Wikipedia Macron Battle

Great news. As of 22 April 2020, Wikipedia is a reliable source on whether or not a populated place is spelled with a macron. New Zealand’s Wikipedians have finished adding macrons to the titles of those town, city, and settlement articles that should have one. And special thanks to one Australian Wikipedian; he did a lot of heavy lifting to finish this process. That work took us exactly one month.

What this means for media organisations is that it’s now even easier to check where macrons should and should not go. Make your editors aware of this fact. So, for example, Tīnui gets the macron that it deserves, unlike the example here.

Media staff could of course go to the New Zealand Gazetteer and get the information from the official database of the New Zealand Geographic Board. That office is part of Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) and they are the arbiters on the correct use of macrons for geographic items. The NZGB was especially busy last year adding macrons to the official names of hundreds of places. But one has to know where to find that information and how to interpret it. Wikipedia’s volunteers have already done the work, making it a handy source for reliable information. We’ve established a good working relationship with the Geographic Board and as soon as further names with macrons get confirmed as “official”, the relevant Wikipedia articles will be renamed straight away.

The next step for us is to adjust the spelling of place names within articles. This is ongoing and will take a while. And we have already started on the list of place names for non-populated places (rivers, islands, mountains) where numerous articles will need to be renamed. As can be expected with “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” there is a bit of macron vandalism going on; some people didn’t get the memo that macrons are now standard in New Zealand English, and try to “fix” our recent updates. A clever editor in Germany is going to programme a bot for us to monitor the removal of macrons, just so that we stay on top of things.

For your information, below is our press release from 22 March 2020 where we announced that Wikipedians had reached agreement on macron usage for populated places. That release provides further context.

Wikipedia macron battle has been won

press release: Aotearoa New Zealand, 22 March 2020

The use of macrons in New Zealand English has been changing fast. One of the last places that needed to adopt the use of macrons for place names was Wikipedia. Consensus has just been reached by Wikipedia volunteers and hundreds of places in Wikipedia will now go through the process of getting renamed: Taupo is now Taupō, and Paekakariki has become Paekākāriki. The request for comment was formally closed by a non-involved Wikipedian based in England. He explains:

It may be surprising to some people that I, a non-New Zealander, appear to be deciding this matter. This is a red herring. As a discussion closer, my role is not to decide, but to determine what the community has decided in the discussion below. I determine this in the way set out at Wikipedia:Closing discussions, and my role is to evaluate what we call the "consensus", which on Wikipedia is not unanimity but "rough consensus".

You might think it would be an easy thing to just declare “Most New Zealand publications use macrons, so now all Wikipedia articles will too.” But Wikipedia, through years of discussion and debate, has accumulated layers and layers of rules, guidelines, precedents, and style guides. They often have cryptic names like WP:COMMONNAME and MOS:DIACRITICS; you’re 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. That’s why this rule change is a big deal. Rules particular to New Zealand names are called WP:NCNZ (Naming conventions New Zealand) and this is what has just been amended.

Macrons are important: a wētā is an insect, but weta is excrement. Macrons have been used in Wikipedia for some time: every use of the word “Māori” has its macron, and articles are increasingly adopting macrons in their names: the “New Zealand pigeon” article was in January 2020 renamed “Kererū”. But place names have always been a sticking point. For some reason, people feel especially attached to towns and rivers, and resist changing their spelling. This applies in the real world – see the kerfuffle over the “h” in Whanganui – and it’s no different in Wikipedia. Wikipedia rules have, for years, stated that place names were “under discussion”, and macrons have not been used in the meantime for place names.

Wikipedia is written by volunteers, all over the world, including quite a few in New Zealand. There’s no editorial board or committee that decides on the formatting or spelling rules and guidelines – those have been thrashed out by the volunteers themselves since Wikipedia started in January 2001. Change happens through long public discussions on Wikipedia talk pages, and anyone can contribute.

Christchurch-based Axel Wilke put forward a proposal to change Wikipedia’s naming conventions where geographic features contain a macron, based on formal decisions made by the New Zealand Geographic Board. Mike Dickison, who was New Zealand Wikipedian at Large in 2018–19, was helping. Much feedback has been received and the draft policy amended several times since it was posted. Thirty three editors voted for the adoption of the guideline, with five against.

Axel says:

“The New Zealand Geographic Board got in touch with us after we published the proposal, expressing their gratitude that Wikipedians were trying to develop a naming guideline.”

This marks a big change for Wikipedia. The idea was first raised on Wikipedia discussion pages in 2007 with no clear consensus. In 2018, a great debate broke out about the appropriate name for Paekākāriki / Paekakariki; thousands of words of back-and-forth discussion ensued, even leaking out into The New Zealand Herald, which wrote about Wikipedia's "battle of the macrons". Later in 2018, the discussion was revived, but after nearly 200 edits to the discussion, no real consensus emerged. So it’s gratifying to see that after a well-researched proposal was put forward, agreement on macron use for place names has now been achieved.

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