Diacritics Moving forward I too have no very clear idea about how to word an RfC other than that it should be in relation to specific proposed changes to the MOS and not something vaguer I also think it s very important to keep to the issue of diacritical marks in the original orthography of the language and not stray into either additional letters like eth or thorn or the use of diacritical marks in transcription transliteration like retaining accents when going from to p te or marking long vowels by macrons in transliterating a number of languages including Greek and Japanese These are separate issues The problems for me are primarily in the first paragraph of WP DIACRITICS which is evasive muddled and inconsistent this is just evasion Their use or non use should be motivated and hence should be encouraged or discouraged according to the strength of the motivation this encouragement to count hits just results in muddled policy apart from the problem of the weasel word general However this bit seems clear that the modifications are to the same word i e can be treated as stylistic modifications This seems to me not to be consistent with the sentence before is the common name here supposed to be with or without the added diacritical marks V ersions of word above should mean that the common is the same with or without the diacritical marks Is it possible to re write this paragraph to achieve consensus I don t know Agreed those are separate issuesAgreed the first quoted passage is evasive but motivating use or avoidance of diacritics seems to be the sticking point Did you have some particular direction in mind My take has been that if reliable sources show that their use is normal for the names in question that they should be used here except where particular subjects eschew them E g for a baseball player named Eddie Sandoval we d give him as Eddie S ndoval if some reliable sources did it can t be based on a majority of English language sources since majority of them ignore diacritics entirely as a matter of editorial publishing convenience It s the same principle that we can cite a single source for Eddie s birth date and place even if most sources don t mention them A fact does not have to be provided by every single source to be considered reliable And it s not a matter of sources conflicting analogous to giving two different birth dates some giving only Sandoval without the diacritics is like some sources giving a birth year but not a full birth date it is incomplete information not conflicting information On the other hand if Eddie himself is quoted saying he doesn t use the diacritic that should be a trumping factor unless WP totally ditches subject preference in all areas which seems unlikely given the number of discussions going on to make more allowances for subject preference all over the place This can apply to geography too Santa Fe New Mexico is Santa Fe not Santa F despite the popularity of the diacritic in certain circles the official name of both the city and the county are Santa Fe with no accent People frequently cite WP OFFICIALNAME as if it were a policy but it s actually just an essay it may not accurately reflect the nuances in cases like this and people often cite it without actually understanding what it says to begin with it s frequently misinterpreted as being against use of official names when it s really only against using them when they re directly unhelpful to readers while otherwise we would almost certainly use the official name I m not sure general in the second passage is actually a weasel word rather than just lack of clarity It s not clear if it means the predominant use in reliable sources generally the predominant use in general audience sources or both The inclusion of and reference works strongly suggests the former Regardless the hit counting aspect is a problem because of the aforementioned facts that a English language sources tend to ignore diacritics for their own conven