[Mesorah] Wikipedia and the name "Israel"

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

This post is addressed to listmembers who are interested and/or 
active in Wikipedia. If this does not apply to you, please ignore 
this post.

There is a statement in Wikipedia which I feel to be a foolish 
mistake, but I was unable to convince another editor of this, and I'm 
hoping that some of the learned members of this list might be able to 
do so.

Specifically: The article on "Israel" contains a section (at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel#Name) where the second paragraph 
(beginning "In an interlinear") says that a literal translation 
of "Israel" can be "upright with G-d".

That translation is based on a translation which came from a piece of 
software mentioned in the article on "interlinear". I say that there 
is a basic and fundamental confusion going on between the 
letter "sin" (which appears in "Israel") and the letter "shin" (which 
would indeed lead to the translation of "upright", but it does not 
appear in the word "Israel").

Because of the other person's reliance on that translation, I was 
unable to convince him of this error. My only source was my personal 
knowledge of the Hebrew language, and that was insufficient evidence 
for that other person. Therefore, I did not change that paragraph, 
but added the third paragraph (beginning 
"Others would say") to show five translators, all of whom chose "sar" 
over "yashar" as the root of "Israel".

I do suspect that anyone who was even a moderate knowledge of Hebrew 
will understand that whereas the letters "kaf" and "khaf" are 
interchangeable for purposes of translating, this is emphatically not 
true of "sin" and "shin", which must be treated as independent of 
each other for translation purposes, despite the fact that they use 
the same glyph when nekudos are omitted.

But I do not have any source for my assertion of the above paragraph, 
and it is my hope that someone on this list can find one.

More useful information is that the recent discussion of this point 
(in which I am user "Keeves") can be found at 
http://tinyurl.com/gozzf and the older discussion is at 
http://tinyurl.com/jd36z

Thanks
Akiva Miller