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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by TaivoLinguist (talk | contribs) at 18:02, 25 June 2009 (→‎Why is this better than the status quo?: Previous status is not being addressed in the proposals). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Macedonia discussion
Main page (talk)
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Other page titles (talk)
Greece (talk)
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WP:MOSMAC  • WP:ARBMAC2
WP:NAME  • WP:DAB
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Naming dispute
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This page is for centralised discussion of the page titles of the six principal pages relating to Macedonia.

The following are currently disputed

Template:Resolved issues

Proposal A: "Macedonia" solution

Rationale

  • The country is the primary topic of the term "Macedonia" in current common usage in English, in the sense of the WP:DAB guideline, as established through investigation of English-language corpora outside Wikipedia.
  • The country article has far more readers than any other Macedonia article (5 times more than Macedonia (ancient kingdom), 10 times more than Macedonia (Greece), 20 times more than Macedonia (region), and 3 times more than all the other related pages together) (see statistics)
  • The intention of the "primary topic" rule of WP:DAB is not to express value judgments about the historical significance of an entity and its name, but purely a pragmatic intention of making things more efficient for the majority of readers. Therefore, reader expectations based on present-day discourse should be the guiding criterion. WP:DAB defines no concrete cutoff point of how much more common a usage needs to be to qualify as primary, but the country leads so strongly in both page views and web/corpus counts it would qualify under any reasonable criterion.
  • This solution is patterned on Wikipedia's existing treatment of other countries that share their name with a wider or neighbouring geographical region of the same name, notably Luxembourg (disambiguation), Azerbaijan (disambiguation) and Mongolia (disambiguation) and has the advantage of consistency with existing nomenclature on Wikipedia.
  • Published encyclopedias, dictionaries and other reference works predominately list the country as the primary meaning of the term "Macedonia". The majority of readers will expect the country article to be at that name.

Envisaged impact on readers

  • This proposal leads fewer people through the disambiguation page. The majority of readers will immediately reach the article they were looking for. A minority will be one click away from their intended target article, and a yet smaller minority have to navigate back to the disambiguation page through the hat note (currently fewer than 10% of those who used the dab page earlier.)
  • Page view statistics show that the move of the disambiguation page from Macedonia to Macedonia (disambiguation) has not adversely affected readership of the other Macedonia articles.

Compliance with Wikipedia policy

  • Compliant with WP:NPOV's requirement to use "the common English language name as found in verifiable reliable sources".
  • Compliant with WP:NCON's requirement to use the English version of the country's self-identifying name.
  • Compliant with WP:DAB's requirement to use the term indicated as the primary topic for the title of the article on that topic.

Why is this better than the previous status?

  • Improved navigation - eliminates an unnecessary detour through a disambiguation page for the great majority of people who look for "Macedonia".
  • Consistent with nomenclature elsewhere on Wikipedia (country as primary topic, further meanings at disambiguation page).
  • Consistent with external nomenclature, where the term "Macedonia" is overwhelmingly employed in common usage to refer to the country, and therefore the best match with readers' expectations about the meaning of the term.

Arguments against proposal A

  • The country may not be the "primary topic" in all domains of English usage, especially not in older academic discourse.
  • The country's status as one meaning of Macedonia and possibly a primary topic is only a very recent historical phenomenon.[1]
  • Choosing the country as the main topic may be perceived by some as choosing a side in the political naming dispute, in favour of the stance dominant in most English-speaking nations.
  • The semantics of choosing the country as the main topic may be perceived by some as taking sides with one POV coming from the Republic of Macedonia[1]
  • Most generic (not topic-restricted) encyclopedias that resemble Wikipedia in generality have coverage of multiple meanings of Macedonia under the title, "Macedonia" (e.g. Britannica covers four "Macedonias" [2]). Online Britannica directs the user to a disambiguation page when querying any word (including Macedonia). Regarding the order of the meanings under the "Macedonia" entry, in some cases the microstructure of the entries is subject to lexicographical choices (alphabetical, chronological) that cannot be used to infer a primary topic. In the case the arrangement of the meanings in those infers prevalence, it can be showed that there is inconsistently in the choice of the first meaning. Many reliable dictionaries list the region (or the ancient region) first, suggesting the region as primary topic - examples: Merriam Webster[3] and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language[4].

Proposal B: "Republic of Macedonia" solution

Note: If/when you support proposal B, could you, please, indicate whether you prefer the 'standard option' or the 'Option B1'. If you do not indicate anything, it would be assumed you support the standard option.

