Mediaboss Marketing

Former New Zealand Wikipedian-at-large Mike Dickison walks us through the slow process of language change on the worlds fifth-most-viewed website, Wikipedia.

Consequently, macrons have quickly spread through publishing and media, spurred by the 2016 Mori Language Act which aimed to revitalise the language and make government departments use it correctly. Almost all news media use macrons, with Stuff starting in 2017 and the NZ Herald in 2018. The Listener, North & South, and Metro adopted macrons in 2018, along with TVNZ. But one of the last bastions of macron resistance for place names is Wikipedia the worlds fifth-most-viewed website. Thats a concern, and some Kiwi Wikipedians want to change this.

Currently Wikipedia is inconsistent. "Mori" is spelled with a macron, and the article "New Zealand pigeon" was recently renamed "Kerer". Place names, though, are a different story. When the style guide for New Zealand English usage on Wikipedia was thrashed out back in 2006, macrons weren't in common use and it was noted the "rules of Maori place names are still under discussion" and there they've remained for 14 years.

Christchurch-based Axel Wilke has put forward a proposal to change those naming conventions to allow macron use for geographic features, based on official names maintained by by the New Zealand Geographic Board. Many place names aren't actually "official", and deciding whether they actually need a macron can involve a lengthy discussion with iwi and hap about what the name means. But in June last year the Board knuckled down and made 824 Mori place names official, and about 300 of those like ptiki, Taup, and Trau use macrons.

If Wilke's proposal is adopted, nearly 300 place names on Wikipedia will need to be updated. Not all those 300 places will have an article on Wikipedia but they'll be mentioned in numerous other articles, and the cascading consequences will require thousands of corrections. This would mark a big change for New Zealand Wikipedia, and the 100200 busy volunteers who keep it up to date in their spare time. Hence there's been some resistance.

"Under discussion" since 2007, the macron debate bubbled to the surface on a Wikipedia noticeboard in 2018 over the appropriate name for Paekkriki / Paekakariki; thousands of words of back-and-forth discussion ensued, even leaking out into the NZ Herald which wrote about Wikipedia's "battle of the macrons", but no real consensus emerged. What was needed was a clear, well-supported proposal to put to the vote, and thats whats happening now.

You might think some editorial board could just declare most New Zealand publications use macrons, so now all Wikipedia articles will too. But Wikipedia change happens through long public discussions on Wikipedia talk pages, and anyone can contribute. Discussions go on and on until consensus is thrashed out. Through 19 years of discussion and debate, Wikipedia has accumulated layers and layers of rules, guidelines, precedents, and style guides, often with cryptic names like WP:COMMONNAME and MOS:DIACRITICS. Youre expected to be familiar with them if you want to contribute, and any proposed changes have to take them into account. All this is invisible to people who just use Wikipedia to look things up, but affects the work thousands of volunteer Wikipedia editors do every day.

If, following discussion, this change is approved, it will bring Wikipedia into line with the way New Zealand English has changed. Years ago, Pkeh used to talk about Maoris and kakapos. Because theres no plural s in Te Reo, New Zealand English usage slowly started using the same word for singular and plural, and now we look a bit askance at someone who talks about the Maoris. Macron usage is making the same journey, to Mori and kkp, and Wikipedia, the world's reference book, looks like it's coming along for the ride.

Follow NOTED on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and sign up to our email newsletter for more news.

Go here to read the rest:
Why changing Mori place names on one of the world's biggest websites isn't so simple - Noted