Talk:Frédéric Fontang

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Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Move. Jafeluv (talk) 06:13, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

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Frederic Fontang → Frédéric Fontang – Sorry but seems this is the only way. Move per WP:FRMOS and every other French Frédéric on en.wp, but more importantly delete double-barreled lead currently " Frédéric Fontang (or Frederic Fontang)[1 tennisworldusa.org] " as contrary to WP:OPENPARA examples, and note that tenniscanada.com reports the same story with " the man who has coached him since he was 12 years old, former player Frédéric Fontang". In ictu oculi (talk) 05:48, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

• Support; more accurate spelling. bobrayner (talk) 09:14, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
• Support move per encyclopedic accuracy and removal of WP:UNDUE and WP:POINTy remark about unnotable "alternative" spelling. HandsomeFella (talk) 20:01, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
• Support. We respect the orthography even an American born-and-bred, so there's no reason to ignore it for a Frenchie, whose words are littered with the little diacritics. -- Ohconfucius ^{ping / poke} 09:23, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
• Support per nom. Jared Preston (talk) 07:56, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

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

"often spelled as Frederic Fontang"

WP:BRD requires D, discuss. this revert is in line with RM above, RfC overwhelming consensus and close, yadayada, etc., Talk:Frédéric Vitoux (tennis), which see... In ictu oculi (talk) 01:13, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

Fyunck, I see you pushed the edit back in, but please don't communicate by edit summaries. Either Talk at Talk:Frédéric Vitoux (tennis) or Talk here. The guideline is WP:Bold, Revert, Discuss not WP:Bold, Revert, Discuss, Don't discuss, Bold again for a reason. In addition to User:bobrayner, User:HandsomeFella,User:Ohconfucius, User:Jared Preston in the RM itself, User:Colonies Chris replaced: Javier Sanchez → Javier Sánchez, Emilio Sanchez → Emilio Sánchez, , CA → , California, Jeremy Chardy → Jérémy Chardy, Franco Davin → Franco Davín using AWB) User:Jevansen removed your edit with summary (Request to remove double-barreled lead was supported) these are editors who have not expressed support for your English names here. It has been noted that your edits always end on top, but there comes a point when pushing through edits with so many editors asking you to stop becomes disruptive. What do you think that point should be? 20 editors? 40? 80? Do you have a number in mind as to how many editors need to disagree with these edits before you leave it alone? In ictu oculi (talk) 07:06, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

I will discuss with others. Fyunck(click) (talk) 05:32, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

Acceptable, you have a choice of several dozen editors who have reverted these leads. Please feel free to ask any of them why they reverted. In ictu oculi (talk) 05:50, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

They'll need to ask me. Fyunck(click) (talk)

RfC on footnote

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Should this article contain a footnote "a. often spelled Frederic Fontang[9]" In ictu oculi (talk) 07:27, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

• No - as proposer. In ictu oculi (talk) 02:08, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

• The last RfC on this exact issue was no consensus, but lets word it a bit more encompassing to your own practices. Run of the mill is open to extreme interpretation and finagling. At least we'll know where wiki stands on this regardless of sources and article.

Fyunck(click) (talk) 08:11, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

• Comment - I think we have to take this case by case as opposed to a blanket censorship approach. Tennis players are governed by the ITF and also either the WTA or ATP. My understanding is they must also register with the ITF with a non-diacritic spelled name. Female players may also register with their country's Federation Cup, and males likewise with Davis Cup. The public at large will be exposed to the spelling used by these official organizations. Our readers will also see spelling used by Wimbledon, Australian Open, French Open and US Open... along with all other important tournaments. This is an English Wikipedia so readers will also be influenced by how the English newsprint, television, and network news spells individual names. Many players have their own Facebook and personal websites that we can also check. Though this wikipedia is in English we also will look at foriegn websites to check their native States spelling. We use Everything to help us determine article titles, spelling in leads, alternate spellings, common renderings, common name, etc. I would look at this as it's one thing to disregard all these sources and spell an article's title that agrees with the lesser percentage of sources. It's either/or, so consensus can only go one way. Same with the exact lead spelling... we can only have one lead spelling and if consensus says go with the 10% usage, that's what wikipedia goes with. I may not always agree with that approach, but it is what it is. That's the way we work with either/or situations.

