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Talk:Ngô Bảo Châu

Latest comment: 4 years ago by Joel B. Lewis in topic Unexplained deletion of sources
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Family name

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Latest comment: 13 years ago7 comments5 people in discussion

Sources suggest that his family name is Ngo rather than Chau.[1] —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rumping (talk • contribs)

Of course his family name is Ngô and not Châu (which is his given name), you can see that his father's full name is Ngô Huy Cẩn. Grenouille vert (talk) 18:14, 22 December 2009 (UTC)Reply
So when the article uses a single name, should that be Ngo?--Rumping (talk) 20:53, 19 August 2010 (UTC)Reply
No, per the custom for Vietnamese people, they should be referred to by their given name. DHN (talk) 23:25, 19 August 2010 (UTC)Reply
I know nothing about Vietnamese naming conventions beyond what I've read in this article, but it seems to be a fact that among mathematicians he's referred to as Ngo, not Chau. For example, the official laudation for his Fields Medal refers to him as Ngo. It's conceivable that because he lives in the USA, he's adopted the convention used there. To refer to him as Ngo may be in some sense incorrect, but it appears to be the common usage. 86.0.200.220 (talk) 06:00, 25 August 2010 (UTC)Reply
If he's adopted Western customs to refer to his name, then his full name should be referred to as "Bao-Chau Ngo", not "Ngo Bao Chau". DHN (talk) 22:47, 31 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

I think people are confusing the usual convention in English print media with cultural customs. For example, a Japanese newspaper or book would never refer to the person known in the English-speaking world as Akira Kurosawa by the name "Kurosawa" but instead they would choose "Kurosawa Akira". The custom of referring to a famous person in print by solely their family name is not Japanese (of course addressing someone face-to-face with an honorific is a different matter). Yet the Wikipedia article refers all over to "Kurosawa", and indeed that holds in much written discussion of him and his works. Are we supposed to re-edit Wikipedia to replace all mentions of "Kurosawa" by "Kurosawa Akira" because that's the Japanese custom? It's a convention in English to refer to these famous people by their family names, hence "Kurosawa", hence "Shakespeare", and hence "Ngo". It seems preposterous that we've purposefully chosen to ignore that in this one article. --DudeOnTheStreet (talk) 21:43, 10 April 2011 (UTC)Reply

When referring to Japanese people by a single name, their family name is used, regardless of whether in an English or Japanese publication. When referring to a Vietnamese person by a single name, their given name is used. This is not an English convention or a Vietnamese convention, it's just how it is. Even the CIA World Factbook follows this [2]. DHN (talk) 18:27, 9 July 2011 (UTC)Reply

Requested move: Removing diacritics

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Latest comment: 12 years ago22 comments16 people in discussion
The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Move - Published English-language sources most commonly omit Vietnamese diacritics, therefore Wikipedia's guidelines about foreign names and anglicization is in support of removing the diacritics from the articles in question. Neelix (talk) 20:32, 18 July 2011 (UTC)Reply

– Vietnamese diacritics rarely appear in English-language writing, not even in Encyclopedia Britanica or National Geographic, both of which use diacritics for other major languages. They are not used by the Vietnam News Agency, the country's official and dominant news service. VNA has English-language Web sites here (wire service feed), here (newspaper format), and here (magazine format). Nor are they used by Thanh Nien, the leading independent English-language daily. The Vietnamese alphabet has diacritics that are significantly more complex than those of other Latin-based alphabets. The character Đ/đ is both common in Vietnamese and problematic for English speakers. See this discussion on Jimbo's user page. The people listed above have all gotten significant news coverage, so they certainly have anglicized names. Note that the form of the name with diacritics would still be given in boldface in the opening, per WP:MOSBIO. The article title should be the version of the name that we want the article to index at, and how we want search engines to find the article. Like a book title, an article title is intended for a wider audience, so characters likely to be unfamiliar to the reader should be avoided. Kauffner (talk) 17:05, 25 June 2011 (UTC)Reply

Here’s who they are, together with diacritic-free usage examples from either Britannica or VNA:

A similar proposal is currently under discussion at Talk:Đặng Hữu Phúc. —  AjaxSmack  01:00, 29 June 2011 (UTC)Reply

