Talk:History of pound sterling in Oceania

Requested move 5 July 2022

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: no consensus. (closed by non-admin page mover) — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 23:53, 19 July 2022 (UTC)

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• History of pound sterling in Oceania → British currency in Oceania
• Pound sterling in the South Atlantic and the Antarctic → British currency in the South Atlantic and the Antarctic
• British West African pound → British currency in West Africa
• West Indian pound → British currency in the West Indies

– I believe it would be more efficacious to follow the pattern of British currency in the Middle East. "Pound sterling" is a clunky compound noun, while "British currency in" would be completely unambiguous and be more appropriate as an article title. TheCurrencyGuy (talk) 02:06, 5 July 2022 (UTC) — Relisting. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 19:00, 12 July 2022 (UTC)

• Comment / oppose on grounds offered. This isn't my area of expertise, but as the person who reverted these moves originally, these rationales seem wanting. "Pound sterling is a clunky compound noun" and "more appropriate" sounds like WP:IDONTLIKEIT / WP:ILIKEIT as an argument - the article is at Pound sterling. It doesn't matter how "clunky" a name is, if that's the name sources use, we're stuck using it. If hypothetically Ruritania changed its currency to some "clunky compound noun", the fact that an editor doesn't like it isn't cause to avoid the term and use "Ruritanian currency" instead, like calling Voldemort He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named or something. If there's some other reason afoot, or if the main article at Pound Sterling moves, then that can be looked into, but we shouldn't avoid the term just because one editor doesn't like it. SnowFire (talk) 16:58, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

  "Pound sterling" is a compromise, not an actual name per se. British government and financial sources all use "sterling" as the currency's name, "pound sterling" is an unofficial description used by media outlets, not the currency's actual name used by official sources. The same is true of media describing China's currency as "Chinese yuan" instead of "Renminbi". TheCurrencyGuy (talk) 17:10, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

  There is no such thing as an "actual name", just names people use. See WP:OFFICIALNAME. Anyway, I disagree with the claim that "pound sterling" or "pound" is an "unofficial description", as if it was slang like "greenback". The British government uses both terms all the time. Even if we decided that "sterling" was the one and only official term that Wikipedia must use, that would suggest standardizing on "sterling" instead, not on dancing around the term. (And the fact that the media uses Chinese yuan means that Wikipedia should also use Chinese yuan. We don't "fix" usage here, we reflect external usage.) SnowFire (talk) 18:34, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

  The simple fact is these terms are unofficial descriptions predominantly used by news publications and not by official sources. The Office for National Statistics always uses either "sterling" or, in informal contexts, "the pound", never the compound noun. TheCurrencyGuy (talk) 19:19, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

  Great! Since you're new here, please read the WP:OFFICIALNAME policy I linked before. It basically says that what the Office for National Statistics says doesn't matter, or at least doesn't matter more than any other source. Unfortunately, a lot of tools for analyzing word usage don't really work because "pound" and "sterling" have other, common meanings which pollute the results. Checking [1], it seems a lot of articles don't even use the term (nor "British currency"), opting for just the symbol... [2] uses "the pound" at least, which would potentially suggest standardizing on "pound" alone. Anyway, that's the kind of analysis I'm asking for - "I checked the following news / respectable financial sources, and they use XYZ." Government offices don't matter. These particular moves are a bit more complicated, as ideally you'd be checking historical records specific to the region. Believe it or not, you can still get me to switch my vote, I'm just trying to explain that your current rationale is not keeping with WP:AT policy. Show us a book that pointedly avoids the term "West Indian pound" when discussing that specific topic, say. SnowFire (talk) 21:33, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

  Okay, let's try and work something out.

  Reliable sources such as Reuters[3], Al Jazeera[4] and the BBC[5] give no results for "pound sterling" as a compound noun, referring to the currency as "sterling", using "pound" as a like for like equivalence in comparing specific units, but notably not using "pound sterling" except for a few Al Jazeera examples where it may say things such as "x pounds sterling", I suspect this is to disambiguate from several Middle Eastern currencies. The Guardian's archives show examples of both[6][7], but shows a strong preference for "sterling", producing 133,816 results for "sterling" and 48,052 for "pound sterling". Many of the "pound sterling" results are describing exchange rates (eg. "x foreign money for one pound sterling"). The majority of the results for "sterling" are indeed currency related, showing up only a few instances of the word in other contexts.

  There was never a distinct "West Indian pound", the colonies each issued their own banknotes but only Jamaica ever issued coins (only in the copper denominations, the locals weren't keen on copper coins so special nickel, and later brass, coins were minted). There was no central bank or independent monetary policy distinct from that of the UK. Government accounts usually (but not always) denominated funds in sterling, while the private sector tended to use a unit of account based on the Spanish dollar (defined as 100 (predecimal) halfpennies, as Spanish coins had long ceased to circulate). It was a complete mess, and this is why the British Caribbean Currency Board was established, which established the Spanish dollar as the official currency of the West Indies (although no actual coins were issued until 1955, until then the currency only existed as banknotes)

  Finally there is the issue of grammar, "history of pound sterling in Oceania" is poor grammar. If it is to use that phrase it ought to be "the pound sterling in Oceania". "History of sterling in Oceania" would be too vague, and I think it would be most appropriate to follow the pattern of "British currency in the Middle East".

  I am very sorry about losing my temper earlier. TheCurrencyGuy (talk) 02:23, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose I fully agree with SnowFire. We should use the proper name of the pound sterling, not the generic term "currency". Dimadick (talk) 12:59, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

  I don't see any proposal to move to "History of Sterling in Oceania" (or in any of the other nominations)? If there were, I would oppose it too per WP:COMMONNAME, technically incorrect or not. But there isn't.--John Maynard Friedman (talk) 19:32, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

• Comment The argument in favour of the request is Wikipedia:Consistency in article titles and surely the case against change should be to show why that policy should not apply. Or, more neutrally, which other consistent article title would be more appropriate for all these "colonial pound at par" articles. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 19:32, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Note: WikiProject Numismatics has been notified of this discussion. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 19:01, 12 July 2022 (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.