However to ban/censor all mention, ever, in an article that a person's name is spelled differently by the vast majority of important English sources (usually the very sources that make this player notable to begin with), is against the fabric of wikipedia. It's not like we are hurting for space, this is not trivial because these spellings are everywhere in our faces and easily sourced. Some players have only governing bodies as sources and no English press. That is a different beast. But in many many cases we have lots of coverage in English, and to actually excise from wikipedia the spelling that is most common in English, and to make sure it cannot be placed in any part of any article (no matter how far buried) would be confusing and a disservice to our readers. If anyone other than IIO has any questions of how these names are handled in professional tennis please ask me here or my talk page and I will do my best to answer and clarify. Thanks. Fyunck(click) (talk) 08:52, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

additional note - I now see, since my comment was posted, that wording has changed to only being about this one particular article and one particular style of portraying a players well-sourced common name, instead of an outright ban encompassing all of wikipedia. That's very different. With this new scenario we can try different placements and different wording to accommodate all editors views. I'm open to any viewpoints that don't censor heavily sourced material. Myself and others have found the (a) footnote to be the least obtrusive choice while still conveying sourced info, but this can be handled many creative ways. I can't recall who first created and suggested the (a) footnote for these cases. I believe it was a previous compromise from other choices in the past. Fyunck(click) (talk) 09:43, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

• Probably, if it's true. Is it? One example is given. If you want to get technical, we don't allow any number of examples to ref a fact, but as a practical matter we do do this often enough. But could we we get more than one example? That could be an outlier.

If it is true -- my gut guess is that it is, since some publications shun diacritics -- then why not add the note? In theory, without the note, a person could read "Frédéric Fontang" and "Frederic Fontang" and think that they were two different people with two similar but different first names. If the retort to this is "Well anyone will figure out that that's not the case", my reply would be, you never know, and anyway why leave it to the reader to puzzle things out when it's not necessary. If we have a data point that will make their life easier, why not provide it.

Rather than "often" it could read "sometimes". That doesn't much matter. Herostratus (talk) 19:02, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

Hi Herostratus, not sure what you mean. No source with a complete font set spells a French Frédéric as "Frederic" - the footnote "a. often spelled Frederic Fontang[9]" is misleading, since no spelling is involved. "a. often appears without French accents in sources without French fonts as Frederic Fontang[9]" would be a more meaningful statement. No "spelling" takes place. The current footnote suggests the person's name has two spellings, which it does not, it is no more meaningful than "Frédéric is フレデリック in Japanese fonts". In ictu oculi (talk) 10:26, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

Hi. Well, if a source renders "Frédéric" as "Frederic", it doesn't matter whether that's because they lack a complete font set or for some other reason. Tennis World uses "Frederick" and so does the ATP World Tour website and the Australian Open website and Tennis Explorer and The Palm Beach Sun-Sentinal and some other sources. Why they do this is not important.

Whether "Frederic" and "Frédéric" are different spellings, I don't know and it doesn't matter, since we can say "...rendered as Frederic" or "...given as Frederic" or whatever.

Tracking down those sources lead me to conclude that it is true that some sources use "Frederic". The argument could be made that they do this because they're semi-literate morons, lack decent publishing software, are lazy, are egregiously anglocentric, or whatever, but none of that matters. What matters is that they do do it. So what's the harm in mentioning that? What's the downside?

I take your point re ""Frédéric is フレデリック...", but this is the English Wikipedia. The Japanese Wikipedia probably should include フレデリック, and the French Wikipedia need make no mention of "Frederic" unless they think it's useful. This being the English Wikipedia, how English-language sources render a word is germane. Herostratus (talk) 13:53, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

Hi Herostratus, it does matter if it is fonts or spelling if we intend to claim "wikt:spelling."

However the main problem here is why this one BLP, and not similar American and British BLPs? In ictu oculi (talk) 22:58, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

I guess. We could change those articles too I suppose. If there's a de facto agreement, tradition, or understanding that, for words containing diacritics the non-diacritic version (assuming there is one and its used by some sources) shouldn't be stated somewhere as an alternate version (or spelling, or whatever), then probably that should be stated somewhere as a guideline? This would prevent case-by-case arguments as we have here -- you could just point to the rule. That's pretty much what most of our rules are for, to codify generally accepted practice. Herostratus (talk) 01:52, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes, there's a de facto agreement, WP:MOSBIO where the example is François Mitterand. This is the normal format and followed for all bios. In ictu oculi (talk) 06:53, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

No, there is no agreement on this issue and there are other examples here and in Encyclopedia Britannica, where both spelling are noted for some biographies. Bandwidth isn't an issue here, nor is giving sourced information to our readers. Fyunck(click) (talk) 07:22, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

