this particular POV). — SomeHuman 7 Jan2007 12:33-13:58 (UTC)
  • Any criteria for 'English usage' we could imagine so far, proved to be disputable and too arbitrary, thus to be a POV, while Wikipedia guidelines do not allow to accept a particular POV by majority voting. Markussep's "preference for the undecided cases would be going with the local majority" is the position the 40% French-speaking part of Belgium is currently using to try connecting Brussels to Wallonia, which is most strongly opposed by the 59% speakers of Dutch; it is the old "Keep it simple at just one language" and then "Let's take French" whereas why French happens to be the choice-of-the moment has varied over two hundred years, resulting now in a majority of French-speakers in the once only Dutch-speaking Brussels area and then that being used as the reason for the fixed outcome. Unfortunately, all checking of encyclopaedias and several methods of intensive Google counts make clear that English usage never indicates a municipality name of French or Dutch, but that for each municipality both are being used in English, most often in a 2:1 ratio which means that for every two English-speaking people using the French name, there is another equally gifted speaker of English who uses the Dutch name. That is the ratio for American English versus all other strains of English. We do not decide for a village in the US to write Scottish English even if that would be the local majority language. Using the 'most used' here where it is unacceptable to Wikipedia standards regarding the British, Australians etc, is a breach of the NPOV demanded above any other consideration by the Wikipedia guidelines. Therefore, English usage forces either bilingual titles, or for some municipalities the Dutch name and for others the French name as title. (In the latter case I strongly suggest alternating names for reasons explained in my such vote above.) — SomeHuman 7 Jan2007 06:09 (UTC)
I think it's not exactly neutral to go against common English usage (even if it is only 60/40) and local population (French/Dutch about 50/10 according to the VUB enquiry Diemietrie quoted), only because of political/historical considerations and the fact that Belgium as a whole has a 60% Dutch-speaking majority. But, that's my opinion. Let's find the English usage first. Any comments on my rejection criteria, other types of sites to reject, other domains to search (.ie, .au, .nz, .ca), weighting of the results? - User:Markussep 12:12, 10 January 2007 (UTC).
The VUB figures do not give a precise ratio, it is between 50:30 and 70:10 but as far more native Dutch speakers had to learn French than the other way around (and very few natively French speakers become good enough at Dutch to say they are bilingual), and speakers of Dutch tend to speak still other languages more often than native speakers of French, both groups of 10% will be mainly Dutch speakers, say (50+1+3):(10+9+7) or 54:26, a ratio close to the 1.8:1 or 2:1 of French/Dutch names of municipalities by speakers of English. More important: the VUB has figures for 'Brussels', while the City itself and 6 other municipalities are not at stake, and thus cannot say anything about these 12.
Even if other sources would confirm a 55:25 ratio for our 12 municipalities, we know that at least 2 of the largest municipalities (Schaerbeek/Schaarbeek and Ixelles/Elsene) and a few others have a very high percentage of French speakers, thus there must be some municipalities where the balance is equal or even a Dutch-speaking majority is present.
It is then absolutely POV to say we take an average of the whole region (or of the 12 municipalities), and apply this larger so-called local balance to each municipality, thus all French; while refusing to say we take an average of the whole country for which these municipalities have the capital functionality, and apply that larger so-called local 0.5:1 French/Dutch balance to each municipality, thus all Dutch. Because we simply can't find reliable figures about several municipalities, and because we would write in American English about a municipality in the US (not even having a function as a capital for the US) where the majority would be speaking great Scottish English: local language is not a few blocks, but refers to the people for whom the place is not foreign. Therefore both languages are to be shown equally balanced if one accepts that established usage in English is not French alone and for some of the municipalities we cannot present objective, reliable, precise figures that prove French to be prevailing. — SomeHuman 10 Jan2007 18:39 (UTC)
I'm not sure whether the VUB study was for Brussels city or Brussels region, Diemietrie should know that. Your statement that if Schaerbeek, Ixelles and some other municipalities have a large French-speaking majority, other municipalities must have a Dutch-speaking majority is not very scientific, to say the least. Frankly, I'd be surprised if any of the municipalities had a Dutch-speaking majority. Better information lacking, we might use election results for an impression of the Dutch/French ratios. There are some problems there, because local elections often have bilingual list combinations (e.g. PS-SP.a), and in federal elections only Belgian nationals are allowed to vote. Not to mention the facts that the performance of individual politicians influences the results (especially locally I guess), and that AFAIK nothing stops a Dutch-speaking voter in the Brussels region to vote for a French-speaking party and vice versa. But it's the best we have so far. Markussep 07:35, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
That wouldn't work, not all parties have those flemish/french affiliations, not everyone votes (and that could be influenced by community...) etc. But I agree that SomeHuman's proposal would not work either.--Caranorn 13:17, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
The turnout for the federal elections of 2003 was 92%, and the turnout for the municipal elections was around 85%. I didn't find results of the federal election by municipality, only by canton, e.g.: Anderlecht (And.+StAg-Berchem), Ixelles (Ix.+Auderghem+Watermael-Boitsfort), St-Josse-tN (St-Josse+Etterbeek+Woluwe-StL+Woluwe-StP), Schaerbeek (Sch.+Evere), Molenbeek (Molenbeek+Ganshoren+Jette+Koekelberg), and Uccle (Uccle+Forest). Maybe the municipal elections are more useful then. I think most of the votes go to parties that have these affiliations, I will check that. Markussep 16:51, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
Markussep just once more puts words into my mouth: I stated there must be some municipalities where the balance is equal or even a Dutch-speaking majority is present; that is not unscientifical but simple arithmetic: with about 620,700 people in total, 55% French, 25% Dutch, 20% speaking neither, would mean 341,384 French-speaking and 155,175 Dutch-speaking. If only 5% of (77,511 + 111,946) or 9,472 Dutch speakers would live in 2 municipalities, it leaves 145,703 in all 10 others. For (77,511 à 90% French-speaking and 111,946 à 80% French-speaking [often as 2nd language]) we have 159,307 French-speakers in the 2 municipalities, leaving 182,078 in the 10 others: 182 thousand and 155 thousand are too close for a statistical probability to keep a majority in each of these 10 municipalities; especially as we know a few other municipalities to have a large majority of French speakers. Thus there must be municipalities where French-speakers do not outnumber Dutch-speakers. Theoretically, if one medium-sized municipality of about 45,000 inhabitants would have 90% French-speakers and 5% Dutch-speakers, the remaining nine would have 141,578 speakers of French outnumbered by the 143,453 Dutch; should we perhaps give 9 municipalities their Dutch name? Not that I think these figures to be sufficiently precise, but it demonstrates that local language at municipality level cannot give our final answers.
Elections do not demonstrate anything at all for us, people do not even always vote on a list of their proper language. And English usage even with a mere 50.01% majority was statistically decisive for only some municipalities. Hence since the beginning I urged for bilingual names, or as 'one' name has been decided, to alternate the names; for several or most municipalities however, we cannot ascertain which language is proper for the name, but deciding for some would not leave any objective guidance for the remainder. Therefore I suggested a choice based on what is practical for speakers of English (their word-order and all saints at front of the name) while fair towards the local inhabitants. Of course it would work (though I maintain that bilingual names would have been even better). — SomeHuman 11 Jan2007 16:59 (UTC)

