Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (thorn)

message: I'm going to post notifications about this new proposal at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) and some other places now. --Francis Schonken 10:11, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

message: If we transliterate thorn every time it occurs but leave other Icelandic characters alone then we will produce very idiosyncratic forms. Let's take Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir as an example. If we transliterate the thorn but leave the other characters intact we get "Thorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir". This is not a form which really sees any use. Here's a Google search.
*429 English pages for "Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir" -wikipedia
*2 English pages for "Thorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir" -wikipedia 
*:doubtful result, see below --Francis Schonken 14:43, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Produces idiosyncratic forms

message: I would imagine that most readers who navigate to an article using þ would (i) either be sufficiently familiar with the letter to read it without problems (indeed, to possibly be majorly annoyed by the deterioration of information incurred by an arbitrary transliteration) or (ii) be sufficiently curious to take 10 seconds of their life to learn this letter. Our readers are expected to be curious and wanting to learn things. For example, about Icelandic subjects. Arbor 18:02, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. —Nightstallion (?) 19:54, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Intelligible to those interested in the subject

message: It seems to me that the way the text is currently is less than ideal for several reasons. First of all, it is proposed that this should be a convention as in this article. As such it should be codifying the current practice but as has been pointed out, all articles on relevant Icelandic localities and as far as I can see, also on relevant Icelandic people, use the Þ in the relevant places. Therefore, writing in a convention that we should not be using Þ seems to be going against convention. I might also note that the English wikipedia is not unique in using the Þ. Check the interwikilinks at Þingvellir, Þjórsá and Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir.
Another problem with this proposal is that it is far too specific. As our page on thorn notes, this letter is only used in writing Old English and Icelandic. I haven't seen any article on an Old English subject use the letter in the title so this proposal seems to only affect articles related to Iceland. As such it would be much more natural to discuss the use of diacritics and ligatures in Icelandic at the same time.
Now, even though the proposal is maybe less than ideal, the discussion has been very good. In particular, there have been raised several points which I think are very good to bear in mind:
#We must take care and not go against the common names principle. This applies e.g. to Althing, which is there and not at Alþingi (the modern Icelandic form) or Althingi, but quite properly both of these exist as redirects.
#Redirects are easy to make and should be used unsparingly. This is generally the case currently, e.g. Thorgerdur Katrin Gunnarsdottir, Thjorsa and Thingvellir but it certainly wouldn't do harm to emphasise this.
#We must think of the indexing. In categories which all or almost all of the entries will be related to Iceland it might be acceptable to have Þ in the index but this is debatable. In general categories I do not think this is acceptable. See e.g. Category:Seismic faults where Þingvellir is under Þ. The ideal solution would be for a change of software which would sort Þ as Th or even better, give two entries, one at Þ and one at Th. It is very common in indices to have multiple entries when it is reasonable to expect that people might look under many names. This, however, requires a software change so for a more immediate solution, I feel we should reindex the entries manually. By this I mean, edit the Þingvellir entry and make it read Thingvellir. I feel that the correct way of doing this would be suggesting it here, see if people like it, implement it, see if people still like it and then write it in a convention. I would be very willing to help in doing this.
#:See below for a suggestion of Phil which I think is superior to what I came up with. Stefán Ingi 11:55, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: On that categorisation aspect, are you aware that it is quite acceptable to add a category to a REDIRECT? I have done so at Thingvellir, and also added  which I commend to you as A Good Thing. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 10:29, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for that info. I was sure I had read somewhere that categories for redirects didn't work but clearly I should have gone and tested it. I also think  is very useful. Stefán Ingi 11:55, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Convention off track 

message: I dislike this proposal very much. Insisting on redirects from other likely spellings is fine, but insisting on an incorrect or inconsistent spelling is absurd. This seems to be an attempt to push the loss of diacritics (etc.) from article titles by the back door, one letter at a time. Þ is no more or less special than ß, and roughly the same arguments apply to both. I can foresee a success here being used to justify similar policies for ß, š, Å, Ĳ, and all the others. Treating letters individually is absolutely not the way to go. Yes, for some people they're unfamiliar and difficult to type, but that's what redirects are for. Please abandon this proposal. --Stemonitis 12:13, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: What we're all going for here is to try to implement the policy to use English names. This will necessarily result in something different from the original if the original contains elements that cannot appear in English. The question is which elements are to be construed as ones that cannot appear in English. Is any difference from the original to be considered a misspelling?  The reductio ad absurdum of that position would be the argument (which I'm sure I'm not the first to raise) that Mao Zedong should be moved to 毛泽东 and Myanmar to . No one wants to misspell anything, but we are trying to decide where to draw the line between that extreme and what's acceptable. I don't think you've really addressed that question. - Nat Krause(Talk!) 04:31, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thorn is considered to be part of the Latin alphabet as far as I know. Ardric47 04:59, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think that the term "Latin alphabet" is somewhat ambiguous: it refers to a variety of European scripts which have a lot of overlap. The Wikipedia article on Latin alphabet currently defines "Latin alphabet" as having 26 letters, although I think this is a bit of an overstatement. Certainly, thorn is a letter of the Icelandic alphabet, which is itself essentially a Latin alphabet. It has the distinction of being one of the few letters in European scripts which is not a modification of one of the original Roman letters. So, I don't think it's accurate to say that thorn is part of the Latin alphabet without qualifying which Latin alphabet is meant. - Nat Krause(Talk!) 23:40, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This report considers thorn (or apparently more properly þorn) to be part of "the" Latin alphabet, as does Unicode (the characters are "Latin Capital Letter Thorn" and "Latin Small Letter Thorn"). Ardric47 01:39, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Oppose 

message: Is there any likelihood of the treatment of this topic turning out different from that of the eth (Ð, ð)? If not, why don't we combine them and move this to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (thorn and eth)? - Nat Krause(Talk!) 04:33, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  eth? 

message: From my own read of this page, it looks like there's a consensus to make this a formal guideline.  Why has it been labeled as "inactive"?  What else needs to happen for it to move forward and get out of "proposed" status? --Elonka 00:47, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It is labelled inactive. This might be because it was discussed a bit in January, and the reception was very mixed to say the least and it was not moved up to being a policy or a guideline. Then the discussion sort of died out, maybe once a month somebody said something there were a handful of replies or less. Stefán Ingi 01:03, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Consensus