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The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.
The result of the proposal was Move per requst. It appears that variations of Lifan Yuan are the
common title used in English language sources over the current.--
Fuhghettaboutit (
talk) 12:21, 12 November 2009 (UTC)reply
I admit "Court of Frontier Affairs" is a translation from French wiki. As you said, "Court of Colonial Affairs" is totally inaccurate. Google book offers several translations for it, as Office of Barbarian Control(Sino-Russian Relations: A Short History By R. K. I. Quested, P46), Office of Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs(Traditional government in imperial China: a critical analysis By Mu Qian, Mu Ch'ien, George Oakley Totten, P135), Board for the Administration of Outlying Regions(Political frontiers, ethnic boundaries, and human geographies in Chinese history By Nicola Di Cosmo, Don J. Wyatt, P367), Office for Relations with Principalities(Imperial China 900-1800 By Frederick W. Mote, P868), Court of Territorial Affairs(Opium and the limits of empire: drug prohibition in the Chinese interior ... By David Anthony Bello, P65), etc. Because of its diversity, I propose to use the pinyin name - Lifan Yuan in presenting some scholarly translations beside. .--
LaGrandefr (
talk) 00:19, 2 November 2009 (UTC)reply
The title of the article should be the most commonly used English version. The original Chinese and other common English versions should be mentioned (with citations) in the article. Pengyanan appears to understand this policy already.
Bertport (
talk) 00:38, 2 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Oppose move. Lifan Yuan is not an English name at all. Therefore, it is not the most common English name. Nearly all the results returned by Google Scholar for "lifan yuan" also use an English name. What is more, "most common" does not mean "most commonly used by scholars". A simple Google search (not a Google Scholar search) shows that common usage in English favors "Court of Colonial Affairs" overwhelmingly.
Bertport (
talk) 01:18, 2 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Using English name does not mean that the name should be originally an English word. It means the name is "most commonly used in the English-language references" (see
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)). For example,
Kuomintang is clearly not originally an English word, but it is the most common name in English references. So we don't use
Chinese Nationalist Party as the article's title. And
Yuan is also commonly adopted in English sources to refer to Chinese government organizations such as
Legislative Yuan,
Executive Yuan, and
Judicial Yuan. The English names used for "Lifan Yuan" in Google Scholar are diverse. The clear trend is that Lifan Yuan has become the most common name used by English academics. Wikipedia should give the academic references more weight than the general
Google search. Google search is helpful, but not decisive (see
Wikipedia:Search engine test). Please note that even Encyclopædia Britannica also adopts the name
Lifan Yuan. Thanks. --
Pengyanan (
talk) 02:00, 2 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Academics who are experts in the relevant field are given more weight in deciding what is correct in the contents of an article, but the title of the article (and it's the title we are discussing here) gets the most common usage, not the most correct usage or even the most common academic usage. Kuomintang is not only common in academic journals, it is also the common usage in newspapers and in books written for the general public.
Tai chi chuan is not of English origin (for that matter, most English words have some origin from another language) but it has effectively entered the English language in common usage, and has an entry in most good English dictionaries.
Bertport (
talk) 02:51, 2 November 2009 (UTC)reply
No, the actual number of Google results for "Court of Colonial Affairs" is the large number (191,000, or 207,000 - it seems to keep finding more as you keep using the search). At the bottom of the last page it explains that it is only displaying a smaller number, but it gives you the option to display the omitted results too. Don't be misled by that number at the top of the last page on searches with large numbers of results. As for Bing, it's obviously not ready for prime time. Casually eyeball the first page of its results for "lifan yuan" and you can see it returned several pages that do not have "lifan yuan" in them at all.
Bertport (
talk) 14:43, 2 November 2009 (UTC)reply
No, those large numbers from Google are real. If you choose to include the omitted results and then advance page by page (not skipping to the end) you will see the results are actually returned, and the number of returned results does not shrink. As for Bing, it is not finding much of what's out there. That is obvious, because Google is finding so much more. There is good reason that Google, not Bing, is the customary tool at Wikipedia for establishing common usage for this policy. Incidentally, the Amazon search (which is also sometimes used to establish common usage) for "lifan yuan" returns two books, and the Amazon search for "court of colonial affairs" returns thirty-eight books - further evidence that "court of colonial affairs" is more common usage.
Bertport (
talk) 20:11, 2 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Easy there, Pengyanan. I got the number 2 by following the Amazon link from your Bing page. (Now it gives 3 - someone has added a keyword to another book since this morning.) Just now, I went back to see what caused the confusion. You are right, Amazon has 29 books with "lifan yuan". The Amazon search linked by the Bing page was for keywords, which is more restricted.
