Category talk:Rail service vehicles of Deutsche Bahn

Rename

•  Oppose I agree that a better name is needed, but this category concerns (service) vehicles for maintenance of ways of Germany, not maintenance way equipment itself. --Foroa (talk) 11:19, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
•  Oppose A german name for a German subject seems best. A translation will always lose some nuance of the meaning (in this proposal, the "translation" hardly overlaps). Erik Warmelink (talk) 15:21, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
•  Comment "A german name for a German subject seems best" - but that clashes directly with one of the main Commons policies, because under that argument, everyone can create local-language category names because they seem best to him. How are we going to work on Commons if there are Urdu categories for one area, Bantu for another, and Chinese for the next? No disrespect to these languages (heck, the one I am proposing to change here is one I speak very well), but unless its a proper name (like "Deutsche Bahn"), we NEED to modify such cases. So Erik, can you please propose a different translation for Bahndienstfahrzeuge? "Category:Rail service vehicles" seems best, so maybe Category:Rail service vehicles of Deutsche Bahn? Ingolfson (talk) 23:40, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

   Comment, no, I can't give a translation, as I said, a translation loses some nuance of the meaning (and "rail service vehicles" is not exactly the same as „Bahndienstfahrzeuge“). If we would have Urdu names for categories for Pakistani pictures, we would have people with local knowledge working on categories for pictures of Pakistan. I really don't see a need to change those names to English (or Mandarin, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, …) approximations. In fact, I do see a need to attract more local knowledge. Erik Warmelink (talk) 10:43, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

• ... or simply category:Rail service vehicles of Germany. --Foroa (talk) 05:40, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

  That would also include rail service vehicles of Stadtbahnen (so it loses more than just nuances). Once again, there is quite some correlation between speaking and writing German, and knowing something about German rail transport (I am quite ignorant about both). Erik Warmelink (talk) 10:43, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Modified rename

Erik, I do speak German well (it is my birth language after all), and "Rail service vehicles" is exactly the translation of "Bahndienstfahrzeug" (Bahn = rail, train / Dienst = service, duty / fahrzeug = vehicle). Thus, Rail service vehicles of Deutsche Bahn. Ingolfson (talk) 07:10, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

 Agree An English name is the way to go here. "Rail service vehicles of Deutsche Bahn" seems exactly right. --Sebari (talk) 17:07, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

 Agree My own tag. Erik, I get your point regarding "attracting local knowledge". However, as long as there is no technical solution for multi-language category names, it is simply not appropriate to break consistency and Commons rules for that.

If we use non-English category names for subjects that are generic, and have clear English equivalents, then we would also have to accept that people start creating (or changing) categories into their local languages, in the end risking splintering the Commons project into mutually incomprehensible little sub-sections, with every language group toiling away in their own little corner. You could get to a point where I would be unable to find the Category:Transport in Oslo because I do not know what that would be in Norsk - worse, we might get into fights whether to use en:Bokmål or en:Nynorsk. And the internationally usable nature of Commons would be shot. Ingolfson (talk) 10:40, 27 July 2010 (UTC)