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Double murders – "Murder of" or "Murders of"?

Should the title of an article about a double-murder be "Murder of [victims' names]" (singular) or "Murders of..." (plural)? There seems to be no consistent policy, e.g. Murder of Harry and Harriette Moore vs. Murders of Alison Parker and Adam Ward. --Muzilon (talk) 05:25, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

I will hazard an inexpert guess: if we are talking about one distinct event (ie both victims were murdered at the same time) then it would be appropriate to say "Murder" in the singular... while if we are talking about two related events (ie two separate murders that are in some way connected) then it would be appropriate to say "Murders" in the plural... However, I am not a grammar expert, so I would suggest you double check at WT:MOS... they are good at grammar questions. Blueboar (talk) 13:30, 14 July 2018 (UTC)
That possibility had crossed my mind, but in the two cases I mentioned above, the victims were killed simultaneously. This question has actually arisen as a result of a proposal to change the title of Harvey and Jeannette Crewe to Murder (or Murders) of Harvey and Jeannette Crewe. --Muzilon (talk) 21:34, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

Recognizability and parenthetical disambiguations

Should parenthetical titles be kept over natural disambiguation (i.e. a full name) due to recognizability if the subject is not widely known by his real name? For example, Faker (video gamer) can be naturally disambiguated to Lee Sang-hyeok, although the page has resisted moves based on recognizability. I am currently drafting a mass RM and this argument has commonly popped up. 93 (talk) 09:46, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

There is no firm answer. MOST of the time, yes... the more recognizable gamer tag name is best, even if we need to disambiguate. However, if the gamer tag name and the real name are BOTH fairly recognizable then I would go with the one that does not need disambiguation. Don’t do this as a mass RM... this hinges on looking at sources that discuss each individual, and weighing how recognizable each name is... so each case needs to be assessed individually. Blueboar (talk) 11:50, 17 July 2018 (UTC)
I won't present that as an option indiscriminately, then. My main issue deals with deciding which parentheticals to use per Wikipedia:Naming conventions (video games) and related consensus. Recognizability was also used to justify moving to (specific game player) rather than just (video gamer) when they were mass moved without discussion, but that seems like an issue for the specific NCs at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (video games) and Wikipedia:Naming conventions (sportspeople) where I have also started discussions. 93 (talk) 22:10, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

Question: Feedback Loop

Is it OK to use this page to ask a question? I have a question about using common names. Has Wikipedia ever considered the possibility of an undesirable feedback loop preventing the change of an article name? By this I mean that Wikipedia is relying on the common name as used in reliable sources, but those reliable sources are taking guidance from Wikipedia for the common name. This could create an eternal loop where both are feeding off each other, causing the name to be fixed forever. A specific example I am thinking about is the article on Liancourt Rocks. I suspect that new reliable sources that seek to use a neutral name for these islands are taking their cue from Wikipedia itself. Wikipedia then refers to these reliable sources to keep the name unchanged. Has anyone ever considered this potentially negative situation? --Westwind273 (talk) 22:06, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

@Westwind273: It has its own page by the way. See WP:CITOGEN. Hddty. (talk) 09:46, 9 July 2018 (UTC)
I think you give WP too much credit for influencing what reliable sources do. Sure, it is certainly possible that our article has influenced RECENT sources (written after our article was created)... but the common usage pre-dates our article by a long shot. Those earlier sources could not have been influenced by WP. So ... if we have an influence at all... it would be more a case of WP adding its voice towards the retention of “liancourt rocks” in common usage, not us creating the common usage. Blueboar (talk) 11:26, 9 July 2018 (UTC)
Thank you for your insightful comments about this. I still have my doubts about this issue, but I enjoyed reading your comments. --Westwind273 (talk) 03:11, 12 July 2018 (UTC)
Even if the phenomenon exists, your characterization of it as a "negative situation" is POV. It would seem to me that stability of common names is a positive thing and that this phenomenon (if it exists and contributes to that stability) would be a positive situation. --Khajidha (talk) 12:28, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

Submarine classes and consistency

There are some issues raised by three recent RMs that I think should be discussed here.

The first of these also raises a question of disambiguation, which IMO should be discussed on that talk page as it doesn't affect other articles.

However all three raise the question of consistency. It has been rightly pointed out that other current and recent submarine classes generally go by their NATO reporting names so far as article titles are concerned.

Is that a valid reading of wp:CONSISTENCY? If so, we are in effect creating a de facto specific Wikipedia naming convention for submarines.

