User talk:Mjh134

French Polynesia

Hello, I've undone your edits to French Polynesia because while many of them seemed reasonably helpful, they were all unsourced and unexplained and I have serious questions about many of them. For example:

1. You changed French Polynesia's native name to "La Polynésie française", but the French Wikipedia article about the place is titled "Polynésie française".
2. You changed spellings of many of the place names without explanation.
3. You changed "kilometer" to "kilometer", in violation of Wikipedia's guidelines about English varieties.

Graham87 01:51, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Hi, I have edited the article because I know French Polynesia, and as a French person, I know its status inside the French Republic. I have also found information on French Wikipedia articles (Polynésie française, Pape'ete, and Fa'a'ā) and in English travel books I own. I can reference them. (http://moon.com/books/moon-tahiti) and (http://www.lonelyplanet.com/tahiti-and-french-polynesia).

1. Nobody says "Polynésie française" when they talk about the place. We always use "La" (The) in French. The French article omitted it in the title because it is a title. We also say "La Marseillaise", "La Réunion", "La Guadeloupe", "La Martinique", and "La France".
2. The true spelling of the 2 following cities in French/Tahitian is "Pape'ete" and "Fa'a'ā'". I have never seen "Pape'ete" with an accent on the final 'e'.
3. I didn't know it was prohibited to change the spelling of kilometer. I do respect both. As I was rewriting the article I just wanted to make it consistent. This does not matter to me.

I understand you need to make sure people do not write whatever they feel like but I think it was really harsh to delete all the work I did. I spent the last 3 hours to make the article better, and now it's all gone. I wish you had asked me those questions before you deleted my edits. Besides, the article has now become incomplete, poorly-organized, and presents false pieces of information. It is really sad. I have saved a draft. Let me know if I can be allowed to repost it.

M.J. 03:07, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Sorry if I seemed a bit harsh. I've put your edits back, with tweaks per points one and three of my original message (plus a couple of wikilinks and the removal of "around" in "around 118 islands). The only point I'd like to dispute Is point #1, as I know a little Italian which, as far as I understand, is similar to French in this respect: Italy is often called "l'Italia" in Italian but Wikipedia's article about the country says its native name is "Italia". Graham87 15:26, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for taking the time to write me back and repost changes you saw fit. French Polynesia is close to my heart, and I want the article to be as true as possible. I understand your point about 'L'Italia'. To give you an example, 'France' and 'French Polynesia' in French are the same as 'United States' in English. They need a definite article. However, you're right, I noticed articles (the one about France for instance) did not follow that rule for the phonetics, so to be consistent, we should not have 'La'. Lastly, I might enter more info about the islands of each group later. If so, I will make sure to reference everything. Plus, if you have any questions or want to edit anything, feel free to contact me or do so. Thanks again. M.J. 01:36, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

Glad it's all sorted. One more thing: your signature doesn't contain a link to your user or talk pages at the moment, unlike almost all signatures on Wikipedia. To fix this, go to the user profile section of your preferences and uncheck the box that says "Treat the above as wiki markup ...". If you need help with referencing, see Help:Referencing for beginners. Feell free to contact me if you have any further questions about Wikipedia. Graham87 01:51, 29 July 2014 (UTC)