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Me, I think changing an article title is a big deal. So why no discussion? Changing this from "Thawip River" to "Huai Mae Thawip" is a fairly substantial change. Are you also changing "List of Thailand articles" and mentions in other articles to match? I oppose this change to the English language version of WP. Why not expend your energies on making a Thai version of the article?Seligne (talk) 15:24, 19 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
A more centralised talk page would probably attract more participants, but since it's been raised here let's just continue discussing here. Pinging Potapt, who made the moves.
First off, I don't think the moves were inappropriate. Potapt was being bold and made changes he didn't think would be controversial. The renamed watercourses were all unreferenced stubs created almost a decade ago by Dr. Blofeld and which have barely been touched since. It can hardly be argued that those are established, widely accepted names. For example, the previous title of this article, Tawip River, isn't found in any online source that isn't a Wikipedia mirror. If someone created a poorly named new article today, I wouldn't hesitate to immediately rename it. That eight years have passed shouldn't matter if the article was left untouched (indicating that no one has probably bothered to check its accuracy).
However, there's also WP:USEENGLISH, which would prefer that English terms be followed, if they were shown to be used in reliable sources. This probably has to be argued case-by-case. Again, take Huai Mae Thawip as an example. Is it a river? A stream? The Thai names can't always be directly translated into English, and there doesn't appear to be any English-language source to follow. As such using the official transcription of the established Thai name would seem appropriate. That there are references to the old titles on other pages are not a concern because redirects exist. Hundred of page moves take place on Wikipedia every day; most of them don't require formal discussion. --Paul_012 (talk) 04:27, 20 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Seligne: Paul_012 has already mentioned most of the reasons why I made those moves, so I will answer just the rest of your questions:
Are you also changing "List of Thailand articles" and mentions in other articles to match?
Yes, of course. I plan to do that, like I did after Cha-Am District was moved to Cha-am District through my request, but I haven't finished renaming these pages yet.
Why not expend your energies on making a Thai version of the article?
Because I'm not interested in doing so. I wasn't even the person who created this article, so I don't think I have to take responsibility for that. One of the reasons why I renamed the article was because I saw "Tawip River" as a wrong name, due to the fact that "Tawip River" or "แม่น้ำทวีป" is unknown by the native Thai speakers, let alone native English ones. To me, changing it to "Huai Mae Thawip" means correcting the name apart from simply rendering it in Thai language.
Now I think it's my turn to ask you questions:
1. I know that the term "river" in English could be used with the watercourses of any size, but are you really going to call this a river? If yes, then:
(1) What about Khlong Saen Saep? Are you going to move it to "Saen Saep River" too? Because it is much wider and has more tributaries than "Tawip River" and seemingly we have to anglicize or translate everything into English.
(2) Anyway, since you said "wholesale changes", what is your evidence to support that "Tawip/Thawip River" and other names are established usages in English? Or are these names also in your mystical dictionary so we have to comply with it? At very least "Huai Mae Thawip" is used in this site.
2. Does adding any English word to any foreign name make the whole name an established usage? If yes, then does it mean that I can ask geographers or English speakers in Thailand where Tarang River is located, and most of them will figure it out right away? I'm asking this because I couldn't find any reliable source in English mentioning this river on the Internet. I'm not saying that "well-known" is equal to "well-established", but are there other ways to prove it?
3. IF in the future someone create more articles about almost unknown watercourses both in English and Thai, will you go to any length to be able to decide that a "ห้วย", for example, should be called "stream", "creek", "brook" or "tributary" in English?
4. In the English version of Wikipedia, why can we use foreign names like Nam Ngum or Nam Ou as the article names while we can't do that with geographical names in Thailand? If you weren't aware of this, now do you think it should be changed to "Nam ... River" too?