And this principle could also be applied to many other areas. Perhaps it already is. Comments? Andrewa (talk) 23:10, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

There is another of these currently open as well: Talk:Type 091 submarine#Requested move 10 July 2018. Dekimasuよ! 07:22, 26 July 2018 (UTC)
WP:SHIPS and disambiguation topics concerning ships have a lot of problems right now. There is a discussion of how to disambiguate ships in general. There was recently an issue over certain ship dab articles actually being list articles. This discussion joins the heap of consistent stylistic issues the project is facing. As for why the Russian subs used NATO names is because in English sources, NATO nomenclature was more prominent in the sources during the Cold War. I cannot speak to the Chinese names currently, but sources like Jane's Fighting Ships do not use NATO names when referring to Chinese ships, so I'm not sure the same rule of thumb would apply. Further discussion on the naming convention for ship class articles in non-NATO navies would have to be hammered out. Llammakey (talk) 11:22, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (sports teams)

At Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (sports teams) the question has been raised as to whether this convention has in fact been approved by consensus.

If not it shouldn't of course be in the category and sidebar. I have not found any evidence that it has been, but perhaps I've missed it. Andrewa (talk) 20:19, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

It was created in 2009 [1] and seems to have been split from the main article title policy, but I can't see where it was... this is the time period. Andrewa (talk) 15:01, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

It was in the main article title policy before being split in this edit. The original wording of Wikipedia:Naming conventions (sports teams) is identical to that in the main policy before the split. Number 57 15:35, 17 August 2018 (UTC)
Thanks, good work! Andrewa (talk) 06:42, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

Parentheses, or round brackets

The article contains seven occurrences of parenthesis (-es, -etical) and one of round brackets. I sought consistency of terminology, changing the sole occurrence of round brackets to parentheses, but this was reverted with the edit summary, The extra clarity seems useful here, to exclude square brackets. I'm not sure I even understand this edit summary; who said anything about brackets, square or otherwise? Elegant variation offers no extra clarity in technical documentation, rather, it does the opposite: it leaves one wondering if we are talking about two different things when two terms are used. This is not the place to spring an AE/BE distinction on the unwitting. Mathglot (talk) 07:05, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

I've always understood round brackets to be parentheses. :D --Izno (talk) 16:29, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

When a country changes its name... (discussion about the WP:COMMONNAME policy)

Hi everyone. I feel that when a country changes its name, Wikipedia should change the article name of that country to reflect that, regardless of whether the new name has technically become the "common name" or not. I was driven to start this discussion here due to all the arguments surrounding the kingdom of Swaziland. On 19 April 2018 the king of Swaziland changed the country's name to Eswatini, with the aim of shedding the country's colonial past. In cases like these, I think that name changes should be respected and that Wikipedia should reflect them. It's not like people looking for "Swaziland" wouldn't be able to find the page if we renamed it – we could simply add a redirect to "Eswatini", and the lead to the article could start like "Eswatini, formerly/also known as Swaziland..." so people wouldn't be confused. Plus, Eswatini is not a country that most people will be searching for. Only people who have some sort of specific reason for looking it up will do so, considering how small and 'obscure' of a country it is. I doubt most people even know it exists (by the name Swaziland nor the name Eswatini).

Most of the opposition to changing the article's name has been on the basis that Eswatini is not the common name yet (regardless of whether that's true or not...), and therefore changing the article name would go against WP:COMMONNAME. The arguments on the talk page for Swaziland are going in circles at this point. This is why I am here to discuss whether there should be an exemption to this policy when it comes to country name changes, especially if the name change was made by a country that was victim to imperialism in order to discard the name given to them by their colonizers.

Thanks!

Iamextremelygayokay (talk) 00:51, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

