Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Hawaii

Wikimedia user group

Salutations,
Is there a Wikimedia affiliate in Hawaii? Are there Wikipedia meetups in Hawaii? I am asking as I will be visiting Oahu in early February. RightCowLeftCoast (Moo) 20:31, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

I'm not aware of a specific Wikimedia affiliate here locally, though I believe there have been meetups and edit-a-thons in the past. Unfortunately, I think the fact that many of us are spread out across different islands can be a hinderance to organizing events. Aoi (青い) (talk) 03:24, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2024 August 14 § Ancient history of Fooland

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2024 August 14 § Ancient history of Fooland, which is within the scope of this WikiProject. Should Category:Ancient Hawaii be moved to Category:Ancient history of Hawaii? Ham II (talk) 13:18, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

Science of Identity Foundation

Editors are requested to take a look at Science of Identity Foundation and ensure compliance with NPOV. I do not see any violations of the policy but as the primary author of the article, I might be biased. Thanks, TrangaBellam (talk) 11:25, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

Somewhat interesting discussion at NGEO re: CDPs in Hawai'i

I've not got much background in Hawaiian political geography, so input from editors who are more familiar with the social position CDPs have there would be helpful. JoelleJay (talk) 03:05, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Moves for place names

There seems to have been an effort on Wikipedia at some point in the past to deliniate place names in "English" vs "Hawaiian" where the only difference is the dropping of the Kahakō and ʻokina. This isn't reflected in official place names or local usage, and mostly seems to be an artifact of people not having the keys on the keyboard. I don't think the "English: Kauai, Hawaiian: Kauaʻi" claims abundant on Wikipedia's articles on the islands will pass even the slightest WP:RS, so I've updated the article for Waikīkī and put in a move request, and I'm putting in move requests for the island articles that corresponds to the government's list of official place names.

I assume this will be uncontroversial with anyone who has familiarity with the islands but there may be issues with editors who don't know any better assuming WP:COMMONNAME erroniously. I know there were previous discussions on this here and there was a general sense that something should be done to correct this, but years have passed since then. May as well get around to it. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 13:46, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

@Kwamikagami and @SMcCandlish, you were both involved in the wildfire discussion where a consensus was basically arrived at and nothing was done. I've put in move requests for the island names and I think the MOS needs to fundamentally be rewritten (though nobody has followed it) after the discussions at the wildfires article to avoid telling people to mispell the names. We probably need a wider purging of "English: ______, Hawaiian: ______" for place names where that's not actually reflected in reality or common use. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 14:20, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

I think the state and archipelago [not nec. the big island] should remain Hawaii, just as we have Mexico rather than México for that country. But otherwise I think that the govt list is a good default guide. If someone wants to argue an exception, I think they should have to make a case for it.

However, the Board has introduced systemic errors into their lists. Specifically, they've replaced okinas with quotation marks! Not consistently -- for example, at the top of that page they use an okina in State of Hawaiʻi and Hawaiʻi Board on Geographic Names. But the very first item in the Oahu list has been 'corrected' from ʻAʻakakiʻi Gulch, with okinas, to ‘A‘akaki‘i Gulch with quotation marks. They do note however that it was 'already correct' in the GNIS form [column 3]. In other words, no correction was needed, and they appear to have only tried to repeat the correct form in column 5, but in doing so introduced errors. They have systematically replaced okinas with quotation marks in 'already correct' names, though Hawaiʻi Board on Geographic Names is typeset correctly at the top of each page. Thus we cannot simply copy-and-paste from these lists. — kwami (talk) 18:48, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

For what it’s worth, the archipelago’s official name per the US lacks the ʻokina, so it’s easy enough to be consistent there without being arbitrary. I think the biggest issue we’re going to run up against is people thinking there’s a WP:COMMONNAME issue when it’s fairly uncontroversial in Hawaiʻi that there’s an actual orthography people sometimes skip only because of missing keys on a keyboard, and in every official title or document the correct orthography is used. That’s why aiming to clear up the MoS and possibly coming up with a standardized note for editors to the main island articles could be useful. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 19:06, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

Agreed. Substitution for typographic convenience does not equate to COMMONNAME. — kwami (talk) 19:13, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

I made a first pass, correcting where we said the okina was a diacritic. — kwami (talk) 19:23, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