The 07:22 comment indicates that Fyunck(click) doesn't accept the de facto agreement, nor accept WP:MOSBIO, however the term "de facto" agreement does accurately describe that 99.999% of en.wp articles do follow WP:MOSBIO. The only ones I'm aware of that don't is where Fyunck(click) has added ASCII names to leads. In ictu oculi (talk) 09:55, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

* No. Per Iio's point. Iceland's Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir is known in English as Johanna, but that isn't mentioned in her article. Similarly, François Hollande is Francois but that isn't in his BLP. In fact, I looked at a half-dozen BLP's and found not one "also spelled as" footnote or lead clutter in any living person who is from a non-English-speaking country that essentially uses Roman characters. EBY (talk) 22:59, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

Well why not? (In fact, the infobox is titled "Johanna Sigurdardottir" FWIW). I don't see any harm in introducing the alternate rendition if it's in general use. Most of us just treat diacritics as their closest English equivalent (é=e, ó=o and so on) anyway. I have no idea what "ð" is, it likes like "o" so I treat it as "o", giving "Siguroardottir". Fortunately the infobox does have a transliteration, "Sigurdardottir", otherwise I'd be blundering around pronouncing the name significantly wrong, and how would that be helpful? (Obviously the "pronounced [jo͡uːhanːa ˈsɪːɣʏrðarto͡uhtɪr]" is just a bunch of squiggles to me (and most everyone) and of no help). But this is getting a bit off topic. I think that most everyone will understand that Frédéric = Frederic, although a few people who don't know English well may not, and maybe for a for a few people I suppose é will render or print as a grey box. Herostratus (talk) 02:07, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

My goodness. I can't make heads or tails out of this Icelandic name, and it gives me a headache to even try. But maybe authorities and the English press spell it this way too? No idea about how authorities spell her name in English. But tennis authorities , tournaments and English press are crystal clear on their preference for professional tennis players. Fyunck(click) (talk) 07:22, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

I like the word "transliteration" because I think it applies here, when dealing with what looks like a name being stripped of its diacritical marks when handled by English-speaking (though it looks primarily American?) media. (For Johanna, I was pointing to the transliteration of the diacritical accent mark over the 'o' and not the translation of the 'ð' which, fwiw, is a letter that sounds like a hard 'g' and that's another conversation all together, I should think.) It boggles my mind that there isn't a conversation & consensus on this somewhere else in BLP-land - not that I'm against re-inventing the wheel. EBY (talk) 10:44, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

ð sounds like the in her name, not a "hard g". — Lfdder (talk) 11:20, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

You're absolutely right, that's how it should sound. Whether it's how I make it sound is another story.EBY (talk) 12:14, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

• No, it's only written like so in news sources et al due to convenience and the lack of é in the English alphabet, it doesn't need clarifying. It's not comparable to the Scandinavian å, where its anglicised form can be inconsistent; as per Alf-Inge Håland and Anton Strålman. VEO^onefive 17:20, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

• No. Frédéric Chopin will be turning in his grave (somehow we have managed to avoid pointing out common misspellings on that page). Frederic is not a proper "Anglicisation" of Frédéric, which would be Frederick. Jschnur (talk) 02:45, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

• No. Should we go through every Wikipedia page of persons whose names have accented vowels and add footnotes saying that some sources may spell them without the accents? If not, then there is no reason to do it here. Common sense suggests that in an English-speaking world, accented vowels may turn into regular vowels for an array of reasons, including keyboard layout, laziness, and lack of knowledge on the writer's part. There is no reason to footnote common sense. The only reason to add a footnote would be if there was an actual English-language spelling variation using different English letters, such as "Frederic" and "Froderic". Factchecker25 (talk) 12:27, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

Actually with most tennis players it's not "some" sources... it's "almost all" sources. Including every important tennis event, the governing bodies of the sport, and English news print. Do all the other wiki pages of persons also have that kind of backing for alternate spellings? Do other sports have bylaws that must be written forever in English? There's lots of peculiarities in tennis which is why this need not apply to other things like writers and composers. Fyunck(click) (talk) 07:24, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

• No per Jschnur. Misspelling not a translation. Agathoclea (talk) 09:14, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

• No. This is effectively a repeat of the WP:TENNISNAMES siliness, just made less severe and moved two lines down - from the title to the lead section. The whole notion of elevating a trivial technicality to this level has already been discussed to death: in the past I remember we talked about character set issues, IPIN names, a comparison to Dr. Dre's lead section, ... and none of it helps assuage some people, they still think this is a huge verifiability issue. At this point it's really starting to remind me of the Obama birth certificate controversy. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 18:06, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

