Talk:But What About the Noise ...

Requested move 11 April 2024

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Moved to But What About the Noise ... (closed by non-admin page mover) Bensci54 (talk) 16:59, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

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But what about the noise... → But what About the Noise ... – (or the full title, similarly capitalized – exact form to be determined in discussion). This is the (partial) title of a specific work, so it should be in title case, following MOS:CT. Most of the cited sources are using title case. I think "what" is an interrogative determiner here. Per MOS:ELLIPSIS, there should be a space before the dots. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 19:13, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

• Question: What would be the full title following MOS:CT? Perhaps But what About the Noise of Crumpling Paper which He Used to Do in Order to Paint the Series of "Papiers froissés" or Tearing Up Paper to Make "Papiers déchirés"? Arp Was Stimulated by Water (Sea, Lake, and Flowing Waters like Rivers), Forests. Is that it? With lowercase for 'what', 'which', 'in', 'to' (twice), 'froissés', 'déchirés', and 'like'? With the question mark outside the quote marks per MOS:CONFORM? —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 19:32, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

  I'm not confident about what part of speech "what" is in the title, and thus whether it should be capitalized. That seems like the toughest aspect of the short form of the title. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 01:11, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

• Support per nom, with long form in lead just as in BP's question. Enough sources do it this way that following our guidelines should be non-problematic. Dicklyon (talk) 19:48, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
  • Update: Support SMcCandlish's tweaked version with capitalized What. Dicklyon (talk) 18:58, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
• Support: It's the title of a work. It's in Wikipedia. Therefore it should be formatted in Wikipedia's style, as should the title in the article. I like to think John Cage is laughing at us right now. I certainly am. SchreiberBike | ⌨  21:08, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
• Slight alternative: This seems to me it should be "But What About the Noise ..." (and "... Which ..." later in the full title), since "what" and "which" aren't in any of the categories MOS:TITLECAPS says to lower-case. They're not prepositions, certainly. Some sources on English usage do classify this as interrogative determiners, while others say they are relative impersonal pronouns (and these are not necessarily mutually exclusive; i.e. the interrogative determiners can be seen as a class of relative impersonal pronouns that serve an interrogative purpose, and this is supported further by them being movable to become more obviously impersonal pronouns: "What did Jane say?" → "Jane said what?"; "Which one?" → "I'm not sure which."). A few sources actually classify these as adjectives if they precede a noun ("What/which/whose outfit should I wear?"), though this is iffy, since it could also be expressed as "What/which/whose should I wear?", with the referent "understood" and omitted, and where our target term is clearly serving as an impersonal pronoun (a noun stand-in) and an interrogative one. Same with some sources saying "what" is an adverb when preceding a verb as in "What do you care?"; it's hard to see any semantic difference between that "what" and the ones in "What about tomorrow?" or "What town is this?" Some sources like Collins English Dictionary avoid the question by using none of these terms and calling them "question words", which is a bit of cop-out, really. "What" is sometimes a conjunction, but not in this kind of usage. Even if it were, it's not among the conjunctions enumerated as lower-cased in the guideline. Those are and, but, or, nor ; also for, yet, so when used as conjunctions. An argument could be made that our five-letter rule should extend to this as well, and include what as lower-cased when used in this way, but it's not being used in this way here. An example of that use would be: "I left behind what I couldn't carry." More anecdotally rather than analytically, I've sent the last 3 months acquiring nonfiction e-books in large quanties, and despite some occasional weird title-casing vagaries like certain publishers having a bad habit of lower-casing any very short word like "it" or "is", I have yet to run into a single case of "what" or "which" or "whose" (the three conventional interrogative determiners) in any of these work titles, as far as I can recall other than in article/chapter titles written in sentence case. So, both the "what" and "which" in this seem to needs capitals, if we use title case.

  Moving on, a couple of extra notes: This is such a weird, excessive title, that some kind of lower-case-the-whole-thing argument might be makeable, if it is not routinely given in title-case form by independent sources. (This is one of those sorts of cases where we have "warring consistencies": we like titles to be as consistent with other titles as is reasonable, yet we also have an overarching MOS:CAPS principle to not capitalize anything that's not capitalized in the overwhelming majority of RS.) Per MOS:FOREIGNTITLE, we give non-English titles in the case conventions of the original language, but this is an odd-ball case of a mostly-English title with French clauses in it, so I would lean toward treating the French parts as French and subject to French conventions, especially since they are not isolated words much less ones that are assimilated into English like "rendezvous" and "sabotage" are; they are clearly foreignisms here (for the same reason, I would argue to capitalize German nouns if this title had injected some). The "like" in this is definitely the preposition version, so use "like" not "Like" (it's not the "I Like You a Lot" usage). Finally, yes, it should be "Noise ..." not "Noise...", per MOS:ELLIPSIS; the ellipsis fused onto the word indicates a truncated word ("Wha...?"), not a truncated sentence.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:10, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

  Thanks. So uppercase for 'What' and 'Which' – OK. As for the discussion of sources and whether the whole thing should be lowercased, I see title case in most of the cited sources for this. Also, we don't use lowercase for The Boy Bands Have Won or When the Pawn.... —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 06:24, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

  Fair enough. Maybe going with lower case was just an idea for simplification, if there was significant source support for it, but if there's not then there's not.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:23, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

• Neutral on capitalisation but Oppose addition of space. Whatever MOS:ELLIPSIS may say, standard practice on Wikipedia (and elsewhere) is not to use a space. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:01, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

  That's just not correct at all. There is no "standard" practice off-site, because there is no body that issues standards relating to English-language orthography (French has such a thing, but our language does not). On WP, we do have a standard, and (for this) it is found at MOS:ELLIPSIS, and it is generally followed, though no editor (new or long-term) is required to read MoS and follow it to edit here; we just clean up after them when they don't, and this is part of that cleanup. If you think MOS:ELLIPSIS should change, you know where WT:MOS is and how to open a thread proposing such a change.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:33, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

  I wasn't aware of it when I submitted this RM, but it seems that the vast majority of article titles on Wikipedia that contain an ellipsis do not have a space before it. See also Talk:When the Pawn.../Archives/2024/May#Requested move 11 April 2024. Having said that, the MoS says to include one, and I think we should follow the MoS unless we choose to change what it says, and a better place for discussing that question is WT:MOS rather than here. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 03:29, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

  By "standard practice" I meant "usually done" not "official", as I'm sure you actually knew very well. -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:02, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

Note: WikiProject Classical music and WikiProject Classical music/Compositions task force have been notified of this discussion. RodRabelo7 (talk) 11:40, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.