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.
Interesting. The rationale given for keep by several people amounted to "because it's useful", but WP:NOT gives plenty of examples of useful kinds of information that are nevertheless deemed to be outside the scope of Wikipedia—after all, there's a whole web out there for this information. It's also the kind of cross-product, subclassification that the guidelines suggest avoiding. A list of Hungarian exonyms is useful in the same way that a list of Greek words for different species of fish or a list of Chinese architectural terms would be or a list of Swahili accounting terms would be. These are all fodder for dictionaries, glossaries, etc. WP:NOTDICT strongly applies.—Largo Plazo (talk) 14:01, 25 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Exonyms, as with the etymology of place names, are considered to be an encyclopedic topic. I'm surprised that this hasn't been done before. I can't say "keep" for this article on the topic, because the execution does not meet Wikipedia standards; it's not sourced, it's not written in an encyclopedic style, and it's not well arranged. As for the topic, if someone wanted to make a table out of it, that's fine. "There's a whole web out there", to be sure, and the best articles in here draw from the information from sources out there. Mandsford (talk) 14:45, 25 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
"Are considered to be" by whom? On what basis? What makes names for places more encyclopedic than names for fish or for architectural elements? —Largo Plazo (talk) 15:11, 25 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
By whom? Based on the existence of an entire category for the exonym articles and the outcome of prior debates, by many of the people who participate in the deletion debates, obviously. For whatever reason, geography, like sports and television, tends to get over-emphasized on Wikipedia. Is it a violation of one of the many Wikipedia rules? Probably. Does anybody really care? For the most part, probably not. You might be successful on deleting this particular article; good luck to you on the others. Mandsford (talk) 19:12, 25 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Strong Keep no reason to single out Arabic exonyms for more negative treatment than the European ones which were kept. Exonomy is encyclopedic based on precedent, the number of articles we have on the subject, the blurbage in many more articles that reference the issue, and the fact that it keeps coming up both at WP and in the real world as being the object of significant coverage in reliable 3rd party sources: Macedonia, Kosovo, South Tyrol, Samaria, Ivory Coast, and even "America", many of their subdivisions, and their names in exononmous sources meet their own sufficient notability that many have articles here- see for some of them Category:Geographical naming disputes -certainly the subject meets it, and lists (of which this one is of poor quality) also meet it. Carlossuarez46 (talk) 21:23, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't single out Arabic vis-a-vis European languages. This is an article I came across, and I nominated it, period. If you read my notes above, you'll see that I also disagree with the outcome of the previous deletion discussion. Next, you're basically saying, "it's encyclopedic because it's been treated as encyclopedic". This is hardly a persuasive argument. As for the specific examples you name, they are significant for reasons particular to them: the name of Macedonia is a subject of international dispute (and, by they way, it is has nothing to do with exonyms); "Samaria" is only the faintest offshoot of the long-time battle over the status of the West Bank/Palestine; "Ivory Coast" is a peculiar case of a country whose name consists of ordinary words, and yet the country's government insists that the correct name in English for this country consists of the French version of those words. As I'm sure you know, notability isn't inherited. The fact that some rock musicians are notable doesn't mean being a rock musician inherently makes one notable. I can't believe you're asserting that if a topic is notable, then any list of things associated with that topic are notable. Words are notable; that certainly doesn't mean people should create stand-alone lists of arbitrary sets of words. —Largo Plazo (talk) 22:08, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
You've created a straw man. The proper analogy is not: "The fact that some rock musicians are notable doesn't mean being a rock musician inherently makes one notable." Your assertion here is: "The fact that some rock musicians are notable doesn't mean rock music is notable." That one doesn't fly - you seem to think the whole topic of exonomy is not encyclopedic, as you have admitted not just singling out Arabic. Carlossuarez46 (talk) 23:36, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep The topic is suitable for an encyclopedia, even if the article needs improvement. Arabic is a major language, names of places in this language have significance, sourcing will be readily available. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 03:54, 29 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Wiktionary is not the place for this--these aren't words in that sense. I do believe the topic to be encyclopedic, though I'd like to see it executed better, obviously. Drmies (talk) 04:58, 29 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep for now. The rationale of the nominator does not apply. On the other hand, if the article is deleted in its present state – without prejudice to later re-creation in a better form – little is lost. Although it is stated that "this list only includes names that are significantly different from the local toponym", almost all differences in the listed names result from the re-romanization of names rendered in the Arabic script. Hambūrġ is not really "significantly different" from Hamburg. To boot, in the few cases where there is a significant difference, the reader cannot see what the conventional English toponym of the place is. I assume that the creator intended to address this but was cut short and taken aback by the prompt nomination for deletion, less than 5 hours after initial creation and less than 35 minutes after the last edit. 88.234.217.196 (talk) 00:58, 30 January 2009 (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.