Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lǐ (李) (surname)

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus. This is a content dispute and a grey area as far as actual policy is concerned, and there are good arguments on both sides. Mackensen (talk) 14:50, 1 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Lǐ (李) (surname)

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Lǐ (李) (surname) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Fork of Li (surname) with non-English title. Nothing to merge back as this was just split out, and the tone mark and Chinese character in the title means it is an unlikely search term/redirect target. Kimchi.sg 15:03, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete, is there really a need for a duplicate? Definitely not, another redundant article which no one is likely going to ever search. --Terence Ong (C | R) 15:28, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect to Li (surname). LittleOldMe 18:10, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect - The article is a duplication, so there's no need for it, but redirects don't hurt anything. —Cswrye 18:20, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: How did we get two articles on the same surname? The thing is, there are surnames in Chinese with the same spelling but different characters and tones. Does this mean editors would prefer to have, for example, a discussion of two discrete surnames in one single article (avoiding the use of the Chinese character and tone mark in the article title)? Badagnani 18:29, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect unless there's any non-duplicated content. Hut 8.5 21:29, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Keep and Comment surnames are different, Chinese characters in title are necessary here, since many different surnames have same romanization, but they are absolutely not the same thing. You can't group surnames by their pronuciations, but their written form. Yao Ziyuan 23:08, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment The Li (surname) article does group it by character, so I'm not sure what your objection is here. The problem here is that this is a very unlikely search term and Wikipedia article titles are generally optimized for searching purposes. ColourBurst 23:30, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • Comment It doesn't work well by grouping CKV surnames by pronuciation, in this case, Wikipedia currently groups "李", "黎", "理", "里", and etc in a single article. This is a bad idea. Since these surnames are totally different, and no relations among them except its romanization. This is say Chinese surnames. But the same surname "李" (and many others) also found in Korea, Vietnam, and Singapore, and they have the same origin and written form, but different pronuciations and romanizations in different countries (unfortunately!), so don't you think it makes far better sense to group all "李"s, not "Li"s in a single article? Yao Ziyuan 23:54, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        • Comment My objections aren't to this. My objection is simply that this is a limitation of the system. Since use of diacritics and non-latin characters in main article titles (ie non-redirects) are strongly discouraged (because of certain limitations of the English-language keyboard and older systems which don't render Chinese characters without additional software; this matters less with redirects, but is a problem for the main article), there's no way to have an article with the title mentioned, without it being very messy. Non-latin characters are discouraged in non-signature usernames for this reason as well. ColourBurst 01:16, 23 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
          • Comment, I see. But use Chinese character in title is the most effictive way to disambiguate for surnames. In China, when people ask someone for their surnames, he/she will answers the question like: "Lǐ", and the "Lǐ" with 木 at top and 子 at bottom., so you see, this is way too long to suitable for disambiguation titles. Second, it is the page creator's business to name the title, other readers and editors can safely ignore the Chinese characters in title, and read or edit the article without any inconvenience. Yao Ziyuan 01:43, 23 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - as far as the English language is concerned, these are the same name. Grouping them together is actually the best way to allow non-Chinese speakers to see that they are actually different (as opposed to confusing them). I also can't see having Li (surname) being a disambiguation page when most English-speaking editors will not be able to pick the correct disambiguation and the redirect has no value as has already been mentioned. Mike Dillon 03:14, 23 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Comment - the "best" way to allow non-Chinese speakers to see that they are actually different is to make current articles for surnames as disambiguations, I think. Yao Ziyuan 03:33, 23 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Smerge and redirect to Li (surname). This is the English Wikipedia, we don't sort based on the Chinese language, and many editors are uncomfortable with the use of non-English characters in article titles, period. --Dhartung | Talk 04:03, 23 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Comment - This is not a "sort" thing. This is what something actually to be. 李 and 黎 are different, just like any other two surnames are different, pronuciation doesn't make too much sense when considering surnames, but the written form is the most important. Yao Ziyuan 04:09, 23 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep separate. 