Talk:List of Brazilian states

General discussion

Nice. -- (WT-en) Evan 23:19, 7 Oct 2003 (PDT)

The articles about states and cities in Brazil should be reachable with or without accents. IMHO the links should have the accents. The articles should be at the most common name in English. To me they look wrong without accents, even in English, but see Talk:Sao Paulo (city). It's not a case of Lisboa vs. Lisbon or London vs. Londres. -(WT-en) phma 20:54, 3 Apr 2004 (EST)

I think it would be helpful to have the alternative Brazillian (Portuguese) spellings also listed here, so the traveller can work out how signs etc. are spelled in Brazil. The Brazillian spellings should redirect to the English articles (and show the Brazillian spelling after the english.) Like English Place Spelling (Portuguese: Brazillian Place Spelling). The Talk:Sao Paulo (city) page explains the specific accent problems for Brazil place names but also see Project:Article_naming_conventions#Language for the basic principles. -- (WT-en) Huttite 03:14, 4 Apr 2004 (EDT)

Yeah, but how should I add the original spellings? Doing two extra columns for the original state and city name seems extremly redundant since the "english" version of the name is exactly the same in all cases, only without any accents. It would look pretty stupid.

I would prefer to simply change the entries to have the accents while linking directly to the version without accents. Every browser I have heard of can deal with ISO-8859-1, and none of the accented letters are outside it (Portuguese uses mostly á, é, í, ó, ú, à, ã, â, ê, ô, ç and ü, with ü fading away nowadays and being replaced by a plain u).

I think the only reason for english having unaccented versions is that in the past the only reliable charset to use was ASCII. Brazilian people do it too when the keyboard is misconfigured or the program does not work properly with non-ASCII. (The main change when not using accents is to change the word "é" (is) to "eh" to avoid confusion with the preposition "e" (and). Sometimes this is also done at the end of a word (like café -> cafeh), but not that often. The rest of the accents is simply dropped. This is because in Portuguese the accent is just an extra mark on the letter; it is still the same letter. é and e are the same letter. ã and a are the same letter. And so on.)

I can understand using romanizations when the original name is unreadable to people from languages using the roman alphabet, or when the romanization is different from the original version of the name, but I don't think it's needed when the only difference is the presence or absence of an accent and the precomposed character is present in ISO-8859-1. Of course, to prevent confusion with browser bugs, the page titles should stay with ASCII only (with the redirect from the original spelling).

(WT-en) cesarb 11:59, 4 Apr 2004 (EDT)

Are there any current browsers with this bug? The only one I know of is Konqueror 2, which I still have on my old laptop. I pulled up an old version of Lynx, pointed it at fr:Brésil, and had no problem. Our site is fully Unicode enabled, so we can link to names with Hungarian double accents too. -(WT-en) phma 09:24, 5 Apr 2004 (EDT)

vfd discussion

• List of Brazilian states is another List of ... article in the spirit of Wikipedia's gillions of "Lists of". I really seriously don't want to see us going down this road, because it represents redundant navigation which will have to be maintained, and it goofs up isIn. -- (WT-en) Mark 04:55, 7 Feb 2006 (EST)
  • Keep. These "list of" articles, although they're outside our normal hierarchy, provide a valuable release valve for pressure to list every canton (say) on the country page itself. They also are useful for making sure no canton, state, or country gets lost accidentally by shifts in the "container" articles. For example, I used List of Mexican states to help re-organize the hierarchy in Mexico. They also have low overhead, since they're just lists. --(WT-en) Evan 08:51, 7 Feb 2006 (EST)
  • Keep. They're very useful to keep isIn tidy. (WT-en) Simone 04:46, 9 Feb 2006 (EST)
  • Keep. -- (WT-en) Ryan 00:54, 20 Feb 2006 (EST)