  • Definitely oppose. I already got involved in the analogous discussion at Talk:Đặng Hữu Phúc. My arguments for every case of that same kind are always the same, and maybe I should put them down in a page in my userspace and link to it every time I choose to express an opinion in such a case. These discussions waste time and energy and contribute to the inconsistency of Wikipedia article naming conventions, as the presence or absence of characters from the extended Latin alphabet in titles will be becoming more and more arbitrary, knowing it's clear that they can never be abolished at all. Currently a town in Azerbaijan is called Qabala according to our article, and the local football team is given as Gabala FC, when in proper Azerbaijani both are spelt Qəbələ, with an alternative spelling Qäbälä, because in that language the letter Ə could be alternatively spelt as Ä. In addition, another article was once (though not currently) claiming that Novak Djokovic was the son of Srđan Đoković. In the cases concerning individuals like the above-mentioned Celine Dion or some native-born German, Swiss, Austrian, Dutch, etc citizens of Turkish origin, giving their names just with plain letters, as they in fact officially are, seems acceptable and even reasonable, but those instances aren't good reasons why we should sacrifice exactness, which is a trade mark of Wikipedia's, by rendering names of Vietnamese people in a non-Vietnamese fashion. In other Wikipedias this matter is not under consideration at all. I can pronounce all Ľudovít Štúr, Höskuldur Þórhallsson and the rest of the names cited above, and even for some of them I require the letter modifiers in order to be able to do so, while for others, if it weren't for the modifiers, I'd have been forced to rely on my intuition and guess which letter should be modified and which shouldn't; and some of the names at this talk page definitely strike me as incorrect, with myself having a Slavic linguistic background. On the other hand, English speakers needn't necessarily know the significance of every single letter modifier in order to associate it with a given name. Antonín Dvořák is surely well known by his actual name, even though the Ř is extremely troublesome for English speakers in terms of pronunciation. At the other talk page it was noted that Wikipedia was not for specialists specifically, but for ordinary common readers. Even if we can call people who know a dozen of new symbols as "specialists", we could well start depriving articles of any information that might be hard for non-specialists to comprehend, in such a way gradually turning Wikipedia from an encyclopedia into a handbook of general knowledge. And those who are actual specialists might not like what we'll be doing in that case. Besides, just knowing how a few symbols sound ≠ knowing a language, so the significance of Slovene Š and its difference from S are by far not obvious to Slovene speakers only. Besides, the search bar can prompt Ở if one types O into it; and of course I for one would only type into the search bar jfk, rather than the President's full names, when I wish to read something about President John F. Kennedy. That's what the search bar is for, and that's what redirects are for, and that's what Template:Foreign character is for, and that's how we ought to be serving our readers. --Theurgist (talk) 17:10, 1 July 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • Support. Agree that we need to clarify some issues, but the current practice and policy is to use English. Andrewa (talk) 04:37, 3 July 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • Oppose, I still don't see how the encyclopedia is improved, or who is helped, by doing this. We use diacritics regularly for names in most Latin-alphabet-based languages - why treat Vietnamese differently? It's clear enough what the underlying letters are, for those who (like me) don't know what the diacritics mean, so the titles are no less recognizable with the diacritics included.--Kotniski (talk) 11:17, 3 July 2011 (UTC)Reply
The main problem is that Vietnamese names are not given with diacritics by any published English-language source. For Nguyen Van Thieu, I found 1 example on Google Books with diacritics out of 6,180 post-1980 mentions. Kauffner (talk) 16:02, 5 July 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • Support Follow English usage, as verifiably documented through our sources. This makes our articles easier to find, more likely to be returned in search requests, and more credible to the wider public. Anyone who needs to be educated the original spelling of his name will see the information immediately at the top of the article. Per WP:COMMONNAME, WP:ENGLISH. Erudy (talk) 14:25, 10 July 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • Oppose. This is merely another case of diacritic-omission for the convenience of foreign (here, = non-Vietnamese) typists and printers. As Wikipedia has the full Unicode typecase set available, why not use it? Anthony Appleyard (talk) 05:43, 18 July 2011 (UTC)Reply
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The link to "Paul Germain" obviously leads to the wrong person, someone accidentally having the same name! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.98.30.178 (talk) 08:54, 15 February 2012 (UTC)Reply

Ngô Bảo Châu own preference

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Latest comment: 12 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Requested move 2

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Latest comment: 12 years ago31 comments11 people in discussion
The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was moved. Closing comment at the bottom. --BDD (talk) 19:04, 4 October 2012 (UTC) (non-admin closure)Reply