李 and 黎 are separate names, and both are common. If you don't like Chinese characters in the title, then use Pinyin tone marks, but the articles should be kept separate. -- ran (talk) 04:16, 23 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep separate. True it is that "Lǐ (李)" is an unlikely search term for English-speaking users, but so are other foreign-named article names such as Bibliothèque François Mitterrand (Paris Metro and RER). It is inappropriate to group different things in the same article simply because they have the same romanisation. An analogy is the provinces of Shǎnxī and Shānxī. These two provinces have the "same" romanisation, and it is unlikely that anyone would be typing search names with tonal marks, yet we work around it by spelling the former differently (as Shaanxi). Imo, Li (surname) should be a disambiguation page, splitting off into articles about the various different surnames. We have the technology to disambiguate, so why shouldn't we do it? --Sumple (Talk) 05:14, 23 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete pointless fork per nom. The contents are duplicated except that the Lǐ (李) (surname) article excludes the people with surname 黎. From a navigational pov, I agree with ColourBurst. An qwerty or azerty searcher will certainly be content with a dab within the page Li (surname) rather than type the name with awkward accents which are not on the keyboard. The only problem, though is the linking of articles to chinese wikipedia for the different Li's. There is only one Li article at the moment, so let's not complicate matters, and deal with the problem when it comes up. Wiki is not 维基百科 (chinese wiki). Ohconfucius 06:49, 23 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Comment I do not understand your view described above quite clearly. But I think the goal of English Wikipedia is to describe fact in English language. Here the fact is several different family names are discussing in one single article, so split these family names, have each of them their own article. Nothing wrong, right? This is what I am doing. Yao Ziyuan 08:37, 23 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep seperate We cannot have one page covering so many radically different things. I do agree that the Chinese page title is a problem though, but there is no other reasonable way to disambiguate them. (You can disambigute them by their meanings, the name's rank in Baijia Xing, etc. but none of those methods make any more sense to the casual reader....seeing that we don't even have an article on Baijia Xing) _dk 09:12, 23 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - The original article does quite a good job to describe and disambiguate the different Chinese characters with the same 'Li' sound, and also provided direct links to a number of individual biographies. I simply feel that placing a dab page like the one Yao Ziyuan did (and which I have reverted for now) is unhelpful to the English-language user who by this initial stage is forced to be able to recognise the differrent Chinese characters (or the pinyin marks) which I think is mighty unfair. Ohconfucius 02:09, 24 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: I encountered this problem with creating the Yuan (surname) article. Luckily the other surnames pronounced Yuan are very minor so they could be dealt with in a footnote. In the case of Li, this cannot be done, as the surname 黎 is statiscally important enough to warrant its own section at the very least. However, I don't think that creating separate articles using Chinese characters is a solution. As has already been stated, it is an unlikely search time, and the use of non-Latin scripts is discouraged on Wikipedia. Also, the title looks decidely clumsy. In the end, we have to accept that this is an English language encyclopedia. Its articles necessarily take the perspective of the English language, even when dealing with Chinese concepts. Inserting Chinese characters as a reference tool parallel to the English is one thing, but it is quite another to use Chinese characters as meaningful entities by themselves. This runs the risk of shifting this English encylopedia to a foreign language one. I think we can only try to explain and differentiate Chinese surnames within the article itself. Yeu Ninje 13:25, 23 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Why can't we use tone marks here? -- ran (talk) 21:42, 23 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • few keyboards are so equipped. But let's put that to one side for a moment. I completely understand where Yao Ziyuan, Sumple, ran and Deadkid dk are coming from. They are approaching the problem from a Chinese linguistic angle, whereas in fact we need an English linguistic solution. To occidentals, they are not radically different: it hardly matters whether a "Li" is "李", "黎", "理", "里", the starting point is still an 'L' and an 'i' on the keyboard. They are no doubt at that page to learn more about the distinctions, and perhaps the subtleties of the pronunciation, so it is convenient (indeed essential) to group them together. Furthermore, the average person searching English wikipedia is probably as incapable of recognising the different chinese characters, or correcly use the accents which make up the 4 pinyin tones, as I am incapable of deciphering arabic writing. So when trying to move this debate forward, I would suggest that the above editors considered how they would respond when faced with navigation pages based on, say, arabic script or sanskrit. Ohconfucius 02:42, 24 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Alphabeta is not everything. There are something in the world that alphabeta cannot describe. So we have to use images sometimes. Things pronounced the same doesn't mean things are the same. This is an encyclopedia written in