If one name, which one

  • The original Dutch name, before it got poorly translated into French.--Steven Fruitsmaak (Reply) 16:20, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
  • As I already said with my vote, preferably the one most commonly used in the English language. If no reputable sources can be found go with google hits instead. And I don't think we'd be offending anyone by opting for a single name as long as we include all the relevant variations in the article introduction.--Caranorn 16:02, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
  • None. Even no article would be less inacceptable than either one language that inevitaby constitutes a violation of WP:NPOV, as there are arguments for Dutch names (history, capital of mainly Dutch-speaking country and of purely Dutch-speaking region and of community that have more Dutch-speaking inhabitants than the French-speaking counterparts, the French-speaking region not even having its capital here) as well as for French names (based on the specific choice of counting inscribed or electoral inhabitants while disregarding numerous other people daily present and of the much larger number of people that are represented by their own capital) and mainly arguments for bilingual names (both communities, inhabitants and workers of both languages, the only official status, the only solution that does not envolve making a political choice but respecting the local political solution and reality). An urge for "Simplicity" does not allow for letting go of the one and only prevailing Wikipedia rule of showing a Neutral Point of View. — SomeHuman 24 Dec2006 13:01 (UTC)
Alternating: The imbalance between French and Dutch names in English is comparable with the imbalance between American English and all other strains of English (2:1) that may seem to allow the article "truck" with a redirect from "lorry", but is contrarily giving precedence to the minority usage of "draught" (British) with a redirect from "checkers" (American). Consequently, the people supporting 'one name' here should be aware that only some municipalities can have the French name while others must have the Dutch name. (I think that is more confusing and hardly less 'simple' because in the future, contributors will start changing Dutch to French or French to Dutch names and thus this discussion will have to be repeated over and over again - thus only two names make life on Wikipedia more simple.) Contrarily, systematically choosing 'one language' here must be matched with systematically making article titles in American English as te latter's usage in English is at least as clearly prevailing as that of the French names for the municipalities. As the latter is clearly forbidden by Wikipedia guidelines, (for the same reasons) the only consequent options we have are 'one name, alternating Dutch and French' of 'two names'. — SomeHuman 6 Jan2007 19:36 (UTC)
Have you read Wikipedia:Manual of Style (national varieties of English)? Where does it say that American and British English have to be completely balanced? Markussep 23:25, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
Yes, I did read that a long time ago. I did not state American/British needing to be completely balanced, I stated it to be unacceptable to let American English prevail systematically although it is always the majority usage (for identical things, as is the case here). Read more under What one name (Dutch and French alternating). — SomeHuman 7 Jan2007 03:12 (UTC)
  • English usage Since this is an English encyclopedia, I agree with User:Caranorn that the best guideline is to conform to the name that Anglophones would normally use to call these municipalities, even if it takes some work to find out what it is. Other criteria, such as the existence of an English translation, usage by non-Anglophones, and especially historical considerations, which are the basis of many of the arguments advanced to date, do not work as well. Consider for instance Beijing instead of Peking (English translation), Rome instead of Roma (local usage), and Tongeren instead of Atuatuca Tungrorum (historical name).
    The only method proposed in this discussion so far to gauge Anglophone usage is the one proposed by User:Markussep and User:Septentrionalis. Granted, this is an imprecise method, and we may find better alternatives later (asking a representative number of Anglophones, for instance…). Unless proven grossly biased, however, the ratio of 11:1 that was determined for Ixelles is decisive. For the statistically inclined, the p value of such a proportion is 0.000, which is decisive at a level higher than 99.9%. An alternative Google search method, proposed in Talk:Bruges#Bruges/ Brugge, yielded a proportion of 3.5:1 for Ixelles versus Elsene, which is just as decisive given the higher number of hits involved. This being said, I also agree that we should make sure that the bilingual character of Ixelles, the local usage of the two names, and historical considerations are all properly explained in the article introduction.
    Such decisions would need to be made individually for each one of the 12 municipalities that have different names in Dutch and French. In case of a tie, I would go for the Biel/Bienne solution. LVan 16:42, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
Before applying statistical calculations, proper data are required: see for instance my table under '#Google tests by SomeHuman' and my comment on Markussep's figures under #Encyclopedias, Google Scholar and Google tests by Markussep. As you seem to be statistically inclined, look especially at my figures and footnotes for a suburb of the City of Brussels, Laeken/Laken. Although it is generally considered most notably because of the royal residence there, 96% of found pages with the French name on several internet domains relate to one and only one entirely different subject, and thus the language far more commonly used in diplomacy than Dutch by one organisation, brings the ratio at 19:1. — SomeHuman 27 Dec2006 04:02 (UTC)
I couldn't agree more that proper data are required and my statistical comments above were meant only for Ixelles. The data for that particular municipality are decisive, even considering the extremely restricted data set you propose under '#Google tests by SomeHuman' (23 to 5 still gives a p of 0.000). LVan 15:29, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
I was as surprised as you will be, to find the Ixelles/Elsene ratio around 1.8:1 which is found to be the average for all municipalities, each now staying rather close to that mean ratio, for an identical search [though raw figures] on all domains except for .com (thus including the domains in my first table). See #Google tests by SomeHuman underneath yesterday's table. I had intended this search to deliver higher counts for the municipalities with so far too low figures for statistical analysis (elsewhere on this page, one already talks about the p-factor for Auderghem with 7 French hits versus a single Dutch hit and calls such 'decisive'), but contrarily to my expectations, in fact the municipalities that had seemed to have sufficient counts now show a ratio strongly deviating from yesterday's. It does show how careful we need to be as to gathering data by Google hits; many factors seem to be at work that would require nearly each page to be examined, which is impossible for significantly high numbers. I suspect a major influence of the .net domain (which is hardly more reliable than the .com for our purpose); unfortunately, to my knowledge, Google does not allow selecting/deselecting multiple domains. — SomeHuman 27 Dec2006 23:12-28 Dec2006 00:46-01:04 (UTC)
  • Either one, I don't really care. However, I have seen proposed somewhere (but forgotten where) to implement it like it is now done at Schaarbeek: if you use the Dutch name for the title, give the French name first in the article (and vice versa), as an indication that we don't want to give preference to either one. And perhaps we can use "Molenbeek" instead of the longer French or Dutch name, since everyone seems to call it Molenbeek anyway (even the official site of the municipality is at [12], and the first text after the intropage says either "La vie à Molenbeek" or "Het leven in Molenbeek"). Fram 13:15, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
If it's going to be "one name", we have to decide somehow what name to take. I've seen one user in favour of only Dutch names (Stevenfruitsmaak), and two for common use in English (Caranorn, LVan), which is the naming convention. On Wikipedia:Naming conflict there are some guidelines to find the commonly used name, especially the sections Wikipedia:Naming conflict#Identification of common names using external references and Wikipedia:Naming conflict#Ambiguity persists look applicable to me. Given the (in some cases perhaps not decisive) preference for French names in Google tests, and the majority (or plurality) of French speakers in the Brussels region, I lean towards picking the French names. But I would like to discuss with you all what criteria should be leading here. Markussep 20:58, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Fram, Encyclopaedic articles, when no English name is clearly established, should have as title the official name(s) of a municipality, not a colloquial one. I had thought about this too, but it would cause even more confusion because that colloquial style cannot be used for any of the other municipalities: Only Saint-Josse/Sint-Joost is quite common as well but still keeps a different version in each language. — SomeHuman 3 Jan2007 21:13 (UTC)
Markussep, the guidelines do suggest to be guided by local situations, rather than choosing for "simplicity". Wikipedia guidelines however, cannot foresee everything. The total of all these municipalities' population is only a fraction of the people envolved because of their function (e.g. employment at and visits to one of the public offices and numerous head-offices of international and national private businesses and organisations incl. the European Union, embassies, etc) inherent for the capital of the country wherein the language balance is 3:2 the other way around and obviously matters to 10 times more citizens than the whole region and nearly 17 times the total population of the municipalities having two names (as the City of Brussels has a clearly established English name and other municipalities have only one name). Would most of these municipalities have been notable for the English Wikipedia or even have been mentioned in English texts if it were not for their capital function? — SomeHuman 4 Jan2007 01:42 (UTC)
The Wikipedia criteria mentioned above are indeed clear, and in favour of English usage. The definition of “prevalent usage” can be made rigorous, as I have tried to explain elsewhere on this page (see #Footnote, for instance). I therefore have to disagree with the assessments that English preference is “mostly not decisive” or that “no English name is clearly established.” If despite all this, however, “ambiguity still persists” (as it seems), a vote is the prescribed solution of last resort. So we are on the right track… LVan 02:24, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
LVan, you're right about the English preference, I changed it in my post here. I'm a bit puzzled about the statistic criteria though. Suppose we find 110 million hits for the French name, and 90 million for the Dutch name, then your p-test will certainly prove that the ratio is not 50/50. But 55/45 is not a decisive preference, is it? Fortunately the difference is (a lot) bigger for most. Could you do your Elsene/Ixelles test for the other municipalities too? Markussep 11:57, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi Markussep, in the example you propose, I would indeed call a difference of 20 million hits decisive (that’s a lot of hits!), even though the ratio is only 55/45. This is especially true if we count the hits for let’s say Ixelles without removing Elsene, as was suggested by SomeHuman and as I also have done so far. This search method adds a lot of bilingual hits on both sides of the proportion, thereby making it closer to 50/50. The alternative method that you suggested (specifically removing the other language term from the search), which is probably just as valid, would yield a lower number of hits but a more significant ratio.
There are indeed different possible interpretations of the word “decisive” – the one I propose makes a “proven” preference decisive. Any other definition of “decisive” (70/30? 3:1? 10:1?) runs the danger of being arbitrary or subjective, unless there is some accepted practice out there that I am not aware of (note that the accepted practice for votes is just majority + one). Given the tediousness of going through the Google data manually to ensure legitimacy, I would propose to wait for the results of the vote to come in before going through the other municipalities. LVan 23:29, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Sorry LVan, I'm afraid you're making two essential mistakes:
Markussep's method of excluding pages mentioning the names in both languages not only excludes e.g. "in Oudergem (French 'Auderghem')" which might occur more often than "in Auderghem (Dutch 'Oudergem')" and then gives a false balance of usage as English; since the main issue of the survey is establishing whether one or both names should be used, this method already rejects precisely that second option. By eliminating pages with both names, the difference between counts remains exactly the same but the total number of counts diminishes and thus the p-factor of the figures will appear decisive while that might not be so. I have shown figures that revealed a most considerable bias.
There is nothing more arbitrary or subjective about finding 10:1 or 3:1 enough to accept an established usage in English, than to find 1.05:1 already enough. In fact, at the contrary: smaller differences can more easily change, causing an opposite balance; something that may easily change is definitely not what is called established. — We may 'establish' 1.05:1 or 3:1 but that is not at all identical to 'establishing' that one particular name is established.
The current survey result is not intended to say once and for all which names are from now on world-wide to be used in English. Wikipedia is not the Académie française: no such thing exists for the English language, which is a naturally evolving language. The English Wikipedia should respect that aspect of the language, but the influence of Wikipedia itself on which name is going to be used in the future is too considerable for otherwise in English rarely used names, to make a decision. (Wikipedia articles may be read by far more people than many of the counted internet pages.) Only if a sufficiently established usage is demonstrated, Wikipedia's influence can be negligible and the decision NPOV (not only NPOV towards the people in Belgium but also NPOV towards the users of the names in the English language: nearly half, or just one out of three, or merely one in ten, may have to accept 'established' usage and therefore need to change their English usage). It may be hard or impossible to calculate exactly by how much the counts must differ to be sure that a name really is 'sufficiently established', but the lack of tools to objectively measure and precisely calculate results mustnot cause assuming that no such thing exists, and thus disregard it, which is what we do if we accept 50/50 plus 1 or another low imbalance. I'm sure you must be aware of this logical trap, for other readers I'll simply demonstrate it: While for a long time one could not measure the voltage of lightning, did it electrocute fewer people? Only if they already stayed away from tall trees. Or rather, only fewer if they were overly cautious.
— SomeHuman 5 Jan2007 05:44-06:01 (UTC)
I'm also afraid, LVan, that you (perhaps unconsciously) tend to obtain and/or publish objective data when it fits your personal viewpoint: You want to await the outcome of the votes before getting data. That means that the votes will be made without those data. If the votes go your way, you will not have to do more. If on the other hand, the votes do not go your way, then and only then will you obtain the data - with intend to turn the votes around (else the results would no longer matter so why would you do the work then).
I find this all the more disturbing because I had suggested the data for Ixelles/Elsene to be rather questionable because of strong variations between previous counts and my own, casting reasonable doubt on both the earlier and on my method or counts for Ixelles/Elsene, and precisely that municipality had by several counts shown the largest imbalance in favor of French. Then publishing the new results (in this case without details) of a job I had stated to be very tedious, but not those for the, also based on the earlier measurements, assumedly more balanced municipalities that with less high counts are less tedious to verify, might suggest you expect the data better to stay away from our eyes... This makes me wonder about the figures you have published. So far we have only your word at face value: you did not state how you went through the samples and decided which ones were relevant for this survey, nor how you decided that your samples could be held representative for the whole. We thus cannot check against conscious or unconcious bias, nor against logical errors, nor against plain mistakes. May I remind you that I published the tables with Google counts per domain including the precise way I obtained these, thus allowing logical criticism on my methods as well as providing the possibility for others to repeat and thus verify the counts. Sorry if I seem to be pushing you in a corner, but I'm really worried. — SomeHuman 5 Jan2007 06:34-06:58 (UTC)
For once I have to agree with you ;-), my "exclusive" method rejects pages that have both names, which is not right if you want to know if the combined name is used outside wikipedia. Probably the best thing to do is search with as little restrictions as possible (excluding all ".com"s is not right IMO), and check for all hits (or a representative sample, and after checking if they're actually written in English) in what category they belong:
only Dutch name
only French name
Dutch, with the French name once
French, with the Dutch name once
predominantly in combination (hyphen, slash, and which one comes first)
I'm curious if it will make a difference, if I have the time I will check it for a representative municipality (Ixelles is too francophile for you, isn't it?). BTW this talk page is already 183 kB... Markussep 11:56, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
There is no need for that: the names will never occur as combination (unless perhaps in a few articles that handle the names encycopaedically or for some other reason need to be strictly NPOV). We do not suggest using a double name in normal writing, let alone speech. That is why I support Diemietrie's "/" separator rather than my earlier " - ", the latter might be misunderstood by a reader to concatenate terms that are part of one long name, while "/" never serves that purpose but is at the contrary generally used to show the writer lets one choose between two words: "It is your opinion/conviction that..." means "It is your opinion or your conviction, it is your prerogative to choose the one you prefer, that..." and also 'his/her' is normally used to clearly show one does not wich to suggest any preference, it does not suggest bisexuality. That is why I promote this usage for an encyclopaedic article title. Nobody expects "his/her", let alone "opinion/conviction", to occur as often as the separate words, it will not be the case for the municpalities either – but using that style for our titles still makes a lot of sence if we wish to express neutrality towards both names an express leaving it up to the reader to choose his preference: Putting a single name in the title, even when thereunder naming the two, especially in an encyclopaedia, is going to be interpreted as the title name being preferred or so notably more common that such is the established name in English. — SomeHuman 5 Jan2007 16:48 (UTC)
Wow – lots of unfounded assumptions on intentions in your message earlier this morning! SomeHuman, believe it or not, my intent was actually the opposite of what you suggest: I would have gone through the tedious work on English usage for the other municipalities only if one-name-English-usage was clearly favoured by the voters. If the vote came out for any other method, why bother since English usage would then be irrelevant? The order of events that seems fair and NPOV to me is the following: first propose and discuss the relative merits of various methods/processes/criteria (possibly with the help of one or two representative examples, as Markussep is proposing to do above), then vote to select the one method that appeals to most based on intrinsic merits, then apply it at large, getting whatever result comes out. At this point, as far as I know, we are only at Step 1 and 2 (discussion and vote)! As for the method I proposed at the bottom of #Encyclopedias, Google Scholar and Google tests by Markussep, it is aimed at finding out (not prescribing) English usage, and it is explicit enough for anyone to try out on any of the municipalities. The only reason I picked Ixelles earlier is that you stated being “…rather curious about your evaluation method applied to Ixelles/Elsene…” LVan 22:06, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
English usage would not have been irrelevant, as you and some others seem to find a small difference sufficient to pick only that one name. Large differences in usage would not even by me be disputed; one will occasionally read 'Stad Brussel' or 'Ville de Bruxelles' in English texts but we all agree on 'City of Brussels' as established name in the English language. You might have used extra data upon a bilingual solution in order to show a larger and therefore more meaningful unbalance. But anyway, the data should be available before people make up their mind, either way. (That has been the problem with Markussep's sudden survey; if one could not agree for one particular clear-cut proposal, the survey should have been prepared by consensus of the four contributors, so as to synthesize arguments and present these only when ready (with some statistics if needed) under the link from Requested moves, so readers would not make up their mind based upon the single-sided arguments of a single user that had become outnumbered, long before a lot of the relevant data became available. Putting the vote section at top of the link's destination, invited people who are unwilling to consider all argument still to vote - and that would then be for 'simplicity'.) Once people have taken and shown a position, they almost never change their mind even if they might easily have become otherwise convinced if they had been well-informed to start with.
I apologize about the severity of my remark on an undocumented method, there are a few things unclear but it's better documented than I remembered while I was taken aback by your statement about delivering data depending on the direction the votes would go. On the other hand, we do not know how Google selects its first batches of hits; I do not think we can simply assume the first nnn to be representative for a specific purpose, but have the impression that such is what you did to obtain the 'representative' samples that were then scrutinized. Indeed I had asked the Ixelles/Elsene data (and stated such here above), but I had also expected an outcome rather unfavorable for my stand in this debate, then leaving out the other municipalities, for which the lesser data seem more easily inspected, had worried me. Surely still appreciating your efforts, — SomeHuman 5 Jan2007 23:31 (UTC)
OK – instead of taking the first nnn pages, we could take every 2nd, 10th, or even every 100th Google page (considering for instance all 10 hits per page, for simplicity) or take the first (or any other) hit on every page or on every third page... the possibilities are endless. I think that any of them would work as long as the relative size of the sample is in proportion to the total amount of raw data on either side. LVan 01:05, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
SomeHuman, I'm getting really tired of your persistent criticism on my starting this survey. No, there was no consensus before I started it. I hope you're not seriously suggesting that we should have discussed all possible options before starting the survey. That's what this survey is for! As you should have noticed by now, there is no wide support for your double naming plan, and I'm sure the survey the way you modified it would have failed. Markussep 09:06, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
I did not modify it, you switched from the 3:you consensus towards your style without giving the opportunity to do things the right way and thus lured several users into making up their mind based on your arguments alone; from the first reaction by your opponents onwards, the votes for 'two' names balance those for 'one' name, even though it had started by 5:0 and most users tend to follow a majority rather than a minute minority unless they must have a very good understanding and strong position. — SomeHuman 6 Jan2007 19:35 (UTC)
If there had been enough support for double naming, this survey would have shown that. Please don't insinuate that this survey was biased, because I did everything I could to make it neutral. For instance, one/two and not support/oppose because that might have negative connotations. I can't help it (although I was pleased, because it supported my view) that the first five votes were for "one", I didn't selectively ask people to vote. I hope you don't seriously believe that "follow a majority" nonsense. We're all adults here, at least so I think (did you see "Life of Brian", the "we all have our own opinions" scene?). Markussep 19:58, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
It seems SomeHuman thinks those who voted for one name are stupid and unable to read through the various points made on the talk page before they cast their vote. Also, not taking part in debates about statistics doesn't mean said voters don't follow these discussions anymore.--Caranorn 20:30, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
Markussep, in your 09:06 (UTC) comment, you again and knowingly misguided readers: The 'double naming plan' is not at all mine as you know all too well (Diemietrie's earlier Requested move that was never closed, and it had partially existed before but had been changed without discussion; the reopened discussion). You know very well that I'm sure ... would have failed is far from true: it is why you unilaterally started your own (this) survey the moment the discussion came 3:1 against you, and why you obliterated my correction towards that 3:1 supported proper proposal on the Requested moves page (as shown under #Relist?); and you know that the earlier #Requested move had a 6:5 support, after which - as you know - Diemietries' improvement by using "/" instead of " - " had brought earlier supporters of your solution towards that already having had 6:5 support before. This all, with the current survey's votes that switch the balance your side having been made before anything but your view was visible for people called here by your unilateral Requested move survey, is what makes the current survey a mockery, hence my "persistent criticism" as also the mockery persists: you close the 'one' versus 'two' on the date you had chosen, while obviously there are still discussions going on and while most votes were made before the data became available and without having a proper overview of the arguments that are dispersed at a multitude of places (confusion created by your multi-section survey with the misleadingly 'simple' vote visible at top).
Caranorn, I do not at all think that those who voted are stupid or unable to read, but I know that some were quite likely to show up who would not read the preceding discussion that had gone on for 5 months, nor be aware of the 6:5 earlier Requested move not being closed, before they would make up their mind: they can read but they could not see the need, as things were presented simply and allowed voting while showing only the new 'discussion' section created by Markussep. I do state that contributors were misled. Please, if perhaps even you might not have taken a look at everything, take a look into the sections (incl. the links in 'Relist?') I linked in my above paragraph to Markussep. — SomeHuman 6 Jan2007 21:17 (UTC)
  • The name most English speakers would currently use, even if the ratio between the usages of the alternate names is small or neither are widely used. I also like Fram's suggestion of using the shortened name "Molenbeek". --David Edgar 17:25, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
Consequently, you must also suggest that under no condition one should write "A candidate can send his/her curriculum to..." because most English speakers in normal conversation and ordinary texts use "his" (788 million Google hits in English language) more often than "her" (586 million such Google hits). I state that the context matters much more than ratios of general usage, an encyclopaedia or an employment offer have other requirements than daily usage. Also the usage of 'Molenbeek' is colloquial, the full and official name is encyclopaedic. — SomeHuman 5 Jan2007 19:06 (UTC)
his/her vs. his, a gender issue, is irrelevant. This is a different issue, what is used in English, or should we use French/Dutch names. Btw: their is much more used than his/her, his or her. The usage Molenbeek might not be colloquial in English. --moyogo 19:15, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
…not to mention that his and her refer to two different entities (hopefully ;), while our discussion here focuses on possible alternatives for a single entity. LVan 22:08, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
Indeed we can often work our way around 'his/her' by e.g. "Candidates can send their curriculum to...", but you too must have seen the usage of 'his/her', and it cannot always be avoided. It cannot generally be avoided for the municipalities' names. Of course it refers to different entities just as in 'and/or', there are better examples as I assume you too realize. "Yet very often it is used to represent the concept or, especially in instruction books.", from Slash (typography). My point is that every reader of the English-language Wikipedia will interpret the slash as separating two alternate names, one of which one may use; and not as concatenating the parts to one name.
Suppose, an American writes a letter in English to a Belgian he knows to be natively French-speaking, he might mention "Woluwe-Saint-Pierre"; but when he knows the addressee to be Dutch-speaking and realizes that both variants are correct in English, he might write "Sint-Pieters-Woluwe". We should not stand in the way of such.
The usage of 'Molenbeek' is colloquial in Dutch and in French, and there is no reason to assume - and a likely impossibility to prove here - it to be less, let alone not, colloquial in English. I would prefer a language-neutral and short name too (as for Evere, Koekelberg etc) but it does not allow simply assuming an established non-colloquial usage of 'Molenbeek' for an article title in an encyclopaedia. Also simply 'Woluwe' is used colloquially exactly as 'Molenbeek', but it refers to the suburb formed by a series of parishes of which two are now making distinction between two municipalities. I hope you're not suggesting to call the article 'Woluwe' with separate sections for each. ;-) — SomeHuman 5 Jan2007 22:33 (UTC)

