Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/India-related articles

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Creative works strongly associated with a specific language and script

The spirit of this guideline was to curb edit wars over languages for e.g places or films that could credibly be associated with multiple languages. Over the years though, some editors have taken it as a license to banish any Brahmi-derived scripts from modern India-related Wikipedia articles, regardless of the context. For example, this edit removes a film's original name (which is on the film's poster) and its English gloss from the lead of a Bengali-language film. The only reverts and possibility of an edit war stems from an editor insisting on a blanket ban on Indian scripts through "NOINDIC"—the string is otherwise completely uncontroversial.

I propose that a note excepting "creative works strongly associated with a specific script" or something to that effect be added to the guidelines. It already does include articles on texts originally written in a particular script, so this isn't much of a leap. regards, TryKid [dubious – discuss] 17:51, 12 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

cc @Rosguill, Vanamonde93, RegentsPark, and Matrix, for any thoughts on this (as editors who have previously weighed in on this page). regards, TryKid [dubious – discuss] 19:36, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I vaguely recall floating a similar suggestion a year or two ago and receiving a quick, negative response from other editors. signed, Rosguill talk 19:47, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/India-related_articles/Archive_2#INDICSCRIPT_RfC —Matrix ping mewhen u reply (t? - c) 20:20, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Strong support: I was thinking about doing something exactly like this about a month ago. Creative works are generally very uncontroversial with their naming if it is standardised. However, exceptions and rules need to be made for cases like Baahubali 2 (two languages), Matamgi Manipur (released before Meitei script movement), etc. We need to draft some kind of policy for this for it to stand. —Matrix ping mewhen u reply (t? - c) 20:20, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not strongly opposed in principle: when a written work in particular is composed in a specific language, including its title seems reasonable. But I must oppose until we work the details out: that needs to happen first. There's any number of possibly edge cases, and "creative works" is very broad. Vanamonde93 (talk) 20:31, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Vanamonde93: I have created Wikipedia:Manual of Style/India-related articles/Naming of creative works, please contribute with every edge case you can think about. —Matrix ping mewhen u reply (t? - c) 20:33, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia:Manual of Style/India-related articles/Naming of creative works already shows how difficult it would be to implement, with how many exceptions we would need to have. — EarthDude (wanna talk?) 04:13, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose: We would run into way too many exceptions and edge cases to make this proposal viable. — EarthDude (wanna talk?) 04:14, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think this will just create more problems. Op's example of films is particularly problematic since the underlying language is usually a mixture of languages and not always clear (Hindi? Hindustani? Hinglish? Urdu? Punjabi? Bhojpuri? Marathi?). What would we do if, for example, someone added Hindi, Urdu and Bhojpuri to PK (film)? Early films are particularly problematic because the language used was not the Hindi of today and was, instead, a mix of Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi. Creative works in India, like much else about the country, are hard to fit into boxes RegentsPark (comment) 14:38, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You make a good point, but I think your concern here really only applies to Bollywood, and that's because most of the actors, directors, and writers in that industry are functionally illiterate in the language they're supposed to be speaking, writing, and working in. Not every film industry is like this, and adding Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, and perhaps Telugu and Kannada scripts should be quite simpler and uncontroversial.
A simple rule of thumb would be to add the native script if the film's title screen or poster is in a specific script. Perhaps we can start with specific regional industries like the Bengali and Tamil ones. Matrix is workshopping a promising proposal. regards, TryKid [dubious – discuss] 15:11, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose - linguistic battles are too frequent in this topic for there to have such a big exception. This was discussed in the past as well where it was unanimously opposed by long term editors of ARBIPA [1], we don't need to waste any more time on this. Orientls (talk) 16:24, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose as above rationales - Indian film articles are already a major battlefield, without adding to the problems. Furthermore, there is a constant stream of people trying to "interpret", or just ignore, the existing rules to suit their agenda, and any relaxation, or alteration to the rules will just encourage more of the same. - Arjayay (talk) 16:46, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

loss of useful information

The decision, however well-intended, introduced sort of a downgrading: (1) above all, loss of useful information (2) chaos of incongruity between newer articles (or new editions) and older ones (3) logic that, if followed through could equally lead to just refraining from writing articles altogether

