Talk:7796 Járacimrman

Untitled

"Named for Jára Cimrman, [...]. Although his name is not mentioned in any encyclopedia, [...]". :) Thue | talk 19:48, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was no move —Mets501 (talk) 02:33, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

Requested move

7796 Járacimrman → 7796 Jaracimrman – This is the proper name per Minor Planet Center http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/MPNames.html Gene Nygaard 08:31, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Survey

Add "* Support" or "* Oppose" followed by an optional one-sentence explanation, then sign your opinion with ~~~~

• Weak oppose - The debate is focused on the use of an accent mark in the name. It is unclear as to whether the IAU recognizes asteroid names with accent marks, but it is possible that the Minor Planet Center's list was written by either a person or a program that did not have the ability to use accent marks. For comparison, the entry for 7796 Járacimrman at the JPL Small Body Database Browser (a NASA website) includes versions of the name with and without the accent mark. This result implies that the renditions of the name without the accent mark are not intentional but are the result of the users' and software's limitations. Therefore, I weakly favor keeping the accent mark in the name. GeorgeJBendo13:38, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

• I've been able to make an á on my computer since I got my first DOS computer over 20 years ago. One way is to type Alt-160 on the numeric keypad, which on a Windows computer still gives the same results as Alt-0225 on the keypad. Then, of course, since it is published on the internet, HTML is another possibility, and á (á) in HTML or á (á) in HTML also give the same results. No matter what software I use, whether word processor, spreadsheet, or database for making this table. Software limitations—nonsense. If this is the (as you have claimed) official naming organization for these bodies, and it officially publishes those names to the world on the internet, then there is no excuse whatsoever for not including this letter if it is part of the official name (or one of multiple acceptable spellings of the official name). Individual user's limitations—nonsense—when this is such a primary role of the Minor Planet Center, somebody needs to be reviewing so that one person's limitations don't cause problems. And, aside from the naming conventions issue (filling the one slot available for an article's name), this makes it clear that the Jacacimrman spelling must be used in the introduction of the article at least. Gene Nygaard 14:36, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

• Oppose: name listed with diacritics (as for all such cases) in the Dictionary of Minor Planet Names, the official reference of the IAU; check the index on Google Books, and the foreword for an endorsement from the Minor Planet Center. Aquilina 18:23, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

• L.D. Schmadel, Dictionary of Minor Planet Names, 4th edition, 2000, Springer-Verlag Telos is not an IAU publication. Gene Nygaard 18:57, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Au contraire; it is the official reference work, and the IAU passed a resolution exactly to this effect: see this resolution from the Proceedings of the IAU:

According to a resolution of IAU Division III at the General Assembly in Manchester in 2000 this publication attained the status of an official IAU reference work. It contains discovery and naming information for all 10 038 minor planets that were named through Nov. 2002

Aquilina 19:09, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Being designated by them as an official "reference work" for them doesn't make it an IAU publication, nor is it an endorsement of the infallibility of the information contained within it (which is primarily dealing with the history and meaning of whatever the asteroids are named after; IAU has no reason to look to an outside reference work to figure out what the names are, since the IAU determines them).

Strange that a 2000 book, also receiving this IAU "reference work" designation in 2000, would be able to include all named "through Nov. 2002". Didn't realize this was written by a prophet. Gene Nygaard 20:05, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

A salient factor in this not possibly being an endorsement of the accuracy of every detail is that this is a post-publication endorsement. Gene Nygaard 20:10, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

• Oppose per Aquilina.--Húsönd 21:25, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

• Oppose per Aquilina. — Knowledge Seeker দ 21:57, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

• Strong oppose. The observatory, where it was discovered, and which is directed by the same person who chairs the Committee on Small Body Nomenclature IAU, uses the diacritics in English texts. Jan.Kamenicek 20:12, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

• Oppose; per Aquilina. WilliamKF 22:51, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Discussion

Add any additional comments here.

As an alternative to George J. Blendo's unverified speculation as to the reasons for the Harvard University list spelling differing from the Wikipedia article name spelling, it is entirely possible that the English alphabet spelling is intended to be the official spelling of the name in English. Can anybody find a reliable sourse to support either of these suggested alternatives, or any other reason from a reliable published source? Gene Nygaard 14:05, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

The asteroid 7796 Járacimrman was discovered on the Kleť Observatory, where they named it. Their proposal, which was written in English and included the diacritics, was accepted. An external link, included in the article, is directed to a web page about this asteroid, provided by this observatory. The observatory is in the Czech Republic, but the page is in English and the name includes diacritics. The director of the observatory is Jana Tichá, who is also the chairman of the Committee on Small Body Nomenclature IAU, so I suppose she should know how the asteroid names should be spelled in an English text. All other asteroid names with diacritics mentioned on this observatory website keep the diacritics in English texts as well.