If two names, how

  • With a '/' between the French and the Dutch name. French comes first, as there are more French- than Dutch-speaking people. See e.g. Biel/Bienne (bilingual German-French city in Switzerland) or the solution for the Brussels region on the German Wikipedia (de:Sint-Agatha-Berchem/Berchem-Sainte-Agathe etc.). Diemietrie 17:23, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
  • As Diemietrie suggests, always a fixed order which may well be French-name/Dutch-name. (I'm Dutch-speaking, the order is not nearly as important as omitting one in the titles: it is first the majority language of the present locals of most of these municipalities and then the majority language of the visiting or there working countrymen/women - or would many women be very upset by this last order.) Thus as I explained in the relevant discussion on 21 Dec2006 23:42, 22 Dec2006 04:48 and 23 Dec2006 00:59. — SomeHuman 24 Dec2006 03:13 (UTC)
  • I want to bring on the German solution: de:Saint-Gilles/Sint-Gillis.--81.241.217.246 01:02, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Hear, hear (see comment in '1 or 2' section). TobyJ 12:34, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
I found this: Wikipedia:Articles with slashes in title. Generally, the slash is inevitable in these titles because they're an integral part of their name, e.g. the film Victor/Victoria. There are two bilingual examples in the list: Biel/Bienne and the Belgian railways NMBS/SNCB. If it has to be two names in the title, then I'd prefer the slash, but I'd rather avoid this. Markussep 20:31, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
In what list? Not a complete one since there may be many more. Just from this very talk page I picked three more Brussels' bilingual articles: La Roue/Het Rad, Arts-Loi/Kunst-Wet metro station, Crainhem/Kraainem metro station. Moreover, I have the impression that it causes few problems (none), and I'm not too sure that the municipalities would be much more notable for readers of this Wikipedia once this discussion subdues; why should such bilingual names, once accepted and moved, then be more controversial or confusing or not simple enough or less English?
As I half suspect some people in the current discussion to oppose to bilingual names for a part because they might consider asking for such a Flemish POV, the latter article about the metro station in Woluwe-Saint-Lambert/Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe mentions "Avenue de Kraainem/Kraainemlaan" with the current Dutch spelling in the French name. I checked it on a map (behind 'rue' fill in 'Avenue de Kraainem' and push the button to the left underneath), it's indeed also in French spelled like that. But according to the article, the speakers of French had insisted the station with a single name Kraainem that had been common in French as well, on request of French-speakers to have been renamed towards the out-of-use old spelling of Dutch, Crainhem, like the spelling of municipality names Auderghem, Schaerbeek... Perhaps it can take away any doubts regarding Flemish POVs. — SomeHuman 6 Jan2007 01:02 (UTC)

Facts

  • From WP:NC: "Generally, article naming should give priority to what the majority of English speakers would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature."
  • From WP:NC: "A redirect should be created for articles that may reasonably be found under two or more names (such as different spellings or former names)."
  • All municipalities in question are officially bilingual: French and Dutch.
  • There are no specific naming conventions for places in Belgium.
  • There are no names commonly used in English that are different from the French or the Dutch name.
  • The character "/" is not allowed in article titles, see WP:NC#Do not use an article name that suggests a hierarchy of articles. Correction by SomeHuman: perfectly allowed in titles when not suggesting an hierarchy, as is here OK, see the link. Next are not exceptions but just samples of proper usage.
  • There are exceptions to this rule, for instance Aoraki/Mount Cook and Biel/Bienne, see also Wikipedia:Articles with slashes in title.
  • Both names are commonly (or both rarely) used in English.
  • On average, there is a small (1.8 to 1 according to #Google tests by SomeHuman) preference for the French names in common English usage. Encyclopedia Britannica and Columbia use only French names in titles, Encarta uses Dutch (4#) or French (8#) names.
  • The majority of the local population is French speaking. - a) natively; b) as second[ary] language before Dutch. According to Dutch wikipedia 70.6% of the regional population was French-speaking in 1947 (last official figure). A recent survey in 2001 conducted by the Free University of Brussels (VUB) shows 50% of the population has French as a mother tongue, 10% Dutch, 10% is bilingual Dutch-French, 10% bilingual with French and another language or Dutch and another language and 20% has neither French not Dutch but only one or more other languages as a mother tongue (source: Rudi Janssens (2002), Taalgebruik in Brussel. Taalverhoudingen, taalverschuivingen en taalidentiteit in een meertalige stad. Brussels: VUBPRESS).
  • As there still is the 'Molenbeek' (mill's or mills' brook) that gave its name to Molenbeek Saint-Jean/Sint-Jans-Molenbeek and the latter requires a redirect from its colloquial name 'Molenbeek', the top of the municipality's article should mention "'Molenbeek' redirects here. For the brook by that name, see Molenbeek (brook)" or in absence of the article clearly mention the brook's existence. Correction: the shortname 'Molenbeek' is also used for the former and possibly the new R.W.D. Molenbeek and for F.C. Molenbeek [Brussels Strombeek] and thus 'Molenbeek' could better be a disambiguation page than a straightforward redirect.

Facts to be checked

  • Many of these municipalities - other than the City of Brussels - have a considerable instream of day-long or week-long commuters from outside the capital region, at least 50% Dutch-speaking; and are wellknown and regularly visited for various reasons (request visa at one of the many embassies, sites and museum visits, walking or driving in the Sonian Forest, ...) by Belgian citizens in numbers representative for the respective major languages [known to be 59% Dutch-speaking and 40% French-speaking].
  • This issue has not (yet) been covered by the Wikipedia:WikiProject Belgium.
  • In the article on Brussels and its suburbs on the Wikipedia in Afrikaans (see table #How Wikipedias in other languages tackle this), I spotted : "In die laaste tyd begin Franstalige ouers egter hul kinders ook na Nederlandstalige skole stuur; die groot persentasie van minderbevoorregtes (veral kinders van immigrantegroepe) wat Franse skole toe gaan maak hulle nou minder aantreklik.", that is Recently however, French-speaking parents start[ed] to send their children to Dutch-language schools as well; the large percentage of underprivilegeds (mostly children of immigrant groups) that go to French[-language] schools, makes these now less attractive. If so, where do English-speaking inhabitants send their children to? I think some English education is provided, but are such schools for free, do English-speakers in an international city as Brussels perhaps wish their children to have contact with native people, and/or to learn a 'foreign' (here native) language properly; as thus children may well have been send to French-language schools, do they now send their children to schools that may currently be seen as of higher standards? Will the assumed imbalance remain in favor of French usage of the names of the suburbian municipalities (where the lower level schools are, and where most speakers of English reside)? Do the larger immigrant groups in a poorer municipality send their children to schools in richer muncipalities where English-speakers usually reside? — SomeHuman 6 Jan2007 01:55 (UTC)
I don't see what this has to do with the common English names of the municipalities. Markussep 08:50, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
If native speakers of English teld to send their children to a Dutch-language school whereas they formerly had send their children to a French-speaking school, not only the children but also the parents become far more clearly aware of their municipality's name in Dutch and probably that for other municipalitie as well. These municipalities' names are rarely used in English thus the influence may easily turn the balance between French and English names in English usage. — SomeHuman 6 Jan2007 19:19 (UTC)
Wouldn't expats send their children to international schools? Markussep 19:41, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

English usage statistics

Google tests by SomeHuman

Brussels-Capital's municipalities having separate French and Dutch names, presented in the English language — Research and table by SomeHuman
Results per Google advanced search on December 26, 2006 set to show up to 50 pages in English language for domains .ac.uk, .ac.gov, .gov, .edu and .org (so as to avoid sources of uncertain reliability like blogs), in the text of the page with at least one of the words "municipality" or "municipalities" ("commune" not in this clause as it is also the French term; clause augments relevance by excluding e.g. the Dutch-speaking historic villages) and excluding the words "wiki" "wikimedia" "wikipedia" "wikimiki" "rue" "chaussée" "chaussee" "avenue" "av" "boulevard" "bd" "steenweg" and "stw" (Avenue d'Auderghem, Steenweg op Elsene etc as part of an address not quite seldomly fully in French language even in English texts; street names in Dutch cannot generally be excluded in this way thus a hit page showing an equivalent, was omitted from the count, as were misspelled French "A venue" and "Ave"); for each municipality entered as exact phrase, number of hit pages shown for per municipality different sites (figures between parenthesis include also the same sites' extra pages shown):
Municipality in French .ac.uk .gov.uk .gov .edu .org total fr Municipality in Dutch .ac.uk .gov.uk .gov .edu .org total nl
Auderghem 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 70(8) 7 Oudergem 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 1(1) 1
Berchem-Sainte-Agathe
+ Berchem-Ste-Agathe 		0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 30(3) 3 Sint-Agatha-Berchem
+ St-Agatha-Berchem 		0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 2(2) 2
Ixelles 1(1) 2(3) 0(0) 3(3) [fr1] 17(23) 23 Elsene 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 1(2) [nl1] 4(5) 5
Forest/Vorst omitted: 'forest' is a common English-language word (found in municipalities all over the world)
Molenbeek-Saint-Jean
+ Molenbeek-St-Jean 		0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) [fr2] 030(3) 3 Sint-Jans-Molenbeek
+ St-Jans-Molenbeek 		0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 1(1) 1
Saint-Gilles/Sint-Gillis (+ St-Gilles/St-Gillis) omitted: also 15 municipalities Saint-Gilles in France, Sint-Gillis (Dendermonde) exists in Flanders
Saint-Josse-ten-Noode
+ St-Josse-ten-Noode 		0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 1(1) [fr3] 040(4) 5 Sint-Joost-ten-Node
+ St-Joost-ten-Node 		1(1) 1(1) 0(0) 1(1) 2(2) 5
Schaerbeek 1(1) 1(1) 0(0) 3(3) [fr4] 16(20) 21 Schaarbeek 1(1) 0(0) 0(0) 2(3) [nl2] 6(7) 9
Uccle 1(1) 0(0) 1(2) 0(0) [fr5] 09(10) 11 Ukkel 0(0) 0(0) 1(1) 0(0) 2(2) 3
Ville de Bruxelles/Stad Brussel omitted: 'City of Brussels' appears to be the established English-language name; hereunder its suburb and royal residence, Laeken/Laken
Laeken [fr6] 20(20) [fr6] 16(16) 0(0) [fr6] 5(6) [fr6] 110(128) 151 Laken [nl3] 1(1) 0(0) [nl4] 3(3) [nl5] 0(0) [nl6] 4(4) 8
Watermael-Boitsfort 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) [fr7] 000(0) 0 Watermaal-Bosvoorde 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0
Woluwe-Saint-Lambert
+ Woluwe-St-Lambert 		0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) [fr8] 020(2) 2 Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe
+ St-Lambrechts-Woluwe 		0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0
Woluwe-Saint-Pierre
+ Woluwe-St-Pierre 		0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 30(3) 3 Sint-Pieters-Woluwe
+ St-Pieters-Woluwe 		0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) [nl7] 2(2) 2
Any of these municipalities 3(*) 3(*) 1(*) 7(*) 64(*) 0   2(*) 1(*) 1(*) 4(*) 20(*)  
(*) Some counted sites may be mirroring others counted as well. A significant number of pages mention more than one of these municipalities. Both cause the figures in italics, given as indication of the balance between domains, to be higher than the number of pages with different texts (hence potentially different authors) that mention any of these municipalities. The total number of sites that independently mention any of these municipalities is still lower, because a significant number of sites mention several municipalities each on a separate page (a site's relevant pages may all be by a single author or house standard or taken from a single source). Any sum of totals would thus not offer valid information.
In particular on the .org domain, the considerable number of sites that appeared not to be of natively English-spoken countries cause figures to primarily reflect these origins, with their respective more or less widespread native languages as potential influence on the availability of sources or choice between them, apart from the possibly non-English native language of writers or translators potentially being a factor.
Notes:

