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Task force tohutō is a Wikipedia task force to update articles on New Zealand places so they use official names with macrons (Māori: tohutō). This involves going through the list of official place names in the Land Information New Zealand's New Zealand Gazetteer, renaming articles as needed, and changing the spellings of that place in all affected articles where appropriate. Progress is being tracked in Google Sheets.

Background

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Many words in New Zealand English are of Māori origin. Māori distinguishes between short and long vowels, and marks the latter with a macron. This matters: short or long vowels change the meanings of words. The special-effects house Weta Workshop is named after wētā, an insect; their name as written means "Excrement Workshop". Since about 2015, macrons have become commonly used on words of Māori origin in reliable sources (media, education, and government). The Wikipedia New Zealand naming conventions did not reflect this change, however, and macrons were discouraged in place names in particular. The matter was debated for nearly two years, and the request for comment was finally closed on 21 March 2020. People are strongly advised to read the detailed RfC!

The main wording change was as follows:

"Where the commonly used name is of Māori origin, use the spelling as defined in the New Zealand Gazetteer if the entry is labelled "official". Do not take guidance from the New Zealand Gazetteer if the entry is labelled "unofficial". Where the "official" name includes a macron, include the un-macronned name in the text – for example, Taupō is the article name, and the article could explain that the town is often known as Taupo."

Bringing Wikipedia into line with current New Zealand English usage is a big job, and we will need volunteer help.

Participants

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  1. Giantflightlessbirds
  2. Schwede66
  3. Pakoire
  4. Canley
  5. ready.eddy
  6. Onco_p53
  7. YttriumShrew
  8. Paewiki
  9. Panamitsu
  10. Yvanyblog

How to help

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We are using a Google spreadsheet to organise the place name list, divided into populated places and geographical features. This allows people to note what they're working on and what has been achieved. Editors may work horizontally (i.e. performing all tasks for a particular geographic item) or vertically (i.e. performing all tasks in a column across all geographic items) with the spreadsheet. Feel free to annotate the spreadsheet and add your initials if you work horizontally.

How to use the spreadsheet

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Here is a section of the spreadsheet; note the columns.

Place name Disambiguation In En WP? Notes Autogenerated En WP link Wikidata Gazetteer ID
Ōwhata Northland no Redirects to Herekino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ōwhata, Northland Q84150797 34831
Taitā moved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taitā Q7676505 41252
Whangarei District do not move official name without a macron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whangarei District Q3696415 15039

The place name may need extra disambiguation text to distinguish it from other places (Ōwhata vs Ōwhata, Northland). It may not have an article in English Wikipedia, or the article could have been moved (retitled) to have a macron. However, the article text has probably not been updated – see "Updating all uses" below. If the article needs creating, there is an autogenerated English Wikipedia link to use: paste this into your address bar, and Wikipedia will prompt you to create the article.

Wikidata

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Always check the Wikidata entry (e.g. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q84150797) to make sure both macron and non-macron versions of the name are listed, and noted as "different from" other identically-named places. And open the Gazetteer ID (e.g. https://gazetteer.linz.govt.nz/place/34831) in a different tab to check if the name is official. Many Wikidata entries were first created when articles were mass-created by a bot for the Cebuano language Wikipedia. The co-ordinates recorded through this exercise are almost always incorrect and editors are asked to update the data by copy-pasting coordinates from the Gazetteer entry.

Mix 'n' Match

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We need to link up the Gazetteer numbers for places to their Wikidata item, and one tool for doing this is Mix 'n' Match. Here is the NZGB Gazetteer in Mix'n'Match. There's lots of work to do matching up places to their Gazetteer numbers, but some sort of nonsense has happened in the import with macrons, so Lake Te Pōhue (Q88946788) has to be matched to "Lake Te P≈çhue". As you can see from the spreadsheet, there are also numerous places – mostly geographical features – without Wikidata items, so they also need to be created and linked to their Gazetteer number.

  1. You can search for particular names within the in Mix'n'Match, although the search does not seem to distinguish vowels with macrons from those without.
  2. Note that the names of rivers and streams is written several times on maps, they often end up with several Wikidata items (and each one automatically gets an article in Cebuano Wikipedia). This is a bigger problem than the macron issue, so avoid river or stream names if duplicates appear and you're not up to merging Wikidata items.

Updating all uses

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For each article that's retitled, we need to go through the body text and fix each occurrence of the name (where appropriate: see Notes).

  1. Search for all occurrences of the name and add a macron if appropriate. Note how the Whanganui article handles its former name: it's "Wanganui" when discussing town history, but "Whanganui" when referring to the town today. If you want to be conservative, only add a macron to the present-day uses of the name.
  2. As per the New Zealand naming conventions, add that the place is "often known as" the un-macronned version
  3. If necessary note the date when the official name gained a macron, linking to the NZGB Gazetteer entry: for example, Paekākāriki became the town's official name in June 2019.[1] Or you can link to the issue of the Gazette that published the change:

    The official name of the town was changed to Paekākāriki (with [[Macron (diacritic)|macrons]]) by the [[New Zealand Geographic Board]] on 21 June 2019.<ref>{{cite web |url= https://gazette.govt.nz/notice/id/2019-ln2814 |title=Notice of Approved Official Geographic Names |date=21 June 2019 |work=New Zealand Gazette |publisher= |accessdate=18 January 2020}}</ref>

  4. Then we need to search Wikipedia for all occurences of that name, and change those too (for articles in New Zealand English of course, and where historically appropriate). This can involve opening many, many browser tabs and working methodically through them.

When you've "completed" a place name, note it in the spreadsheet, perhaps with your initials. Thank you!

Dealing with problem users

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Here's an example of what could be posted to disruptive users.

Notes

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  1. Make sure the article is in New Zealand English. The template to add is{{Use New Zealand English|date=August 2023}}(using the current month). Only articles with strong national ties to NZ should be in New Zealand English. (This means articles in American English that mention New Zealand places should not use macrons, at least until they become common usage overseas.)
  2. Don't be anachronistic! Book titles, official electorate names, and community groups probably used the old macron-less name in the past. Businesses, railway stations, and schools may not have updated their name yet. Leave those names as is, until those organisations or publications change them. Some will try to argue that all references to the place with a macron before, say, 2019 are anachronistic. But referring to the place two different ways depending on the point in time looks messy. One solution, if you add macrons to all the place names in an article, is to simply say somewhere in the "name" section "until 2019, its name was spelled without a macron" or similar wording, with a NZGB reference of course.
  3. Not all places have an official name: Taupō (the official name) is on the shores of Lake Taupo (not an official name yet). The lake will get a macron when its name gets reviewed, which is happening at an accelerating pace: hundreds of names received macrons in 2019.
  4. Not all the official names have been updated by NZGB. So Waitakere River is an official name dating to 1948, but it flows through the Waitākere Ranges (official name as of 2019). These inconsistencies are annoying and will gradually be resolved by NZGB, but until then it's best to stick to the official name.

References

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  1. ^ "Paekākāriki". NZGB Gazetteer | linz.govt.nz. Retrieved 2020-04-08.
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