Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/蜀

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was absolutely no consensus whatsoever, the discussion is probably more wide-ranging than this one article and should continue at another location. Black Kite (t) (c) 10:56, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

蜀

蜀 (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log) • Afd statistics

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Andyjsmith, who probably is a new pages patroller, re-directed 蜀 to Shu, which, upon examination by any user who doesn't bother to take a second look, gives the inference that all Chinese terms with a pinyin of "Shu" are 蜀, which is worse than a fallacy. Because I wish to get on to other tasks other than provincial abbreviations, I believe that the compromise solution will be to delete the title, as I still believe that such a re-direct is inaccurate. HXL's Roundtable, and Record 00:26, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

• The above nomination was misformatted; I am just the person who reformatted it, not the nominator. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 03:40, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
• Delete. This is the English Wikipedia. If this character means anything to a user, that user is probably not going to expect to find an explanation or disambiguation of it in the English Wikipedia. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 03:40, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
  • "If this character means anything to a user, that user is probably not going to expect to find an explanation or disambiguation of it in the English Wikipedia" is an incorrect assumption. Many Anglophones speak foreign languages but would prefer to read English where it's available, or they prefer using the English Wikipedia because other language Wikipedias are less complete. Thus it's quite common for people to paste foreign-orthography terms into the English Wikipedia search box. See for example the 노무현 redirect, which got more than 1000 hits in the days after he committed suicide cab (call) 02:27, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
    • I am now recommending redirecting to Shu in hopes of helping build a consensus for that and avoiding a "no consensus" keep. I would prefer that a Chinese character not be the main title for a page in the English Wikipedia, but if it were a redirect that could be acceptable. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 14:29, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
      • Bandwagon, anybody? Recommending a position that you do not firmly believe in just for the purpose of creating a consensus. It does sound like you believe this is an election, but it is not. Sorry. If a decision to keep has been built on consensus, there has been consensus... And there already are quite a few titles (not re-directs) at Chinese, yet few have complained. --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 14:38, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
        • As to the last issue, see Andy's comment below at 15:48, 16 November 2010. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 15:59, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
          • As a small note, Metropolitan90, remember to indicate the time zone, as, though I knew quickly that was UTC, there may be other users reading this debate who may not immediately know which time zone you are referring to. --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 16:03, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. -- Jclemens-public (talk) 04:10, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
• Keep as these kinds of disambiguation pages are very useful when trying to disambiguate between article which may all be known by the same character, but be about different things. ···日本穣^? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WikiProject Japan! 07:26, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
• Merge to Shu, keeping the redirect. I don't follow the reasoning that the redirect "gives the inference that all Chinese terms with a pinyin of "Shu" are 蜀" at all. On the contrary, it implies that all Chinese terms with 蜀 can be found at Shu. —Angr (talk) 07:54, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

well maybe you did not read me correctly. At least to me such a redirect or merge gives the very idea that all "Shu" are 蜀. Such a redirect would be fine iff all cases of [pinyin-isation] presented are indeed [character] 文山. As such an interpretation is possible, it can't be discounted. It follows from the same reasoning that all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. Get it? Moreover, there are Non-East Asian terms on that page (did you read the entire page?). Hence the re-direct/merge becomes even more ridiculous. --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 14:21, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

I read you correctly, I simply disagree. Such a redirect does not suggest that all "Shu" are 蜀, but rather that all 蜀 are "Shu". If all information about 蜀 can be found at Shu, that's sufficient reason for a redirect, with no implication that 蜀 is the only meaning of Shu. Disambig pages have redirects from lots of things that are only subsets of what's listed on them. For example, Gloria (song) redirects to the disambig page Gloria, because every song called "Gloria" is listed there. The redirect Gloria (song) → Gloria doesn't imply that everything listed on the disambig page is a song. —Angr (talk) 07:05, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Angr, the fact that there are Western terms on that page is grounds enough to avoid the re-direct. The re-direct would be more appropriate if everything on that page were Chinese, but that's clearly not the case. Plus I believe the case you use, though valid, is dissimilar. --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 13:18, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

No, I disagree. The redirect just takes users who are interested in 蜀 to the page where they can find the information about it, with no implication or expectation that they won't find anything unrelated on that page. That's the difference between articles (one topic per article) and disambig pages (a wide variety of possibly unrelated articles that happen to spelled with the same string of letters). —Angr (talk) 21:06, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

whatever. the last sentence doesn't address the question at hand and is fairly obvious. I believe you are twisting what I said. I know what the potential re-direct does and what should be found on the potential target. It is simply not true that all 蜀 are "Shu"; the province is one example, and it should be removed immediately from the page: Does Sichuan equal "Shu"? what do you think the answer is?