[fr1] 2 excluded: "Lettre à Hetzel. Ixelles 7 avril" + in list of names & locations with non-English name "Natalia Garcia Mozo Brussels-Ixelles"
[fr2] 2 excluded: "Commune de Molenbeek Saint-Jean (Belgique)" + "Region Bruxelles Capitale - Belgium ... Twinning between Molenbeek-Saint-Jean Et Oujda" (copy-edit from www.molenbeek.be/fr/JumelagesFR/Jumelages.htm incl 'et' instead of 'and')
[fr3] 1 excluded: "St. Josse-ten-Noode (Bruyn, Trésor artistique des églises de Bruxelles, Louvain, 1882)"
[fr4] 3 excluded: "Administration Communale de Schaerbeek, Belgique" + "Hôtel de ville de Schaerbeek" + "Halles de Schaerbeek"
[fr5] 4 excluded: "The Belgian d’Uccle Bantam was bred for the first time in the small municipality of Uccle" (as the placename here serves to explain the poultry breed name) + "39 communities in Flandern (the Flamish speaking part of Belgium) and 81 communities in Wallonie (the French speaking part of Belgium) have declared themselves GMO-free. Flandern: ... Wallonie: ... Uccle ..." (names in German and Uccle erroneously in unilingual region) and site with copy-correction having Flanders, Flemish, Wallonia, but the place still in the wrong region + "(Uccle-Bruxelles)" and "Une commune de l'agglomeration Bruxelloise, Uccle, IV" as reference work in the extra page from same site)
[fr6] All refer to the 2001 European summit there, e.g. by 'the Laeken Declaration' or 'the Laeken indicators', except for 1 on .ac.uk (to a 1993 summit) and about 4 on .org
[fr7] 2 excluded: "commune de Watermael-Boitsfort" + "Collège des bourgmestre et échevins de Watermael-Boitsfort"
[fr8] 2 excluded: "Administration communale de Woluwe-Saint-Lambert (Bruxelles)" + "Musée Communal de Woluwe-Saint-Lambert"
[nl1] 1 excluded: "Illus. by Clare Elsene Peck. © 23Feb34"
[nl2] 1 excluded: "Basisschool Hendrik Conscience, Schaarbeek"
[nl3] 1 excluded: "und die Hausfrau faltet Laken"; the other one mentions 'the Declaration of Laken' cf. [fr5].
[nl4] 1 excluded: "Sikand, A., and Laken, M." (authors of a reference work)
[nl5] 1 excluded: "to Morton Laken" (person)
[nl6] many excluded: "S. J. Laken et al." (and other personal names) + "All anthropometic data were laken according to the WHO recommendation", "have been laken. to military. canps." (?) + "West-Virginia's antiquated correctional facilities ... a new prison facility for women was opened at Laken", "Derwent Laken" (locality of Clarence City in Australia), "Inter-Laken" (Interlaken), etc. + several with the Dutch word 'laken' as in "gilds of laken-makers", "municipal museum De Laken- hal". Of the withheld 4, 2 refer to the Laken indicators, cf. [fr5].
[nl7] 1 excluded: "St Pieters Woluwe – Brussel, Gemeentelijke basisschool Stokkel – primary school"
Mentionings that were disputable, or could not be shortly demonstrated as dubious, or were rather uninformative, were withheld and counted. A mere few samples:
"Ekila Liyonda, (Adrienne) (b. Oct. 16, 1948, Kinshasa, Belgian Congo [now Congo (Kinshasa)] - d. June 22, 2006, Uccle, Brussels-Capital region, Belgium), foreign minister of Zaire (1987-88). She also served as minister of social affairs and the status of women (1983-85), ambassador to the Benelux countries (1985-87), and minister of information and press (1988-90)." (born in outwardly French-language colony and made name in that later independant country) and on same page "Engels, Alphonse (b. Jan. 7, 1880, Schaerbeek, Belgium - d. Aug. 31, 1962, Uccle, Belgium), deputy governor-general of Equateur (1919-21) and deputy governor-general (1922-29) and governor (1925-29) of Congo-Kasaï." (Spanish-language Equador is mentioned by its French name) and also "Elslande, Renaat (Antoon Joseph) van (b. Jan. 21, 1916, Boekhoute, Belgium - d. Dec. 21, 2000, Ukkel, Brussels-Capital region, Belgium), Belgian politician. Although a member of the Christian People's Party (CVP) and not of one of the traditional Flemish nationalist parties, he was a major advocate of the Flemish cause in Francophone-dominated Belgium in the 1960s and '70s." The site, rulers.org, was withheld for many of the municipalities, for the French and/or (for less) the Dutch name, either being presented as English.
"Spa belgium - 17 Sun 2006 15:07:58 UTC - University in belgium: Manchester United States and oratories of Belgium. ... 2 Jul 1559 French Community the Belgians are Brussels Airport SaintNicolas Schaerbeek Seraing SintNiklaas Spa SpaLa Sauveniere StHubert Uccle Vilvoorde More Books Document Downloads Document Downloads Document code CRL university in belgium" (here on December 26, 2006 from Google's cache of metroway.org/belgium/University-in-belgium.html as retrieved on December 18, 2006; not a language or not a mind of this world?) This site was withheld for many of the municipalities.

Brussels-Capital's municipalities having separate French and Dutch names, presented in the English language — Research and table by SomeHuman
Results per Google advanced search on December 27, 2006 set to show up to 50 pages in English language for all domains except .com (so as to avoid sources of uncertain reliability like blogs), in the text of the page with at least one of the words "municipality" or "municipalities" ("commune" not in this clause as it is also the French term; clause augments relevance by excluding e.g. the Dutch-speaking historic villages) and excluding the words "wiki" "wikimedia" "wikipedia" "wikimiki" "rue" "chaussée" "chaussee" "avenue" "av" "boulevard" "bd" "steenweg" and "stw" (Avenue d'Auderghem, Steenweg op Elsene etc as part of an address not quite seldomly fully in French language even in English texts; street names in Dutch cannot generally be excluded in this way; as too many pages are reported to inspect each against such, as simple check the count for Elsene was compared with that one also excluding simultaneously Elsenestraat, Elsenebaan, Elsenelaan and Elsenesteenweg and that count was identical, thus for the other municipalities at most a very minute misbalance is expected; for each municipality entered as exact phrase, number of hit pages shown for per municipality different sites (figures between parenthesis include also the same sites' extra pages shown):
Municipality in French all but .com Municipality in Dutch all but .com
Auderghem 440(58) Oudergem 250(29)
Berchem-Sainte-Agathe
+ Berchem-Ste-Agathe 		300(36) Sint-Agatha-Berchem
+ St-Agatha-Berchem 		160(19)
Ixelles 95(119) Elsene 520(62)
Forest/Vorst omitted: 'forest' is a common English-language word (found in municipalities all over the world)
Molenbeek-Saint-Jean
+ Molenbeek-St-Jean 		420(51) Sint-Jans-Molenbeek
+ St-Jans-Molenbeek 		230(29)
Saint-Gilles/Sint-Gillis (+ St-Gilles/St-Gillis) omitted: 15 municipalities Saint-Gilles in France, Sint-Gillis (Dendermonde) in Flanders
Saint-Josse-ten-Noode
+ St-Josse-ten-Noode 		370(46) Sint-Joost-ten-Node
+ St-Joost-ten-Node 		220(23)
Schaerbeek 113(139) Schaarbeek 580(70)
Uccle 77(102) Ukkel 390(48)
Ville de Bruxelles/Stad Brussel omitted: 'City of Brussels' appears to be the established English-language name
its suburb Laeken 5??(571) its suburb Laken 880(95)
Watermael-Boitsfort 410(51) Watermaal-Bosvoorde 190(22)
Woluwe-Saint-Lambert
+ Woluwe-St-Lambert 		410(51) Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe
+ St-Lambrechts-Woluwe 		280(34)
Woluwe-Saint-Pierre
+ Woluwe-St-Pierre 		420(54) Sint-Pieters-Woluwe
+ St-Pieters-Woluwe 		2733(0)
Any of these municipalities 562 (000)   309 (000)
This table is to be considered less accurate than the one for specific domains because the number of hits made even a rudimentary inspection for relevance of each page too tedious, here the raw figures are put in the table. While still excluding the assumedly least reliable domain with an expected high number of hits and thus potential influence, the more significant number of hits might allow a statistical analysis. In general, the balance French/Dutch here comes near 1.8:1, surprisingly also for Ixelles/Elsene that in other counts had shown a far more notable unbalance.

Minor comment on your remark about Equateur in your first table: not the South-American country Ecuador, but Équateur, province of the Belgian Congo colony, is meant, see [13]. Markussep 13:10, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

My mistake indeed. I had heard of the 'Evenaarsprovincie' which was never called 'Evenaar' in Dutch language, hence my assumption that it referred to the only country that I knew to be Equateur in French, some diplomats do move around the world during a career. Fortunately, my erroneous assumption between parenthesis had little influence as that particular page was kept for the counts, as the rest of my remark shows. But I did scratch the false part from the table (still visible but no longer presenting it as valid). Thanks. — SomeHuman 5 Jan2007 07:39 (UTC)

Encyclopedias, Google Scholar and Google tests by Markussep

This is an attempt to find the most used name in English for the Brussels municipalities. For Google Scholar and Google several additional search terms are used in order to avoid picking up false hits, see the links. Markussep 17:52, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

municipality Britannica Columbia Encarta Google Scholar Google Am. Heritage
Auderghem no no Oudergem# Auderghem 17, Oudergem 7 Auderghem 58k / Oudergem 14.8k no
Forest Forest no Vorst# both heavily ambiguous idem no
Ixelles Ixelles Ixelles Ixelles Ixelles 233, Elsene 21 Ixelles 136k / Elsene 57.4k Ixelles
Molenbeek-Saint-Jean Molenbeek-Saint-Jean no Molenbeek-Saint-Jean# Sint-Jans-Molenbeek 9, Molenbeek-Saint-Jean 6 Sint-Jans-Molenbeek 21.4k / Molenbeek-Saint-Jean 19.7k no
Saint-Gilles, Belgium no no Saint-Gilles# Saint-Gilles 115, Sint-Gillis 10 Saint-Gilles 38.2k / Sint-Gillis 13.7k no
Saint-Josse-ten-Noode no no Saint-Josse-ten-Noode# Saint-Josse-ten-Noode 14, Sint-Joost-ten-Node 11 Saint-Josse-ten-Noode 25.2k / Sint-Joost-ten-Node 21.3k no
Schaarbeek Schaerbeek no Schaerbeek Schaerbeek 93, Schaarbeek 45 Schaerbeek 86.4k / Schaarbeek 56.1k Schaerbeek
Sint-Agatha-Berchem no no Sint-Agatha-Berchem# Sint-Agatha-Berchem 5, Berchem-Sainte-Agathe 3 Sint-Agatha-Berchem 17.6k / Berchem-Sainte-Agathe 0.9k no
Uccle Uccle no Ukkel Uccle 901, Ukkel 134 Uccle 191k / Ukkel 35.3k Uccle
Watermael-Boitsfort no no Watermael-Boitsfort# Watermael-Boitsfort 27, Watermaal-Bosvoorde 4 Watermael-Boitsfort 23.6k / Watermaal-Bosvoorde 14.4k no
Woluwe-Saint-Lambert no no Woluwe-Saint-Lambert# Woluwe-Saint-Lambert 15, Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe 1 Woluwe-Saint-Lambert 21.5k / Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe 20.1k no
Woluwe-Saint-Pierre no no Woluwe-Saint-Pierre# Woluwe-Saint-Pierre 9, Sint-Pieters-Woluwe 2 Woluwe-Saint-Pierre 17.9k / Sint-Pieters-Woluwe 18.5k no

