Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-4139960-20130707225455/@comment-188432-20130710190842

Well, more or less. Thing is, we also have to remember that it needs to have been mentioned in the DWU to exist, and even then we need to be sensible about it. For instance, Hokkien is actually used as a noun to refer to "a person of a group called 'Hokkien'". Cantonese, while it can be a noun to refer to 'a person from Canton', is not so used, as far as I'm aware. Japanese is actually a noun — "a Japanese" is correct — and it almost certainly has been used that way in the DWU. But is it worth an article that essentially says, "A Japanse

The question we face is this. Do we want to:
 * create Japanese (people) and Japanese (language)?
 * have Japanese simply used for both?

The thing is we've done this act of genuine laziness where American, for instance, redirects to United States of America and French redirects to France, rather than actually having proper articles.

So since we've now kinda gotten into a discussion on all this, we should make a decision not just on the title of these articles, but on what the articles should contain.

We tend to do rather better with fictional demonyms than real world ones. For instance, Venusian and Martian don't point to Venus and Mars. they both try to make a go of defining the words.

So while we're deciding on the proper title for these articles, we should give some thought to what the articles actually contain.

In my opinion, it would make the greatest amount of sense to just start an article like Russian with:
 * Russian was a name applied to people from Russia, as well as their main language.

I'll grant that we could split the articles. But policy on this sort of thing is different for articles than for categories. Categories are required to be about one thing and one thing only. There is actually no policy about an article being about one thing only. If they're about related things, but there's not that much info on either, they can often be combined. That's why Venusian and Martian are about multiple things, really. On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with having both a (language) and a (people) page for Cantonese.

It's just a matter of deciding, really.