Template talk:National parks of France

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Protected areas

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Use of accent marks

In bringing this template across from the French Wikipedia (see fr:Modèle:Parcs nationaux en France), I noticed that the individual articles for the parks in the English Wikipedia were not consistent in their use of the accent marks in the article names. For example: Cévennes National Park vs. Pyrenees National Park.

Because this template forced the issue of consistency among the different parks, I consulted WP:UE, WP:NAME, and WP:NCGN extensively to determine whether to use the accents or not. Conclusion is that there is no conclusion: There has been extensive controversy over the course of years about the use of diacritics in the English Wikipedia, and no consensus has emerged.

In the end, I elected to go with the advice at WP:NCGN#Widely accepted name, especially the referral to Google Scholar and Google Books, to establish the form of the park name most commonly used in formal English-language publications. Pretty much consistently across the board, Ecrins was used more often than Écrins, Cevennes than Cévennes, and Pyrenees than Pyrénées. It appears that little has yet been written about Réunion National Park, and references to Réunion the island were about evenly split between accent and no-accent. Thus I omitted the accents from this template.

I translated Guyane to Guiana to keep in line with English usage of "French Guiana". Google Scholar and Google Books had virtually no references to the park.

In line with this logic, I am presently working on creating articles for Reunion National Park and Guiana Amazonian Park. I also recommend that Écrins National Park eventually be moved to Ecrins National Park, and Cévennes National Park to Cevennes National Park. Ipoellet (talk) 02:03, 16 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I am disappointed that some users still don't get the fact that Google is not The Bible and that we use diacritics throughout the EN Wikipedia for years, no matter if Google, the Almighty is in favour or not of diacriticized names. - Darwinek (talk) 09:25, 8 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]