# Note: Encarta World Atlas, no encyclopedia article available.

Little decisive differences, I think. Only Ixelles is obviously more common in English than Elsene, according to all sources. Diemietrie 20:03, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
Hi Diemietrie, Google results are more useful if you search exclusively, i.e. Auderghem without Oudergem and vice versa: Oudergem 14.8k, Auderghem 58k. I've changed it for all of them. Another thing you can do (using "Taalhulpmiddelen" or "Language Tools" in Google) is search for pages in specific countries. Same search for US: Auderghem 971, Oudergem 290. But if I look at the present figures, I see decisive usage of the French name for Auderghem, Ixelles, St-Gilles, Schaerbeek, Uccle and Watermael-Boitsfort, 4 draws, and decisive usage of the Dutch name for Sint-Agatha-Berchem. Actually the difference there is so large I wonder if the town has a different name in French. Markussep 21:26, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
I would have called the googling for St-Gilles, Schaerbeek, and Watermael-Boitsfort a lead, rather than decisive; but with the encyclopedias agreeing, insofar as they say anything, they are probably the better choices. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:08, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

I see Molenbeek redirects to Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, and googling it gets 57K, without either spelling of Saint John, and without "wikipedia". This won't work with the other ties, I see. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:18, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Without restriction to specific domains, Google searches are utterly irrelevant for the purpose of determining English usage, even when the language is set to select pages in English. Especially the .com gives the most dubious results but too many to inspect each source individually, which would absolutely be required. See under #Facts the table for the domains that by their nature are most likely to deliver useful data in proper English. The problem however is a very meagre number of hits in the most suitable domains: too few to have reliable statistical data though it is obvious that the English language shows no clear prevalence, the balance goes mainly from 1:1 to 1:4 (Ixelles/Elsene even slightly higher and Auderghem/Oudergem disregarded as 1 more hit could bring it at 1:4) and averages just under 3:1 but for the most relevant domains (.ac.uk, .gov.uk, .gov and .edu), the overall balance is under 2:1. This means that in English, both the French and the Dutch names occur as equally correct and with a balance that is too feeble to pick a preferenced one. At least, the usage in English appears not sufficiently apparent to be a determining factor for either one name on Wikipedia. In fact, the influence of Wikipedia on the .org domain and indirectly further onwards, could well have a larger influence on which usage will come to prevail in English [and may already have had such influence], than what is found so far - such would not be acceptable, it is better to state both names entirely equally (as I suggested, the French may well be mentioned first, but none omitted). — SomeHuman 27 Dec2006 01:20 (UTC)
Note about Markussep's table at top of this section: By explicitly excluding the name in the other language, the searches have a clear built-in bias: The Flemish being a relative minority in Brussels, and their respect for the bilingual status or not wishing to appear flamingant, causes them to often mention the other language as well; the speakers of French are usually less careful and simply mention the French name. Proof is found by searching e.g. ['Uccle Ukkel' (23.6K)]: by replacing 'Uccle' (211K) with 'Uccle -Ukkel' (188K) brings the French-language figure 12% down, replacing 'Ukkel' (58.7K) with 'Ukkel -Uccle' (35.5K) brings the Dutch-language figure 40% down - the arbitrary choice to exclude one language exaggerated the balance from 3.6:1 to 5.3:1 in favor of French; e.g. by replacing '"saint-gilles"' (50.5K) with '"saint-gilles" -sint-gillis' (37.2K) brings the French-language figure 26% down, replacing '"sint-gillis"' (27.7K) with '"sint-gillis" -saint-gilles' (13.3K) brings the Dutch-language figure 52% down - Markussep's choice brought the balance from 1.8:1 to 2.8:1 in favor of French.
Also, a search without domain selection catches all French sources that have been translated by speakers of French and all Dutch sources that have been translated by speakers of Dutch; the search may thus largely measure the number of speakers of French versus the number of speakers of Dutch worldwide and has little to do with establishing usage in the English language: other terms do not become proper English because of the usage by non-native speakers either. This assumedly strong influence might be proven by doing similar searches on the .ac.uk, .gov.uk, .gov, .edu (mainly native English/American sites). (The more restrictive searches in the table under #Facts showed rather few pages having both names of a municipality.) — SomeHuman 27 Dec2006 02:19 (UTC)

Hi SomeHuman, some comments on your impressive work:

  • I'm sure you will get more (relevant) hits if you don't restrict yourself to pages that contain "municipality" or "municipalities". If you need something to weed out false hits, try "brussels" or "belgium".
  • about your built-in bias comment on my exclusive searches (e.g. uccle without ukkel): I think this is the only way to determine differences in usage. By using both you'll probably pick up many pages that mention the other name only once, and maybe some translation lists.
  • I agree that the differences (French vs. Dutch) are not overwhelming, but they're certainly significant for a number of municipalities (Auderghem, Ixelles, St-Gilles, Schaerbeek, Uccle and Watermael-Boitsfort). Markussep 10:56, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
Using the restricted data set proposed by User:SomeHuman in #Facts, and assuming that all bias has been removed from that data set, the statistics [1] are as follows:
  • Auderghem versus Oudergem: 7 to 1, p-value is 0.035, decisive
  • Ixelles versus Elsene: 23 to 5, p-value is 0.000, decisive
  • Schaerbeek versus Schaarbeek: 21 to 9, p-value is 0.021, decisive
  • Uccle versus Ukkel: 11 to 3, p-value is 0.029, decisive
All the other data from the same table (except Laeken) show p-values larger than 0.05 and would therefore require more data before we can say anything. The question now becomes: can we get more unbiased data for these municipalities? LVan 17:46, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi Markussep, I still see little decisive cases here. I agree that apart from Ixelles, Saint-Gilles and Sint-Agatha-Berchem may be considered decisive as well. But Schaerbeek and Watermael-Boitsfort only have a firm lead over the Dutch names (not even 2:1), while in the case of Auderghem/Oudergem and Uccle/Ukkel encyclopedias do not agree (Encarta uses the Dutch name here). So still 9 out of 12 municipalities aren't decisive in my point of view. For the two sub-municipalities of Brussels city, based on Google search only, I would call Laeken 169k decisive over Laken 14.4k and Haren 38.6k decisive over Haeren 0.6k. Diemietrie 22:41, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Reply to Markussep: 1) The term 'municipality' was mainly chosen because I was interested in finding pages written by someone who knows his subject (assuming the term usually relates to the searched municipality), leaving out incidental mentionings, of a name repeated from some source of for our goal dubious origin, or connected with specific people (e.g. the birthplace of a famous person could swing the balance considerably) etc. 'Brussels' or 'Belgium' could not serve this purpose. 2) I wanted to establish usage mainly by native speakers of English (or living in a major country with this native language, thus the domains choice - .org was added as I needed to get some higher counts for relatively serious sites, though that domain tells little about the country of origin). It does not matter that a same page may be listed under Dutch and under French, your mutual exclusion would be relevant if you wanted to establish the notability of municipalities but that has hardly been a topic on this talk page. In fact it was necessary to allow both names because also this option is being considered for Wikipedia and their counting for each would bring the ratio towards a level that supports such possibility, fair enough for pages that mention both names. For establishing main usage in English, the shown strong bias is certainly not desired. 3) The significance of ratios could not be determined for the municipalities that had very low counts [incl. Auderghem/Oudergem and Uccle/Uccle that are 2 out of the 4 withheld by LVan]; and my new table for all domains except .com and thus more significant numbers, throws the earlier ratios in the bin even for the least expected municipalities (see once more under #Facts). — SomeHuman 28 Dec2006 00:38 (UTC)
Comment for LVan: As I understand it, you use the term 'decisive' as having a 20:1 chance of one language having prevalence over the other; in other words, it can be decided that the ratio is not 50/50. Even with a 70/30 ratio established however, this does not necessarily mean that it can be decided that in English one term will maintain that ratio. The balance may swing quickly, e.g. an important meeting [cf. the Laeken Declaration] and for these rarely mentioned municipalities even far lesser causes. Whether this would make the 70% or the 30% becoming dominant cannot be decided. As for now, while 30% of speakers of English write the term in a particular way, should we decide to present the other way as the 'mainly' established spelling, in fact causing that spelling to become the established one? This is a very different question from being 50/50 undecided or not. Personally, I would not consider 70/30 a sufficient ratio to determine whether a particular term outranks the other one. — SomeHuman 28 Dec2006 01:33 (UTC)
Hi SomeHuman, thank you for engaging me on the stats and also for your work done on pointing out the dangers of using data without having a good look at them (I acknowledge I was a bit hasty myself in that respect in the Bruges talk page). Like you, I looked at the Google results in more detail and I was also astounded at the number of repeats and illegitimate results that came out regardless of what keywords are specified. The example I took was Auderghem/Oudergem, the first one in the list and the one that was mentioned as a subsection above. Looking at the UK pages for Auderghem, adding the keywords Brussels and Belgium as suggested by Markussep, and not removing Oudergem as you suggested, I got [14] 175 “raw” hits. Checking manually one by one for those that were not part of addresses, or written in wikis, or written by obvious non-Anglophones, or from a site already obtained earlier (lots of those!), I got only 19 legitimate hits. The same procedure for Oudergem got me 8 legitimate hits out of [15] 16 “raw” hits. For the US pages, the number of “raw” hits was [16] 722 and [17] 324 for Auderghem and Oudergem, respectively. I had the courage to go only through the first half of those in each case and got 27 and 18 legitimate hits, respectively. The total number of legitimate hits for the UK and the US is therefore 46 for Auderghem and 26 for Oudergem, and I could have had a few more if I had gone through the second half of the US data. Note how close these numbers are from your second table (coincidence?). The p value of this ratio is 0.012. I didn’t have time to do work on the other municipalities yet…
Now for the stats… Your understanding is perfectly fine; my interpretation of “decisive” is indeed whether we can or cannot say, with a 1:20 chance of error, that English usage prefers one name versus the other. Using a manual check of the data, as described above, would limit wild swings in the data since a major event in Laeken would add only 1 data point per Anglophone author describing it. But this is indeed a danger for rare data: the 7 to 1 decisive results for Auderghem in your first table would have suddenly become indecisive had Oudergem got one more hit. The way the data is obtained then becomes critical… With the current 46 to 26 ratio, however, this danger has disappeared. Also regarding the 70/30 zone of comfort, it is usually not needed as soon as we have a reasonable amount of data (some people got to be president of the US with a lot less of a margin!) LVan 04:04, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
We, who try to establish a proper choice, are not appointed by politicians. Fortunately, we can choose for both names simultaneously at equal level if all the arguments pro and contra a single or which single name are about in balance. Having two equally enpowered presidents was not an option, but making up the rules as one sees fit at the time of coming to a decision, has clearly been proven not to gather deep respect from any observers. I do not intend to make Wikipedia procedures the laughing stock of the world, or otherwise jeopardize the believability of an assumed neutral point of view. Interesting data, good job! I'd be rather curious about your evaluation method applied to Ixelles/Elsene (for which the sampling and analysis methods gave very different results), though this might be too tedious for it's about three times as big a job as appears bearable. — SomeHuman 28 Dec2006 23:20 (UTC)
Not too tedious if we take a representative sample. The total “legitimate” hits for Ixelles and Elsene in the UK were 63 and 15, respectively. The total “legitimate” hits for the first 2% of the US pages for Ixelles and Elsene were 77 and 36, respectively. Needless to say, both ratios are decisive. LVan 02:40, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Revised Google test

I re-Google-tested Sint-Agatha-Berchem using a different method: search for both names simultaneously, English language, restricted domains (.uk, .edu etc.), no wikipedia, for instance [18]. Of these 23 hits, I rejected the ones that:

  • were obviously not written in English
  • had the name only in an address
  • were very similar to another hit, e.g. from the same site, or mirrors
  • had the name only in combinations, e.g. Hallen van Schaarbeek, Cercle Philatélique de Berchem-Sainte-Agathe
  • had the name only as a motorway exit (part of the ring around Brussels is in Flanders, and has only Dutch road signs)

I categorised the others in Dutch, French, and mixed. If the French name is used once, and the Dutch name several times, I call it Dutch, and vice versa. For .uk, the result was: 23 hits, 10 rejections, 3 Dutch, 6 French, 4 mixed. For .edu: 3 hits, 2 rejected, 1 French. For .gov: 1 hit, rejected. For .org: 58 hits, 5 Dutch, 13 French, 3 mixed, 37 rejected. Totals: 85 hits, 50 rejected, 8 Dutch, 20 French, 7 mixed. Maybe someone else will get other results, there were some hits I wasn't too sure about, e.g. lists of towns. I allowed them if Brussels and Antwerp were shown with their English names. Markussep 21:03, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Hi Markussep, thank you for going through this. Maybe we should structure the second part of the vote into two questions:
  • Question 1. what “one name” (Dutch only, French only, alternating Dutch and French, English usage, other)?
  • Question 2. for those who choose “English usage” in Question 1, what would be considered “decisive” (a few options could possibly be proposed) and what would the fallback position be in case of “indecisiveness?” LVan 21:39, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
About question 1, I now see:
  • SomeHuman for alternating (no idea if he's serious about that)
  • Stevenfruitsmaak for Dutch
  • you, me, Caranorn, David Edgar and probably Septentrionalis for English usage
  • Diemietrie, Fram, Eugène van der Pijll, Westermarck, AjaxSmack and TobyJ haven't indicated their preferences yet
In theory, "English usage" could lose its majority. I'll move your two questions to the top of the survey, and make a place for discussion. Markussep 22:28, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

In the table below I list the results of my revised search for Dutch and French according to the method I explained at the beginning of this paragraph (with Berchem-Ste-Agathe as the example). I also searched for abbreviated saints (St and Ste). In case there were too many hits to hand-check them all I took a representative sample, and divided the results by the sample fraction (e.g. 66/222 for Molenbeek). For Molenbeek .org I took hits nr. 1,4,7,11,14,17 etc. Legend: NL=Dutch name, FR=French name, mix=mixed use, rej=rejected (see criteria above). For Molenbeek I also counted the hits that had Molenbeek without St Jean/St Jans (and rejected references to streams), see the underlined numbers in the table. Markussep 15:17, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

municipality .uk (NL, FR, mix, rej) .edu (NL, FR, mix, rej) .gov (NL, FR, mix, rej) .org (NL, FR, mix, rej) total (NL, FR, mix, rej) %FR, p-value 50/50
Auderghem 4,15,5,118 1,6,0,12 0,2,0,7 1,8,2,146 6,31,7,283 84%, 2e-5
Berchem-Sainte-Agathe 3,6,4,10 0,1,0,2 0,0,0,1 5,13,3,37 8,20,7,50 71%, 0.012
4,6,3,13 0,1,0,2 0,0,0,1 8,10,5,36 12,17,8,52 59%, 0.177
Forest 6,17,3,421 1,1,0,431 0,0,1,297 5,13,2,394 12,31,6,1543 71%, 0.002
Ixelles 5,61,10,133 0,25,3,98 0,6,0,19 11,58,11,196 16,150,24,446 90%, 1e-25
Molenbeek-Saint-Jean (Molenbeek) 4,6,2,73 (18) 1,2,0,32 (1) 0,1,0,8 (0) 66/222 of the hits: 2,1,0,53 (10) 12,12,2,291 (53) 50%, 0.5
5,10,4,14 0,2,0,4 1,0,0,1 8,4,3,40 14,16,7,59 53%, 0.36
Saint-Gilles‡ 64/159 of the hits: 2,16,1,45 0,8,0,57 0,2,0,5 60/296 of the hits: 1,11,0,48 10,104,2,411 91%, 7e-19
6,26,4,84 0,10,0,34 0,2,0,4 7,25,0,86 13,63,4,208 83%, 5e-9
Saint-Josse-ten-Noode 8,8,2,19 1,4,0,2 0,0,0,0 7,14,2,59 16,26,4,80 62%, 0.06
11,18,3,89 2,6,0,43 0,1,0,6 9,19,5,108 22,44,8,246 67%, 0.003
Schaerbeek 20,39,4,84 6,17,1,49 2,2,0,12 29,49,5,144 57,107,10,289 65%, 5e-5
Uccle 13,58,8,135 10,40,9,127 4,6,6,89 23,105,6,171 50,209,29,522 81%, 3e-23
Watermael-Boitsfort 6,8,3,24 1,3,1,7 0,2,0,0 6,18,6,49 13,31,10,80 70%, 0.003
Woluwe-Saint-Lambert 3,6,3,35 1,5,0,6 0,3,0,4 66/132 of the hits: 3,18,3,42 10,50,9,129 83%, 1e-7
5,10,3,29 0,5,0,7 0,3,0,4 7,39,7,80 12,57,10,120 83%, 3e-8
Woluwe-Saint-Pierre 6,9,3,23 1,1,0,6 0,2,0,1 58/115 of the hits: 3,6,4,45 13,24,11,119 65%, 0.035
9,8,3,21 1,3,0,4 0,2,0,1 6,31,7,71 16,44,10,97 73%, 1.5e-4
note ‡: "Brussels" added as search term in order to reduce the number of false hits.

The data appearing in green in the table above were obtained independently, using a similar search technique as used by Markussep, with the following slight differences: allowed names in addresses (as long as they are not street names, or appearing together with Brussel or Bruxelles), took different sampling (odd pages), and added both Belgium and Brussels in the search for Forest/Vorst and Saint-Gilles/Sint-Gillis. LVan 18:17, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Given your decisive results for Auderghem, Forest, Ixelles, Schaerbeek, Uccle and Watermael-Boitsfort, I'm not going to test them anymore. I see clear leads for the French names for all municipalities except Berchem-Sainte-Agathe (my test pass, your test fail), Saint-Josse-ten-Noode (my test fail, your test pass), and Molenbeek (basically 50/50). Maybe we get more decisive results if we include more domains (.net, .info, .eu, .int?). For Molenbeek the short name is used a lot apparently, we may have to vote about that. Markussep 09:50, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
I agree with your conclusions and steps forward (can’t comment, however, on the choice of new domains to test). As a general observation, it seems that English usage for those municipalities located to the NE of Brussels (near Koekelberg and Ganshoren) is less well established than for the other ones. LVan 18:30, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
I tested the three "disputed" municipalities in the .net domain, which made my results get closer to yours: Saint-Josse is decisively French now, but Berchem is closer to a draw, see table below. Markussep 20:19, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
municipality total uk+edu+gov+org (NL, FR, mix, rej) .net (NL, FR, mix, rej) grand total (NL, FR, mix, rej) %FR, p-value 50/50
Berchem-Sainte-Agathe 8,20,7,50 6,3,7,27 14,23,14,77 62%, 0.069
12,17,8,52 59%, 0.177
Molenbeek-Saint-Jean (Molenbeek) 12,12,2,291 (53) 3,2,4,26 (4) 15,14,6,317 (57) 48%, 0.43
14,16,7,59 53%, 0.36
Saint-Josse-ten-Noode 16,26,4,80 2,12,6,35 18,38,10,115 68%, 0.004
22,44,8,246 67%, 0.003
Those are great results: as clear as we are going to get and, by the way, coinciding with the original Google tests published in the table above, in #Encyclopedias, Google Scholar and Google tests by Markussep. I would propose to use the full Dutch names for Sint-Jans-Molenbeek (I agree with SomeHuman that the shorter ”Molenbeek” name would eventually be better on a disambiguation page) and Sint-Agatha-Berchem, and the French names for the other municipalities. This solution would also make perfect geographic sense! LVan 02:46, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
What do you mean with your last line? It's true that a 10-2 French-Dutch ratio would correspond more or less with the local population, if that's what you mean. If noone else has better suggestions (I'll wait a few more days) I'll put our conclusions on WP:RM and on the articles to be moved. Markussep 15:32, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
Sorry, I should have been more explicit on the geographic argument… I just observed that the two municipalities for which English usage is less well established happen to be located close to each other and close to three municipalities for which there are no French names: Anderlecht, Koekelberg, and Ganshoren (see Brussels-Capital Region#Municipalities), all of them on the North-East side of Brussels. This may all be just coincidence, but it may also be reflecting a larger percentage of Dutch usage locally (hard data would be welcome!), hence my suggestion to adopt the Dutch names for those municipalities. This solution dispels the notion that all should automatically be in French while giving justice to English usage where it is clear. LVan 23:32, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
I think it's coincidence indeed (you mean north-west, don't you?). We could also just leave them as they are, Molenbeek French, and Berchem Dutch. But your suggestion is fine with with me. Markussep 00:45, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
You are right: it is indeed northwest, and the argument is a weak one... LVan 00:55, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Auderghem/Oudergem tests by Septentrionalis

Done as a sample, because neither form is likely to be ambiguous:

Four of the methods recommended under WP:NC (geographic names) seem applicable:

  • Encyclopedias:
    • Britannica; neither found
    • Columbia:neither found
    • Encarta Oudergem
  • Scholar.google and Books.google
    • Scholar; excluding patent to exclude street addresses in patent applications, and Avenue to exclude "Avenue d'Auderghem, Brussels"
  • Standard histories and country studies
    • No country study for Belgium.
  • Major news sources.
    • Neither found in Lexis-Nexus.

In short, yes, they are rare. Are they notable? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 00:20, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Notable enough I'd say, they're rather big towns/suburbs. You picked one of the smallest, probably Elsene/Ixelles, Schaarbeek/Schaerbeek and Uccle/Ukkel would give more results. Some test results for Elsene/Ixelles:
Britannica: Ixelles
Columbia: Ixelles
Encarta: Ixelles
Google Scholar: minus "1050" = zip code Elsene w/o Ixelles 21, Ixelles w/o Elsene 233.
That's still not many hits, would you call it decisive? Markussep 00:54, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
It's a lot more and the ratio is 11:1, so I'd call it decisive; others may differ. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:51, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
The figures might be different for other municipalities: Ixelles/Elsene is certainly not known as a municipality that had for a long time significantly resisted to become French-speaking. Note that for several of the other municipalities, the French name is simply the Dutch name that is spelled as it used to be in Dutch, or a very obvious translation like 'Sint-Pieter(s)' -> 'Saint Pierre', whereas Elsene got its very own French name Ixelles. — SomeHuman 24 Dec2006 04:47 (UTC)
Three remarks: 1) The region is very young, its officially bilingual status is too. Thus there will be more sources in English found that derive information from older sources, with French immensely prevailing. 2) There used to be a time that "Malines" was much more common in English than "Mechelen", a city that was always Dutch-speaking. Now the native name clearly prevails in Google searches; but for the municipalities in the bilingual region, the current situation with respect to languages is much more recent. 3) The current French majority has come to existence only during an officially unilingual French period in which the French-speakers in Belgium were clearly politically dominant, this situation has, without intention to get it the other way around, recently changed with a considerably economically stronger Flanders than Wallonia - significance and speed of according changes in language balance in the bilingual municipalities of the country's capital region are as yet an open question. It is however very unlikely that a historical balance of the names used in English is going to remain, as none of these names have become more than very rarely used in English, unlike the mentioned Malines which usage did change most considerably. [For all clarity, the city of Mechelen had earlier been commonly known in English as "Mechlin" and that had quickly changed to "Malines" as well.] It is however, most unlikely that in any foreseeable future, any one of these municipalities could become officially unilingual, and unlikely that the number of Dutch-speaking inhabitants that survived as a minority would further diminish while now having much more favorable circumstances. — SomeHuman 24 Dec2006 04:35-05:52 (UTC)

Discussion and conclusion

The results of the #Revised Google test indicate that 10 out of 12 municipalities are significantly more often called by their French name than by their Dutch name in English usage. For three of these municipalities, the article titles are currently not their French names:

The only municipalities that did not show a significant preference for either Dutch or French are Sint-Jans-Molenbeek/Molenbeek-Saint-Jean and Sint-Agatha-Berchem/Berchem-Sainte-Agathe. A previous suggestion for undecided cases was to use the name in the local majority language. This may be difficult to determine. For instance, there haven't been linguistic censuses since 1947. Local election results may help, as federal election results are not given by municipality. If it proves to be impossible, we could vote about the names for these two (using simply "Molenbeek" has been suggested by some participants).

The present city council of Molenbeek (NL/FR) consists of 27 French-speaking (PS, cdH, Ecolo, MR, FN) and 4 Dutch-speaking (SP.A, VB) councillors, that's 87% French. For St-Agatha-Berchem it's a bit more complicated, because there are list combinations (LBR = list of the mayor, and the two socialist parties PS+SP.A). However, if the language of the street names in the addresses of the councillors (see FR/NL) is a good indication, it could be 19 French and 8 Dutch, that's 70% French.

Thoughts? Markussep 21:40, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

As Caranorn 13:17, 11 January 2007 and I, SomeHuman 2007-01-11 16:59 had pointed out, election results are meaningless for our purpose for several reasons but mainly because these do not represent the language of the local voters - who cares what language 27 people speak. Furthermore it is a peculiar intellectual bend to disregard artificial official bilingual names, but then choose for the at the same time worked out artificial official system of representation to find what you like to be local usage.
Anyway, 'local usage' is nonsense as I already explained several times because the Wikipedia naming convention, after English usage, resorts to 'local usage' which happens to be mainly on a country level (as opposed to English usage) and not on a mere municipality level. These are not in a country's outskirt as South Tyrol bordering another country, but form the country's central capital region at the middle of the Brussels agglomeration. Suppose no English usage of 'Bangkok' would have been established, we would never ask "How do the people inside that place call it?" but we'd ask "How do the Thai call it?". We never inspect whether the name Din Daeng is even used therein or in the whole of Bangkok municipality or province; just if it is common in Thai, the main language of the country. It is equally incorrect to look at the artificial regional level because even this slightly broader kind of 'local usage' would then have to include their other immediate neighbours within the Brussels agglomeration, comprising also the considerable population of Flemish municipalities —around the official boundaries of the officially bilingual region— that would have mainly (in Flemish part of BHV) or only (to the East) Dutch-language representatives, and in both chiefly Dutch-speaking inhabitants. — SomeHuman 16 Jan2007 23:05 (UTC)
Markussep's opening statement of this section is once more, and repeatedly, incorrect: For 10 out of 12 municipalities it may have been shown that counts were decisive to establish English usage of at least 50% by the French name. At least 50% is definitely not significantly more. I had argued before that one should determine what can be considered 'significant' to allow saying 'this is main English usage' and as other comparisons (American/British) had shown 2:1 not to be enough for Wikipedia, 3:1 could have been reasonable and clearly significantly more. Then the p-value [probability of statistical reliability] would have to be calculated for that ratio instead of on a 1:1 ratio so as to know for which municipalities we could decisively determine that English usage; it would have shown significantly more French for much less than 10 out of 12; for all others WP naming conventions directs clearly to 'local usage'.
This would have brought us for at least 10, possibly all, municipalities to 'local usage' which according to my 23:05 UTC comment here immediately above would by normal WP interpretation of 'local usage' have delivered (for undisputedly 2:1 Dutch speakers in the country) (nearly) all Dutch names. As this might be seen just as POV as getting them (nearly) all French by the currently by WP-voters most supported but highly disputable interpretation of 'English usage', having either bilingual names (locally normal NPOV but deprecated by WP Multiple local names) or else alternating Dutch/French, 6 municipalities by each language name would have been acceptable NPOV decisions. — SomeHuman 16 Jan2007 23:43 - 17 Jan2007 00:16 (UTC)
SomeHuman, you know the outcome of our votes (single name, determined by common English usage) and you had your chance to contribute to the criteria for the latter. I think it's far too late to start pushing your ideas again, against consensus. If you want to propose using Dutch names for Molenbeek and St-Ag-Berchem, fine, but don't start questioning the whole process again. Markussep 19:10, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
I merely showed my view of what the current process has established. You had pushed your ideas against the outcome of votes on a 1st process and against consensus of a 2nd process, by starting this 3rd process and this time orchestrating it along the way, it had to go your way sooner or later. — SomeHuman 20 Jan2007 12:45 (UTC)
  • As explained above in #Revised Google test, I would favour using the full Dutch names for the two undecided municipalities. LVan 23:37, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
  • As LVan pointed out, it appears to make a geographically coherent sense to show those two with a Dutch title (of course the full names), and as Markussep noted, 10/2 approaches the language balance on regional level; it may seem to be better than other names for only those 2 municipalities. For reasons I explained here above, too many subjective and contradictory decisions were necessary for the entire outcome, to have confidence for a long-lasting self-evident result or one that can convince future contributors. We'll have to wait and see... — SomeHuman 20 Jan2007 12:23 (UTC)

So then we have one more move (in addition to the three above):

Markussep 19:45, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Time to move some pages?