RfC bot has now closed? removed the RfC In ictu oculi (talk) 08:08, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

RfC part II

The following message was notified to all participants:

Hi. You participated in RfC on Talk:Frédéric Fontang. Per the advice of closing admin "This result sets no precedent for similar articles. To address the other articles, I would suggest a broadly-worded RfC" I have confirmed the title of the second RfC addressing the other 105 affected articles with the closing admin and that follow on broadly-worded RfC is at Wikipedia:Requests for Comment/Duplicate name in basic ASCII character set. Thank you. In ictu oculi (talk) 03:18, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

Other articles

It should be noted that the User is adding variations on the theme to other BLPs.see here, where these additions have been reverted by 6 or 7 different editors. The consensus on Frédéric Fontang is clear above, but when closing, should another, or 105 other, RfC be opened on the other 105 articles affected by these leads. Alternatively would this editor be satisfied with a note in the infobox ASCII name: Frederic Fontang? The User's claim above about WTA and ITF has been overwhelming rejected by WikiProject Tennis RfC last July, and increasing use of French, German and Spanish accents on WTA and ITF websites, see Martina Müller (tennis) footnote for example. In ictu oculi (talk) 06:21, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

I've always been open to compromise and others have reverted you as well. I'm only against total censoring. The infobox seems an even more prominent placement which was why I buried it out of the lead (even though policy says it should be in the lead). "Ascii name" doesn't quite sound right as NY Times, Encyclopedia Britannica, ITF, ATP, WTA, Davis Cup, Wimbledon, US Open, pretty much every tennis event in the world spells tennis players names with the English alphabet. He's also registered under that name. Also spelled: Frederic Fontang would work better. ITF-ATP spelling: Frederic Fontang would also be much better. I guess we would need to put an extra "ITF Spelling" under "fullname =" section of the Infobox tennis biography template. My complaint has almost always been that we do not ban from every article, extremely well sources spellings... not where it is placed in an article. Fyunck(click) (talk) 06:58, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Note : It is true that there is one other tennis editor who has occasionally, in the past, supported User Fyunck(click)'s "also known as Frederic Fontang" type additions, putting them back after the 20 or so dispersed editors and article creators who've reverted those additions have attempted to revert by WP:BRD. But it would be misleading to suggest that of the 100 and increasing BLPs affected by "Tennis names" there is more than this one second editor occasionally assisting Fyunck's BLP lead additions to always remain on top. (Anyone arriving at this page can check this by randomly searching "tennis" + "professionally known as" or any of the other variants and looking at article history).

And as noted before NY Times, Encyclopedia Britannica ITF, WTA are not basic ASCII and do use accents in many cases. In ictu oculi (talk) 07:31, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Of course they do... which is why I check them and many other sources to make sure. When I find a player whose spelling in the English language seems to be 50/50 I've been leaving it alone. And it's also misleading to say the BLP additions have been increasing. As others can check, additions have happened only when censoring of sourced names have happened in other articles. Trying to keep a balance suggested by an administrator, which was nice and stable until IIO started banishing English variants. I'll adjust the template later in the week to see how it looks in the infobox. Certainly not as good as in the prose section where it really belongs, but at least it's not a permanent banning of multi-sourced info. Fyunck(click) (talk) 08:23, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

How's it censorship, do you think people reckon Frédéric Fontang and Frederic Fontang are different people? Lucky you're not a football fan, otherwise this would make your brain explode. FIFA sticks with the conventional 26-letter alphabet[1] and it's only in certain cases where the name needs some clarification on here, never because of the use of a simple ` or whatever. VEO^onefive 20:28, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

If almost the entire English press from New Zealand to Canada spells a name a particular way. The governing bodies of a sport and all the tournaments do the same. We also have players registering using the English alphabet. It's overwhelming and not trivial in the least. To not have that mentioned somewhere in an article is censorship and banishment of information. Maybe wikipedia wants to go that route and permanently ban all sourced versions of a name no matter if it's 999 to 1000 in English usage. We are supposed to use the most common variant for an article title and have the formal spelling right up front. Since that hasn't happened we at least need to show the most common variant someplace. There is lots of flexibility here rather than an outright ban on every article on wikipedia. IIO suggested a creative way to do this and it looks to be gaining traction at Tennis project right now. Fyunck(click) (talk) 20:53, 26 June 2013 (UTC)