We are writing a wikipedia using the English language and the Latin alphabet. So the reason for why we do not have an article at Roma is that the name of the city in English is Rome, and we do not have an article at Москва because that is written using the Cyrillic alphabet so we must transform it into the Latin alphabet. Now, there is a user, Quintusdecimus, who keeps reminding us that ß is not used in Latin. That is true but very much besides the point because "the Latin alphabet" is not only the name of the alphabet used in Latin, but also the name of the various adaptations of this alphabet as used in English, Spanish, German, Polish and many other languages. All of these languages use letters that are not in the original Latin alphabet, for example, English uses J, U and W.
As I said above, we are writing a wikipedia in English. However, for completeness we have many articles whose subject does not have a common name in English but where the local language uses the Latin alphabet. In these cases it is very common practice on Wikipedia to give the name in the local language. Just a few examples: Magna Carta (Latin), Weiß Kreuz (German), Jyväskylä (Finnish), Alliance française (French), Tromsø (Norwegean), the brothers Ó Siochfhradha (Irish), Gàidhealtachd (Scottish Gaelic), Antonín Dvořák (Czech), Łódź (Polish), Davíð Oddsson (Icelandic) and Höðr (Old Norse). This is also very useful information for the readers. The reader of an article about an Icelandic politician is likely quite interested in Iceland. The reader is therefore very unlikely to run away even if the name contains the letter ð, and we would be doing a disservice if we hid this fact. Now some people here like to use Google to "prove" that, let's say Jyväskylä is more commonly written Jyvaskyla in English texts. This may be true but I believe that this is mainly because the people who write these texts do not know how to write these symbols and do not have time to find out. I do not think that these people think that Jyvaskyla is more of an English word than Jyväskylä or that they would be offended if they saw an English text using the form Jyväskylä. The reason for why so many articles on the English wikipedia use these symbols is that the people who work on the articles know a lot about the subjects and want to give the name of the article as accurately as possible and would be annoyed if they had to use a form they felt was more inaccurate. This is for example the way I feel about having written an article about Weißenburg but be forced to refrain from using ß. I can imagine writers of articles using American English would feel the same if whenever they wrote something, somebody else would come along and change it in to British English. That's why we have rules to prevent that.
It is clear that none of the names given above are English and they don't become any more English if we drop the diacritics or any of the other symbols which are not among the 26 letters most commonly used in English. For example O Siochfhradha is written only using these 26 letters but it still is not an English word and an English speaker generally would have no idea how to pronounce it. But we should strive to be as accurate as possible, give the name with these extra few symbols which are not enough to cause confusion but give guides on pronounciation, put redirects on any common spelling and also mention them in the article. The proposal of Stemonitis at Weißenburg-Gunzenhausen is I believe a very good step forward.
- Kæri Stefán, eða Edinborgarstefna
- Skiptu röksemdum þínum í málsgreinar.
- Annars drukkna þær í textanum.
- Þinn núna tiltölulega drukkni Io Io 20:21, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
- Annars drukkna þær í textanum.