Wikipedia:Simple pronunciation markup guide

This policy is under development and part of the Wikipedia:Policy thinktank.

Introduction

In the course of creating and editing articles, there have been times when a simple Wikipedia guide to indicating pronunciation was sorely needed. I'm not alone in noticing this.

Opponents of this view point to IPA and SAMPA as alternatives, but they are much more difficult to use for both writers and readers. They have their place in language studies, but for ordinary use Wikipedia should use a simple guide, in my view, as do many reference works. Details of my proposal are at:

Draft guide: Wikipedia:Pronunciation (simple guide to markup, American)

Arguments: Wikipedia_talk:Pronunciation (simple guide to markup, American)

The page you are reading is where we vote and debate policy. Those who wish to discuss the technical details or assist with development of the Simple Guide itself should go to this talk page.

Originated by NathanHawking 04:52, 2004 Nov 3 (UTC)

Oppose

• I strongly oppose. IPA is an international standard and I see no reason to develop an alternative to it. Also, there is none so far. The easiest way to put the names down is an "English language" approximation, that is putting the name "Warszawa" as [vahrshava]. However, this way is both inaccurate and ambiguous. I bet most of English speakers already know how would they pronounce the name. What they want to know is how do locals pronounce it or how the guy pronounced his surname.

Also, if the new system is just an approximation - it would be inconsistent. If it is consistent though, one would also have to learn it. If this would be the case, then why not just learn the system used by the rest of the world, from South Africa to Iceland and from Canada to Russia? IPA is the way to go here. [[User:Halibutt|Halibutt]] 23:48, Nov 3, 2004 (UTC)

• Oppose: A system designed for WP is the worst possible choice, regardless of its possible systematic merits. We have IPA for exact phonetics, and we have the much simpler subset International Phonetic Alphabet for English. It is very hard to get a large number of editors use any standard at all, but it would be impossible to enforce a WP-only non-standard! dab 16:56, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Undecided

Personally, I prefer IPA; it's scientific, unambiguous and it's an international standard. However, I am aware that some readers are not able to read IPA characters due to technical constraints. For this and other reasons simple pronuncation markup schemes are and will be used. That means that we do need a standardized "Simple Guide". And that readers should be able to learn it (it's supposed to be intuitive, but no scheme will be obvious for all, especially not for non-native English speakers). -- Kpalion 17:08, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)

(I vote "undecided" becase I think a "Simple Guide" might be useful as long as there are people who want to use simplified schemes instead of IPA/SAMPA. However, I won't cry for it -- I'm still convinced that IPA is the best way to show pronunciation. -- Kpalion 00:00, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC))