College Name Mistakes... looking to fix on Wikipedia

[naraht]

"Standford University" has about 400 hits, so it is next.

"Dartmouth University" actually existed as a part of an effort to force "Dartmouth College" to be public. US Supreme Court got involved. But my guess is a good number of the hits are wrong. I'll take a look.

"California University" may get some hits to 90210. more likely would be google hits on pages with strings "attended University of Southern California, University of Texas", so may be too many false positives...

University of North Carolina Charlotte
The page starts "The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, also known as UNC Charlotte, UNCC, or Charlotte, ..." . While it would be inappropriate to delete UNCC because there are lots of people who use that albeit improperly, I think that *adding* what the formal abbreviation is (with reference to UNC Charlotte's marketing web page) would be appropriate.

As for why? If I saw it in a paper encyclopedia, I'd write the company. Since it is Wikipedia, I'd fix it myself. I live in the DC area and have worked with the students at that school (as well as others in DC/MD) so I've had to check it in my own work.

I've got a semi-automated tool, so it isn't quite so bad, but I've got to do each language separately with "John Hopkins University Press" showing up in references in languages that I didn't know *existed*, it was an adventure.

[MysticCat]

Originally Posted by naraht

University of North Carolina Charlotte
The page starts "The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, also known as UNC Charlotte, UNCC, or Charlotte, ..." . While it would be inappropriate to delete UNCC because there are lots of people who use that albeit improperly, I think that *adding* what the formal abbreviation is (with reference to UNC Charlotte's marketing web page) would be appropriate.

Personally, I'd assume that a school like UNC Charlotte or any other major university has someone monitoring its Wikipedia page, and that if they wanted it changed they would have already taken care of it. Correcting references elsewhere might be one thing, but I don't think I'd correct something like that in the page on UNC Charlotte itself.

Just my $0.02.

[naraht]

Originally Posted by MysticCat

Personally, I'd assume that a school like UNC Charlotte or any other major university has someone monitoring its Wikipedia page, and that if they wanted it changed they would have already taken care of it. Correcting references elsewhere might be one thing, but I don't think I'd correct something like that in the page on UNC Charlotte itself.

Just my $0.02.

Well, that is part of the issue. By Wikipedia's Conflict of Issue rules, the people *least* appropriate to change the wikipedia page about UNC Charlotte are employees of UNC Charlotte. Though if you declare your conflict of interest, you can be OK. Preferred for an employee would be to edit the talk page with the preferred changes and have someone unrelated make the changes..

Not equating the two groups but, I wouldn't want the preferred people to keep the page about Westboro Baptist to be the members of the church...

[MysticCat]

Originally Posted by naraht

Well, that is part of the issue. By Wikipedia's Conflict of Issue rules, the people *least* appropriate to change the wikipedia page about UNC Charlotte are employees of UNC Charlotte. Though if you declare your conflict of interest, you can be OK. Preferred for an employee would be to edit the talk page with the preferred changes and have someone unrelated make the changes.

But you're not talking about things like public perceptions of UNC Charlotte (or Westboro Baptist) or other matters about which insiders might lack objectivity or evenhandedness. You're talking about correcting the name of the institution in the article about the institution. If the entry doesn't bother UNC Charlotte, why should it bother anyone else?

And just to go a bit further on UNC Charlotte specifically, the Wiki entry on that school has the following as the first sentence:

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, also known as UNC Charlotte, UNCC, or Charlotte, is a public research university located in Charlotte, North Carolina, United States.

That is accurate. Whether it's the school's preference or not, and whether it is how the school refers to itself or not, it is known by many as UNCC. In fact I'd hazard a guess that UNCC is how people in North Carolina are most likely to refer to the school. [ETA: On re-reading, I caught that you've basically already said this. Sorry.]

Much further down in the article this can be found:

University name
The official name of the university is "The University of North Carolina at Charlotte." "UNC Charlotte" has been accepted as a shortened version of the name and the athletic department has used "Charlotte" since 2000.

UNC Charlotte's branding guidelines are cited for this statement.

So, it looks like they've got it covered.