Hi. I'm working on the backlog at WP:RM, and I'd like to close out as much of this move request as possible. I can see that we've decided to go with one name per article title, and to go with common English usage, which leaves the problem of determining what that is. Above, I read that most cases are decidable, with the only three in need of moves being:

It sounds like those need to be moved, seven others need to be left alone, and two are still undecided. That's a total of twelve. Do I have those details correct, and are those three pages ready to move? -GTBacchus(talk) 23:13, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Do you take responsibility to accept English usage having been 'decided' according to Wikipedia standards, see my 2nd comment in the above section? Anyway, I think it's best to perform the moves only when the names are decided for all 12 municipalities. — SomeHuman 17 Jan2007 00:03 (UTC)
I'm not trying to take responsibility for anything that hasn't achieved some kind of consensus yet. I hadn't seen the comment that you indicated, but seeing it now, I think this discussion has some more days left in it. I'll relist the request at WP:RM, in the interest of clearing the backlog, and probably see you again in five days. -GTBacchus(talk) 06:42, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

How Wikipedias in other languages tackle this

Wikipedias shown with a gray column are irrelevant for comparison: these use the in their respective languages singularly established names of the municipalities, as the English-language Wikipedia does for the 'City of Brussels' – (see also the note below about Valkenburg). Other languages might for some or all of the municipalities have such singularly established name coinciding with the French or Dutch name.
two tables by SomeHuman
5 Jan2006		 WP in romance languages WP in germanic languages other than English WP in other languages
Titles↓\ Wikipedias → Catalan Esperanto French Italian Portugese Romanian Spanish Dutch German (Dutch)
Limburgish		 Luxembourgish Indonesian Polish
Auderghem/Oudergem French Dutch French n/a n/a n/a French Dutch French/Dutch Dutch French - Dutch French-Dutch n/a
Berchem-Sainte-Agathe/
Sint-Agatha-Berchem		 French Dutch French n/a n/a n/a French Dutch French/Dutch Dutch n/a French - Dutch n/a
Forest/Vorst French Dutch French n/a n/a n/a French Dutch French/Dutch Dutch n/a French-Dutch n/a
Ixelles/Elsene French Dutch French French n/a Dutch French Dutch French/Dutch Dutch n/a French-Dutch n/a
Molenbeek-Saint-Jean/
Sint-Jans-Molenbeek		 French French French n/a n/a n/a French Dutch French/Dutch Dutch n/a French - Dutch n/a
Saint-Gilles/Sint-Gillis French French French n/a n/a n/a French Dutch French/Dutch Dutch n/a French - Dutch n/a
Saint-Josse-ten-Noode/
Sint-Joost-ten-Node		 French French French n/a n/a n/a French Dutch French/Dutch Dutch n/a French - Dutch n/a
Schaerbeek/Schaarbeek French Dutch French n/a French French Dutch Dutch French/Dutch Dutch n/a French-Dutch Dutch
Uccle/Ukkel French French French n/a n/a n/a French Dutch French/Dutch Dutch n/a French-Dutch n/a
Watermael-Boitsfort/
Watermaal-Bosvoorde		 French French French n/a n/a French French Dutch French/Dutch Dutch n/a French - Dutch n/a
Woluwe-Saint-Lambert/
Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe		 French French French n/a n/a n/a French Dutch French/Dutch Dutch n/a French - Dutch n/a
Woluwe-Saint-Pierre/
Sint-Pieters-Woluwe		 French French French n/a n/a n/a French Dutch French/Dutch Dutch n/a French - Dutch n/a
The Limburgish here is the dialect of Valkenburg in the Netherlands (recognizing its 'Limburgs' as a regional language as the EU agreed with). Dutch is the standard language in this province and in the one also named Limburg in Belgium, where its dialect is seen as one of Dutch as any other in Flanders. This Limburgish WP, as the Dutch & French ones, uses names established in its (standard) language, thus not bilingual.
↓Wikipedias↓ Usage merely in text on all other linked Wikipedias with Latin alphabet, and on the above Wikipedias with titles missing
Afrikaans Brussels article: only a few: Dutch (French)
Finnish Brussels article: (list) French/Dutch
Hungarian Brussels article: (list) French/Dutch
Plattdüütsch Brussels article: (list) Dutch links prepared (red)
Swedish Brussels article: 'Stockel/Stokkel' (in Woluwe-St-P/St-P-Woluwe): French/Dutch
extra Italian Municipalities of the Brussels-Capital Region article: French links prepared (red) (Dutch)
extra Portugese Brussels article: (inline list) Dutch
extra Romanian Brussels-Capital Region article (list) Dutch (French) and French (Dutch)
extra Luxembourgish Brussels article: (box) French and Dutch
extra Polish Brussels article: only a few: Dutch

Personal comment: Romance languages are closely related to its French child, and it is more than likely for people speaking such language, to have access to and understanding of a French-language source, than would be the case for more different and for the large majority of these people unintelligible languages of germanic origin, or would be the case for even less related groups of languages; also sheer geographical distance puts Catalan, Spanish and Portugese closer to French.
English is a germanic language, though of all those none other has incorporated as many words of romance language origin. Nearly all native speakers of Luxembourgish (a language comparatively rarely written) are quite able to read French, one their country's major languages, and have France and the French-speaking part of Belgium as close neighbours and relatively litte contact with distant Flemish or Dutch people, hence have less obviously access to Dutch-language sources than to French ones. Because the Dutch language is far less a world language than French, even people speaking another related language such as German do not generally bother to learn Dutch.
It is then revealing that the non-romanic Wikipedias opted for systematically bilingual titles, as I promote for this English-language Wikipedia. There is only one single article in a non-romanic language with only one name for the municipality; it happens to be the Dutch name. It appears safe to assume that the degree of establishing one particular name for any of these municipalities in German (or even Indonesian, a native dialect of Malay and the only official language of a former colony of the Netherlands for which the Belgian municipalities hardly mattered), is not all too different from such in English. — SomeHuman 5 Jan2007 20:46 (UTC)

Consequences of the survey result

As for now, 6 people have voted for one name in the title, but only 1 has made clear what name he wants the title to have. If people don't vote for the second question (if one name, which one? - if two names, how?) this survey has little use, as it remains unclear how the result should be implemented. What can be done about this? Diemietrie 15:12, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

What can be done is to wait for January 6, when voting on the second question opens. Eugène van der Pijll 16:38, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
What also can be done is to determine the options to choose from in the second vote. For the "one" case there are some obvious options:
  • all French
  • all Dutch
  • name most used in English (my preference, but what if there is no clearly preferred name, and how is it determined?)
  • local majority language (but how is it determined, census?)

Markussep 10:11, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Since 1947, there hasn't been any census about language in Belgium. In fact, because of the tensions the census results on language gave in the past, language censuses are banned forever when the 'language border' (taalgrens, frontière linguistique) was fixed "once and for all" in 1962. So the last option is very difficult to determine. We only know there are more French-speaking people than Dutch-speaking people in Brussels, but the exceptional situation is that none of these two linguistic groups have a majority, according to the survey of the VUB (Free University of Brussels).
The name most used in English would be the best solution if only one name has to be chosen. But this is also very difficult to determine, because most names are not very common in English at all (otherwise there was no discussion or survey needed...). I think the choices here will always be based on arbitrary methods of determination.
That's why I think everyone who votes should choose for a concrete solution rather than a vague preference for "one name". Of course my first preference is also to choose one name for articles. No one likes long-winded names. But the question here is: what's realistic in this specific case? When most of the voters for one name do not make clear how they want their votes to be implemented, it seems to me as if these votes only show a simple preference for articles with one name, rather than a contribution to a solution for this problem.
Maybe that's the result of the way this survey is set up. Maybe it would be better to make a survey with only concrete options and make clear before the survey starts how these options will be implemented, particularly how the name most commonly used in English will be determined. Now we run the risk this survey produces more questions than answers. Diemietrie 13:23, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Discussion

Add any additional comments:

I prefer one single name because double names are ambiguous and confusing, especially for people who are not familiar with the region, and don't speak French or Dutch. Two names in a title suggests that the article is about two (related) places rather than one. See Talk:Communes of South Tyrol for a similar discussion. Markussep 11:37, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

This 'survey' is assumed to be designed to keep stalling a long overdue action indefinitely; the discussion time should by now be finished and a proper proposal to move the articles of the municipalities at hand has been requested. See #Requested moves for its municipalities. — SomeHuman 23 Dec2006 12:38 (UTC)

Weren't the Dutch names used long before there were any French names? --Ganchelkas 15:05, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

That's right, the region was predominantly Dutch speaking before the 19th century. Markussep 15:59, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
The Dutch names are the original ones. In some cases the French name is only the old spelling of the Dutch name! The Brussels region had a Dutch-speaking majority untill the first half of the 20th century. Since Belgium was founded in 1830 as an officially unilingual French state (although with a Dutch-speaking majority!), many people in the Brussels region gradually switched from Dutch to French. This process continued untill circa 1970, when Dutch and French communities got their own institutions (schools, public centers, libraries, etc.). Diemietrie 17:38, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
If the articles are primarily about the present towns, I don't think it matters who was "first". We should describe present dominant use then (in English, if any). Is the use of Dutch in the Brussels region increasing lately? Markussep 01:06, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
Do you mean a) the City of Brussels [which established English name is not part of the discussion about the titles] as well as the other 18 municipalities? b) usage by 1. inhabitants incribed in the registers for having their main residence there, 2. inhabitants renting a place there where they stay during the week, 3. people living or working there. The figures and the changes of figures might be quite different, though rather difficult to obtain reliably even for 1. as there has not been a census for a long time.
Furthermore, which precedence is to be given (provided there is no established English name, which is likely for these in English rarely mentioned municipalities: a Google search on rarely used names does not find established names but does original research): a) the local name of the municipality officially or by de facto majority; the name local on municipality level or on community level (with identical official but inverse majority-based result); c) a position that does not make Wikipedia envolved in and an accomplish to local, inter-regional and national heavy disputes that are currently still going on with strong political consequences for the whole country? — SomeHuman 24 Dec2006 05:17 (UTC)
You're right that there are several definitions for "inhabitants". I'd go with people actually registered in the municipality, I don't think commuters contribute much to local culture. Regions and communities will not bring us further because the Brussels region is part of both the Dutch and French speaking communities. That Brussels isn't part of Wallonia is irrelevant. Let's not exaggerate the severity of the language conflict, I've never heard of Dutch or French speaking schools and institutions being torched etc. Markussep 10:05, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
You do not think commuters to contribute much to local culture. Which local culture then, because a) the typical commuter employment of the capital area is a main source of income for the locals, as in several municipalities the unemployment rate is very high (immigrant non-EU majorities) and the "locals" in the other communities are on the opposite scale of the social ladder, substantially rather recently arrived (from other Belgian regions, from EU countries, from still other countries) and for a part [NATO, European Community, the many embassies] came to live there temporarily. Thus selecting 'inhabitants' as determining culture is POV and then using such for language orientation for article titles is a violation of WP:NPOV. b) Your remark while addressing me, about the irrelevance of Brussels not being part of Wallonia, is misplaced as I never mentioned such [though probably shows which region you feel Brussels should belong to]; but I did mention the communities which you wave away while precisely the communities are the institutions entitled to finance, organize or supervize cultural elements in the Brussels-Capital region (that has no such authority) and thus the communities nearly alone determine what is culturally available - and the Flemish Community contributes substancially more to this region's culture than represented by this regions minority of Dutch-speaking inhabitants, not only for pure national political reasons but simply because all the Flemish people are represented to the world by their capital. Indeed there have not been incidents of torched schools, financed by each community for its language; which shows a degree of civilisation so as to resolve conflicts in a non-violent way by creating an officially complex situation, in particular the bilingual character of these municipalities. Is it then not about time that Wikipedia respects that? — SomeHuman 24 Dec2006 12:09-12:19 (UTC)
"Is the use of Dutch increasing lately?" Yes and no. There are several groups of inhabitants using Dutch in the Brussels region. The traditional Flemish community (10% of the population according to the VUB-survey) is more or less stable in number. However, since the 1990s the use of Dutch language institutions is increasing very rapidly because of the good quality and reputation of especially Dutch language education, which attracts more and more students of unilingual French-speaking background and also of ethnic minorities. Currently the Dutch language education network has a 'market share' of over 20% (nursery and primary schools even nearly 25%) and the ambition is to make it 33% within the next 15 years. As a result, an increasing percentage of the population will be able to speak Dutch on a native level, if not being totally bilingual. On the other hand, the number of people with Dutch as a mother tongue shrinks rapidly as the native bilingual Brusselers with their typical Brabantic (Dutch) dialect as a mother tongue fall away. Most of them never took part in the Flemish community and as a result, their children have 'frenchified'. Good example of this extincting group is the present mayor of Brussels city, Freddy Thielemans: he is of mixed Brussels, Flemish and Walloon descent, his mother tongue is the original Dutch dialect of Brussels, he speaks French and Dutch fluently and appears regularly in Flemish media, but is member of the Parti Socialiste, the French-speaking social democrats, and takes part in the French-speaking community. Diemietrie 14:57, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Manipulation