Is the institution directed by the same person who chairs also the Committee on Small Body Nomenclature enough reliable? Jan.Kamenicek 20:09, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Sure, and the website specifically points out on the page at http://www.klet.org/names/ that "Names are written with all Czech diacritical marks", indicating that this is unusual. A likely and common result, in fact, when any site is published in two different languages, but chooses to use one database for its tabular information, to avoid the headaches of maintaining two different ones. I guess that since they only talk about the ones discovered at their observatory, they won't have to worry about using the diacritics which are not in the Czech alphabet! And if they aren't going to use non-Czech ones, why should we use non-English ones?

So a Czech observatory uses the Czech alphabet in its list of asteroids discovered at that observatory, and an American observatory uses the English alphabet in its list of all of the named asteroids. I'd say that is a fair indication that both have some degree of offical acceptance, wouldn't you? But since we are the English Wikipedia, I'd say we should go with the primary English-language observatory, which according to its article, is "the official organization in charge of collecting observational data for minor planets (asteroids) and comets". Gene Nygaard 21:30, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Well, it is not the same. It is not a Czech observatory, but it is the observatory which proposed the name. If you look at the site, you will also notice a diacritical TeX version of the name, which was the version sent to and accepted by Committee on Small Body Nomenclature. The \' means that there is an acute above the following letter. All the accepted suggestions must be written and are stored in Minor Planet Center in TeX and it is a common practice that the TeX coded names include diacritics.

Pointing out the fact that they use the diacritics is very fair from them. As you have written, some observatories do not use it. And because there are also no redirects at this site, it is important to warn that the diacritics has to be used to find an asteroid. Luckily, Wikipedia has redirects, so I can see no problem: The name can be in the same form as it was accepted by the Committee, and it can still be easily found even when searched without the diacritics. Jan.Kamenicek 22:13, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Of course it's a good idea for them to point that out. But if they only use Czech diacritics, then we should only use English diacritics.

Not having "redirects" isn't really accurate. Any DBMS going back to the early dBASE and before has been able to handle multiple fields, and the results displayed in this database search engine could easily be constructed to accomodate such factors. They don't have to be displayed, even if they are part of the search. You are supposedly dealing with fairly intelligent and computer-savvy people here, sso I cannot see where that would present more than a minor difficulty easily solved. And better solved, too, than the use of redirects. Of course, other equivalences can also be built into the database search engine itself; it is common for database search engines in Norwegian websites, for example, to treat a search for either "aa" or "å" so that they give the same results.

The "form in which it was accepted by the committee" has no particular relevance, when the committee doesn't have any say-so in what the language police of any particular country specify with regard to use of their own language, and when you get to the obvious point that they are also naming this for people who speak Russian, or Hawaiian, or Thai, or whatever. In other words, giving something a name doesn't necessarily mean they specify the exact typography everyone must use to express that name.

Redirects don't just "happen"—you do know that much, don't you? If you fail to see a problem with this in Wikipedia in general, you'd better open your eyes. Get off your collective duffs and get out there and create a whole bunch of the missing redirects here in Wikipedia. And make sure you check out the indexing in categories at the same time, to increase people's chances of finding them there. But of course, you know that, Jan; you created the redirect for this article right away; unfortunately, most of the rest of the diacritics-happy crowd doesn't have that much sense.

The asteroids in general are much better at this than any other area in Wikipedia—but even the asteroids don't all have them right; some are missing redirects, some are not sorted right in categories. Sure, a lot of the articles do have redirects from the names without diacritics—but that is in many cases due to the fact that they are old articles which were moved from an article name without diacritics, and the redirect remained behind. The articles created since the software change to UTF-8 are more likely to have problems.

And a big problem in this area, of course, is that there are about seven zillion redlinks, not only in all the various lists of asteroids but also in the articles about the discoverers and about the people and places and things that the asteroids were named after, just waiting for somebody to pounce on them and create the articles. Of course, some of those redlinks have diacritics, some do not. There's also no way to connect the ones which do to those which do not, without changing them so that they are no longer red.

Furthermore, even if you have a redirect, failing to have the variants in spelling in the visible text of an article is sometimes going to unnecessarily hide existing information from various searches, including not only many different search engines but also the various browsers' find on this page searches which are almost always strictly literal.

