Talk:The European Magazine

Requested move 9 February 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: moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) TheBirdsShedTears (talk) 02:06, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

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European Magazine → The European Magazine – "The" is part of the magazine's title, and appears on its title page, and on the cover of a hardcover compilation published in 2015. Our usual practice is to include "The" for newspaper and magazine titles (The Times, The Spectator, The Guardian) where appropriate. The article was moved to the current title without discussion by 4meter4 in 2011. Tevildo (talk) 00:19, 9 February 2022 (UTC) — Relisting. BD2412 T 06:57, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

• Support per nomination. Although there are various inconsistent references to this publication as "European Magazine", the ultimate title form falls to the magazine itself which, on its front page as well on tops of its individual pages, clearly indicates the name as THE EUROPEAN MAGAZINE. —Roman Spinner (talk • contribs) 01:24, 9 February 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose. Nearly all reviews and magazines of that period start with "The" (e.g. The Edinburgh Review, The Quarterly Review, The Westminster Review, The Monthly Repository, The British Critic, the Monthly Magazine, etc.) but do not use "The" in the title of the articles here. If it was the sole distinguishing feature in a single word title (e.g. The Economist, The New Yorker) then it would merit inclusion of "The" in the title to disambiguate (the examples you give are single word titles). But "Magazine" already disambiguates the "European Magazine" from other uses of the term "European".

For fairness, I will note that for some reason the articles for the "London Magazine" and the "Gentleman's Magazine" include "The" in the article title on Wikipedia, even though the term without "the" links directly to it. These seem to be an exception and I would suggest removing it there, rather than starting a new trend of attaching "The" to every magazine, journal, review, and newspaper titles. Nearly all of them use it. Walrasiad (talk) 10:46, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

According to MOS:THETITLE, "A leading A, An, or The is preserved in the title of a work". This would suggest that all the above-named publications should be at The Westminster Review, etc. (The Tatler is an exception, as its modern successor does not have "The" in its title). Perhaps this is a case for a formal RFC of more general scope. Tevildo (talk) 21:28, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Maybe an RfC is warranted. If mere official title is enforced, then nearly all English-language newspapers from the "Calcutta Times" to the "Zambia Daily Mail" would have to change article titles to start with "The". As would most 20th Century academic journals ("The Review of Higher Education", "The American Economic Review", etc.) even if no one actually uses the 'The' in referencing them. I would actually push for "The Tatler" (for the historical review, which how it is widely referenced). I think if you find the "The" always italicized and capitalized in RS references and bibliographies (e.g. The Economist, The Spectator, etc.), it should apply. But if not, then just drop it in the title. The Review of Higher Education is usually just referenced as the Review of Higher Education. The "the" is not essential nor helping disambiguate. Walrasiad (talk) 10:42, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

I think there's a subtle distinction between a "work" (e.g. The Tempest) and a "publication". In the former category, leading articles are almost always capitalized in running text, but for the latter RS often do not capitalize. For example this ngram query shows more instances of "in the European Magazine" than "in The European Magazine". MOS:THECAPS says that names "should be quoted exactly according to common usage". Colin M (talk) 17:05, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

• Neutral. I didn't realize that this was a controversial move at the time I made it over a decade ago, and did so per WP:BOLD. The fact that so much time has elapsed between the move and the objection suggests that the move was viewed by others as reasonable. I'll note that at least 10 editors have worked on the article post move in the last ten years and have not raised an objection to the article title. That said, I think there are reasonable arguments to be made for either title, and have no strong opinion one way or the other. Many scholarly publications (perhaps the majority?) leave out the word "The" when discussing the magazine. Others include it. There doesn't appear to be a consistent practice across sources.4meter4 (talk) 14:00, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose as not meeting either of the core criteria set out at WP:THE. I think this statement from the nomination gives a misleading picture: Our usual practice is to include "The" for newspaper and magazine titles (The Times, The Spectator, The Guardian) where appropriate All those examples are titled with "The" because they meet criterion 1: the addition of the "The" disambiguates the subject from other topics (i.e. Times, Spectator, and Guardian are not suitable titles for reasons of ambiguity). This does not apply here. As for criterion 2, it seems RS do not consistently capitalize the "the" in running text when referring to this magazine. Colin M (talk) 16:52, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
  • WP:THE states - "The definite or indefinite article is sometimes included in the official title of literary works as well as other kinds of fiction and non-fiction publications and works such as newspapers, films and visual artworks. In this case, the article should be included in the name of the corresponding Wikipedia article as well", and specifically cites The New York Times as an example. "New York Times" is not ambiguous. The question, I suppose, resolves into "How do we determine the official title of a magazine?" I would argue that looking at the masthead is as good a way as any. Tevildo (talk) 18:37, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose. per above comments. Rreagan007 (talk) 16:55, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
• Support per nomination. "The" is clearly a core part of the name similar to The New York Times or The Washington Post. I disagree with Colin M's argument that whether it's "essential to help disambiguate" is relevant here: we don't truncate names simply because the full title isn't required (if we did, then we'd cut off a lot more than the word "the" from article titles - Darwin's "Origin Species"?). What is a relevant argument is if the "common name" is to cut off the word "the", and it seems some of the referenced sources do indeed do this (The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland link, for one), but the coverage seems thin enough that I'd rather trust the linked image of a front page itself, since there doesn't really appear to be a common name at all here. SnowFire (talk) 19:00, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
• Support per nomination, discussion, and proper name. Randy Kryn (talk) 10:41, 26 February 2022 (UTC)
• Support per SnowFire. Peter Ormond 💬 12:28, 26 February 2022 (UTC)
• Support. Per WP:Consistency. One has to only wonder why this title needs to be an outlier European#In publishing when in fact the masthead is The European Magazine. Mike Cline (talk) 15:33, 5 March 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.