Like it or not, the re-direct does imply that all "Shu" are 蜀, which is downright wrong: take for example, the two cities of Taizhou in Eastern China. Just because all 泰州 or 台州 are Taizhou, do we re-direct to that DAB? NO. And clearly a re-directing both of them to "Taizhou" would be WRONG. Not all Taizhou are 泰州！Your reasoning is ridiculous! You are pretending that you are qualified to participate in this discussion when you clearly are not! --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 22:15, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Once again, please be civil. You brought this ridiculous AfD and there's no reason to shout at people who choose to participate. Anyone can chip in if they wish, and if you don't like what they say you must make the point politely so the closing admin can reach their own conclusions. And on that point, please note my comment further down this page that a page with a Chinese title is against policy - it should have been "Shu" all along. andy (talk) 22:31, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Andy, I am not the one guilty of baiting editors. And whether a person's tone is aggressive is up to interpretation, chiefly of the person being directed at. --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 03:12, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

• Redirect to ShuDelete. I already did the merge but the nominator reverted my redirection. It's brain-dead simple: if you search for 蜀 you should go to an article with that title; but the article is a wholly contained subset of Shu so you should be redirected there, ideally with a targeted redirect. andy (talk) 10:27, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

  to you it may be "brain-dead simple" (don't use such a term; that's blunt), but not to others. Read my response to Angr to see why I disagree, and respond there. --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 14:21, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

  Since most of us don't speak Chinese it would be more appropriate to explain our error than to shout at us about it. There was no reason for you to bring this AfD in the first place. If I understand your nomination you seem to be asking for the article to be deleted (which you could have done without an AfD) rather than suffer the ignominy of a redirection which, for reasons you cannot explain to mere "new pages patrollers", would be wrong. What's going on here? As I said earlier, if a user types 蜀 into the search box and clicks Go, what exactly should they find? andy (talk) 00:16, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

  Once again, you ought to both read what I wrote and soften your reactions. Boldening, italics, and caps (when used sparsely) serve to emphasise and are not necessarily shouting, something which you ought to learn. --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 00:41, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

• Redirect per Angr and Andy. I don't really see the point to this coming to AfD. Handschuh-^{talk to me} 02:28, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
• Keep per Nihonjoe. There is ample precedent for foreign-orthography disambiguation pages: Category:Disambiguation pages with Chinese character titles, many of which have been kept at AfD. People tend to go through these pages when there is potential ambiguity about how it could be spelled in English, either due to multiple competing systems of romanisation, or multiple potential languages the foreign characters could be read in resulting in multiple pronunciations (e.g. Chinese vs. Japanese, Arabic vs. Persian, Russian vs. Mongolian). In any case definitely don't redirect to Shu --- as HXL49 points out, this would be inaccurate and confusing. cab (call) 02:27, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

  Thank you! Finally someone who explicitly agrees with me that the re-direct that Andy proposes is inaccurate. --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 02:31, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

• Redirect to Shu per WP:Use English and WP:Redirects are cheap. All of the DAB content Nihonjoe refers to is there, so I don't see any real need to duplicate it here. On the other hand, inaccurate use of Chinese writing is not a policy concern on English Wikipedia, so far as I know. I note, too, that Shu contains links to three Wiktionary pages and mentions both 属 and 树. Therefore, I don't see any terrible consequences of keeping the title as a redirect. Cnilep (talk) 02:56, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

  then if English WP does not value accuracy when the information does not need a source for verification, then we have a major problem here. WP: Use English can be struck down because there exist many DAB pages with a Chinese writing.

  well did you see the existence of non-East Asian terms on that page? Adds to the graveness of merely re-directing the damn thing to "Shu". --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 03:13, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

  I'm sorry, but no, it doesn't. A user who searches for 蜀 and winds up at the disambig page Shu expects to find all information about 蜀 on that page, but he cannot reasonably expect to find no other information about things called "Shu" there. After all, it's a disambig page. —Angr (talk) 07:12, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

• The argument you just presented is some sort of circular reasoning. Obviously if we choose to re-direct to Shu, then the user somewhat have to expect other usages of the term. Whatever. I have my plans, as I will introduce shortly.