– Ngô Bảo Châu (Fields Medalist, Vietnamese mathematician professor in Chicago and Paris) per his own personal preference “Ngô Bảo Châu” on his Chicago webpage, per sources incl. New Scientist, Nature websites. Plus the two “fathers” of Vietnamese mathematics Lê Văn Thiêm and Hoàng Tụy less known in the west, Wikipedia Naming conventions (use English) states “If this happens, follow the conventions of the language in which this entity is most often talked about (German for German politicians, Turkish for Turkish rivers,..” etc.. However both feature in Neal Koblitz’s autobiography as “Lê Văn Thiêm” and “Hoàng Tụy” and per publications in Math-Net.Ru etc.. Also per consistency with 100% en.wp treatment of other Latin-alphabet mathematicians, such as: Jakša Cvitanić (Croatian in California), Jaroslav Nešetřil (Czech), Paul Erdős (Hungarian), Viktoras Biržiška (Lithuanian in Chicago), René Schoof (Netherlands), Stanisław Gołąb (Polish), José Sebastião e Silva (Portuguese), Gheorghe Ţiţeica (Romanian), Đuro Kurepa (Serbian), Štefan Znám (Slovakian), Dušan Repovš (Slovenian), Cem Yalçın Yıldırım (Turkish). …note also that en.wp does not have to follow Britannica where other sources show that Britannica is not in this case WP RS “the best such source” “reliable for the statement being made”, see recent RM consensus at Talk:Paul Erdős and Talk:Ilie Năstase In ictu oculi (talk) 18:03, 30 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

  • Oppose. The current format of these titles is a standard one for Vietnamese names. It is the usage of other encyclopedias, of the major media, of the Vietnam-based English-language media, and of most biographies for Vietnamese on Wikipedia. Putting the diacritics in misinforms the reader as to what real-world usage is. “Follow the general usage in reliable sources that are written in the English language,” per WP:DIACRITICS. See New York Times, Saigon Times, and VietnamPlus. (This last one is a Vietnam News Agency story, if you want to see the official style.) Highbeam has 40 news stories on Chau, and every one of these gives his name without diacritics. Compared to almost any other English-language publication, Britannica’s use of special characters is intensive. But they do not use diacritics for this name, or for Vietnamese names generally. Vietnamese diacritics are more complex and distracting than those used in the German and Portuguese examples provided in WP:UE. If you interpret the “no established usage" clause broadly and apply it to every language, we end up with Russian in Cyrillic and Korean in Hangul. Kauffner (talk) 04:07, 31 August 2012 (UTC)Reply
(i) En.wp editors are perfectly capable of distinguishing Jaroslav Nešetřil and Hoàng Tụy from (Cyrillic) Владимир Арнольд or 이임학 (Hangul) so we will not "end up with Russian in Cyrillic and Korean in Hangul". WP:UE continues "..if there are too few reliable English-language sources to constitute an established usage, follow the conventions of the language appropriate to the subject (German for German politicians, Portuguese for Brazilian towns, and so on).... Names not originally in a Latin alphabet, such as Greek, Chinese, or Russian names, must be transliterated.. But we don't Romanize names which are already Roman.
(ii) There was extensive response to the above arguments only 2 weeks ago in Talk:Ngô Sĩ Liên and Talk:Hồ Quý Ly, both of which received strong support to treatment equivalent to that given French and Czechs. And the mathematical sources here are considerably stronger than for either of those biographies. In ictu oculi (talk) 12:29, 31 August 2012 (UTC)Reply
"No established usage" isn't even one of the top five WP:NAMINGCRITERIA. But here you treat it as a supermighty criteria that overrides recognizability, consistency, WP:DIACRITICS and other provisions of the guidelines. Kauffner (talk) 11:10, 1 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
  • Support per nom. Actually I would support reversing nearly all of the previous moves -- there's no good reason to misspell things when it's easy to spell them correctly and redirects are available. The fact that e.g. Châu spells his own name on his website with the diacritics is the clincher. --JBL (talk) 02:05, 2 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
  • Support per nom, use correct spelling. The names are not anglicized and there are still sources spelling their names with diacritics. Redirect is cheap in Wiki. ༆ (talk) 02:30, 2 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
Quote: "Redirect is cheap in Wiki". Yes, surely it is cheap if you are not paying the bills. But it's surely true that redirects on popular pages would soon bring Wikipedia to its knees. *Quote: "If there are too few reliable English-language sources to constitute an established usage, follow the conventions of the language appropriate to the subject". The conventions for Vietnamese are described here. LittleBen (talk) 04:30, 2 September 2012 (UTC)Reply