Rationale

  • The country is not clearly the "primary topic" for plain "Macedonia", because in academic discourse, as documented in counts of Google Books and similar sources, referents other than the modern country (especially the ancient kingdom) have a comparably high prominence. Therefore the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC pattern should not be applied.
  • If readers are taken straight to the country page from a wiki search on "Macedonia", some readers might not realize they are not on the most pertinent page, when the information they are really looking for might be more appropriately found at Macedonia (region) or Macedonia (ancient kingdom).
  • Regarding the country article's title this convention is similar to Wikipedia's current treatment of such cases as:
    Other more loosely related examples exist [6].
  • "Republic of Macedonia" is an acceptable disambiguator because it is also the self-identifying official (constitution) name.
  • This proposal has some advantage over the other proposals in that it can be applied not only to the main article (dealing with the page title of the main country article), but also to other page titles (dealing with the page titles of various sub-articles), and in the text of other articles (how to refer to the country in normal article text in other articles, including articles of international organizations and Greece-related articles). A universal solution applied everywhere looks more neat. It is very easy to see why other proposals can not achieve this: Greece-related articles can not use Macedonia to refer to the country, because Greece has a region with the same name. (But could (in principle) use "Republic of Macedonia" without the possibility of confusion!) That excludes proposal A. "Category:Politics of Macedonia (country)" looks very odd, while "Category:Politics of the Republic of Macedonia" looks decent. That excludes proposal C. And so on. Other proposals simply don't fit the universality criterion (even in theory).

Envisaged impact on readers

  • Readers using the wiki-search function on "Macedonia" will be led through the disambiguation page.
  • Readership of the disambiguation page will be artificially inflated by its placement at the term used by most sources to refer to the country, as was the case before April 2009. However all readers would very quickly continue towards the article they want.
    • With option B1, when typing "Macedonia" and getting redirected to "Macedonia (disambiguation)", the reader would be pointed through the largest letters on the screen (the title) that this is a disambiguation page, therefore would not waste energy trying to read through the text, but probably would first try to find the appropriate link to click on, and only when that fails would have to apply the extra effort to read a few paragraphs, or whatever the disambig page would contain.
  • The great majority of readers will need to take an extra step to reach the article with the greatest level of usage, i.e. the country article.
    • With option B1, when the largest letters on the screen (the title) tell the reader that this is a disambiguation page, he/she would quickly follow through to click once more and will loose less effort than in the case of the standard option when the title page would contain no word "disambiguation".

Note: Option B1 is an add-on to proposal B. It is not an alternative. Standard option and option B1 deal with a matter of taste, or visual perception, if you want: should the reader see the word "disambiguation" in the title or not.

Compliance with Wikipedia policy

  • Compliant with WP:DAB (use simple title for disambiguation page) and WP:PRECISION (prefer precisely specified names when ambiguity exists) under the premise that there is no clear "primary topic".
  • Compliant with WP:NCON's criterion favouring the English version of the country's self-identifying (constitutional) name [7][8].
  • Compliant with WP:DAB suggestion that "If there is extended discussion about which article truly is the primary topic, that may be a sign that there is in fact no primary topic"
  • Compliant with suggestion of WP:Naming conventions (common names)#Do not overdo it that "if there is no agreement over whether a page title is "overdoing it", apply the guidelines at WP:PRECISION"

Why is this better than the status quo?

The title of the country article would be unambiguous. In no circumstance would any reader find himself directed to an article he didn't seek for. This version would be the least likely to raise objections. No one is likely to think of this solution as representing any POV on any matter.

Arguments against Proposal B

  • Less efficient than A for the majority of readers using the wiki search function.
  • Minor practical issue: every proposal except A (and E) will require substantial cleanup of a large number of incoming wikilinks pointing to plain Macedonia and meaning the country; that should be changed to the appropriate target rather than a disambiguation page. This pratical issue is labeled minor, because a bot can solve it; nevertheless a bot would have to be set up, so it is not zero-effort.
  • The use of full formal names is generally deprecated by Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names), as they "require people to know that name, and to type more." Full formal names are generally only used on Wikipedia to distinguish sovereign states which share a geographical name with another state, namely the two Chinas, the two Congos, the (formerly) two Germanies. There is no other contemporary country called Macedonia.
  • Reference works and cartographic works make very little use of "Republic of Macedonia". The formal name appears to have little common usage, making it likely that the term will be unfamiliar to the non-knowledgeable reader.
  • Some of the examples with which this proposal is compared, e.g. to use Republic of Ireland, not Ireland, are considered by some as controversial, and in the case of Ireland a parallel wikidiscussion is going on.

