Talk:Mass wasting

Why Mass Wasting and not Mass Movement?

During the 25+ years I have worked with geomorphology mass movement has always been the generic term. Is the use of mass wasting perhaps prefered by some English speakers? In lingua franca and American literature mass movement dominates completely, in my experience. --Lindorm 22:08, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

I also believe it should be named "Mass Movement". "Mass Wasting" sounds very strange for me. Danuthaiduc (talk) 12:22, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

I agree. Also, the style does not seem encyclopedic, and some headings only have one or two lines and be expanded greatly.Yash (talk) 18:35, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

In my (mainly UK) experience, "Mass wasting" is the term normally used. However, from the number of googlehits, it looks like "Mass movement" is used just about as often and should be there in the lead at least as an alternative. Mikenorton (talk) 19:21, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Well I believe the term is and American one that is also used in Australia. But Mass movement is a better description and doesn't sound like nature is wastfull. Enlil Ninlil (talk) 04:37, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

I am a geologist and work as a volcanologist. I have always understood the term "Mass Wasting " was only applied to volcanic edifice failure - not the more general slope failure generating landslides etc. This is because volcanic edifices shed excess mass due usually to becoming over-steep and a section of the edifice fails en-masse. It is now a recognised phenomena of all active volcanoes. I am not aware of any landslide that has a headwall several kilometres long, but I ma aware of several volcanoes where the headwall exceeds 10 km. Landslides were when I was at university (many years ago), always referred to as "Mass movement" but crucially volcanic failure was always referred to as "Mass Wasting."The Geologist (talk) 15:43, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

Mitigation

Do denudation and subsidence really belong here?

They don't - moved to the "See also" section. Thanks for pointing that out. Mikenorton (talk) 08:36, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

Requested move 1 June 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: Mass wasting not moved, Mass movement moved to Mass movement (politics). This is a very difficult close, so prepare for a long close reason. The RM consists of two intertwined questions:

1. Which name is the most common name of the geological phenomenon?
2. What is the primary topic of the "mass movement"? Geological or political phenomenon?

Let's examine the second question first. The discussion found no consensus on which is primary. Usage examinations proved inconclusive. The nominator's examination that mass wasting is primary, mainly made on pageviews and one Google Scholar search of just "mass wasting" and "mass movement", has been disputed by Mikenorton and Uanfala, whose independent investigations (with more refined Google Scholar searches) led them to the conclusion that there is explicitly no primary topic. Since we cannot be sure that mass wasting is primary, I think it's safer to not declare it as such.

So under the premise of there being no primary topic, both the geological concept and the political concept have to be disambiguated somehow. The parenthetical disambiguation for the political article has been universally supported as the go-to if it ever came to that, so that article will get moved accordingly.

That leaves us with mass wasting itself to deal with. We can either use a parenthetical or not. The natural disambiguation principle however makes the first question moot (the naturally disambiguated title doesn't have to be the most common name; just don't be too uncommon) and favours staying at "mass wasting", so it will not be moved. (non-admin closure) — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 20:21, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

---

• Mass wasting → Mass movement
• Mass movement → Mass movement (politics)

– A simple Google Ngrams search shows that "mass movement" is by far the more common term, appearing many times more often in books than "mass wasting".[1] In my research on dozens of scholarly sources about landslides, I have come across a few that use "mass movement" or similar terms, but I have never seen the term "mass wasting". I think that "mass wasting" is misleading and certainly not the common name. There are many possible alternative titles, including "landslide" and "slope movement", but "mass movement", in its similarity to "slope movement", is most easily connected to related topics by a layperson, and most similar in technical definition to what this article is actually about. A 2008 discussion on the Talk page indicated that this may be a regional variation, but the sources are clear enough that WP:RETAIN can be overridden (if it even applies to article titles). Toadspike (talk) 19:57, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

• Weak support. I hesitate to extrapolate too much from the Ngrams, given that the data will include both the political and geological senses of "mass movement", but a Google search does seem to suggest that "mass movement" is most commonly used to refer to the geological term. (Google News mainly uses the term in its political sense, but then, I can't imagine that many news articles go into depth about geology.) The term "mass wasting" is used by some sources, like the US National Park Service, but "mass movement" does appear to be the WP:COMMONNAME overall. A check of the pageviews also suggests to me that the nominator is correct in treating the geological term as the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC for "mass movement." ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 19:44, 2 June 2022 (UTC)
• Conditional support provided rename Mass wasting instead → Mass movement (geography), and Full support to move Mass movement → Mass movement (politics). Redir Mass wasting and dab Mass movement. Mass wasting is the more familiar term in geography and the less ambiguous term for me, deeply astonished to learn mass wasting is not used ubiquitously. As it is not, turning Mass wasting into a redirect makes sense. -- Paleorthid (talk) 20:34, 2 June 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose the first move which would denote this as the primary topic for the term "mass movement", neutral on creation of a dab page, and no particular objection to Mass movement (geography). Having this article at Mass movement would, for me, violate WP:ASTONISH since I believe the primary association is with Mass society. Google Books does not seem to indicate that this is the primary meaning of "mass movement", and as noted above, a vanilla Ngrams search will also pick up anything related to politics. The spike around 1970 seems likely to be due to the Protests of 1968, not a sudden interest in mass wasting. Dekimasuよ! 03:59, 4 June 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose per Dekimasu; instead create a disambiguation page at "mass movement", and rename this article with a disambiguator mass movement (geology) -- 64.229.88.43 (talk) 04:07, 4 June 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose. Political "Mass Movement" should remain primary topic (and not disambiguation page). Not sure about moving "Mass Wastage" to "Mass movement (geography)", as evidence of the two in geographic/geological context has not really been shown. Just scanning through the references in this article, it seems "Mass wastage" is quite common, and don't see the alleged dominance of one of the other. Walrasiad (talk) 07:09, 4 June 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose While I can't prove it, I suspect the majority of Wiki searches on the term "Mass movement" are going to be to the political topic, and we should put our targets where the readers are aiming. We already have a Mass movement (geology) redirect to this page, which should bring those looking for the geologic usage here with very little fuss. In addition, my American geologic dictionary seems to prefer "mass wasting", listing "mass movement" as a synonym and giving it a much shorter separate entry, while my British geologic dictionary lists "mass-wasting" and does not have an entry for mass movement at all, listing it only in the mass-wasting entry as a synonym. So I think the case for "mass movement" being preferred is not strong enough to warrant making "Mass wasting" the redirect and "Mass movement (geology)" the article. --Kent G. Budge (talk) 16:51, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

