should this category name be changed?

Question

We have a category called "Category: Battle of Cressy".

Honestly, I don't think I've ever seen that spelling, although I do not doubt it exists in older books. Surely it should be Crecy (or Crécy), which is not only the modern French name but also the name more usually used in English?

Comments

I keep having problems with this. I think it should be Crécy.

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Put an aka in the category page then, no sense in spinning around on this, Cressy is considered archaic, but then, the battle would be archaic also.

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Practical problem is that I sometimes need to find it and I never can. It takes me 20 minutes because the spelling is unusual on Wikitree.

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my suggestion is to put a note to yourself on notepad, very handy tool that, I have all sorts of things that recur pasted on mine, then I just look through it to find what I need.  Includes sources already formatted.  

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I am not sure if you are joking. I sometimes work with a dozen windows open including notes I am holding for various purposes, and I also create a lot of longer term notes as I work.

Isn't this discussion kind of weird though?

Why does Wikitree use "Cressy"? You are avoiding that issue, which should really be the only issue. I already know how to use a computer.

I think if the answer to a the question is "set up a special routine to keep reminding you of Wikitree's special names for things" then there is a problem with Wikitree's whole approach.

The names are meant to be meaningful, and easy to find, I would have thought?? Why would they NOT be?

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Hmm, well, looking at the Wikipedia article on it, it happened in 1346.  So the place would not have been written Crécy.  The use of accents in French hadn't started yet back then.  So the ''archaic'' version Cressy would be more appropriate.  

Wikipedia actualy has a page Battle of Cressy, which redirects to Battle of Crécy.  

But meanwhile, tag Military and War on your question, I believe they would be managers with categorization of this category.

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I think in English it is indeed most often written Crecy in the context of the battle. I certainly don't propose using medieval spellings. Cressy looks like a perfectly reasonable medieval spelling, but there will be others as well.

Answer 1

I've only ever seen Cressy.  I think it's an accepted variant spelling.

Comments

I do not doubt it is a variant that has some use, but we need to choose one variant and I would have thought the modern place name normally gets used in such cases? (Agincourt would be an exception to that, but logical because in this case there is virtually no use of the modern spelling.)

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I'm not sure I can comment on this. I know how we French refer to these battles (and I had to look up "Agincourt" the first time I saw it, because we only ever refer to it as Azincourt, either the place or the battle) but have no background on what would be preferrable in English.

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Understandable. It is particularly famous in English in an old form, because of Shakespere.

Answer 2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cr%C3%A9cy

Crécy or variant Cressy

Crécy-en-Ponthieu

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Crécy-en-Ponthieu show Location within Hauts-de-France region

Crécy-en-Ponthieu, known in archaic English as Cressy

Comments

The Cressey's here in my county are big landowners - they have country homes they visit here - they do "the Hunt" with the horses and the hounds - my daughter exercised and trained with one of the big hunt trainers and various barn managers through college - Chicago Lawyers I think, wander if it is connected

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hard to tell Navarro.

Answer 3

Wikitree Categories are in a specific language, so one could have a French version and a linked English language version.  But "Google translate" just made fun of me on this:  I entered "Battle of Cressy" and got....

"Bataille de Cressy" 

Comments

Which means you put Cressy in as the word to translate, and google often does not attempt to translate proper nouns. But we still don't have any good clear reason to call it Cressy as far as I can see.

From google books it seems to have been a popular spelling in "popular history" books in the 19th century. That's a good enough reason to have a dab redirect on Wikipedia, but not for having it as the main spelling.

I think it is not controversial to say that Wikitree and many of its users have base a strong connection to reproducing 19th century popular histories, but more worrying than that is the lack of any way to get anything fixed, improved or even discussed.

This type of problem seems unnecessary to begin with.

The only answers to my original post should have been about which spellings are most used today?

Answer 4

Is this related to the policy to use what they used?  In my humble opinion this is similar to the issue of all the names we use for people and locations that work from one way of looking at things but makes it hard to search and find what is the  most common usage which tends to be more current spelling or names

There is a thread in g2g about location names because in the Germany Project we have members saying the policy to use what they used does not work well for them.  This is another example of how location names in their time period version causes even very knowledgeable people problems.

Comments

Hi Laura, no, though perhaps Danielle was suggesting the discussion could go in that direction. But this policy, which hardly ever really seems to be followed, can not really help in medieval situations.

In fact, we know in the confusion of policies this policy is even enough to get your criticized, because only modern French people can have a surname with a "de", not medieval ones. Sigh.

It also leads to crazy discussions like ones where people think that William the conqueror and William the Marshall were really named Guillaume.

If we wanted to use that policy, we should use Latin for most western Europeans in the middle ages. That was the official language that was really used and had some amount of standardization.

I would say that policy is an example of how Wikitree makes policies badly, in such a way that they make discussion more complicated and not less.

But coming back to the Battle. I would think this is a category for people seeking historical events, and so the normal terminology used in modern English historical books should be used? (I would find it easier if we used modern French.)

I have NO IDEA what arguments there are to use 19th century English. Perhaps there is a policy about that somewhere too.

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I think the name of the category should be as close as possible to the "intuitive" name. If you're looking for people who took part in the battle in question (I dare not even write it), what would you type?

Using an archaic name in that case would IMO be pushing it too far and counter-productive.

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My 'A' level history was 50 years ago. We covered the battle. It wasn't called Cressy  in our textbooks then and  I wouldn't think to look for it as Cressy now.  (like Andrew, I was surprised to see it spelled that way but  looked it up. The spelling was in  use during the 18th and 19th c.). The one problem I can forsee is  caused by the accent on the é . It's  relatively difficult for those of us with qwerty keyboards to apply accents; we are likely to be lazy and omit them. Is it possible that Crécy and Crecy could lead to the same category?

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We could mirror a French "Bataille de Crécy" and an English "Battle of Crecy" category. They would both hold the profiles added to either category. (Edited to add: we already do that with the Battle of Agincourt / Bataille d'Azincourt).