Proposal C: "Macedonia (country)" solution

Rationale

  • Same rationale for putting the disambiguation page under the simple title as for [B]
  • This solution reflects the practice that the most common naming to be used in article text elsewhere will be plain "Macedonia" and that the rest ("country") is just a disambiguation addition; the common way of linking to it will be through the pipe trick "[[Macedonia (country)|]]".[3]
  • This solution may be more stable than [B] in the hypothetical case that a political solution in the real world is reached, involving a change in the country's official name. In that case, "Republic of Macedonia" as the official name may become factually incorrect, while plain "Macedonia" may well continue to remain in use as the most common informal appellation at least for some time, until the new naming takes hold in practice.
  • This solution is comparable to Georgia (country) with Georgia as a disambiguation page (though note that Georgia is the only country in the world for which Wikipedia uses a "(country)" disambiguator, although not the only country with an ambiguous name).

Envisaged impact on readers

  • same as B

Compliance with Wikipedia policy

  • some points shared with B.
  • Compliant with WP:NPOV's requirement to use "the common English language name as found in verifiable reliable sources".
  • Compliant with WP:NCON's requirement to use the English version of the country's self-identifying name.
  • Compliant with WP:DAB's requirements that when there is no primary topic "the disambiguation page should be located at the plain title with no '(disambiguation)'".
  • Compliant with WP:DAB suggestion that "If there is extended discussion about which article truly is the primary topic, that may be a sign that there is in fact no primary topic"

Why is this better than the status quo?"

  • same as B and additionally
  • focus of editors is directed to more productive issues than arguing about what is the primary topic for a topic that has such a complex state that it needs a Macedonia (terminology) article similar to the American (word) page.


Proposal D: "Region" solution

This was the status quo before 23 September 2005.

Rationale

  • This has been proposed mainly because of its perceived analogy to two other problematic naming cases: Ireland and China. In each of them, the simple page title currently leads to a geographical/historical survey article (Ireland = Ireland (island); China = China (historical region), Taiwan = Taiwan (island)), while the modern country of the same name is at a longer disambiguated title. The same solution is used for the less disputed Micronesia case.
  • The geographical meaning of Macedonia, while not "primary" in the sense of quantity of page views, may be regarded as naturally "primary" in a logical sense, insofar as it is the historically prior meaning to both the country and the Greek province, and encompasses them both.
  • Reflecting the practice of the Library of Congress that uses the label "Macedonia", alone, to cover the region (from antiquity to 1912) in its taxonomy preferences.
  • Many reliable dictionaries list the region (or the ancient region) first, suggesting the region as primary topic - examples: Merriam Webster[9] and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language[10]. However the ordering of the meanings might be irrelevant (reasons explained in rationale against A)

Compliance with Wikipedia policy

  • Not compliant with WP:DAB. It would have been compliant if the region were in fact the primary meaning of the word in English.

Envisaged impact on readers

  • Readers who want to read about the country (the most numerous group) will arrive at the region of the same name, of which the country is part. It is possible that some of the information they seek is in the Region article, the rest is one click forward.
  • Same for readers looking for the other meanings.
  • Readers are unlikely to perceive this as having reached the wrong article.

Why is this better than the status quo?

  • No, or almost no users (as opposed to editors) would perceive that they had landed at the "wrong page." With proper hat notes, they could all be at the right place, or just one click away.
  • No readers will go to the DAB page unless they direct themselves there.

Arguments against Proposal D

  • Not compliant with WP:DAB -- "Macedonia region" is the least common (fourth place) meaning of "Macedonia", it comes after Republic of Macedonia, Macedonia (Greece) and Ancient Macedonia.
  • Landing people on an article about the region is actually the least likely to give them the info they are looking for (because the main usage of "Macedonia" and because of observed page visiting patterns).
  • "Macedonia" in its modern geographical sense is not an inherently salient and natural geographic unit (like the islands Ireland and Taiwan) but a highly arbitrary product of historical coincidences. As such, it is a relevant unit of geographical categorization only for a very short historical time period, roughly from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries.
  • For a reader to navigate onwards to their real target page through a large article is less efficient than navigating onwards through a disambiguation page.

Proposal E: Redirect solution

This would go along with a Macedonia redirects here... dab link

Rationale

Envisaged impact on readers

  • absolutely none since it simulates current status quo

Compliance with Wikipedia policy

  • see B and C about compliance of disambiguated titles for the country page
  • does not contradict WP:DAB in that says that "In some cases, the primary topic may be a redirect to a different article"
  • independent to WP:NAME

Why is this better than the status quo?

  • this proposal simulates the status quo. It is better in the part of using an unambiguous title (as per arguments against proposal A and the rationale of Proposals B and C)

Arguments against Proposal E

  • Not really substantially different from Proposal A in practice: the only difference is that readers won't be seeing the plain name "Macedonia" at the top of the country page but something else instead. But there is no reason to avoid just that, because it is undeniable that "Macedonia" is one common name of the country and hence legitimate in that place in principle. The real problems, namely the issue of prioritising in disambiguation, is not addressed.