I think I may have mentioned this here before, but it may be worth checking out the New Zealand naming conventions. We had an RfC about five years ago now that resulted in a very similar change to our conventions, which essentially boils down to "If the common name is of Māori origin, then we should use the spelling as recognised in the New Zealand place name gazetteer". That's kept pretty up to date with correct orthography, and so allows us to use the correct tohutō (macrons / kahakō) on the places. Since it seems like you've got an equivalent database (even if it has the odd issues with the ʻokina) it could be reasonably straightforward to adapt something similar as a regional thing and use that as rationale for the moves. Turnagra (talk) 04:06, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

Thanks. That's helpful. — kwami (talk) 04:14, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

To address this all at once: WP should use the ʻokina character and Kahakō diacritic when commonly present in official names (as found in English-language documents not just Hawaiian ones). WP has a de facto position against suppression of diacritics just because some editors find them inconvenient or some readers jingoistically don't like them. But we should not impose them into names or derived terms when their use is not conventional in English, as with "Hawaii" th state and "Hawaiian" as a general adjective, despite activism that would prefer it. This is not LanguageReformAdvocacyPedia. Next, this is entirely correct: "Substitution for typographic convenience does not equate to COMMONNAME". Not only does WP:COMMONNAME have nothing to do with style questions of any kind, we have MOS:CONFORM which directs us to silently fix typographical glitches that do not change the meaning of the material, to normalize the typography to a correct and consistent style (and additional MoS provisions on enforcing proper use of quotation marks and similar characters, and not using one character when another is actually appropriate, e.g. do not use - or – in place of − in a mathematical expression, and so on and so forth). In short: any time an ʻokina is called for, use the proper ʻ character (even in directly quoted material!) regardless whether some government functionary or whoever had mistakenly put ' or ‘ or ’ or ‛ in some document (or even a bunch of documents).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:30, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

I think this is very consistent with what’s being said above. Hawaii, the state, officially lacks the ʻokina, so no need to determine which version is English. I actually don’t know any Hawaiian speakers, advocate or not, who would push for “Hawaiʻian” without just aiming to correct it. I don’t think there’s going to be a need to carve out expceptioms that are unique to Wikipedia to be consistent. I’ll put some work into the MOS today, I think @Turan Asat gave us a pretty good basis for this. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 07:57, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

The main problem I think is going to be the main islands. The capital Honolulu doesn't have them and so isn't a consideration. Personally, I think we should work on everything apart from the inhabited islands, following the NZ model, and if that works, initiate a discussion on following the govt guidelines across the board. If we get consensus then, then we can request a move for the big 7. — kwami (talk) 08:15, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

Honestly we should just start with the Islands, because it's easy to demonstrate they're the official and used names and once those are done there's going to be a lot less resistance overall as people grok this isn't a COMMONNAME issue. My biggest fear is editors thinking this is a WP:RGW issue, which is why getting some consensus on the MOS is probably a good idea. Last time these name change swere proposed all the opposing votes called the ʻokina a diacritic and cited HNN et al. despite several print organizations in Hawaii specifically deliniating print and internet spellings due to Google indexing, so I think a stronger consensus prior to the request is going to be necessary to deal with people assuming the COMMONNAME is the one with stripped orthography. I already fixed up and requested a move for Waikīkī since that one is pretty blatant in every single local organization using the correct orthography.

I also thought that once the MoS is cleaned up it could be useful to have a talk page template along the following lines:

Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 11:27, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

I think the islands will be more of an issue than less widely known places, based on my experience. If you've got the naming conventions and you've got the evidence of other Hawaiian articles using ʻokina or kahakō then the argument becomes a lot stronger to move the islands.

I'll also note that we've had a few people point out the difference between a MOS and a naming convention and try to use this to discourage use of the correct name, so you may want to add something in to make it explicit that the guidelines being written count as both for Hawaiian articles. Turnagra (talk) 17:34, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

I think the talk-page template is a good idea, at least for common names. — kwami (talk) 18:54, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

Proposed change to language in MOS:HAWAII

Following the above discussion and discussions from last year, I've rewritten some of the language in the MOS to reflect the currently building consensus. The discussion can be found at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Hawaii-related_articles#Proposed_changes_to_article_names_section. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 11:46, 6 January 2025 (UTC)