Note that Vietnamese does not have to be used in titles—it should NOT unless unavoidable, because it forces a redirect for every access, as virtually nobody searches for article names using a search term with diacritics—but both diacritic and non-diacritic versions should be used in the lede, and diacritics can be used in the body. English Wikipedia article titles should as far as possible be words that English-speaking people can read, write, and remember. LittleBen (talk) 04:30, 2 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
  • Oppose: Surely the same idiotic "misspelling" argument applies to Chinese, Japanese and Korean as well: if you don't "spell" names in the native language—and use the native language order, which is reversed (surname first) in Japanese—then you are "misspelling" them. Nonsense, you romanize them—and use the English name order, like major English sources do, regardless of how the individual concerned does it on his personal web site. LittleBen (talk) 04:30, 2 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
You seem to be arguing that Chinese names should use English name order "like major English sources do". But no one ever says "Zedong Mao", etc. PS, redirects are indeed very cheap, and in any case there is absolutely no Wikipedia policy that tells us to choose titles based on some supposed (and probably entirely negligible) redirect processing impact. And finally, nothing on a wikitravel.org URL constitutes a Wikipedia policy, so why even cite that? — P.T. Aufrette (talk) 05:48, 2 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
  • I said that major English sources—like the English press, and publishers—use English name order and not reversed name order for romanized Japanese names—regardless what a Japanese individual uses on his or her personal web site. So what a Japanese individual uses on his or her personal web site or in publications by his or her employer is irrelevant. Wikitravel policy—to NOT use diacritics in article titles—is sensible, because it puts users first—(Quote: "English Wikipedia article titles should as far as possible be words that English-speaking people can read, write, and remember")—and uses existing standard conventions for romanization, as discussed above.
  • Repeating: "Note that Vietnamese does not have to be used in titles—it should NOT unless unavoidable, because it forces a redirect for every access, as virtually nobody searches for article names using a search term with diacritics—but both diacritic and non-diacritic versions should be used in the lede, and diacritics can be used in the body". LittleBen (talk) 14:44, 2 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
Like most slippery-slope arguments, this one is inane. The difference between languages written in a variant of the Latin alphabet and those not is natural and obvious; this proposal applies only to the former case. --JBL (talk) 14:35, 2 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
  • Wikipedia has articles on the ISO basic Latin alphabet, which is taught in schools in English-speaking countries, and Extended Latin alphabets which are used for foreign languages and are NOT widely taught in schools in English-speaking countries. So the great majority of English Wikipedia users cannot be expected to read, write, or remember words written in such foreign alphabets, thus it is not sensible to promote the use of such words in article titles. LittleBen (talk) 14:56, 2 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
  • Did you know that the name of the first female American Nobel prize winner for literature was 賽珍珠? Yes, that's the name she had inscribed on her tombstone. Would it benefit English Wikipedia users to change the article title to what she considered her "true name"? LittleBen (talk) 17:59, 2 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
Please use preview so that you don't make 10 edits for every comment, and please stop ranting -- your comment merely repeats the same bad argument as the original. There is a difference between diacritic marks on (or other minor variants of) the Latin alphabet and completely different alphabets (or non-alphabetic writing systems), and so your argument is not germane to this discussion. Also, if you respond to this comment, please do not merely repeat the same argument again. --JBL (talk) 18:42, 2 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
  • Did you even bother to research usage on the web? Even in Vietnam, the version without diacritics is far more frequently searched for. Did you notice the page title (in the browser toolbar) here? Surely it reads "Ngo Bao Chau's homepage" without diacritics? We're discussing article titles here, not use of diacritics within articles. LittleBen (talk) 01:51, 3 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
The idea that Wikipedia should misspell names because other sources have done so is very strange, especially when the other sources references often have such misspellings due to technical restrictions that do not affect Wikipedia. --JBL (talk) 22:17, 14 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
What about Voice of Vietnam? They don't have the technical capability give Vietnamese spelling? National Geographic gives diacritics for many, many languages. But for Vietnamese they say, "the number of accent marks can be distracting and may therefore be omitted."[3] A title should inform the reader, tell him how a name is normally given in English-language sources. So if the sources don't use diacritics, it is misleading to put them in regardless of why they are omitted. Kauffner (talk) 23:27, 14 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
@Paragon, thanks for your comment - while you didn't cite a policy, what you said is enshrined in WP:BLP. Re the following comment, anyone commenting here is probably already familiar with User:Prolog/Diacritical marks etc., so it shouldn't need restating that news agency websites tend to use ASCII The Voice of Vietnam website "Francois Hollande" is a ASCII website, so yes an ASCII website doesn't have the "technical capability" (by choice) to represent French names. Even AFP, Monsieur Hollande's own news agency doesn't "have the technical capability" (by choice) to represent the French President's name. But since en.wikipedia is not a news ticker tape, we do not let this influence in François Hollande article. Searching ["Francois Hollande" -"François Hollande"] in Google illustrates that en.wp does not follow the majority of sources even for simple cases like French names. We certainly do not follow majority sources for Czech, Polish, Turkish, Maltese. Ngô Bảo Châu actually has far better English sources (not least his own Chicago CV and math publications) than most of the Czech, Polish, Turkish, Maltese articles on en.wp. And yet they are all, 100% at full Czech, Polish, Turkish, Maltese spelling. So why are some of us singling out Vietnamese people for special treatment? In ictu oculi (talk) 02:54, 15 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
The VOV site is not wire service feed. And they can certainly put a cedilla on "François Hollande when they choose to do so. There is nothing about diacritics in WP:BLP. It says, "Be very firm about the use of high-quality sources," not "source it to a personal Website." Other encyclopedias don't use Vietnamese diacritics. Maybe there is a reason. Kauffner (talk) 05:33, 15 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
  • There are surely naming conventions (p.24) (that apply to birth certificates, passports and the like) for US nationals. Of course other countries have similar naming guidelines for passports. International sporting events like the Olympic games have similar rules. The reason is simply accessibility and usability -- non-English words and names are not widely used in English media. The whole idea of English Wikipedia is to make knowledge widely accessible to people who have grown up in English speaking countries and have not learned diacritics.
  • Wikipedia has not had any RfC, and surely does not have any guideline, that says that diacritics must be used virtually universally in titles of articles relating to Europe (or Vietnam, for that matter) for the same reason—accessibility and usability.
  • It is acceptable to have both foreign and romanized forms of names in passports, and it is acceptable to have both foreign and romanized forms of names in the lede and body of Wikipedia articles. (But it is surely not acceptable to add diacritics to article titles and then use that as a reason for removing English versions from the article body, except for simple and well-known names like Pele.)
  • How many of the people who have apparently been invited along to this discussion are active in the Vietnamese part of English Wikipedia, and are familiar with the country and its culture? LittleBen (talk) 15:13, 15 September 2012 (UTC)Reply
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.
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Latest comment: 6 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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French or not?