English language, not an encyclopedia change what things actually to be and localized them for English speakers. Yao Ziyuan 02:54, 24 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • More info It is not my idea to use Chinese characters in titles for surname disambiguations, here is some earlier discussions: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Chinese_surnames#Naming_conventions Yao Ziyuan 03:01, 24 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I do agree that alphabeticisation can still fail ; a picture can often paint a thousand words, to coin a phrase. The debate which you linked to above still does not propose any solution which is workable to the average English user of wikipedia. In fact. it pretty much mirrors the one we are having here. But really, how would you respond when faced with navigation pages based on, say, arabic script or sanskrit, bearing in mind you're in English wikipedia? Ohconfucius 03:13, 24 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I'm trying best to make my solution workable to average English users. My solution: (1) Title style: Pinyin (Chinese character) (surname), pinyin is readable for English reader, Chinese character here for removal of ambiguities, (surname) tells average users what Pinyin here mean if he/she has no background knowledge of Chinese names. (2) A user do not have to know Chinese characters: The characters is in bracket only for disambiguation purpose, readers and editors can safely ignore it and reading or editing the article, use what Chinese text in bracket is page creator's business. I'm trying my best for WP:NPOV, since pinyin is PRC stuff, but the surnames might be used in several different East Asian countries. I can't find another romanization better for this situation (might be somewhat unfair to Korean speakers, but I'm trying my best). Yao Ziyuan 14:27, 24 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I propose we took this debate back to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Chinese surnames Ohconfucius 03:40, 24 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Your comment that only the page creator needs to use the title is incorrect (in other words, it cannot be safely ignored). Nominations (linking to page of the day, FAs, AfDs) requires the article title to be pasted in. The fact that the article title needs to be linked is the very reason the naming convention for non-latin characters exists in the first place. ColourBurst 14:34, 24 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment This is not a problem. Just select the title, copy, and then paste. You don't have to aware of what the content you were copied, just select and copy it. I am doing interwiki works among many different languages of Wikipedias. I can't read them all, but I can still done the interwiki jobs, right? Yao Ziyuan 15:22, 24 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge/delete I don't see what the harm is in keeping two different names on the same page, simply because they have the same spelling. This is the English Wikipedia, and we use English spelling. Li (surname) already has an explanation of the differences in the original Chinese. -Freekee 17:17, 24 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
When you have four or five surnames on one page, with each surname having the amount of content like in Yuan (surname), then you'd have a problem. _dk 17:26, 24 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - consider this is not "Chinese surname", this is a surname of Chinese origin, it also found in Korea, Vietnam, and Singapore, with different spellings. This makes things complex. Not a simple "Li" or "李" problem. What I am doing is make these complex spellings in order, standardize them with a single naming convention. Yao Ziyuan 17:31, 24 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - We should not have non-Roman characters in article names that the average user cannot type.--Niohe 21:36, 24 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment - Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, but things cannot named using only Roman characters are not in Wikipedia's view according to your word? Yao Ziyuan 08:02, 25 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • I thought I had seen the last of your ethno-centric POV on CFD; evidently that is not the case. You ignore that he is only referring to article names. No one is calling for the elimination of non-English/ASCII content from Wikipedia. Kimchi.sg 08:17, 25 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • The fact: completely different surnames might have exactly the same pronunciation and romanization, but on the other hand, many same surnames of China origin have found and extensively used in other East Asian countries with different pronunciations and romanizations. Chinese character to Roman is not a relation of one-to-one or one-to-more, but more-to-more. The relation is too complex to figure out what the surname actually be only by its romanizations. There is no way to organize each surname under one single article title unless we use Chinese characters in title to disambiguate (only for disambiguation purpose). I'm propose to use "Pinyin (Chinese) (surname)" form of title for surname articles, this can be read and edit (but not create) by both people who can or cannot speak Chinese, no matter if he/she has installed Chinese font. As a IT/computing expert, I see no technical problem by using Chinese characters at Wikipedia. Yao Ziyuan 08:27, 25 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Another fact - Most people using Wikipedia are not computer scientists.