Of course, in many cases, there are more than one way to transliterate many letter with diacritics. Other times some of the potential diacritics are used, and others are not (e.g. fr:(2055) Dvorák)So there are likely a number of articles which could use more than the one redirect they have now. Redirects from split-up versions of run-together names and vice versa might also be helpful; I don't know how much of a problem is created by the inconsistencies of IAU naming conventions in that regard. Hyphenation, too, and different hyphens and dashes and apostrophes and the like, as in the missing redirect for Klet' Observatory which could well be duplicated if someone ever creates 2199 Kleť. Gene Nygaard 08:18, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

It is quite difficult to suit your demands. First, JPL Small Body Database was given here, but it does not satisfy you, because you do not consider it enough official. Then an entry from the Kleť observatory (which proposed the name) database was presented, but you object that it uses the diacritics only because they list just their discoveries. So I try to convince you that Committee on Small Body Nomenclature and Minor Planet Center accept diacritics in the names, and you reply that it is not relevant, because "giving something a name doesn't necessarily mean they specify the exact typography everyone must use to express that name."

But as far as I know, all the accepted names must be transliterated into English alphabet. The Committee does not accept any name written with Chinese characters, but they accept Latin alphabet including the diacritics.

The Committee does not accept only the name, it has to be accompanied by a citation, written in English of course, explaining why this name was chosen. If the committe does not like the way it is formulated they do not accept it and the discoverer has to rewrite it. The Committee on Small Body Nomenclature accepts and MPC stores also these English language citations (written in TeX code). It means that they officially accept the names with diacritics inside English texts. Not only the above mentioned chair Jana Tichá, but also renowned native English speaking astronomers working in these bodies, like Brian Marsden, have no problems with this.

As for the long part of your contribution dealing about the redirects, it has no relevance to this article. As you also admitted, this article has been well redirected since the very beginning. The fact that other articles are not should be probably discussed somewhere else. Maybe a policy stating the necessity to make non-diacritical redirects should be accepted, maybe some bots could help to solve the problem. But the article 7796 Járacimrman does not have and has never had any problems of this kind. Jan.Kamenicek 20:22, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

So, to summarize, we have

1. The observatory charged with collecting the data on minor planets saying "7796 Jaracimrman"
2. A U.S. laboratory which "builds and operates unmanned spacecraft for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)" and has nothing to do with asteroids per se saying both "7796 Jaracimrman" and "7796 Járacimrman".
3. A Czech observatory which discovered it saying "7796 Járacimrman".

What does that add up do? At best, an indication that two different spellings are in use.

Then we throw in a whole lot of speculation and/or original research as to exactly what the IAU does determine, what languages it uses, etc. The part about "redirects" is directly on point to some of the various speculations you have offered here, about why the Czechs had to warn us that they were using the Czech alphabet because they couldn't make a search using the English letters work.

And, whether or not submissions are accepted in Chinese characters, the Chinese people still have to have a name to call these asteroids, and something to write in their characters for them. So who does determine that, if not the IAU? And if the IAU doesn't determine it for the Chinese, do they also not determine it for the French either (example above)? Not for the Lakota either? Just for Czechs and English? Or what?

The only evidence we have of what the Kirt Observatory submitted to the Minor Planet Center is your unverified speculation.

The only evidence we have of what the Minor Planet Center got from them, and the only evidence of what was approved, is the MPC listing which spells it Jaracimrman. Gene Nygaard 03:04, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

I do not speculate, I know it, although I admit this can be considered original research. I know it because some time ago I used to help writing citations for the Committee to Czech astronomer Petr Pravec. The JPL Database can be considered evidence - if they have the diacritical version (with diacritics not only in the name but also in the citation), where do you think they got it from? Did they go asking some Czechs or is there hidden anybody from the "diacritics-happy crowd" among their employees? No, of course they have it from the MPC database.

As for the characters: MPC determines, which characters does it accept for the names used in the English language citations. And it does not accept Chinese (Thai, Russian...) characters, but it accepts diacritics.

You are right, I think JPL said it was from the MPC database, didn't they?

We still only have the fact that two spellings are in use. While that might be enough to keep the one available slot for this article's name where it is at 7796 Járacimrman, it is also certainly enough to show that any claims that 7796 Jaracimrman in English is wrong are false. Gene Nygaard 13:15, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, I did not notice they mentioned the source.

I have never said that the nondiacritical version is false, I just said that the official version approved by MPC has the diacritics. I think we agree with each other at the point that the nondiacritical version is also used, that is also why I made the redirect shortly after creating the article.

I also e-mailed the chair of the Committee on Small Body Nomenclature of the IAU to find out their official opinion and verify "my speculation". She wrote me back that they approve all names with diacritics and in this way they are published not only in the Dictionary of Minor Planet Names (as Aquilina had already argued above), but also in printed versions of Minor Planet Circulars (which are both English language publications). According to her the reason why Minor Planet Electronic Circulars omit diacritics is the fact that they are written in plain ASCII. Jan.Kamenicek 20:26, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.