Thanks Clay for the advice. I would characterise this approach as the
convenient approach. If we choose the puritan approach, the entries
would be in Velthuis, and a redirection or disambiguation page set up
under the sloppy (non-diacritical) paali terms. I suppose the latter
approach would be better for a Buddhist or paali wiki.

Dennis

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, Clay Collier <spasemunki@...> wrote:
>
> We ran into a the same issue at Everything2, a Wikipedia-like site.
> Our decision was to create entries with all diacritical marks
> stripped, and then include both Velthius encoded and Romanized with
> full diacritical marks (using HTML character entities for the marked
> letters) at the top of the article. We settled on this despite the
> obvious inaccuracy because of the difficulty of searching for terms
> with diacriticals; most users of any English-language online site are
> likely to be uncertain how to enter proper diacriticals, and may have
> difficulty doing so because of the layout of their keyboard.
>
> I would suggest that if you are creating keywords for a Buddhism- or
> Pali- specific site that you name entries using the full diacritical
> marks, and create some sort of a link so that someone searching for
> the 'stripped' version of the word is directed to those entries. For
> a more general-purpose site, I would suggest naming entries with no
> diacritics and including the correct transliterations of the word in
> the text of the article. It's a compromise, but we've found on E2
> that locating entries by what users are likely to search for is more
> useful than having correctly named entries that are difficult for many
> users to find.
>
> Clay Collier