--Niohe 14:11, 25 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment - Yao Ziyuan: Yes, English Wikipedia is "Latin-centric" just as much as 維基百科 is "Hanzi-centric". English will be written in Latin letters for the foreseeable future and Wikipedia is not the place to change English usage or create new words. Before you try to change the way Wikipedia works, perhaps you should sit down and read WP:NOT or zh:WP:不 if that makes more sense.--Niohe 14:47, 25 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Nobody's disputing that fact that these names need to be disambiguated from each other, but the fact remains that they can either be disambiguated on the same page, or on separate pages. That is what we're arguing about - not whether the names need to be disambiguated. Either way it will require the use of the Chinese characters. -Freekee 17:08, 25 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • You may want to refrain from calling yourself an "expert"; it sounds pretty pompous. Mike Dillon 17:13, 25 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • Be polite, please. Don't you also write "This user is an expert SQL programmer." on your own user page? Yao Ziyuan 17:54, 25 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        • That's in the userbox and I didn't write it. That box is on my page to let people know that I am available to help with high-level SQL-related issues in the context of Wikipedia. I'm not going around calling myself an "expert" in conversations and I would not do so. I would probably say "IT professional" or "software engineer". Mike Dillon 19:47, 25 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. If the name can be disambiguated on some other way, that would be fine, but it doesn't seem to be a deletion issue. (And the separate pages for all the different "Li" names are probably needed, as I doubt we cover anywhere close to all notable people with these names yet.) Uppland 12:12, 25 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • We'd be most interested if you could offer some suggestions of how to do so without introducing chinese characters into titles of articles and categories. Ohconfucius 18:07, 25 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep for the time being. Merging this with "Li" not only brings in those other Lis (which I could live with) but loses those 李 who are spelled differently in English (Lee, Lý, Lii, Plum, etc.). I understand the problem, but the real solution would be to merge this and all similar articles with Chinese surnames. That would be useful. But until that can be done, Lǐ (李) (surname) serves a purpose that Li (surname) does not.

OinkOink 22:56, 25 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep. The need for a split is clear. We've long since reached a consensus that the common East Asian surnames are notable topics in themselves; different surnames are *different* notable topics and have to be dealt with on different pages. It is unfortunate that there is no alternative means of disambiguation - or at least none has been proposed -- but in any case that would be an argument for renaming, not deletion nor even merging. I'm tempted to suggest Li (plum tree) (surname), but don't think it would fly. :-) -- Visviva 15:38, 26 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • keep. Let those who are knowledgeable decide consistently--while the question is still live, its absurd to delete. It should only be deleted if the correct style is decided by consensus, and then someone insists on a different way. DGG 05:35, 27 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I think I can see the fundamental difference between the "Keep" camp and the "Merge" camp: If you think of this as "an article about the surname 'Li' in English", then the "different" Lis should be in the same article. But, if you think of this as "an article or articles about the various East Asian surnames, which can be written as "Li" in English, then they should be kept separate. Obviously, coming from a Chinese cultural background I see things from the latter p.o.v., whereas I would guess that editors from a non-East Asian background would see things from the former p.o.v. So I guess the question we are really asking is, what are we trying to write an article on: the "English" word (surname) Li? or the underlying Asian names that "Li" represents? If the former, merge. If the latter, separate. --Sumple (Talk) 08:02, 27 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment If we write the both, this article should be also keep. Yao Ziyuan 08:18, 27 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • Comment - The thing that have puzzled me most in this discussion is the fact that people who wish to keep the article, take the Chinese language as the norm and then tries to fix whatever is "lacking" in the English language. The fundamental problem is that no two languages correspond one to one, and we should not try to impose the logic of one language on another. I want to stress that this is a two way street: my experience is that editors on other language versions of Wikipedia (such as Chinese) are sensitive to impositions of foreign language logic on their language - and we should be equally sensitive here at English Wikipedia. I am not saying that languages don't change and that Wikipedia should not reflect that. But this is not the place to reinvent language and for want of a better norm we should stick to the norm "in Rome do as Romans" do, or 入乡随俗 as we say in Chinese.
The whole problem seems to have started when one of the participants in this debate decided that there should be a page in Englsih Wikipedia, which corresponds exactly to zh:李姓. However, such a one-to-one correspondence is unrealistic and the closest guide to this problem can be found on Wikipedia:Interlanguage_links#Purpose, where it is stated that we should link to corresponding pages for want of better matches.
