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Reasons for discussion request --J JMesserly (talk) 02:13, 31 January 2009 (UTC)
The city of en:Qingdao is sometimes tranliterated as Tsingtau and Tsingtao. According to en WP, Qingdao is the currently the accepted international spelling. Commons is currently using 3 different transliterations and we should use just one. With the one "buildings" exception noted below, the occurance of tsingtau or tsingtao should simply be replaced with Qingdao.[reply]
The following are source cats and might need to be excepted for operational reasons. Someone needs to check with the BARCH group folks that are uploading german archive images, these may or may not be impacted by changing these cat names: I have not cfd subste'd these. I also left the cat for Tsingtau Brewery as it is a commercial proper name.-J JMesserly (talk) 02:35, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Historical categories should continue to use the name that was used at the time. To change these names to modern name is to attempt to rewrite history and is academically incorrect. E.g. Category:Battle of Tsingtao - this was a battle between Westerners and this is the name all the Western literature has used. To change this to Category: Battle of Qingdao is historically silly. If Wikipedia starts wholesale renaming the past it will become a laughing stock : there never was a German colony of Qingdao. Are you then going to change every article in all the Wikis that refer to it ? Rcbutcher (talk) 03:55, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Pardon my ignorance. The Battle of Tsingtao appears to be an accepted fossilized expression, and it appears in en:WP as the title of the article on the subject. Commons does not rename fossilized expressions like French Revolution to Revolution of France even when they violate guidelines because of this status. But is "German military in Tsingtau" a fossilized expression? I agree that using the "name at the time" seems reasonable at first glance, but taking a closer look, things get murky very fast.
First off, if "name at the time" is the rule, then since the official name for Pennsylvania between 1681 and 1776 was "the Quaker Province", are you saying we should also rename Category:Pennsylvania in the 1750s to Quaker Province in the 1750s? If not, why not?
Next question: "name at the time" according to whom? The one that the germans used at the time (Tsingtau), english speakers (Tsingtao), or the local Chinese? Are you saying we should have cats with names Tsingtao, Tsingtau, Jiāo'ào (the transliteration of the Qing dynasty name)- all for the same place? Why do we choose Tsingtau for one cat, and Tsingtao for another? The current scheme appears ad hoc.
Fortunately, these arcane and complicated details have been discussed at length. The current concensus recorded in Commons:By location category scheme is that an arbiter of placenames other than Commons be chosen, and that arbiter is en:wikipedia. En says it is Qingdao, so that is my proposal for the normalized name. But really, if you have some compelling argument for making them all Tsingtau, or Tsingtao then fine. Cats for the same place should use the same name. I don't care which. -J JMesserly (talk) 08:56, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I think you are missing the point, which is that the current usage is indeed Qingdao, but the historic usage in Western languages was variations of Tsingtao. It is standard practice when writing in a language to use the names as used in that language at the time of the events being covered. Hence English writers use Ypres when writing of World War I even though current usage is Ieper. While the Chinese would not have referred to the German colony as Tsingtao, that is what is has been called in English and German historical texts because it was a German construct. To describe events in the German Colony of Qingdao in 1914 in English would be a nonsense. Likewise it be incorrect to refer to Pennsylvania in 1700 if there was no such entity at that time. Rcbutcher (talk) 09:26, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
No, I understand the point. I just think that other factors mitigate the practice of lifting techniques that are standard practice from one problem domain and applying them to another. I doubt many will go along with the idea that Category:Pennsylvania in the 1750s should be called to Quaker Province in the 1750s. I agree that this is proper from the perspective a subject domain experts (who actually might state the correct contemporaneous german term for the colony was Kiautschou). However, the category scheme must also serve the needs of lay users. They shouldn't first be required to educate themselves on what the various correct terms are for Pennsylvania simply because they want a picture of an area located in present day Pennsylvania. -J JMesserly (talk) 17:06, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Let´s have a look at that problem under the aspect of practical research in the internet. When I created some of the categories concerning Tsingtau, I - being a German-speaking historian - had no idea that the correct modern name of this former German colony is now Quingdao. Doing research in German colonial history I would have looked for