Talk:White-collar boxing

No Place for Fantasy

". . . As they watched 9 fantastic bouts at the Meca Venue. . ." [emphasis added] This kind of thing is quite unacceptable in an encyclopedic entry. Orthotox (talk) 06:37, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

WP:SOFIXIT.  :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:53, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Requested move 10 August 2014

The following discussion is an archived 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. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: not moved. Jenks24 (talk) 13:29, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

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White-collar boxing → White collar boxing – Sources predominantly omit hyphen. This article has followed that 'convention', with the exception of the article title. SMcCandlish originally moved it to it's current location, with the rationale that it is a compound adjective, but we should describe popular usage, not prescribe. —Akrabbim^talk 02:07, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with *'''Support''' or *'''Oppose''', then sign your comment with ~~~~. Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's policy on article titles.

• Oppose – the hyphen helps the reader parse the complicated compound correctly. Without it, the topic would appear to be collar boxing that is white. It is not unusual to find this hyphen in sources that discuss the topic generically, as this book (see a bunch more here). Others use other mechanisms to clarify the parse, such as capitalizing the three words to act as a proper name, or putting "white collar" in quotes. Dicklyon (talk) 04:33, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
• Oppose: This is an article about boxing, by white-collar people; it's not an article about collars, that happen to be white, engaging boxing, nor about whites engaging in something called collar boxing, or the boxing up of white shirt collars, or ... English hyphenates for a reason. WP and it's manual of style are emphatically not bound by what "reliable" sources do stylistically, only what they say the facts are (see WP:SSF for a detailed explanation of the reasoning). Specialist publications of many sorts are notoriously bad at punctuation and other grammatical niceties, and this is more true of sports publications than almost any other type, expect maybe popular music and subculture 'zines. It basically comes down to this: Sources reliable on the history or other details of white-collar boxing (or on any other specialization other than English-language writing) are not reliable sources on English-language writing. Even with regard to reliable English-language writing sources, like Chicago Manual of Style and Hart's Rules, WP's MOS still is based on WP consensus about what is best for WP, even if we tend to ground that process in mainstream style/usage sources. Finally, all style guides and manuals of style (including WP's) by their very nature and definition, are in fact prescriptive, even when they are based on linguistic description more than prescriptive grammar. The nominator here is confusing this grammatical prescription in the abstract ("what is best in English", etc.), which WP's MOS does not and cannot engage in as matters of content (i.e., what our articles say about style and grammar), vs. in situ prescription of style and grammar rules for our internal editing purposes that are most useful for our readers (which is something our MOS must do, or it would not actually be WP's style guide but just some essay).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:52, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

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