Bertport (
talk) 01:25, 3 November 2009 (UTC)reply
All right, I think you may be right that we should disregard the "191,000 results" or "207,000 results" type numbers coming initially from Google. That leaves us with various searches showing approximate parity between "Court of Colonial Affairs" and "lifan yuan" in terms of usage. I still support keeping "Court of Colonial Affairs" because it is the most common English term.
Bertport (
talk) 05:08, 3 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Lifan Yuan is not an English name at all. Therefore, it is not the most common English name.
Bertport (
talk) 06:06, 3 November 2009 (UTC)reply
As I already put it, "using English name does not mean that the name should be originally an English word. It means the name is "most commonly used in the English-language references" (see
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English))". I don't want to repeat myself. But it seems that you did not read others' comments carefully. Thanks. --
Pengyanan (
talk) 06:26, 3 November 2009 (UTC)reply
We seem to each think the other is paying insufficient attention to our points. If "lifan yuan" were used commonly enough to say that it had entered into the English language, and it were much more commonly used than the current title, you would have a case for moving the article. As it is, the Google search results are almost identical between the two, if we accept your technique of going to the last page and seeing how many were actually displayed. This varies somewhat with each attempt, but just now I did that and got 279 for lifan yuan, 273 for CoCA. On Amazon, searching books (not keyword search), I got 29 for lifan yuan, 38 for CoCA - significantly more for CoCA. On Google Books (not Google Scholar, which is not representative of common usage), I got 299 lifan yuan, 379 CoCA. CoCA is more commonly used; it is already the title of the article; and it is English.
Bertport (
talk) 14:37, 3 November 2009 (UTC)reply
That makes no sense. We might as well search for Office of Barbarian Control, Office of Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs, Board for the Administration of Outlying Regions, Office for Relations with Principalities, and Court of Territorial Affairs as "related versions" of Court of Colonial Affairs.
Bertport (
talk) 18:23, 3 November 2009 (UTC)reply
You are welcome to search for those terms. I must say that each term you mentioned above is more accurate and more proper than
Court of Colonial Affairs. They are not "related versions" of
Court of Colonial Affairs. They are totally different from CoCA and are much better. --
Pengyanan (
talk) 02:40, 4 November 2009 (UTC)reply
"Related versions" is an invalid concept in picking a title for an article. "Li fan yuan" is not the same title as "Lifan yuan". "Court of Colonial Affairs" is the most commonly used English name.
Bertport (
talk) 15:13, 4 November 2009 (UTC)reply
It is YOU that use the concept of "related versions".
Lifanyuan and
Li fan yuan are NOT the so-called "related versions" of
Lifan Yuan. They are just other varieties of spelling. Thanks for your understanding. --
Pengyanan (
talk) 15:26, 4 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Same thing. "Varieties of spelling" is an invalid concept in picking a title for an article. "Li fan yuan" is not the same title as "Lifan yuan". "Court of Colonial Affairs" is the most commonly used English name.
Bertport (
talk) 02:50, 5 November 2009 (UTC)reply
No. "Varieties of spelling" is a VALID concept in picking a title for an article. "Li fan yuan" IS the same title as "Lifan yuan". "Court of Colonial Affairs" is NOT the most commonly used English name. --
Pengyanan (
talk) 03:23, 5 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Support move: I think with all arguments above, people have no reason to keep the inaccurate, purposive, shoddy title "Court of Colonial Affairs".
Bertport is simply a Tibetan propagandist so I don't expect he would change his twisted mind one day.--
LaGrandefr (
talk) 11:46, 2 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Support Lifanyuan (or some version thereof) per most common name. However: technically, those search results for Lifanyuan should be restricted to English language sources, which I think was not done when searching on google books.
Yaan (
talk) 19:26, 3 November 2009 (UTC)reply
New information: [www.britannica.com] adopts the title "Lifan Yuan"
[1].--
LaGrandefr (
talk) 13:56, 4 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Well, thanks. But this is not new. I have already pointed out this information twice. --
Pengyanan (
talk) 14:28, 4 November 2009 (UTC)reply
What's going on? Shall we wait 3000 years for a correct title? What does "Backlog" mean?--
LaGrandefr (
talk) 09:09, 11 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Now that the
bureaucracy of English Wikipedia works in this way, I have no choice but to correct the wrong title in my way.--
LaGrandefr (
talk) 22:33, 11 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Please be patient, and DON'T rename a page by cut and paste. See
Help:Moving a page. Thank you! --
Pengyanan (
talk) 05:55, 12 November 2009 (UTC)reply
The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Mongols, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of
Mongol culture, history, language, and related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join
the discussion and see a list of open tasks.MongolsWikipedia:WikiProject MongolsTemplate:WikiProject MongolsMongols articles
This article is within the scope of WikiProject China, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of
China related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join
the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ChinaWikipedia:WikiProject ChinaTemplate:WikiProject ChinaChina-related articles
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Russia, a
WikiProject dedicated to coverage of
Russia on Wikipedia. To participate: Feel free to edit the article attached to this page, join up at the
project page, or contribute to the
project discussion.RussiaWikipedia:WikiProject RussiaTemplate:WikiProject RussiaRussia articles
The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.