Tsingtau ( not Quingdao ). I can´t see any sense in using just one term ( Quingdao ) when that poses an obstacle to research. My suggestion: Change all historic categories using the term "Tsingtau" or "Tsingtao" into subcategories to "History of Quingdao". In this case doing research you have the chance to find whatever you like under all terms in use ( Quingdao, Tsingtao, Tsingtau ) -Xenophon (talk) 12:26, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Well, a historian would be aware of the lexographic variation, but certainly kids doing a high school term paper might not. Really, this is a generic problem with search, isn't it? Tarantulas are categorized as Category:Lycosidae, but I don't know biological classification so I didn't know that term. But I can find it using commons search because some images are named tarantula, so I can then traverse the cat tree. Similarly with the variations of Qingdao. The larger question of multilingual support for categories might be solved by sticking the first sentences of each WP article for each language in a navbox with state=collapsed on the categories, then searches for "Jiāo’ào", Chheng-tó-chhī (zh-min-nan WP), 青島, 胶澳,کنگداؤ, 膠澳, چینگدائو,青島市, 칭다오, צ'ינגדאו would all work too. Btw- this is not my idea, and I don't. I think it was User:Duesentrieb that suggested simply taking the article name of the various interwiki'd links. It didn't receive much discussion. My variation is to take the entire first sentence because it usually containst genus terms that a lay user might use in a search expression. Either could be easily done by bot. It might be completely hideable nowdays because searchers like yahoo are now delivering search hits on en:microformats, which is being used on lots of WP and commons pages for stuff like coordinates. It also can be used to declare these synonyms without raising the issue of "spamming" commons. I don't care which way that subject goes, but let's not try to solve it by junking up classifications. A taxonomy is not a thesaurus.-J JMesserly (talk) 16:44, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
A taxonomy may not be a thesaurus, but it is also not a value in itself, it has to be practical. As a matter of fact, a German colony of Qingdao didn´t exist and nobody would look for such a category; its name was Tsingtau or Kiautschau. A high school kid doing a high school term paper in history on this subject will probably be aware of that fact if his teacher is worth his money ( By the the way, I am teaching history to high school kids ). If you look for the modern city of Qingdao, you´ll find it in the category "Qingdao" with a subcategories hinting at the correct historical terms that are in use by everybody in touch with that subject. I don´t care either about the final decision; as you said, for an experienced researcher in Wikimedia ( but maybe not for high school kids ) it will still be possible to find out about Tsingtau. Regards -Xenophon (talk) 22:05, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
In the end it is a balance between competing goals. You guys understand the issues and have good intent. I'll go along with whichever way you choose on this. Really though, I think your point about the need for category synonyms is a huge one- I just don't think the cat structure is the right way to do it. I think Duesentrieb's old suggestion on this was a good idea. Wouldn't be hard to run a bot to do it... Do you you think that if the text were hidden in a navbox that the community wouldn't freak out about "spamming" categories with text copied from WP article names? How about if it were totally invisible (I don't know if it would work, but for example hidden in microformat data)? -J JMesserly (talk) 21:57, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
My only interest in this is to create a user-friendly environment for practical research. A well structured taxonomy is usually one way to reach that goal, tools for using category synonyms may be another, and if it serves the aim to reconcile competing goals - well, that sounds perfect for me. Concerning your last questions - well, I may be good at my issues ( being history and art ) and have a fairly good idea about possibilities to categorize them, but I am absolutely not well informed enough about technical questions like bots, navboxes and the like to discuss it with you. But if you find a way to reconcile the competing goals - go ahead; I would appreciate it if you keep me informed and I will look at the results. Regards -Xenophon (talk) 11:10, 1 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Confession: I was an art major (got involved in computers to pay my way through college, and was astounded at how much programmers got paid for work that seems trivial compared to making art). Anyway, the buddha saying is that there are many paths to the mountaintop. Unfortunately, we really don't have a lot of good paths to the content, and the rigors of taxonomies are not especially pluralistic when it comes to alternative rationales for organizing information, so the category scheme though perfectible can at best be only one of many paths. If I do anything with the synonym idea, you will hear about it on the village pump.-J JMesserly (talk) 16:22, 1 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
