Talk:Scotland / Alba

Categories

Some of the pictures in this article (including, quite admittedly, my own) are somewhat specific to other articles. It seems weird to me that a subject that is its own over-arching category, such as Scotland, should also be a standalone article when it features non-miscellaneous images.

Should the Scotland article be retained, but only for generic images of Scotland?

Kouros 18:29, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I guess it depends upon how you see things developing. At some point, hopefully, there will be so many images that greater degrees of granularity would be needed — Scotland: Castles, Scotland: Cities, Scotland: People, Scotland: Miscellaneous Images, etc. — but at this point at least I like having a single place to look for Scottish images vs. having to look at, for example, castles and then trying to pick out the Scottish ones. Tcr25 15:54, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Fair enough. Though from my point of view, I might type in a keyword, for example 'Strathpeffer' now, and get no results, yet bizarrely enough Scotland does. Just my point of view - and perhaps an insinuation that the search facility isn't perfect.. but then again, what in this world is? Kouros 21:08, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Name of this page

This page has been moved a couple of times between Scotland and Scotland - Alba. There's precedence (might even be a guideline somewhere, couldn't find it) than countries have the name they have in their official language, with redirects from English. See Norway, Spain, Italy etc. Countries with two official names have both, België - Belgique. Thus I would believe that Scotland - Alba is indeed the correct name of this page, even if it was originally created as Scotland. I'm inclined to move the page back again, but will wait until other users have had the chance to express their views. We need to settle this, moving the page back and forth without discussion is not the way to deal with this. Finn Rindahl (talk) 11:02, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I put it as just Scotland since thats what the cats are in Wikimedia - Category:Scotland. In its native language Scots, as well as English the name of the country is just Scotland. The Gaelic name "Alba" is more of a nickname, since around 1% of Scottish people speak Gaelic as a second or third language. IMO it would be like moving England to "England - Albion" or United States to "United States - [whatever the Cherokee name for it is]". Its not a sitution similar to Belgium or Switzerland IMO because everybody speaks English (or Scots which is very close). - Thomas Gun (talk) 11:11, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I am concerned about the last edit on the gallery by Thomas Gun, see:- this diff. I fail to understand why the Scottish Gaelic place names were deleted from the page leaving only the English ones in place. Roadsigns in the country all carry place names in both languages, as shown on the linked article. Regardless of the percentage of the population that speak it, it is their national language. This does appear to be a form of censorship and an attempt to suppress use of the language! 82.30.77.192 17:09, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I understand your concern, 82.30. All those places have both English and Gaeliv official names, for Outer Hebrides it's even the Gaelic that's the primary name. There are a lot of good edits in that diff as well (fixing template formats) - I'm reverting none the less. Regards, Finn Rindahl (talk) 17:20, 18 February 2009 (UTC)