Disputatio Vicipaediae:Titulus

Praecepti nominum paginarum

The enwiki sister of this article mainly concerns titles of articles, and thus only as a special case titles of persons. IMHO, this page should be expanded to cover the same meaning; or another page covering that meaning should take the place of this page in the iw linkings. This possibly might be done by translating the enwiki sister en:WP:AT, but with adaptions.

It is not self-evident that what works for larger wikis work for the somewhat special lawiki. I believe that most WP:AT-sisters implicitly or explicitly refer to the principle of least astonishment; lawiki doesn't have to, but if not, should motivate why. One reason against is the rather small amount of users having Latin as their native or almost native language. Hence, "least astonishment" in practice in the discussions also has been associated with usage of cognate expressions in Roman languages, or in "learned English" terms and phrases with constituends of Latin origin.

Yes, and this is what I have argued for. There is no essential reason Latin must be different from other languages in this respect. Pantocrator 04:59, 21 Martii 2010 (UTC)

Personally, I think that actual usage in Latin texts are of uch greater importance. In particular, word meanings have shifted, both in Romanic languages and in "learned language"; and the actual usage in Latin always should be decisive, when a clear such usage is discernible.

Sure, but the disputes almost always arise over cases where there is no use in established Latin texts. Pantocrator 04:59, 21 Martii 2010 (UTC)

Even this might be a bit self evident than it seems, though; there has been some disputes on what weight to give to "modern Latin" texts. If a scientific concept has only existed in modern time (i.e., for at most 500 years), then it cannot be attested directly in classical sources. In such cases, if nevertheless there is an attested and reasonably uniform usage in scientific texts in (more recent) Latin, then I think this usage normally should be our guideline; even if some may find this actual usage bad and not quite consistent with the classical meaning of the terma. Nevertheless, consistency demands as well as linguistic ones sometimes might overrule this.

Correct. For example, scientific Latin texts around Newton's time used vis to mean force, power, acceleration, and energy, which would be intolerable today. But normally, attested Latin should be the primary guide, up to the time Latin ceased to be an important language. Pantocrator 04:59, 21 Martii 2010 (UTC)

My rationale is a (possibly naive) belief, that this wikipedia may be of actual use, for readers of Latin texts. If they find concepts named with Latin words or phrases, say in a 200 year old treatise of electrical phenomena, then they should be able to get an expanded explanation directly in Latin (and with the ordinary benefits of categories and of both intralawiki and interwiki links).

Well, obviously some disagree as we now have Fluxus electricus pointing to something different than any actual Latin usage of the expression. I already made all my points on this, however, at Disputatio:Fluxus electricus but the person simply ignored them. Pantocrator 04:59, 21 Martii 2010 (UTC)

The important point is not whether you agree or don't agree with this. The point is rather that this should be discussed in connection with such a Vicipaedia page, decided on by consensus, and later hopefully at least make discussions on article names more concentrated to the factual issues - possibly even making some of them slightly shorter. Georgius B 17:51, 20 Martii 2010 (UTC)

Well, I think the point of having a discussion here would be so that we don't have to do it in conjuction with every individual page in dispute. Pantocrator 04:59, 21 Martii 2010 (UTC)

Taking Georgius's final point and Pantocrator's final comment, this reads like an embryonic consensus ... Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 11:49, 21 Martii 2010 (UTC)