• D00D. If a valid character representation were to re-direct to some page, in most cases there ought to be a Chinese wiki-link to that page. But there isn't for Shu, implying something that I shall not explain for now because I have already hit all of you on the head about it. --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 13:38, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

• I think the third way is to re-direct to Sichuan. Obviously if we consider each term represented by the character in its proper name, the province is the primary topic by a considerably wide margin. For those of you who don't know, 蜀 is one of the officially accepted abbreviations of the province. I really should have considered this option before coming to the hard reality that many of you know absolutely nothing about this language. --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 13:26, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

  This is weird - your position all along has been that a disambiguation page is needed because 蜀 might reasonably lead to any one of several other articles, and that's why you created the darned thing in the first place! This AfD debate is taking place at your request - are you now saying that you have changed the basis of your nomination? You could have requested that the page be deleted, you could have asked for a second opinion, but you chose to bring it to AfD and now you're moving the goalposts. This is a waste of everyone's time. andy (talk) 13:41, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

  no. During this debate I never said the disambiguation page is necessarily needed. I changed my position after you had re-directed (wrong thing to do) but before coming to this debate, in order to offer a compromise. The compromise, between my original position of keeping the page and re-directing, is, IMO, to delete the page. You need to learn how to read more thoroughly. And tone it down. I have warned you. You don't want to reach Level 4 --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 14:05, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

  So are you saying that you wish the page to be deleted? Because if so, as you are the author and the provider of the only substantial content, the matter can be resolved very swiftly with {{db-author}} and a non-admin closure of this AfD. Since it seems likely from the foregoing debate that the page will be redirected, which you don't want, then I assume you want it deleted? andy (talk) 14:46, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

  I may be the only provider of substantial content, but since you budged in, I am not the only author. I'm not sure if db-author would be legitimate in that case. Maybe I got the guideline wrong. One reason that I just realised to bring this AFD up was to bring to make people like you show how foolish your reasoning WRT to this manner is. --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 16:58, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

  Redirecting to Sichuan it is, per primary topic. It seems that the only new participants are going to be the ones who don't know Chinese and will thus have a false understanding of the issue at hand. I did my part in not attempting to canvass. It's not like I have the energy to anyway. --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 17:01, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

  "One reason that I just realised to bring this AFD up was to bring to make people like you show how foolish your reasoning WRT to this manner is" So, what you're saying is, this is a bad faith nomination? I would also suggest that you brush up on your civility. Handschuh-^{talk to me} 22:23, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

  No I am not saying it in exactly that way. the word "just" is CRITICAL here. It was not at all my intent at the time, but now that I have come to realise it, you lot are downright embarrassing yourselves. And this nomination was not made for the show; If you read me, I nominated it as a means of compromise, something that Andyjsmith fails to, possibly refuses to (note the word possibly before you go off like a firecracker), recognise.

  And I ask that you withdraw your accusation, which was made after not properly reading what the other poster reads. I would also suggest that you brush up on your patience here before I am willing to work with you at all once more. --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 23:54, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

I didn't accuse you of anything. I asked a question so that you could clarify your statement. Calling other editors foolish and "hitting them over the head" what not is not civil conduct. And you shouldn't use an AfD to try and prove a point. If you want the article changed then take it to the talk page. If you don't get the result that you want there, ask for a third opinion. If you're still not satisfied, go for an RfC. From what I understand, the article in it's current form is exactly how you want it, so how about we close this AfD since only Metropolitan90 is even making an argument for deletion (which seems to have been adequately refuted)? Handschuh-^{talk to me} 02:59, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

ok. I misunderstood your intentions, and I apologise. I viewed it as a sort of reprimanding, but evidently it was not so. and do I really have to repeat over again? I guess I am not being clear enough. The article in its current form is not my strongest preference. I'm fine with (no strong preference for any):

1. a deletion on the grounds of accuracy and duplicating of content
2. no modification
3. or a re-direct to Sichuan, but nothing else. --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 03:17, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Keep with no modification, since it currently serves the purpose of disambiguating the Chinese character as it should. The disambiguation page for Shu lists all terms that could be meant by Shu (including any pinyin variants), so it is appropriate to have both pages. I also think that this AfD should be closed, since there is no serious policy based argument to delete it entirely and this is not the appropriate place to debate the form in which it should be kept. I think the take home messages are:

1. There's nothing wrong with having two disambiguation pages for different terms with overlapping meanings (US, USA and United States for one obvious example).
2. Pages shouldn't be refered here when the question is really one of what form the page should take (redirect to A or redirect to B or merge: have it out on the talk page of the article or the editor with whom you have the disagreement). Handschuh-^{talk to me} 07:12, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

• Comment. There's a policy issue here which we've all overlooked, but it's there in black and white. Wikipedia:Article titles states that "Names not originally in a Latin alphabet, such as Greek, Chinese, or Russian names, must be transliterated. Established systematic transliterations, such as Hanyu Pinyin, are preferred", and WP:EN says the transliteration must be "into characters generally intelligible to literate speakers of English". The guideline at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Chinese) states that "The article title itself is normally the pinyin representation with the tone marks omitted". So it's clear that 蜀 is forbidden as an article title, even for a DAB page, and should be rendered as Shu. The only outcome of this debate that is compliant with policy and follows the guidelines is to delete the page. I'm changing my !vote accordingly. andy (talk) 15:48, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