Proposal F: Central outline solution

  • The content of the article at Macedonia will serve as a main backbone (a kind of introduction to Macedonia). Since Macedonia region is variable with history, this article should contain at least an outline (brief) description of the historical phases all the way to the present day region of Macedonia. For example, it starts with ancient Macedonia, through to Roman , Byzantine etc. times to the present time (basically these phases correspond to a historical map). Each historical section is covered briefly including hat links to the "main articles". In the section of the present day Macedonia region there would be coverage of all contemporary subregions: (a) the country (b) the region of Greece (c) the Bulgarian province; all with the hat links to their respective main articles.

This could be achieved by modifying the article Macedonia (terminology) (easiest) or the article Macedonia (region) (in which case is a variation of proposal D)

Rationale

  • This proposal may be the simplest yet comprehensive general approach (if all nationalist desires and agendas are removed from the scope of Macedonia).
  • In the case of the proposed modification of the terminology article, then Macedonia could also be a redirect to the Macedonia (terminology) article similar to proposal E. That is because terminology is not the main topic. In the other case, that of modifying the region article, the arguments about [D] apply.

Envisaged impact on readers

  • Unknown but similar to Proposal B in that it will include section hat links to all the other main articles

Compliance with Wikipedia policy

  • Novel concentrative approach, an interpretation of WP:NPOV

Why is this better than the status quo?

  • By the rationale of this proposal it would facilitate lay readers by offering a introduction up front while still giving the possibility of navigating away to any one of the more specific contexts with one click.

Arguments against Proposal F

  • Basically same as against Proposal D (if modifying the region page). In addition, the subjects are too disjunct to be contained in one article, people who search for Republic of Macedonia might not be interested in Ancient Macedonia issues and the other way round.


Proposal G: the UN provisional solution

Rationale

  • Same rationale for putting the disambiguation page under the simple title as for [B]
  • "former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" is an acceptable disambiguator because it is the term used by most international organisations, and more commonly used than the shorter formal name "Republic of Macedonia" according to a Google search ([13]).
  • This is the English Wikipedia, not the Simple Wikipedia, so we should not sacrifice accuracy or policy for the sake of simplicity.

Envisaged impact on readers

  • Same impact as [B].

Compliance with Wikipedia policy

  • Compliant with WP:DAB (use simple title for disambiguation page) and WP:PRECISION (prefer precisely specified names when ambiguity exists) under the premise that there is no clear "primary topic".
  • Compliant with WP:DAB suggestion that "If there is extended discussion about which article truly is the primary topic, that may be a sign that there is in fact no primary topic"
  • Compliant with WP:NC (WP:NCCN to be more precise), by using the most common name of a person or thing that does not conflict with the names of other people or things.
  • Compliant with WP:NCON by using the most common English-language equivalent (since the name is disputed by two jurisdictions).
  • The clause that the title is not uncommon is supported by three criteria found in WP:NCON#Identification of common names using external references, a Google search, usage by organisations (e.g. UN), usage by other international bodies.[14]

Why is this better than the status quo?

The title of the country article would be unambiguous. In no circumstance would any reader find himself directed to an article they didn't seek for. This version would be best adhering to wikipedia policies of common use, while at the same time still using the provisional reference that the country itself agreed to use (under the 1995 interim accord) as official appellation in it's relations with the UN and most other international organizations.

Arguments against Proposal G

  • "former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" is neither the self-identifying term nor the term most commonly used in English, and therefore against both sets of criteria outlined in WP:NCON.
  • As a disambiguator, "former Yugoslav Republic of" is unnecessary, because even where disambiguation is needed there are shorter and less cumbersome alternatives, such as "Republic of"; using an unnecessarily long term is against best practice as described in WP:DAB and WP:PRECISION.
  • As a provisional reference, it is likely not to be stable in the medium term.
  • Using this term may be perceived as taking sides in favour of the Greek POV.
  • This proposal violates WP:NPOV's requirement to use "the common English language name as found in verifiable reliable sources".
  • This proposal gives a wrong impression to the reader that Wikipedia's editorial voice is governed by the naming conventions of a specific organisation (the UN); that comes as challenging WP:NPOV in a way. That is more apparent since the provisional reference was agreed as a consequence of the naming dispute rather than for disambiguation purposes - unlike some other descriptive terms like e.g. Macedonia (Republic) that is used by other neutral sources.

Notes

  1. ^ Loring M. Danforth, The Macedonian Conflict p.4 preview
  2. ^ See current dispute at Wikipedia:WikiProject Ireland Collaboration and Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Ireland article names
  3. ^ Of course, whichever of [B] or [C] is chosen, the two linking techniques "[[Macedonia (country)|]]" and "[[Republic of Macedonia]]" don't technically exclude each other, since both page titles will exist as redirects.
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