Talk:Weissensee (Berlin)

No Brainer

This link demonstrates pretty clearly—in full color—the fact that German speakers do not uniformly object to the use of "ss" in place of "ß". Move is clearly in the spirit of WP:UE. Unschool 05:58, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Insufficient reasoning

User:ProhibitOnions knows full well that "German name, German spelling" has not been accepted as sufficient reasoning on other pages with this issue, and it is disingenuous to suggest so. This is an unacceptable move; if this is to be moved, it needs to be discussed. Unschool (talk) 11:58, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Funny how that same logic didn't seem to apply when you unilaterally moved the article to "Berlin-Weissensee" -- inconsistent with the other borough and Berlin locality articles. I was merely reverting your "disingenuous...unacceptable...undiscussed" move. "Insufficient reasoning," indeed. ProhibitOnions ^(T) 15:00, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

The two moves are completely different. You merely used a phrase that has often been used as the opening salvo in many discussions regarding German spellings in en.wikipedia. While usage of German spellings has sometimes carried the day, it has never done so because of the simple (yet elegant) reasoning "German name, German spelling". The issue is clearly more complicated than that, at least for a great many en.wikipedians. What I did was to include a link to a German-language website on Berlin-Weissensee which uses the spelling to which I have moved the article. The point was and is, that if the German language website for this place uses "ss" and not "ß", then probably the English-language wikipedia is on safe ground doing so as well. It's hardly a case of the "same logic". Unschool (talk) 23:21, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

I saw this discussion after I moved the article to "Weißensee (Berlin)". The reason for my move is WP:GERCON, that deprecates using compound article names for quarters/boroughs of cities (Köln-Deutz, Bonn-Beuel, Berlin-Spandau etc.). About the use of Weissensee on the website: since the "ß" cannot be used in URLs, the name of the website is "berlin-weissensee.de". And the capital "ß" is written as "SS". In other instances, you will see Weißensee. Markussep ^Talk 13:47, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

WP:GERCON is merely a proposed guideline. As such, it is clearly trumped by WP:UE, which is a long-established naming convention. Only 11 editors have contributed to WP:GERCON since it's creation over two years ago, dozens of editors have contributed to building WP:UE. If you mean to use WP:GERCON to justify imposing the "ß" here, it would be disingenuous to do so in this instance. But if I understand you correctly, that's not what happened here, and I accept that.

Now as to the matters regarding the "ß", I disagree with your reasoning. Note:

• Your point about the URL is irrelevant to me (though I find it very interesting and it sheds further light on the attempt to impose non-English characters on en.wikipedia); I had not referred to the URL in my post.
• Your point about the capital ß is also beside the point. If you look, "ss" is used all over the webpage I gave, regardless of whether it is being used as a lower case or upper case. usage on the webpage is split; both "ß" and "ss" are used.
• I gladly yield to your point about the labeling of quarters/boroughs of cities; I have no expertise regarding this matter. The only expertise I'm claiming is to be able to ascertain English usage, which is the reason the "ß" was removed from this article.

I welcome further discussion on this matter, if you have other questions. I would have preferred to have it discussed prior to the move, but I understand your perfectly reasonable explanation, namely, that you were simply looking at the format of the name, rather than the use of the ß. Unschool 04:47, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

The use of ss in computer usage has been ß has gone back to to the early days when it was not possible to use ß. It was about late 80s when at the German taxoffice we had to go through lists of names to manually check and update to the correct spelling. Until very recently it was also impossible to use ß in domain names. So looking at the link you provide you will find two usages of ss. In the domain name and the associated branding as well as the image of the newspaper which is called in weissensee - where the headline to the image uses ß in "Eine Zeitung für Weißensee" The name of the newspaper does not have to follow the spelling of the area. You will find that looking at proper sources ie books about the area it will use Weißensee and that in the absence of a clear alternative English usage that goes beyond the simple inability to spell (ie. my local newpaper can't get my name right and spell it differently every single time) the correct article title is Weißensee. I will move that back in 24 hours until you can find a clear majority of RS pointing to Weissensee. Agathoclea (talk) 08:06, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Agathoclea, I defer to your expertise on the history of how this situation came about. But with all respect, I don't see that that history is particularly germane to this discussion. All that WP:UE requires of us is to ascertain what constitutes standard English usage. And I don't think it's asking too much to say that the burden of proof (per WP:RS) should rest on those who wish to make use of characters such as "ß" which are clearly not included in the English language. And of course, those sources need to be in English, would you not agree? Personally, I think it would be an uphill battle to assert that this must be titled Weißensee rather than Weissensee, when you've got a German-language source spelling it "Weissensee" (see link at top of this discussion page). One must also take into account that this is a relatively obscure article and topic; there are going to be very few reliable sources anyway, at least, in English. I just think that a decent respect to en.wikipedia policy needs to be demonstrated here. I don't see justification for moving this back, but am listening. Unschool 08:22, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Indeed I referred to WP:GERCON only for the move from "Berlin-X" to "X (Berlin)". About the use of ß and ss on this website: the title of the newspaper is in all caps, "IN WEISSENSEE", see also ß#Substitution and all caps. You'll see that all other uses on the website, apart from the URL, are with ß (except when in all caps). Of course, that's all German usage, not English, but I don't think there is much English usage for this rather quiet neighbourhood. Markussep ^Talk 10:59, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

You'll see that all other uses on the website, apart from the URL, are with ß (except when in all caps).

I don't know what you're looking at, but near the top of the webpage I see a pane of photos, mainly of buildings, that has white letters superimposed saying "Das Portal für Berlin-Weissensee", capitalized just as I have done it there. I also see in the upper-left corner what appears to be a search button that says "Dierktsuche", and immediately below that it has two radio buttons, one of which is labeled "www", and the other is labled "Berlin-Weissensee", with exactly the capitalization I have used there. Whether anyone in the neighborhood uses English or not, whoever created this German-language website does not appear to have a problem with substituting "ss" for "ß", so it seems to me that it should also be okay in an English-language website since "ß" has not generally found its way into English usage. Unschool 08:05, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

The reasoning is flawed in various ways. a) the Weissensee parts of the website you refer to are part of the branding as I mentioned above (search button and header image) matching the domain name. b) WP:UE is not taking about converting spelling but using names as they are commonly used in English (ie Munich instead of München) {It can happen that an otherwise notable topic has not yet received much attention in the English-speaking world, so that no established usage exists. Very low google counts can but need not be indicative of this. If this happens, follow the conventions of the language in which the entity is most often talked about (German for German politicians, Turkish for Turkish rivers, Portuguese for Brazilian towns etc.). and (English usage is often best determined by consulting works of general reference which deal with the subject and seeing what they use. Search engines are always problematic, unless their verdict is overwhelming; modified letters have the additional difficulties that some search engines will not distinguish between the original and modified forms, and others fail to recognize the modified letter because of optical character recognition errors. If there is a consensus on spelling in the sources used for the article, this will normally represent a consensus of English usage.)- which brings us to c) the website you have been using as source does not qualify as WP:RS as it is a personal website. If you are looking for looking for a WP:RS local spelling try Berliner Morgen Post Agathoclea (talk) 09:14, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, I suppose we can argue about what constitutes "established" usage. I think that that section of the policy is for cases when the English speaking world has not touched down anywhere in sight. That does not appear to be the case with Weissensee; it has certainly been discovered by the world of tourism, as evidenced by [1] and [2], both major English-language (American, I believe) services for travelers. (There were of course a plethora of other touristy sites as well, but they were either unknown or merely less prominent than these two.) And unlike your source, these are in English, so there does appear to be "established" English usage. Unschool 09:29, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

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