The result of the proposal was Move per requst. It appears that variations of Lifan Yuan are the
common title used in English language sources over the current.--
Fuhghettaboutit (
talk) 12:21, 12 November 2009 (UTC)reply
I admit "Court of Frontier Affairs" is a translation from French wiki. As you said, "Court of Colonial Affairs" is totally inaccurate. Google book offers several translations for it, as Office of Barbarian Control(Sino-Russian Relations: A Short History By R. K. I. Quested, P46), Office of Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs(Traditional government in imperial China: a critical analysis By Mu Qian, Mu Ch'ien, George Oakley Totten, P135), Board for the Administration of Outlying Regions(Political frontiers, ethnic boundaries, and human geographies in Chinese history By Nicola Di Cosmo, Don J. Wyatt, P367), Office for Relations with Principalities(Imperial China 900-1800 By Frederick W. Mote, P868), Court of Territorial Affairs(Opium and the limits of empire: drug prohibition in the Chinese interior ... By David Anthony Bello, P65), etc. Because of its diversity, I propose to use the pinyin name - Lifan Yuan in presenting some scholarly translations beside. .--
LaGrandefr (
talk) 00:19, 2 November 2009 (UTC)reply
The title of the article should be the most commonly used English version. The original Chinese and other common English versions should be mentioned (with citations) in the article. Pengyanan appears to understand this policy already.
Bertport (
talk) 00:38, 2 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Oppose move. Lifan Yuan is not an English name at all. Therefore, it is not the most common English name. Nearly all the results returned by Google Scholar for "lifan yuan" also use an English name. What is more, "most common" does not mean "most commonly used by scholars". A simple Google search (not a Google Scholar search) shows that common usage in English favors "Court of Colonial Affairs" overwhelmingly.
Bertport (
talk) 01:18, 2 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Using English name does not mean that the name should be originally an English word. It means the name is "most commonly used in the English-language references" (see
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)). For example,
Kuomintang is clearly not originally an English word, but it is the most common name in English references. So we don't use
Chinese Nationalist Party as the article's title. And
Yuan is also commonly adopted in English sources to refer to Chinese government organizations such as
Legislative Yuan,
Executive Yuan, and
Judicial Yuan. The English names used for "Lifan Yuan" in Google Scholar are diverse. The clear trend is that Lifan Yuan has become the most common name used by English academics. Wikipedia should give the academic references more weight than the general
Google search. Google search is helpful, but not decisive (see
Wikipedia:Search engine test). Please note that even Encyclopædia Britannica also adopts the name
Lifan Yuan. Thanks. --
Pengyanan (
talk) 02:00, 2 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Academics who are experts in the relevant field are given more weight in deciding what is correct in the contents of an article, but the title of the article (and it's the title we are discussing here) gets the most common usage, not the most correct usage or even the most common academic usage. Kuomintang is not only common in academic journals, it is also the common usage in newspapers and in books written for the general public.
Tai chi chuan is not of English origin (for that matter, most English words have some origin from another language) but it has effectively entered the English language in common usage, and has an entry in most good English dictionaries.
Bertport (
talk) 02:51, 2 November 2009 (UTC)reply
No, the actual number of Google results for "Court of Colonial Affairs" is the large number (191,000, or 207,000 - it seems to keep finding more as you keep using the search). At the bottom of the last page it explains that it is only displaying a smaller number, but it gives you the option to display the omitted results too. Don't be misled by that number at the top of the last page on searches with large numbers of results. As for Bing, it's obviously not ready for prime time. Casually eyeball the first page of its results for "lifan yuan" and you can see it returned several pages that do not have "lifan yuan" in them at all.
Bertport (
talk) 14:43, 2 November 2009 (UTC)reply
No, those large numbers from Google are real. If you choose to include the omitted results and then advance page by page (not skipping to the end) you will see the results are actually returned, and the number of returned results does not shrink. As for Bing, it is not finding much of what's out there. That is obvious, because Google is finding so much more. There is good reason that Google, not Bing, is the customary tool at Wikipedia for establishing common usage for this policy. Incidentally, the Amazon search (which is also sometimes used to establish common usage) for "lifan yuan" returns two books, and the Amazon search for "court of colonial affairs" returns thirty-eight books - further evidence that "court of colonial affairs" is more common usage.