In conclusion, as long as most users of English Wikipedia are not bilingual in Chinese and English, I do not see what purpose separate pages satisfy.--Niohe 15:53, 27 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Rename to Li (surname meaning "son born beneath a plum tree") - there is no way for an English speaker to use that title with the chinese character in it in ANY useful way - I can't type it - I can't read it - I can't tell my friend over the phone how to get to it - I can't search for it (because I can't type the chinese character and 'Li' by itself is too short)...and I can't link to it (because I can't type it). SteveBaker 00:28, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That would be redundant name, but I agree on renaming it. AQu01rius (User • Talk) 00:46, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment This is not always work. Because for many surnames, since a character usually has many meanings, and it is hard to say which meaning the surname origin. And for general uses, surnames are about no additional meanings with them. They only mean surnames. So we are here talking about about the character itself. Yao Ziyuan 02:08, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - I said it before, and I'm saying it again: we cannot take Chinese characters as the starting point when we create entries in English Wikipedia. Please read my comment above, Yao Ziyuan.--Niohe 02:12, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - I know you have said before. You always says 維基百科 this 維基百科 that, but this is English Wikipedia, this is not 維基百科, and personal, I don't contribute at 維基百科. Maybe you are familiar with 維基百科, but none of people here. Please don't talk about 維基百科 here again, which is already communism. Yao Ziyuan 02:29, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - Thank you for your enlightening contribution.--Niohe 02:34, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. Yao Ziyuan, I found your statement extremly ignorant and offensive. The Chinese Wikipedia is communist? How? Because it displays Simplified Chinese? sigh. Many of the people here actually do contribute to Chinese Wiki, and your wide accusation does not help you at all.

The opposing point is clear: on a computer with no East Asian character encoding, all characters simply displays "[]", do you realize that?. The only way we can solve this is by renaming the article. AQu01rius (User • Talk) 05:46, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

    • Comment. It was not me ignorant and offensive. You didn't understand me. Yes, I certainly realized they would be displayed as "[]", but even they displayed as [], copy-and-paste and be still done correctly. Yao Ziyuan 06:46, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - Well, who is that was ignorant and offensive, then? I am starting to wonder whether you actually understand what has been said in the debate. By making the inclusion of Chinese characters look like a purely technical question, it is clear that you are not paying any attention to what other editors have said in the matter. As regards the use of Chinese characters, there are relevant Wiki-policies in place that we need to respect. Furthermore, if you disagree with our interpretation of these rules, please quote Wikipolicies in support of your argument. Thus far, you haven't even mentioned any of these policies. Are you listening at all? This is getting very repetitive and I fear that people will stop listening to you if you keep dodging the issue.--Niohe 07:40, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - It doesn't matter that the chinese character has many meanings - we only care about the meaning that applies in this particular case. This is no different from someone with an English name that can be pronounced in many ways and have different meanings. Suppose someone was called 'Tom Bow' - Bow can be something that shoots an arrow or the front part of a ship - and it can be pronounced in two different ways and spelled 'Bough' and sound the same. We don't care because it's just a name. The fact that the same kinds of ambiguity exists in chinese isn't a reason to start making things even more confusing for English readers. Pick whichever meaning applies and put it in brackets after the name if disambiguation is necessary - explaining the differences in detail inside the article. Putting a symbol that it utterly incomprehensible to almost all of our readers quite simply doesn't help in any way - in fact it makes matters worse because we can't read it aloud OR type it. The precedent this would set for other articles would be unbearable. If we allow this, then shouldn't the article on Aristotle be called Ἀριστοτέλης instead because 'Aristotle' is only an approximate spelling based on the latin alphabet? SteveBaker 05:35, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That's not a fair comparison at all. The various "Li" surnames are actually written differently *and* pronounced differently in Chinese. When properly transliterated, whether via Pinyin or W-G, many of them look different. All they have in common is that, when transliterated in English, they are commonly written the same way.
It would be analogous to, say, there being two towns, one called Θήβα and the other called niwt, but which are both called "Thebes" in English. Yet, we keep them on different pages because they are different things.
The distinguishing feature of the present debate from the Thebes situation is that we have no effective way to technically disambiguate the various surnames that correspond to "Li".
