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Latest comment: 6 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
It was my understanding from discussions at, for example, Celine Dion that the English-language form of peoples' names should be used on English Wikipedia. However this page quickly moved to the (French) "François" version, causing readers to encounter redirects since none of the references in other English-language articles use the "François" version. Should this article be returned to "Francois Lavoie"? Expert advice needed. —RCraig09 (talk) 19:23, 6 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
Wikipedia does not have a blanket rule about always removing accented characters from foreign-language names — in fact, with some admitted exceptions we usually don't. Per the namelist at François, we don't actually have a policy of removing the cédille from the name François in most cases — very nearly everybody listed on that page has the cédille, and the only one who doesn't is from Trinidad and Tobago and thus wouldn't be bound by French spelling conventions the way a François from France or Quebec is. By and large, in fact, we maintain the accented characters on the vast majority of people from Quebec or France: see René Lévesque, Évelyne de la Chenelière, Luc de Larochellière, Bernard-Henri Lévy and (to tie it all back together) François Hollande for just some other examples. The difference at Celine Dion wasn't "accent has to be removed on principle", it was that she dropped the accent herself when she made her bid for the US market — and even then, in the Canadian context we have a rule that articles under the aegis of WikiProject Canada still sometimes link to her through the accented redirect instead of the technical page title anyway, if it's contextually important for a link to maintain the French spelling (e.g. in articles specifically related to Québécois music, or the parts of La Fin du monde est à 7 heures where her name comes up.) But the rule wasn't that we took it off because accented characters are somehow forbidden on Wikipedia — we took it off because she did. Bearcat (talk) 20:08, 6 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
