Talk:Kolkata/Archive 4

message: Search for google on 
Kolkata + city --  1,500,000 
Calcutta + city  -- 1,450,000 
so the point of using google to support commonly used english usage is not entirely correct. Calcutta as such gets larger number of hits as a number of books, movies, buildings etc are also named after it and this should not be considered here for this discussion. kaal 01:08, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: More on google

message: I am sure Wikipedia's standard based on popularity was made after much thought and for a very good reason. However, I have a few points to remind myself and everyone else about in terms of popularity:
* The only acceptable popularity measure would be a mass survey of people, which is clearly impossible. 
**No. The measure is "Wikipedian consensus about what the 'most common name'" is, arrived at after discussions like this one. There's no way to push a button and get an automatic answer. For easy questions ("Should the last name of the leader who brought India to independence be spelled "Ghandi" or "Gandhi") it doesn't much matter what you do, Google or encyclopedia or what, you'll come to the same conclusion. For "hard" questions, there's no easy answer. What there should not be any debate about is that the policy is "Use the most common name of a person or thing that does not conflict with the names of other people or things." The most common name, not 
***the most "correct" name, 
***the most "official" name, 
***the name used by those most knowledgeable in the topic, 
***the name used by the national group with the greatest interest in the topic,
***the name used in the most recently published atlases (as opposed to the name used in the atlas I happen to have.
**The most common name. That's what we're discussing. My firm belief at this point is that as of 2005 "Calcutta" is still, by far, the most common name. My expectation is that by 2015, the New York Times and the BBC will be using new style sheets, I will have bought a new atlas, the high school classrooms will have new textbooks and new maps, and "Kolkata" will be the most common name. As of 2005, it is not. Dpbsmith (talk) 19:01, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: But we don't use incorrect names—what kind of encyclopedia would this be then?  My favourite example: every schoolchild's best known dinosaur Brontosaurus, three-to-one Google search results leader, redirects to Apatosaurus.  —Michael Z. 2005-03-8 00:32 Z
* Taking samples, while a good approximation, is still only an approximation and might give biased results; statistics would support this view.
* When using Google or BBC hit counts, please do not ignore effect of the elusive fourth dimension, time. How many of the hits returned were written before the Government changed the official English spelling? Should we be interested in only post-alteration articles or not? Does BBC use Kolkata in recent articles and TV coverages?
**Over 50% of those references to Calcutta (i.e. well over 100) came after the official name change. The most recent usage was on 28 February 2005. Of the ten total usages of Kolkata, five were used by members of the public (mostly residents) in posts to 'Have Your Say' sections, one was actually "Calcutta (also known as Kolkata)", and three were in articles connected to the name change. That leaves a single article in which a BBC correspondent actually referred to the city as Kolkata. I think we can safely say that the BBC still calls it Calcutta. -- Necrothesp 22:22, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

text: When the BBC and the NYT become good metrics as to the prevalance of common usage in Indian English, I'll give this argument some credence.  National variety of English is specifically endorsed by the manual of style, why should the naming conventions be any different?  If these discussions are always going to come down to "unqualified majority usage rules", we might as well just say "US usage everywhere" and have done with it.  Alai 02:16, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Popularity measure