Moved Markussep's section "Brussels survey" here from SomeHuman's talk page
I reverted your revertion of my attempt to make the voting section more intelligible. As I stated in the introduction, only very brief explanations were supposed to go with the votes. A little discussion about the explanations is fine, but the discussion was much too long for that place, and you topped it with a complete detailed scheme of why every municipality should be named as such. Do you think potential voters would have found the "follow english usage" votes after those lengthy discussions about alternating names? Or was that your intention? How would you have liked it if I had done the same, but favouring my preference? And what's the point of removing the section in the introduction where I explain what the options are, and where the details are discussed? If I wasn't assuming good faith, I'd think that you were deliberately obscuring the "follow english usage" votes in order to make people think your solution is the only one, besides the apparently not so popular "all dutch" and "all french" solutions. I hope you will act more constructively than that. Markussep 18:08, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Another comment: you may want to add a single line to the voting section about what exactly you mean with "alternating". People might think you want to change the titles from French to Dutch and vice versa periodically. I can think of something ("one half of the municipalities French name, other half Dutch name, details to be discussed subsequently") but since it's your proposal, I'll let you add it. Markussep 18:20, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

You had not started the discussion and only when at a one against three stance, you took on your survey, and then also destroyed the proper Requested move I proposed in strict accordance to consensus. You took charge over all the line, never seeking advice for proceedings; your lead asking to have a vote followed by "a very brief explanation" favored once more the 'Keep it simple' attitude which is your end of the stick; I nevertheless kept it as brief as possible in the one paragraph of my vote: there are far more arguments but I only explained the main one that as second choice allows 'alternating' to be my vote.
I cannot help other users and yourself to have started and to have been keeping on commenting my sufficiently brief essential explanation. Only when that already had brought the 'English usage'-vote section out of sight, I followed your invitation in the lead "If you have another suggestion, make it here." Thus my suggestion for the respective alternating names (which is in the smallest possible character size and reduced line-height), was not and cannot possibly have been what you accuse me of in your edit comment: "obvious attempt by SomeHuman to make his proposal more prominent than the other ones". But your reaction was to move not only that suggestion away from the place that you alone had indicated, and not only also the discussion underneath my initial vote, but even the essential explanation of my vote itself, out of sight AFTER you had been contributing to that discussion: clearly you thought that someone just might see my suggestion before making a vote, and precisely that is what you at any price and against your own procedure rules and your earlier actions, prevented. And then changed the lead invitation to match your today's opinion.
I revert that and things stay where they are, not where you want to store it out of sight: This is not your personal talk page. You have no right to refactor an article talk page moving people's contributions towards what you feel best at your whimses. The lead had been set by you and it was meanwhile acted upon by others, therefore you can no longer change conditions as if others (I of course) would manipulate things by their actions. I had very reluctantly followed your initiative and now so shall you. — SomeHuman 8 Jan2007 21:32 (UTC)
You are incredible. I'm not going to fight over this, if it makes you happy I'll leave your post where it was. Just don't remove the headers I made. There's no satisfying you, is it? I put your option before mine, I tried to reason with you using arguments, but I see it's no use. Markussep 22:03, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
I thought I as well had been using a few arguments... — I had not been under the impression that you had done great efforts trying to satisfy me, but the above is fair enough. ;-) — SomeHuman 8 Jan2007 22:34 (UTC) — Correction: Sorry, Markussep, I also thought it to be a good idea to provide links to the four vote options under '#What one name'; unfortunately by this new header you caused the contents-box at the top of the page to provide these as direct links as well. As in this phase of the survey, one does not generally still need to see other people's votes, one would simply click one's preference and thus neither my suggestion nor your instructions would ever come under the eyes of voters. Surely that cannot possibly have been your intention; I put your original bold titles for the four options back and left your new instructions clearly point out that these follow: everyone will know pretty well what the scroll bar or the PgDn-button is for! Kind regards. — SomeHuman 9 Jan2007 01:12 (UTC)

Relist?

I'm on self-appointed WP:RM duty tonight and ran across this. Should it simply be relisted at WP:RM? Or do you want to call part of the issue settled and you can re-start a different request? This sounds like an awfully complex issue - I even see a chart above... —Wknight94 (talk) 02:26, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

No, not for now. After a timeconsuming and lengthy discussion, 3 out of 4 contributors had come to a consensus and then the fourth quickly created on the "Requested moves" page an invitation to a Survey that would start the whole thing over again. As I knew all too well that calling in the troops would get a lot of quick looks and thus the "simple" solution that the proposer defends, making the complicated appearance of the WP:NPOV style that others had come to, chanceless. I then intervened with a real proposal to move and created the above section Talk:Brussels-Capital Region#Requested moves for its municipalities. But the forementioned proposer reacted with what is still there with edit comment "revert vandalism to move request" (Not vandalism, and not a request to move either as such was to be established by his survey). Under Names survey, after most (5 out of so far 8) of the expected "one"-name votes came in during just 3½ hours, the survey has revealed some interesting research results in the 'Facts' subsection and comments in particular in the 'Auderghem/Oudergem', 'Discussion', 'If one name, which one' and 'English usage' subsections, and after those first hours, 3 more "one"-name votes and 4 "two"-name votes arrived, but the holidays seem to have stopped further reactions. — SomeHuman 2 Jan2007 06:07 (UTC)
I object to your interpretation of the events. It's true that you and Diemietrie found consensus between the two of you, but you two are not very representative for wikipedia users since you're from Flanders and Diemietrie is Dutch (so am I). And again, the third vote pro is only wishful thinking on your side, see Moyogo's reply. I don't claim to be perfectly objective either, so IMO it makes perfect sense to invite more people, also because the previous move request to bilingual names failed.
Would you care to read the last sentence of Moyogo's reply from your link here above... And that reply came after your unilateral 'survey'; consensus was clearly reached including Moyogo since "Those changes have been waiting to be made for a while. It's time the people who think the current situation is wrong change it instead of blaming others for doing POV. --moyogo 08:19, 22 December 2006 (UTC)" and thus most clearly did not want you to stall by a survey about all possible and impossible directions and options either. And again:
"Support of Diemietry's suggestion to use "/" without blanks instead of " - "; further following my proposal as explained. — SomeHuman 2006-12-23 00:59 (UTC)
'/' makes more sense than '-' as long as it doesn't end up making subarticles. Btw, the maps in the metro are either using French/Dutch, or alternating French/Dutch and Dutch/French. --moyogo 01:14, 23 December 2006 (UTC)"
  made clear that a proper request to move – if not an immediate move – was immanent since not only the principle but also the precise type of bilingual naming had been determined. Your starting that bewildering survey after Moyogo's far from enthousiastic but very decisive comments, was not intellectually honest – neither towards the 3 that had come to a consensus, nor towards new readers who by the multi-threaded survey were kept unaware of that definite consensus. Furthermore, that January 2006 request to move towards bilingual names was opposed by 4 and supported by 5 users, which is not a failure but it seems that no-one bothered to close.
Anyway, my explications and proven facts in this section this morning and now here above, clearly indicate that relisting Markussep's multi-threaded survey would not be as appropriate as a proper and precise request to move (thus this but without showing the striked-through survey of Markussep, and now mentioning There is no English name for any municipality around Brussels; nor can a French or a Dutch name singularily be established for usage in English. For most municipalities, the French name is slightly more often (1.8:1) found than the Dutch name in English texts, and is therefore consistently placed first in the titles. - as such was proven by the survey and several users had come with such simplistic usage in English argument that it misses the point of that part of the problem). Personally, I'm not to keen on immediately listing because this would most likely cause another merry-go-round; better keep the current 'survey' in the 'Backlog' section of Requested Moves for a few more days. — SomeHuman 2 Jan2007 18:11 (UTC)
That's still no response to my point that this shouldn't be decided by two Belgians and two Dutchmen. I count 5 oppose and 6 support on that previous survey, and that is too little support for a move. And you probably missed this part of the previous discussion: "Concluding, I think that a survey about the subject is a good idea. Diemietrie 20:01, 20 December 2006 (UTC)". Markussep 21:19, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
Be serious, that remark by Diemietrie came well before any consensus had seemed likely as there had remained a 2:2 tie. But you awaited many more comments and only days later at the 3:you outcome, suddenly without consulting you started the then inappropriate survey.
Indeed there were 5:6 votes in favour of bilingual names, not 4:5 as I accidentally typed. But whether that could not sufficiently support the moves is another matter: many titles had been bilingual before and had been moved unilaterally without discussion, thus a minute difference could well be decisive.
You keep blowing smoke in front of the readers' eyes: 1) as long as we keep in mind that this is the English Wikipedia, nationalities do not matter as most native speakers of English will not be as interested in or aware of the many aspects regarding the topic, they were not kept out but had simply never joined – in your survey, so far I was the only one who attempted to find texts written mainly by native English speakers [though it can still be translations that are likely to be guided by their source's language with respect to a municipality name] by searching typical domains, so as to come to a more reliable idea of the balance between French and Dutch names in English by British and American speakers; and 2) you already know my response to your incorrect statement that we decided: we proposed by requesting the moves towards the clear-cut set of titles that had become the result of the discussion – see Requested moves for its municipalities and you alone decided to obliterate that proper proposal from the Requested moves page. — SomeHuman 2 Jan2007 23:24-23:45 (UTC)
I see we'll never agree on this. If you don't see the added value of the current survey, to which several long-time and active Wikipedia editors are contributing, I have nothing more to say to you. Markussep 10:37, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Yep, I did not think you had anything to say upon my last reply. But your "nothing more to say" is lead by once more a false accusation trying to discredit your opponent: my first comment in this section already included: "the survey has revealed some interesting research results in the 'Facts' subsection and comments in particular in the 'Auderghem/Oudergem', 'Discussion', 'If one name, which one' and 'English usage' subsections," - that looks like my recognizing added value. — SomeHuman 3 Jan2007 21:35 (UTC)

Footnote

  1. ^ The generally accepted method for measuring the decisiveness of a proportion is the statistical p-value. In the particular case of proportions, the p-value is equal to the probability that a proportion equal (or more extreme) to that observed was obtained by luck of the draw (because of chance sampling), assuming an underlying reality of 50:50. The classical example is that of the perfectly unbiased coin (the underlying reality of 50:50): from 24 flips of a coin showing 17 tails and 7 heads (in any order), would this result be considered decisive in demonstrating that this coin favours tails rather than being unbiased? In that particular case, the one-tailed p-value can be calculated from statistical tables (or software) to be 0.032; in other words, there is a 3.2% chance that this proportion could have been obtained by luck of the draw from a perfect coin, or equivalently that we would be mistaken if we were to say that this coin favours tails. The widely accepted threshold used by statisticians, and by decision makers in many different fields, is 5%: any risk of mistake smaller than 5% is accepted. Therefore, the decision here would be to consider that the coin indeed favours tails, with the understanding that this kind of decision would be incorrect 1 time out of 20 (5%).
    The current debate offers an excellent example of application. If properly compiled data were to show for instance 17 Anglophone Google hits for Name 1 versus 7 Anglophone hits for Name 2 (these would need to be manually reviewed, unbiased, uncontested data), the p-value would be 0.032 and I would call these results decisive, with the understanding that I have a 3.2% chance of being wrong. If it had been let’s say 0.062, I would have abstained and called the proportion not decisive until more proper data can be found. Note, to be complete, that the more hits there are, the lower the p-value and the less chances we have of being wrong: if we had had 34 tails and 14 heads (same proportion as 17 versus 7), the p-value would have been 0.003 instead of 0.032.
    This does not change anything to the questions of accuracy, non-bias, or general legitimacy of using the Google tool for assessing English usage. If it is decided, however, that Google is indeed a good tool and that proper data can be obtained from it, the question of decisiveness is an easy one. The power of statistics is that even seemingly infrequent usage (17 versus 7) is often enough to be decisive. LVan, 27 December 2006
    If interested, try the following on-line free calculator, [1], where the “Sample size” is the total number of hits (taking both sides together) and the “Proportion” is the ratio discussed above (one side over total). The other fields should be left alone. You will notice slight differences with the results mentioned above – this is because of the different underlying distributions used by the various software packages. LVan, 4 January 2007
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