(1) There are various reasons why listing the native spelling is useful to the reader. And also to some of us editors. The least known may be the fact, that there are several languages (in Europe), that have their own norm of correct spelling of South Asian place names, and the like. It is dependent on the Indic script spelling. Until I know the spelling in a relevant Indic script, I cannot ascertain the correct spelling of a given placename (and the like). We have plenty of incorrectly named cs.wikipedia articles concerning South Asia - incorrectly by the standards required by Czech spelling rules. Trying to donate as much of my expertise to the public benefit as I can, now and then I check a couple of Czech articles for spellings of terms & names of South Asian provenience. However, I do not know everything I encounter. Typically, I do not know the native spellings of many place names. It is then much more helpful if the native name is listed in the inbox (and clearly this is why we have the "native-name" line in the infobox) and/or in the intro section of the English article. If not listed there, one has to open the article in the relevant language, to find it out. The latter method is much more cumbersome (whoever tried to navigate a page in a script they can't read will know), involves knowing which of the many Indian languages is the relevant one, and is prone to error in cases where e.g. the Hindi article is still named as per the older name of the city, while the article in the state language (such as Kannada or Marathi) is named in accordance with the new official name - a user thus might misidentify e.g. गुलबर्गा as native spelling of Kalaburagi (or what's the new name, I forgot). 

There are meant good reasons to list native names in English articles (also) in their original scripts.  This is why we give the native spelling of Athens, Riyadh, Moscow. The divergence of the India related articles. The Survey of India claims it maintains a list of placenames where standardized Hindi spellings have been codified based on local naming connections reported by the collectors in the states, while standardized English spellings have been created based on the non-English  ones. Therefore it follows "difficulty to find out the correct spelling" should be minimal. So should be the problem to decide which script is relevant. Since we should strive to give all information that might be useful, which is the purpose of an encyclopedia, I definitely prefer to find all possibly relevant scripts (e.g. listing the old name Gulbarga also in Urdu makes sense). However, if someone thinks English Wikipedia should try to initiate Simple English Wikipedia in trying to be easy to read to anyone who cannot handle too much written information, it is fair enough to decide the relevant script is only the script of the main state language (e.g. Kannada in case of Gulbarga), or better both the main state language and Hindi.

(2) So many articles still (thanks God) do have the native names in one of the Indic scripts either in the infobox or in the intro, or both. Therefore, the articles that don't stand in opposition to those that do. Removing them from those that do would not only mean immense work, but also would be outright silly: If there's an article that includes a native name, survived years without anybody challenging its correctness, or appropriatness of the choice of the script or whatever, purging that piece of information out of it would be, at best pointless (but in my opinion even precisely that to which the definition of the word 'vandalism' points). So at present we are grossly inconsistent. (3) if we think such approach as "let's ban entering any information that might get challenged by some groups" (as manifested in the argument that since in few cases some people challenge the relevance of a given script for a placename in a given state or UT) all the way to its logical consequences, we should probably not write anything on Wikipedia, surely not on Indian place names that have (had) more than one name in recent history (to be sure, more people engage in the dispute over which city name should be the name of the article then whether the Kannada script is relevant to any city in Karnataka) Yak-indolog (talk) 02:34, 20 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

IAST for Sanskrit & ISO for 'other' creates confusion

Yes, ISO is indispensable for transliterating, among other, the Dravidian languages (as the habitual IAST does not distinguish various graphemes of the southern alphabets, above all the length of e & o ) And yes, IAST is the method that people like me, whose main education is Sanskrit philology, are accustomed to use for transliterating Sanskrit. But for an encyclopedia to set an internal rule to transliterate modern Indic using ISO and Sanskrit using IAST is (1) placing the comfort of editors above the needs of the reader (2) invariably causing dilemma, as well as outright chaos in case of the great number of words that are BOTH Sanskrit and modern Indic. (3) doomed to never be 100% adhered to

