Talk:India Supreme Court overrules High Court: rivers Yamuna, Ganga no longer living entities

Can't quite understand one sentence
"State government explained with the example of flooding as the "legal guardians" or the state may not be able to support financially for the harm caused by the river to others."

This sentence may need some rewording - what exactly is it meant to be saying? It's a bit confusing to read currently. -- numbermaniac  04:37, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

Review of revision 4329226 [Passed]

 * The problem about names is subjective. People call this river as "Ganga" in this part of the world. The number is in the order of hundred millions to a billion. Calling it the Ganges makes no sense. I can understand Köln is called Cologne because ö is not in the English alphabet. But again, isn't it a personal choice? Let the people know it exists and what they know was not the actual pronunciation/spelling. People acagastya 04:01, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I did not know that "Ganga" was another name for the "Ganges" until just now. I've heard "Ganges" many times but had never heard "Ganga" until this draft.  When I worked on it, I thought that it was a completely different river. (India does have more than one river, after all.) It wasn't like that article with the girl from Virginia, where I could tell from context that the word probably meant "Ramadan."
 * So regardless of whether the goal is to make the article accessible to as many readers as possible or educate U.S. readers that another version of the word they're used to exists, then yes, we have to add "also called the Ganges." It costs us almost nothing to do so.
 * Things can change. "Beijing" has supplanted "Peking" as the standard U.S. and British spelling of the name of that specific city,  but we still pronounce "llama" with an L sound and not a Y sound.  Maybe "Ganga" will supplant "Ganges" one day, especially if there's a case that it's more correct (see "tsunami" supplanting "tidal wave" just because people think it's more correct), but that's not the audience we have to work with this week. Darkfrog24 (talk) 21:05, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
 * You didn't know. Now you know. Good, isn't? The thing here is: billion people calls it Ganga. That is more than the number of people using English (US). Something might be called by a different name in a different geographical location that doesn't mean we should list all of them. We are not an encyclopedia. I don't know what to say: you are arguing about Ganga Vs The Ganges for a story that deals with the country where it is called Ganga. Yamuna is also called as Jamuna. Why miss that point? We call Ram, in English, native speakers call it Rama, we say Bharat, they say Bharata, we say Ravan, they say Ravana. We can't please everyone. acagastya 07:00, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
 * That reminds me of "to table a bill". Please stop using the grey area of the policies for what you wish for. acagastya 07:04, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Afaik, the question at this point is not whether to use "Ganga", but whether to explain that "Ganga" refers to the same thing as "the Ganges". When you're arguing against providing clarity in news writing, and some of your readership would not understand as well without the explanation, you're not in a strong position.  It doesn't matter how many know it as "Ganga", but rather how many would benefit from the explanation.  The fact that those who would benefit are unevenly distributed on the planet is, if anything, a further point in favor of explanation &mdash; we want our article to be as helpful as possible to as many as possible, and we certainly want to be helpful uniformly across the planet.  --Pi zero (talk) 11:39, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

We can not satisfy everyone. Chinese name for Ganga might be different. It has different name in Arabic. The Koreans know it by a different name -- how are we going to deal with it? Agastya Chandrakant  ⚽️ 🏆 🎾 🎬 🎤 📰  12:29, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
 * No need to overthink this. Non-English names don't come into it.  --Pi zero (talk) 13:59, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Sure, listing a hundred names can be a problem, but if we can get 95% of all English speakers by listing two or even three, we should do it. So let's flip this around. Adding "also called the Ganges" does something good for let's call us Western English speakers.  Does it do something bad for anyone else?
 * Even if one of the goals here were to go "Ha ha, silly Americans. How do you like it when it's not all about you?" that point is made much better by using "Ganga" as the primary term and presenting "Ganges" as the alternative. Otherwise, both joke and lesson will zoom over most of their heads. Darkfrog24 (talk) 18:04, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I can go on talking about it -- "how about learning to pronounce the Indian names?" Let's do a quick math. (Population of India - Population of the US) > one billion. So don't speak about how the US knows it. It is a proper name. if I ask you what is the first name of Microsoft's CEO, would you say "Truth", or "Satya"? acagastya PING ME! 04:29, 22 August 2017 (UTC)