And, as I have said before, IMO the fundamental question is whether we are having an article about the English transliteration "Li" per se, or the underlying Asian surnames which are represented by it. Connotations and denotations. Dum-dee-dum-dee-dum. --Sumple (Talk) 11:43, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
So call the article Li (surname pronounced as XXX) where 'XXX' is whatever most accurately approximates the correct pronunciation using the English/Latin character set. There must be some means to disambiguate these articles without resorting to a useless and incomprehensible (to most of our readers) symbol. I simply do not believe that you couldn't (with a little imagination and subject matter expertise) come up with some means to state the differences between these surnames without resorting to a chinese character. Remember, I'm only talking about the title of the article. I have no problem whatever with appropriate use of the chinese character in the body of the article or in the body of the disambiguation page for 'Li'. SteveBaker 15:02, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think that's what Aqu01rius is proposing below: --Sumple (Talk) 22:07, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. The problem which underlies our discussion is the structure of the language. Chinese is words are all monosyllabic with 4 tones (mandarin only), and there may be a number of homonyms for each tone. I had proposed the Li 1/2/3/4 elsewhere as a partial solution to the issue, as chinese scholars are familiar with the notation which represents the tones in mandarin. However, the simple fact is that it cannot be suitably disambiguated without either chinese characters or the use of extremely long descriptions like "Li" with 'mu' at top and 'zi' at bottom, in which case I vote for the latter. Ohconfucius 03:24, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Rename. I guess if we keep all the Lis in one article, it would eventually become way too long. I would recommend that we rename them all according to their sound. Those special characters are not good to be included in the article title, so we can adjust them to be something like these:
Lī -> Li (1) - Probably won't need it as there is no matching Chinese lastname.
Lí -> Li (2) - Which is most likely for 黎 only.
Lǐ -> Li (3) - Focus on 李, but address 理 or 里 also if necessary.
Lì -> Li (4) - 立?
Then change the Li page into a disambiguation page. AQu01rius (User • Talk) 00:46, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
There is no problem with having Lī, Lí, Lǐ, Lì, since they are Latin characters and anyway, lots of French articles use accented letters in their names. --Sumple (Talk) 22:08, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep separate - Chinese character purely for disambiguation purposes, and the subject of the page is, in a sense, the character itself. Schrödinger's cat 02:23, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - As you can see above, many editors a wary of using Chinese characters or other non-Roman characters in page names. Please advice.--Niohe 04:08, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Ideally as advised in Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English) ("Also, a non-Latin-alphabet redirect could be created to link to the actual Latin-alphabet-titled article."), we could keep this page as a redirect to Li (surname) and have 李 as its own section in the latter article; however no thanks to a Mediawiki bug it is impossible to redirect to specific sections. Kimchi.sg 04:20, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect to Li (surname) per Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English) would be the best solution in my opinion (with a merge of content of course). That said, if this is kept outright I would say the idea being floated here to dab Li (surname) to several subpages is a bad one and should not be done. Leave it as a link it at the end of the article but leave the Li (surname) content intact as a good concise overview.--Isotope23 15:08, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep, and turn Li (surname) a disambiguation. — Instantnood 18:22, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Let's remind ourselves that WP:NAME is wiki policy. It seems pretty unambiguous that the article should be deleted as being non-compliant with same: "Generally, article naming should give priority to what the majority of English speakers would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature." Ohconfucius 03:24, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy. Follow the spirit, not the letter, of any rules, policies and guidelines. The use of Chinese character is the most straight way to solve this problem, rather than use unreasonable long "mu at top and zi at bottom". Here is the problem 李, it has simple structure, so what if we next write article about 龍? I suggest to use a uniform way to disambiguate all surnames. And that it is Yao Ziyuan 03:45, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: If this article is kept, it should be moved to Li (李) since the Chinese character is already sufficient disambiguation. Kimchi.sg 04:48, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - here is Jimbo's take, straight from his talk page:

  • First, a rant, and then some limited support for your proposal. :)

    I am deeply, deeply opposed to the use of ALL non-English characters in the titles of articles in English Wikipedia in most cases. This is already a horrible problem in such cases as Stanisław Lem. Look closely at that... it contains the character "ł", which is not an English character. Therefore, it is wrong as a title for an article in the English Wikipedia. Because of the nature of English as a mongrel language with no official academy or spelling rules, there can be rare exceptions where some special non-English characters are extremely well known as part of a proper name. I accept this. So be it. But this is not license to play it deuces-wild and dispense with the entire English spelling system.

    The correct name of Munich, in English, is Munich. This despite the fact that it could be written as the Germans write it: München, or perhaps even Anglicized as Muenchen. The correct English name for the capital of Japan is Tokyo. It would be deeply wrong to write that "The capital of 日本 is 東京." It would be also wrong to say "The capital of Nippon is Tōkyō... or any other variant. In English the name is "Tokyo".

    Now, having given that rant, I find that I must take what might seem to some a contradictory position. In the case you are considering... purely for disambiguation purposes, the subject of the page is, in a sense, the character itself. I find this to be an interesting proposal, and I promise not to blow a gasket about it. It is not for me to decide of course.

    (And notice that although I think the community has made a deeply wrong decision in the case of Stanisław Lem, I keep mostly quiet about that, too.)

    --Jimbo Wales 02:47, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

  • My comment from Jimbo's talk page - Jimbo, I am one of the participants in the debate whether to use Chinese characters in page names and I would like to thank you for your input. However, I think it is wrong to draw a parallel between the use of diacritics in Latin-based names and Chinese characters.
First, it is hard to draw the line where diacritics should be considered non-English or not. Not long ago, it was considered proper English to write: coöperation, reënactment, rôle and archæology, etc.
Furthermore, in case diacritics are used, it is very easy to create disambiguation pages that will lead the user to the "correct" page. Type Stanisław Lem or Stanislaw Lem and you get directed to the same page.
However, when it comes to the use of Chinese characters in page names, we are potentially raising a barrier to many users, at least as long as we can assume the majority of English Wikipedia's cannot type Chinese. If we set a precent for this, there is nothing that prevents us from creating pages with Arabic, Hindi, Hebrew, Cyrillic texts, which may make parts of Wikipedia inaccessible for many users.
Just my two cents.
--Niohe 23:05, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep; Merge other articles into this one. I just now searched for 李, and now I find here that my search is seen as an "unlikely" one for English speakers. I would note that if popularity of search terms is a determinant of inclusion within this reference site, then a great many more of these 1.5 million English articles are also unlikely to be searched, and need to be deleted along with this one. I was hoping to search for people across the East-Asian spectrum who shared the same surname as the first Korean president, Rhee Syngman. With due deference to Jimbo Wales' xenocentrist and somewhat insulting view that "all foreign place names must be rendered in English" (as if the native languages simply did not exist at all, or were all on their way to extinction, or at any rate were unlearnable to us daft, monolingual English-speakers), it feels kind of tedious for me to complete my search here without resorting to a direct search of the 李 character. I do see some merit in restricting foreign language characters in titles, but I also see that total anglicization of every other language puts up a serious barrier between users like me, who actually set foot outside of their own country, and languages that really exist and are used in this world. This is an English encyclopedia, yes, but encyclopedic topics do not only exist within English-speaking countries, and I would prefer to have the privilege of being able to connect with ideas in other languages without muting them with romanization. Frankly, it makes me feel like an idiot to not be able to search for 李, and it makes me want to turn to other sources. Now, there is certainly a lot of duplication with this surname, but this 李 article here is the most complete so far, at least for my present search, including lists of both Korean and Chinese prominent bearers of the name. The other articles should be merged into this, preceded by a disambiguation page connecting me with the article, Lee (Korean name). It might be best to simply put the 李 title on that disambiguation page. Retaining the diacritic is immaterial... I wouldn't even see the need to put any romanization on a 李 disambiguation page. Bravo-Alpha 22:48, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - It may have eluded you that there are other language versions of Wikipedia and that many articles are interlinked. That is the beauty of Wikipedia as a whole. However, it seems that rather than improving Wikipedia in their native languages, many Wikipedians prefer to write articles in English Wikipedia. No problem in and by itseld, but the end result is that the linguistic hegemony of English is perpetuated by many people who are opposed to it. I use Chinese Wikipedia on a daily basis, and occasionally contribute to it, but I'm often struck by the fact that it is so small - it turned 100 000 articles only recently! --Niohe 23:28, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
One should not rule out the possibility that the frequency will change, IMHO. Then we'll have to move the page every so often. _dk 15:35, 30 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Using Hundred Family Surnames is problematic though, because many surnames it lists are not common any more, and it doesn't list many surnames which are common these days. I'm working on a wikified version of the text at User:Sumple/Surnames. Check it out, especially all the redlinks. --Sumple (Talk) 20:30, 30 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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