(1) our current approach runs counter the goal of providing a sufficiently accurate information ACCESSIBLE to non-specialist as well as to any user not acquainted with (current) rulings of a group of editors. Now we require of the readers: -knowing what IAST & ISO is and esp 

what is the difference between the two methods

-knowing which term is in Sanskrit and which is in another language We leave them perplexed. (2) plenty of words that are Sanskrit words are also integral part of the vocabulary in the modern Indic languages (so called tatsama). Such words are neither Sanskrit-only, nor Hindi/Telugu-etc-only. The rule "IAST for Sanskrit, ISO for other" thus fails to provide any guidline for those many words that are both. An author is just left to decide in each article whether to treat a word as Sanskrit or as, say, Hindi, when choosing transliteration. Reading across articles, the reader will invariably be given, at times, two different transliterations of the same word and left to wonder why so, or whether they are different words

(3) Of course it is never achievable that everyone who creates or edits an article containing transliteration from Indic has read this rule, so there will, time and again arise irregularities. Moreover, they are already they, as articles created before this "ruling" also often don't follow it

A much better solution would be to consistently give always BOTH methods of transliteration (wherever the resulting output differs) in case of all words that are (also) Sanskrit. Or in case of all Indic - Sanskrit and modern - languages. The best solution, if technically possible would be such that the reader could toggle between getting transliterations of Indic scripts displayed in ISO or IAST. Yak-indolog (talk) 04:07, 20 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

IPA vs ISO/IAST

As transliteration is actually representation of spelling in a source script (not an attempt to represent the pronunciation of the language, though it may happen to overlap), it is pretty weird to transliterate the one and same source, e.g. the Devanagari script, by one method here, and another method there, depending on whether it is used for Sanskrit or Hindi as, sensu stricto, we do not transliterate Sanskrit or Hindi, which are languages, we transliterate the letters (hence trans-LITER-ation) of a script, in this case the same in both cases. This is how transliteration differs from transcription. IPA (as well as any other phonetic or phonological transcriptions methods) does not serve as an alternative for the transliterations. It serves to provide a very different information: While IAST and ISO are designed to give information on what the spelling is, and can only secondarily (and in some cases imprecisely) give a hint about pronunciation, the IPA is there to give information what the phonological analysis of the word in a single language is (as is mostly the way it's employed here) or what the actual pronunciation is (that is it's primary function, but not usually employed so in the Indic context on Wikipedia). Either way, transcriptions into IPA represent the language (its sounds) while transliterations (including IAST/ISO ) represent a writing system. Bearing this in mind is of utmost importance. In case of some languages, such as Tamil, Bengali or Assamese/Oxomiya, it would be very helpful to give the IPA as well as a transliteration, the pronunciation being likely more of interest to a general user than the (rather different) spelling. However, the pronunciation is often harder to choose from (if there are several variants and the language not having strictly normalised single pronunciation). In case of majority of Indic languages, however, it is perhaps not so necessary to give also the IPA, as with a bit of knowledge of the pronunciation rules of the language, one can infer the pronunciation from the transliteration. Yak-indolog (talk) 04:08, 20 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Does the WP:NOINDICSCRIPT rule only apply to Indian articles?

Does the WP:NOINDICSCRIPT rule only apply to Indian articles or any articles using Indic scripts? I'd also like to know which scripts come under "Indic scripts". Msasag (talk) 11:20, 22 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Ophyrius:, @Matrix:, @EarthDude:, I wonder if you can tell whether we can use "Indic scripts" in articles related to other South Asian countries (other than India). Msasag (talk) 16:27, 25 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Msasag WP:NOINDICSCRIPT only applies to articles related to India. Articles about countries such as Nepal or religions such as Buddhism, which also often use Indic scripts, are exempt from having to avoid it. If you want to know which scripts count as Indic scripts, the article Brahmic scripts has a useful list. — EarthDude (Talk) 17:31, 25 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
allikas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style_(India-related_articles)