Bertport (
talk) 20:11, 2 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Easy there, Pengyanan. I got the number 2 by following the Amazon link from your Bing page. (Now it gives 3 - someone has added a keyword to another book since this morning.) Just now, I went back to see what caused the confusion. You are right, Amazon has 29 books with "lifan yuan". The Amazon search linked by the Bing page was for keywords, which is more restricted.
Bertport (
talk) 01:25, 3 November 2009 (UTC)reply
All right, I think you may be right that we should disregard the "191,000 results" or "207,000 results" type numbers coming initially from Google. That leaves us with various searches showing approximate parity between "Court of Colonial Affairs" and "lifan yuan" in terms of usage. I still support keeping "Court of Colonial Affairs" because it is the most common English term.
Bertport (
talk) 05:08, 3 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Lifan Yuan is not an English name at all. Therefore, it is not the most common English name.
Bertport (
talk) 06:06, 3 November 2009 (UTC)reply
As I already put it, "using English name does not mean that the name should be originally an English word. It means the name is "most commonly used in the English-language references" (see
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English))". I don't want to repeat myself. But it seems that you did not read others' comments carefully. Thanks. --
Pengyanan (
talk) 06:26, 3 November 2009 (UTC)reply
We seem to each think the other is paying insufficient attention to our points. If "lifan yuan" were used commonly enough to say that it had entered into the English language, and it were much more commonly used than the current title, you would have a case for moving the article. As it is, the Google search results are almost identical between the two, if we accept your technique of going to the last page and seeing how many were actually displayed. This varies somewhat with each attempt, but just now I did that and got 279 for lifan yuan, 273 for CoCA. On Amazon, searching books (not keyword search), I got 29 for lifan yuan, 38 for CoCA - significantly more for CoCA. On Google Books (not Google Scholar, which is not representative of common usage), I got 299 lifan yuan, 379 CoCA. CoCA is more commonly used; it is already the title of the article; and it is English.
Bertport (
talk) 14:37, 3 November 2009 (UTC)reply
That makes no sense. We might as well search for Office of Barbarian Control, Office of Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs, Board for the Administration of Outlying Regions, Office for Relations with Principalities, and Court of Territorial Affairs as "related versions" of Court of Colonial Affairs.
Bertport (
talk) 18:23, 3 November 2009 (UTC)reply
You are welcome to search for those terms. I must say that each term you mentioned above is more accurate and more proper than
Court of Colonial Affairs. They are not "related versions" of
Court of Colonial Affairs. They are totally different from CoCA and are much better. --
Pengyanan (
talk) 02:40, 4 November 2009 (UTC)reply
"Related versions" is an invalid concept in picking a title for an article. "Li fan yuan" is not the same title as "Lifan yuan". "Court of Colonial Affairs" is the most commonly used English name.
Bertport (
talk) 15:13, 4 November 2009 (UTC)reply
It is YOU that use the concept of "related versions".
Lifanyuan and
Li fan yuan are NOT the so-called "related versions" of
Lifan Yuan. They are just other varieties of spelling. Thanks for your understanding. --
Pengyanan (
talk) 15:26, 4 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Same thing. "Varieties of spelling" is an invalid concept in picking a title for an article. "Li fan yuan" is not the same title as "Lifan yuan". "Court of Colonial Affairs" is the most commonly used English name.
Bertport (
talk) 02:50, 5 November 2009 (UTC)reply
No. "Varieties of spelling" is a VALID concept in picking a title for an article. "Li fan yuan" IS the same title as "Lifan yuan". "Court of Colonial Affairs" is NOT the most commonly used English name. --
Pengyanan (
talk) 03:23, 5 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Support move: I think with all arguments above, people have no reason to keep the inaccurate, purposive, shoddy title "Court of Colonial Affairs".
Bertport is simply a Tibetan propagandist so I don't expect he would change his twisted mind one day.--
LaGrandefr (
talk) 11:46, 2 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Support Lifanyuan (or some version thereof) per most common name. However: technically, those search results for Lifanyuan should be restricted to English language sources, which I think was not done when searching on google books.
Yaan (
talk) 19:26, 3 November 2009 (UTC)reply
New information: [www.britannica.com] adopts the title "Lifan Yuan"
[1].--
LaGrandefr (
talk) 13:56, 4 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Well, thanks. But this is not new. I have already pointed out this information twice. --
Pengyanan (
talk) 14:28, 4 November 2009 (UTC)reply
What's going on? Shall we wait 3000 years for a correct title? What does "Backlog" mean?--
LaGrandefr (
talk) 09:09, 11 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Now that the
bureaucracy of English Wikipedia works in this way, I have no choice but to correct the wrong title in my way.--
LaGrandefr (
talk) 22:33, 11 November 2009 (UTC)reply
Please be patient, and DON'T rename a page by cut and paste. See
Help:Moving a page. Thank you! --
Pengyanan (
talk) 05:55, 12 November 2009 (UTC)reply
The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.