Talk:Osama bin Laden

Article name

He's usually given as Osama bin Laden, isn't he? (The 'bin' means 'son of' in Arabic, so I often see it lower-cased.)

You are absolutely correct about the "bin". Good catch.

"Usama Bin Laden" is the usual spelling used by the Department of Defense. I am not wedded to this spelling, over other spellings.

Cheers! George Swan 14:37, 4 May 2008 (CDT)

I did a quick Google, to see which was more common, and "Usama" gets 285K, "Osama" 10.8M. Is there a standard for the transliteration of Arabic names (I know Chinese and Japanese have these, but don't know so much about Arabic) that would prefer one or the other? If not, we should probably move it to comport with common usage. J. Noel Chiappa 15:08, 4 May 2008 (CDT)

PS: Restricting it to pages in English gives 344K for "Usama bin Laden" and 670K for "Osama". Less of a difference, but still significant. "Osama bin Ladin" ('i' instead of 'e') gets 179K, and "Usama" only 35K. J. Noel Chiappa 15:14, 4 May 2008 (CDT)

I have created a redirect from Osama and renamed this one, as I think we all agree on these naming issues. Martin Baldwin-Edwards 15:04, 4 May 2008 (CDT)

As I see it, this is a Romanization issue. We will want to have the article live at the proper transliteration of bin Laden's name, with redirects from all of the other common spellings. Until we get someone who does MSA, though, we'll just have to muddle through. Brian P. Long 15:21, 4 May 2008 (CDT)

What's an MSA? I took a quick look to see if there was a 'preferred' transliteration system, but don't seem to see that there is one (there are several, but none seems to be preferred). J. Noel Chiappa 15:29, 4 May 2008 (CDT)