• There already are plenty of DABs at a Chinese character title, but changing them to pinyin would be strongly inappropriate in some scenarios. Realise that not all of East Asia is mainland China. An example is the second character of Tokyo (go look yourself; I'm on a comp that cannot input Chinese). Following your reasoning, because it is a Chinese character, it ought to re-direct to its pinyin-isation. But then you violate naming policies, and then we have some sort of unnecessary Sinicisation. Note that I am countering your reason for deletion and Metropolitan90 once recommended deletion on the same grounds. --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 15:59, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

• The guideline at Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(Japanese)#Article_names may deal with this. I don't know - I don't speak Japanese and have only a few words of Cantonese. But it looks to me like it's all been though out pretty carefully. andy (talk) 16:08, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but you may have misunderstood my point. The second character of Tokyo, kyo in Japanese, or "Jing" in Mandarin, is currently a DAB. A re-direct to "Jing" based on the reasoning in your 15:48 (UTC) comment would discount Tokyo in favour of Beijing and Nanjing. I don't wish to explain further... --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 16:11, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

This "policy issue" is not one which we've all overlooked, it comes up practically every time there's a deletion debate for one of these pages. The article titles policy quite clearly does not apply to redirects, and arguably neither to disambiguation pages. Redirects may be misspelled, spelled oddly, use outdated terminology, use a different variant of English than the target topic, follow a convention which violates WP:NC(CN), use the name of an unnotable subtopic, etc. The only types of redirects that are regularly deleted are those which violate WP:NPOV (e.g. insulting nicknames) or WP:V (e.g. an unverifiable name for a topic), or which are clearly implausible. And if a redirect has more that three potential targets, then it becomes a dab page. cab (call) 16:17, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

• Sorry, but I can't find anything in WP:TITLE that makes exceptions for redirects, still less for disambiguation pages. There's a lot of stuff about misspellings etc, as you say, but it's all within the context of English. andy (talk) 16:25, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

• regarding re-directs...Andy, don't make me go there. The community had such a discussion back in mid-April, and the deletist camp was soundly defeated. --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 16:36, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

• That debate was not about dab pages and in a sense it wasn't even about redirects. It was a procedural matter and the outcome was perfectly reasonable because procedure had not been not followed. The discussion didn't overturn policy nor could it have ever done so. andy (talk) 22:25, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

• Excellent job at distorting the facts. It was reasonable not only due to the procedural fail but due to the reasoning. I am not implying that policy was overturned. I have found nothing in policy banning non-Latin re-directs. --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 22:34, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

• We're not talking about redirects but non-Latin titles in general. The policy is at WP:TITLE. And please moderate your tone. Your edit summary for your last comment was "liar" which is astonishingly uncivil and really doesn't help your case at all. andy (talk) 22:42, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

• Did I imply that edit summaries ever help a person's case? Edit summaries are not substitutions for discussion. And I have every right to say that in light of your extremely confusing direction. What are we talking about here? If you diverge off, it implies many things. You are not helping. You are obstructing, regardless of the intention. I think it is reasonable to presume that a person being lost in a conversation would be irritated. --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 22:51, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Andy, if you look at the list of articles that were deleted in violation of procedure, most if not all of them still exist. So in our case here we should at least maintain the article as a redirect. There is clear value to the project in keeping these pages, and it would be disruptive to the project to start deleting them. Deletion should be off the table at this point.

My understanding of WP:TITLE is to give guidelines for the actual title under which an article is published. Clearly, there is long standing precedent that non-roman redirects can be used, and it's not far from there to say that non-roman DABs should be used if there is ambiguity as to what the foreign characters may mean in English.

Even if current policy technically extends the ban on having non-roman character titles to disambiguation pages, I think the specific nature of cases, where Chinese characters have multiple meanings, demand a more explicit statement of policy. Absent explicit policy, I think ignoring all rules is appropriate, since following WP:TITLE to the letter is not helpful to our non-bureaucratic project.

HXL49, you're going the wrong way about arguing the right point. Advocating for changes that help improve the encyclopedia is helpful, but insulting other editors is not. When we're not civil to one another, the project suffers. Handschuh-^{talk to me} 02:53, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

• I'm not totally convinced but I could just about live with a redirect (which is what I tried to do originally before this weird AfD was raised). IMHO a dab page is an article and therefore shouldn't have a non-Latin title; a redirect is arguably not an article, but it does create a sort of pseudo-title for the real article. Whatever. andy (talk) 23:35, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

I now propose re-directing to Sichuan, per primary topic. --HXL's Roundtable, and Record 23:42, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

• For the avoidance of doubt, I meant redirect to Shu per WP:UE etc. andy (talk) 00:23, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

• Keep as a useful disambiguation page that does not violate any policies or guidelines. 蜀 will be very helpful to readers. Cunard (talk) 08:54, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.