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Sunday, 26 January 2020, 11:44 amPress Release: Axel Wilke

The use of macrons in New Zealand English is changing fast.Print and television media, local and central government,they have almost all adopted the macron to indicate longvowels in Mori. Macrons are important: a wt is aninsect, but weta is excrement. Many places inAotearoa now use macrons in their names. But one of the lastbastions of macron resistance for place names is Wikipedia,one of the worlds most-viewed websites. Thats aconcern, and some Kiwi Wikipedians want to change this.

Macrons have been used in Wikipedia for some time: everyuse of the word Mori has its macron, and articlesare increasingly adopting macrons in their names: the NewZealand pigeon article was recently renamed Kerer. But place names have alwaysbeen a sticking point. For some reason, people feelespecially attached to towns and rivers, and resist changingtheir spelling. This applies in the real world see thekerfuffle over the h in Whanganui and the in Taup and its no different in Wikipedia. Wikipedia rules have,for years, stated that place names were underdiscussion, and macrons have not been used in themeantime for place names.

Wikipedia is written byvolunteers, all over the world, including quite a few in NewZealand. Theres no editorial board or committee thatdecides on the formatting or spelling rules and guidelines those have been thrashed out by the volunteersthemselves over the last 19 years, and continue to beamended and improved. Change happens through long publicdiscussions on Wikipedia talk pages, and anyone cancontribute.

Christchurch-based Axel Wilke has putforward a proposal to change Wikipedias namingconventions where geographic features contain a macron,based on gazette notices by the New Zealand GeographicBoard. Mike Dickison, who was New ZealandWikipedian at Large in 201819, is helping.

In June 2019, the New Zealand Geographic Boardreported that 824 Mori place names had been made official,and about 300 place names now include a macron.

If the proposal is adopted, nearly 300 place names onWikipedia would thus be changed to show the macron in thepage title and throughout the text (note that not all 300places will have an article on Wikipedia yet).

Thiswould mark a big change for Wikipedia. The idea was firstraised on Wikipedia discussion pages in 2007 with no clearconsensus. In 2018, a great debate broke out about theappropriate name for Paekkriki / Paekakariki; thousandsof words of back-and-forth discussion ensued, even leakingout into The New Zealand Herald, which wrote aboutWikipedia's "battle of the macrons". Later in 2018,the discussion was revived, but no real consensus emerged.In none of these cases was a clear, well-supported proposalset out and put to the vote. Thats whats happeningnow.

You might think it would be an easy thing tojust declare Most New Zealand publications use macrons,so now all Wikipedia articles will too. But Wikipedia,through years of discussion and debate, has accumulatedlayers and layers of rules, guidelines, precedents, andstyle guides. They often have cryptic names like WP:COMMONNAME and MOS:DIACRITICS; youre expected to befamiliar with them if you want to contribute, and anyproposed changes have to take them into account. All this isinvisible to people who just use Wikipedia to look thingsup, but affects the work thousands of volunteer Wikipediaeditors do every day. Thats why this proposed rulechange, which will affect hundreds of articles and requirethousands of changes, is such a big deal.

If thechange is approved, it will bring Wikipedia into line withthe way New Zealand English has changed. Years ago, we allused to talk about Maoris and kakapos. Becausetheres no plural s in the Mori language, Englishspeakers in New Zealand began using the same word forsingular and plural, and now we might look askance atsomeone who talks about Maoris. More recently, macronshave crossed over from Te Reo into New Zealand English, andrapidly spread through the media, book publishing, legaldocuments, government, and education, which increasingly nowrefer to Mori and kkp. This has been aremarkable and swift change, reaching critical mass only acouple of years ago. So its understandable that Wikipediahas taken some time to catchup.

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