Talk:Joseph Gilbert Seamount

Name

@Canley: Is Joseph Gilbert Seamount the most commonly used name for this seamount? People often assume that, where an official name exists for the subject of a Wikipedia article, that name is the correct title for the article, and that if the article is under another title then it should be moved. In many cases this is contrary to Wikipedia practice and policy. Wikipedia convention is to go with the more commonly-used form per WP:COMMONNAME. Volcanoguy 23:22, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

There's a couple of reasons I moved it. Firstly, it's a seamount not a city, it's unlikely to be controversial or "commonly" referred to by either name. Secondly, the name was changed was to distinguish from another seamount called "Gilbert Seamount" in the north Pacific, so while there isn't an article on the other one, it's not unreasonable to add a disambiguator to the article title – this could be "(Tasman Basin)" and "(North Pacific)", but why not use the official name in this case as it is different and performs the purpose of disambiguation? Lastly, and this is just my opinion, I really dislike the primacy of WP:COMMONNAME over, well, common sense – people often try to "prove" what is an inherently arbitrary and subjective "measure" of common use one way or the other by comparing dubious metrics such as six-year-old Google Books ngrams or old search corpuses, or Google search comparisons which pick up other instances such as the substring in the new name or the other Gilbert Seamount or use, or dismissal of any "official" use as not independent. I agree with WP:COMMONNAME in general, such as the examples given in the policy (very widely-used English language names), but a requirement to "prove" common use for an officially-named/renamed obscure geographic feature is neither reasonable or sensible in my opinion and just makes Wikipedia looks sloppy and outdated. --Canley (talk) 00:21, 5 October 2021 (UTC)