Comments:

1. Contrary to @Dekimasu's statement and subsequent votes, I believe "mass wasting" is the primary meaning of "mass movement" and leaving the political article at "mass movement" would be misleading. I acknowledge the inadequacy of the Ngrams search for this task. However, although Google Books may not clearly show that geology is the primary meaning of the term, neither does it show that politics is, with results split about evenly between the topics. Google Scholar and a vanilla Google search both lean heavily toward the geological term; the Scholar search produced no results for politics that I could see, and the first 5 pages of vanilla web search results related to geology (I did not bother to look further). Given this evidence, I think WP:ASTONISH is far from applicable, and a disambiguation page would be appropriate even if the first move fails.

2. I would like to apologize for the lack of sourcing given for my claim that "Mass movement" is more common than "Mass wasting". I will give some more scholarly evidence here. First, the USGS's fact sheet on identifying landslide types [2], equivalent to and much more detailed than the NPS page linked above, uses the term "mass movement". Searches on the USGS website turn up more results for "mass movement" than "mass wasting" (134-83). A Google Scholar search turns up almost 14 times as many results for "mass movement" [3] than for "mass wasting" [4], which is certainly a significant difference. When there are almost 6 million of scholarly papers using "mass movement" and less than 500,000 using "mass wasting", the WP:COMMONNAME is fairly clear to me.

Apologies again for the lack of decorum in presenting further arguments after the discussion has commenced. I realize this seems like the first step towards bludgeoning, but I felt that I did a poor job in my initial request, and should put some effort into correcting that. Toadspike (talk) 23:24, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

The only entry for "mass movement" at the Oxford English Dictionary is for political concept. On the other hand, britannica.com has an entry only for the geological concept. I think it would be hard to establish that "mass movement" more commonly refers to one or the other. I'm not sure how useful comparing numbers for Google Scholar is, unless you can distinguish references to the political concept from the geological concept.

This argues for making "mass movement" a redirect page, since there is not an obvious preferred meaning. --Kent G. Budge (talk) 00:34, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

I did some Google Scholar analysis, comparing '"mass movement" geology' (52,100 hits) and '"mass movement" geomorphology' (28,700 hits) with '"mass wasting" geology' (42,400 hits) and '"mass wasting" geomorphology' (26,600 hits) against '"mass movement" politics' (93,000 hits). That's nowhere near exhaustive, but is at least suggestive that "mass movement" should be a dab page. "Mass wasting" has the advantage that it has only one meaning and is almost as common as "mass movement" in the geological/geomorphological literature. Mikenorton (talk) 15:49, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose as proposed. The primary topic for mass movement is clearly the current one. Neutral as to whether mass wasting should be moved to another title-- Necrothesp (talk) 13:12, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
• Support the proposal for a dab page at the base title. Much to my surprise, prominent results in both Google Books and Google Scholar appear to be evenly split between the two uses, and if the total counts on Scholar are anything to go by, then the lead of the political concept isn't enough to push it over the border. The latter use is obviously more likely to be familiar to the average reader, but I'm reminding myself here that quotidian familiarity doesn't necessary correlate with greater encyclopedic notability: one of the two uses appears to be just a type of social movement, while the other is among the small number of highest-level topics of study in geo(morpho)logy. It also attracts readership that's higher by a factor of nine [5] [6].
  The comments above indicate a preference for "mass movement" over "mass wasting", and the former is about 25% more common according to Mikenorton's links above. The natural disambiguation principle is relevant here, but I'd rather we used it only for choosing one type of disambiguator (natural) over another (say, parenthetical), and not as a justification for the use of less common names. It seems strange to have a core content question (how an article's topic should be referred to throughout its text) be determined by obviously irrelevant facts (what other, unrelated, topics with the same name we happen to have articles about). I'm not sure about the exact disambiguator, should we go for "(geology)" or for "(geomorphology)"? And how about the other article, is it really constrained to political movements? If not, then maybe "Mass movement (society)", or – using natural disambiguation – "Social mass movement"? – Uanfala (talk) 15:54, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose as currently proposed. My own analysis, incomplete though it undoubtedly is, suggests that "Mass movement" should become a disambiguation page. Combining my geological and geomorphological hits for "mass wasting" versus "mass movement" actually gives a total of 69,000 v. 80,800 a difference of 17%, which is a bit more evenly split than suggested above. To quote from my comment above ""Mass wasting" has the advantage that it has only one meaning and is almost as common as "mass movement" in the geological/geomorphological literature." Mikenorton (talk) 19:41, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

  Just a minor point: adding up the hits like that would work only if the two sets of results were disjunct. However, most sources that mention "geomorphology" (GM) also mention "geology" (G) (though not the other way round) [7] [8]. If you subtract those hits from your original totals, then the new totals will be only 2–3 thousand higher than the simple "geology" search. – Uanfala (talk) 22:31, 8 June 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.

Geography form 3

Mass wasting 105.161.101.161 (talk) 19:59, 2 March 2024 (UTC)