Talk:Cairo–Alexandria desert road

Egypt Low‑importance

	Egypt portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Egypt, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Egypt on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.EgyptWikipedia:WikiProject EgyptTemplate:WikiProject EgyptEgypt articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Highways: Africa High‑importance

	Roads portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Highways, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of highways on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.HighwaysWikipedia:WikiProject HighwaysTemplate:WikiProject HighwaysHighways articles
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.
	This article is supported by the African Highways Task Force.

Opening heading

a stub.--TheEgyptian (talk) 22:12, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

External links and references were added.--TheEgyptian (talk) 22:20, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

No consensus to move. Vegaswikian (talk) 06:08, 14 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Cairo–Alexandria desert road → Cairo–Alexandria Desert Road – Relisted. Vegaswikian (talk) 18:36, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It has a proper name (literally, the Yellow Pages have it as "Cairo Alex Desert Rd."[1], and it appears in postal addresses with the full capitalized name[2][3] ). Limiting the search to egyptian government sites shows a majority of capitalized usage[4]. This is not "the road that goes from Cairo to Alexandria through the desert", this is the "Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road" and the Egyptian postal service will accept letters addressed to that name. Per WP:LOWERCASE, proper names are capitalized. --Enric Naval (talk) 18:25, 28 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Support proposed name. Imzadi 1979 → 19:41, 28 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Support — FoxCE (talk | contribs) 12:38, 29 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose – more than a third of the uses in Enric's link to the Egyption gov site show it in lower case. If they don't capitalize it consistently, it's clearly being treated as a descriptive more than a proper name. And the postal address evidence with the slashed form Cairo/Alexandria is further evidence of it being a description more than a name. Dicklyon (talk) 05:30, 4 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That only means that two thirds of the pages as using it as proper noun, and one third are using a descriptive sentence. Unless, of course, you can read the mind of the page writer. The slash usage in the postal address is in a small minority, and they still capitalize the name. --Enric Naval (talk) 21:05, 4 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Most people seem pretty clueless about capitalisations or proper nouns, and this one doesn't strike me as a proper noun in crying need of capitalisation. There's only one source that uses it as capitalised, and it does not seem definitive. It seems to me, more likely than not, that there is no official name to this road, and that if it does have an official name, it would be 'Cairo–Alexandria Highway', 'Cairo–Alexandria Freeway' or "A-42" or somesuch. --Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 07:06, 8 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, the one cited source also calls it the "Cairo-Alexandria Freeway". Two official names, capitalized, in one article, probably means neither is official or proper. Just a guess. On maps and addresses it's often Cairo/Alex road, Cairo-Alex Desert Rd., etc. Same on the government site; also lots of Cairo-Alexandria highway on the gov site, too. They should name it. Dicklyon (talk) 03:20, 9 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I very highly doubt that the road is nameless. What name would be displayed in the road signs? Unfortunately, all road signs appear to be in Arabic[http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=917828].

There are two highways connecting Cairo-Alexandria, the second one is the Cairo-Alexandria Agricultural Road, which is capitalized in postal addresses and is listed in the yellow pages as "Cairo Alex. Agr. Rd." [5]. "Cairo-Alexandria highway" is just a descriptive sentence, it doesn't matter if you can find isolated sources that capitalize it. In the government site, there are like 8 times more sources using "Desert Road", most of them capitalized, while almost all the ones using "highway" are uncapitalized.

Again, all postal addresses use "Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road" with various abbreviations (for example the contact page of the Egyptian Ministry of Communications[6]). The Egyptian Yellow Pages uses "Cairo Alex Desert Rd.". None of them use "Cairo-Alexandria highway" or freeway or an uncapitalized name. Those are very strong indications that this is an official name. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:45, 12 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The "Cairo-Alexandria highway" referred to in that sources goes through Sadat City, so it's obviously the desert road, not the agricultural road. It's not as common a term for it, I agree, but there is no standardized name, as the sources clearly illustrate. See for example this current news item. Many resort and real-estate addresses drop "desert". Some say "highroad", as in Cairo-Alex highroad. There are many ways this road is denoted. Dicklyon (talk) 05:11, 13 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.