Talk:Henry I of France

I redirected this from Henry I to Henri I so that those searching (for knowledge) when typing in Henry will learn that in English we always spell a foreign person's name by their language spelling and will see that Henri is French for Henry.

DW -- we don't always use the foreign spelling. If we did, people would know to look under it. Please just stop being silly. JHK

How then do you justify changing Pepin (the English and French spelling) to Pippin in direct contradiction of every recognized publication and leading experts in the world. All this being the way you see it, (different from page to page) means the French spelling of Charlemagne should be changed to Carolus.

As I said, it's case to case and changes over time. I was raised with Prince Henry the Navigator -- a review copy of a new textbook uses Enrique. If there were good reason to just change everything to the original language, fine, but there isn't. It comes down to what the norm is at a given time. JHK

Here is a sample of more imposition but altered opinion under changes over time and the norm. Here is fact: you and most of us never heard of Henri but are used to Henry. But, conversely, we are all used to Louis instead of Lewis so that is okay. In one breath you say to be consistent and use an English name, then next you contradict like Joan III of Navarre>more commonly found Jeanne d'Albret). I call it all a lack of professionalism.

The goal is to write an encyclopedia for an English-speaking audience. Not to be absolutely consistent on everything over time and space--or do you want to go and edit all the articles on South America to use the current transcriptions of Quechua names? If someone is best known in English as Jeanne d'Albret, we use that name; if someone is best known as Pippin rather than Pepin, we use that one.

Name calling, on the other hand, does not help matters. Vicki Rosenzweig

Thank you Vicki R. Using best known is not what JHK is doing. In the case of Joan of Navarre, it makes sense. But Pippin instead of Pepin is a direct contradiction. Pepin is used in Britannica, Encarta etc. ... SL

For the Last time (I hope) -- you can read my comments on this elsewhere. Pippin is being used more and more often in English-language scholarly works on the Carolingians. This is the trend since about the 1980s. Noted historians such as Bernard Bachrach, Rosamund McKittrick, Timothy Reuter, and Janet Nelson all use Pippin. Pippin is the form used at the time, in terms of the Latin. The change in usage may have something to do with that, or perhaps with the fact that Carolingian scholarship in English now includes all of the Carolingian kingdoms, and not just the Carolingians as part of French history (although of the historians mentioned above, only Reuter focuses more on the Carolingian East). Brittanica and Encarta are general reference works, and tend not to be in synch with immediately contemporary scholarship. Wikipedia is unique in that we can constantly bring things up to date. There is no agenda here except consistency, and I have never said Pepin isn't correct -- only that it made sense to reflect current scholarship (but make both terms searchable). I know that I have seen texts with Pippin since I started College in 1982, so I don't think it's that out of line. JHK

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The convention here, which is shown on the naming conventions page, and worked out among our users by consensus, is to use whatever form of the name appears most commonly in other English-language texts which the reader is likely to encounter in scholarly research. So even though it is currently fashionable to refer to the Italian city of "Torino" when talking about the upcoming Olympics, for example, the article should probably be called "Turin" because that's what English-speaking students of history are likely to have learned about, just as they are likely to refer to "Italy" and not "Italia".

Having our "chosen" form be the main title and others redirects doesn't really matter much for usability of the titles themselves, as long as both appear at the start of the article and are searchable. But for the simplicity, it would be best to make sure internal references in articles are as consistent as possible, and having a "primary title" standard helps accomplish that goal.

The case where general scholarship is currently changing is a difficult one. If there's good reason to suspect that many textbooks currently use the newer term, and that the newer term is likely to be used in furute texts, then by all means update the titles to use the newer one. It will save us work later. But otherwise I'd be inclined to use whatever form appears common general- purpose English sources--and Britannica is about as good as any. I don't know enough about this particular case to say if that's true or not, but I want to make sure you guys understand that "consistency", in the form of always using an Anglo name or a Latin name or a native name, is not a goal here, and never has been. The goal is ease of use--what is the reader likely to have seen in class? In other articles on the Net? There's nothing at all wrong with using "Henry" here and "Louis" there, or Wade-Giles "Taoism" here and Pinyin "Beijing" there, if that's what English-speaking people are used to seeing. --LDC

Textbooks, like Britannica, are written by generalists. It will take a few years for Pippin to filter through. As for what people recognize, I normally don't recognize Pinyin because I was raised on Wade-Giles. I would say a vast majority of people still recognize Wade-Giles over Pinyin. However, since Pinyin is now encouraged, I support it's use as the main title- as long as the Wade-Giles version appears somewhere in the article so that people can search. JHK

As I said, consistency isn't a goal. Yes, Pinyin is encouraged for future use, but the fact is every English dictionary lists "Taoism", not "Daoism", so that's where the article should be (and is). But the city is "Beijing" because not only is it preferred, it is in common use already (Peking still lingers in a few places--maybe even Britannica--but it's clearly on the way out). I really don't know what the case is with "Pippin", but if that's the form used in books currently in use, and likely to filter into things like Britannica in the future, I'm all for it--especially since it's close enough to "Pepin" that it shouldn't be too confising in any case. But let's do evaluate such cases honestly; are the works of "current scholarship" you mention just obscure specialist texts that only Ph.D. historians will ever read, or do they really represent the consensus of present scholarship likely to filter into common texts in the future? --LDC

I honestly think they will. I also had not been particularly consistent myself, and had written some articles with Pepin and some with Pippin, but found that, as I was looking more and more details up, my sources used Pippin. Arguably those sources are the dreaded scholarly sources -- although McKittrick was required for an undergrad class in Medieval History that I took at UCSB. Still, the people I mentioned are some of the people who are now producing PhD students in the field -- so I can say that it's pretty likely that Pippin will become more and more the norm. Perhaps my knowledge is too specialized for this forum. Apparently we are going for the lowest common denominator, if a bunch of people who think American Heritage is a valid source versus works by specialists can make this much of a fuss without any justification whatsoever. After all, the initial reason many of the articles that used Pippin were changed to Pepin is that the that's the "proper" name because he was "French". JHK

Thank you for the info LDC re The convention here, which is shown on the naming conventions page, and worked out among our users by consensus, is to use whatever form of the name appears most commonly in other English-language texts which the reader is likely to encounter in scholarly research. Now that JHK has chosen to observe silently, I hope that DW or someone will change Pippin to Pepin which not only is in Britannica, Encarta, etc.etc., it is the name most recognize by far as evidenced by a Google search and numerous history books. I was never able tofigure why JHK wanted to impose her new views which does nothing except isolate Wikipedia..... Elliot