Category talk:La Habana

Renaming of category

According to "Commons:Categories", category names should generally be in English, and the well-established name for Cuba's capital in English is Havana. I propose that this category be renamed "Category:Havana". — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 16:22, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

•  Support per en:Havana. Multichill (talk) 16:35, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
•  Support per en:Havana. --Foroa (talk) 16:39, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
•  Support --Apalsola ^{t • c} 18:12, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
•  Support - Jmabel ! talk 18:16, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
•  Support I also suggest this be applied to subcategories as well. I've been working with some of the relevant categories and notice that "Havana" "Habana" and "La Habana" seem to be used rather at random. Agree they should all be standardized, and English place names are usually used in Categories, and "Havana" is still the most common spelling in English. -- Infrogmation (talk) 19:07, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
•  Support - Ebyabe (talk) 16:37, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

Looks like there's clear consensus on this issue. I'll list the category for renaming at "User talk:CommonsDelinker/commands". — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 03:25, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

•  Oppose - I am in support of a trend to no longer apply whatsoever foreign names to places. They all should be named as they are called in their own countries. I deem this a very decent concept. I also suggest, that decency commands, that such a discussion runs for at least a week, especially in a holiday season. OAlexander (talk) 12:31, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

According to COM:CAT#Category names and COM:LP, category names should be in English. We can change the language policy, of course, but it requires a separate discussion, probably in Commons talk:Language policy. Personally, I strongly support the present policy for the following reasons:

• The present policy in consistent. When adding/modifying categories e.g. with HotCat, category names should be easy to guess. That does not happen if the category name may be in any language.
• Adding media into categories such as Category:Москва́ or Category:北京 would be very difficult for most of the users.
• What about the countries with several official languages (e.g. Belgium, Canada or Finland)? Would it be Category:Bruxelles, Category:Brussel or Category:Brüssel?

Still  Support. ––Apalsola ^{t • c} 14:11, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Sorry for the early closure of this discussion. The consensus seemed pretty overwhelming. I would still support renaming for the reasons clearly set out by Apalsola. Certainly, if there is no common English name for a place the local name should be used, but if there is a common English name that should be used in order to adhere to COM:LP. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 15:14, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Personally, I hate exonyms, but I have to agree with Apalsola. In the many areas with multiple languages, a well known English name is a blessing. Many exonyms will disappear, probably in 5 year or so time slices:

• some are really disappearing: Ghotenburg/Göteborg, Bombay/Mumbai,
• in a first round Hanover/Hannover, Cologne/Köln, The Hague/Den Haag, Ostend/Oostende, Antwerp/Antwerpen, Munich/München ...
• in a second round Ypres/Ieper, Bruges/Brugge, Napels/Napoli, Ibiza/Eivissa ...
• the most entrenched: Rome/Roma, Florence/Firenze,
• the most difficult ones because of different diacritics, accents and above all, other character sets

Anyway, this discussion makes not a lot of sense because, besides the Commons English naming rule, Commons is a server for wikipedia projects, and there too, Havana is the most used name, while the official name "San Cristóbal de La Habana" doesn't help for uniformisation neither. --Foroa (talk) 18:08, 3 January 2011 (UTC)