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Latest comment: 5 years ago5 comments5 people in discussion

The lead sentence of the article describes Ngo as "Vietnamese-French". Another IP would like to remove the descriptor "French", based on a variety of arguments (see the edit summaries of recent edits to the article). I would like to keep the descriptor, since it is accurate (Ngo has French citizenship) and expresses an important piece of his biography (citizenship + PhD awarded + 20ish years of residency + several academic positions there). Can other editors please weigh in, in order to establish consensus? --173.79.47.7 (talk) 22:59, 6 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

Radical suggestion: Remove nationality from the lead sentence. It is not that important for mathematicians. The nuances can be explained in the body. --Trovatore (talk) 23:34, 6 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
In general, if we do not have reliable sources for his citizenship, we should not be stating his citizenship, per WP:BLP. In this case, we do have sources, but they state that he has both citizenships. So my position is that either we should omit the citizenship as too unimportant for the lead, or list both. To choose one or the other is to editorialize without justification. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:17, 14 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
I agree with David Eppstein here. Per WP:ETHNICITY, it's fine to give Ngô's nationalities. Dropping it is also fine, per Trovatore, but I wouldn't mind seeing it stay given Ngô's recent work in the development of mathematics in Vietnam (e.g. the newly-created Vietnam Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics). — MarkH21 (talk) 18:36, 15 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
I agree that both or neither seems right in the abstract. And his connection to Vietnam seems significant enough that I wouldn't want to drop that from the lead. [Edit to add: looks like MarkH21 and I were writing the same thing just at the same moment!] --JBL (talk) 18:39, 15 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

Unexplained deletion of sources

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Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Some IP editor keeps deleting a bunch of sources with no explanation (first [4] with an edit summary that does not appear to relate to the edit, most recently [5]). Can I get a second opinion on whether this is defensible or not? (In the latter case, I will apply for some form of protection for the article.) --JBL (talk) 23:59, 18 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

I agree with you that the IP editor's repeated deletions without explanation are indefensible. NealKoblitz (talk) 16:23, 20 November 2019 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for your input -- I have (again) restored the references, and hopefully the IP editor will try to explain their edit. --JBL (talk) 16:34, 20 November 2019 (UTC)Reply
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