  • Mild oppose In essence, this amounts to saying that for countries we should use the official name, not the most common name, but this is clearly against Wikipedia:Official names. There are many, many disputes about article titles, and once we start to make exceptions to COMMONNAME for one kind of article, editors will quickly start to use this as support for other kinds. If it were agreed, there would have to be clear reasoning to show why it doesn't support other uses of official names that aren't COMMONNAMEs. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:56, 23 September 2018 (UTC)
  • Strong Oppose. Any rule based on a determination of whether a country "was victim to imperialism" are inherently WP:POV and is likely to fall over on the first contact with reality.
In this case, for example, the name change took place nearly 50 years after independence. Up until April this year (and for a while afterward in some places), the only name for Swaziland used in English by that country's independent and sovereign government was "Swaziland". Short of suggesting that for the last 50 years there has been a giant global conspiracy to suppress news of a secret colonial government in Mbabane, it's difficult to argue that "Swaziland" is some imperial name foisted on an unwilling country.
In a lot of other cases, the official name is different from the common name for mundane reasons. It's officially not "Russia" but the "Russian Federation". Presumably we'd have to replace "South Korea" with "Republic of Korea" and "North Korea" with "Democratic People's Republic of Korea". If the proposal does not affect these cases, then it is (possibly unwittingly) an attempt to bypass the consensus-building process at Talk:Swaziland
Of course, editors at Talk:Swaziland should be ready to endorse a move in that particular case should it become clear that the WP:COMMONNAME has changed. As of today, nobody has started an WP:RM at that page arguing that there has been a change in WP:COMMONNAME, nor has anyone otherwise distilled the sources into a coherent case for change based on WP:COMMONNAME. But it is not entirely obvious (to me at least) that a convincing case could not be made. Kahastok talk 10:23, 23 September 2018 (UTC)
I completely respect your decision to oppose, but there are a few things I would like to clarify.
Firstly, I admit that saying a country was "victim of imperialism" is rather POV, but I was under the (possibly false? I am much less experienced at Wikipedia than you are, haha) assumption that WP rules/policies were not bound by NPOV, unlike articles themselves. Additionally, the statement "is likely to fall over on the first contact with reality" seems pretty POV too, unless I'm misinterpreting what you were trying to say.
My claim that their (former) name was "given to them by their colonizers" was admittedly (and unintentionally) inaccurate, and I apologize. It is still true however that the king did change the name "noting the name change is intended to shed vestiges of the country's colonial past" – in his own words, "African countries on getting independence reverted to their ancient names before they were colonised...So from now on, the country will be officially be known as the Kingdom of eSwatini". Thus it may indeed be difficult to argue that "'Swaziland' is some imperial name foisted on an unwilling country" (which, again, I apologize for insinuating), but it is certainly not difficult to argue that it has direct ties to imperialism and colonialism.
I do not agree that this proposal is inherently an attempt to bypass consensus at Swaziland if it does not affect the countries you listed. As you said, those country names were changed for mundane reasons unrelated to imperialism (as far as I'm aware). Therefore, a distinction can be made between them and cases like that of Eswatini without being an attempt to bypass consensus. I understand if you believe that distinction shouldn't matter when it comes to WP article titles, but I do not appreciate the claim (which I recognize was probably made in good faith) that in believing the distinction does matter, I am therefore attempting to bypass consensus.
Once again, I fully respect your decision to oppose, and I am glad that you are (seemingly like most other editors) open to changing the name if it is proven that Eswatini is the new common name. Iamextremelygayokay (talk) 18:34, 23 September 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose stick to the English common name, which is not necessarily related to the official name of the country whatever that may be. I agree with [User:Dodger67|Roger (Dodger67)]]. - Nick Thorne talk 12:04, 23 September 2018 (UTC)
  • oppose. per the above arguments. I would also note that this is an excellent example of why the common name is best, as if the article were moved to "Eswatini" it would be confusing to many, including me, who were not aware its name had officially changed and had never heard of the new name. One day maybe the world will know it by this new name, as such name changes often do stick. But for now use the common name, per the policy which does not need to change.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds 12:27, 23 September 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose as per RogerDodger67. This is why we use the common English name here at Wikipedia. Perhaps someday it will be the common name and we'll re-look at it, as we did with Myanmar (Burma). Fyunck(click) (talk) 09:14, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
  • Comment In general we should be following usage in English but there are a number of factors in these debates that get irritating.
    Firstly comparisons between "long form" and "short form" names of countries are utterly irrelevant to comparing quite different names.
    Secondly it's very tiresome for people to be declaring what is and isn't the "English name" when proper nouns are involved. Many, many names used in English originate from other languages including the names for many, many countries (to name but two, "France" and "Canada" originated outside English). What matters is usage, not whether one can point and shout "Foreign word! Translate! Translate!!! TRANSLATE!!!" but the latter happens a bit too much.
    Thirdly it really doesn't matter if the new name is one already being used in other languages. There is a strong drive for places to have uniform recognisable identities across languages, slowly dismantling the old separate names, though tempered by existing usage. Would people have any less of an objection if the name in Swazi was also being changed from something else to eSwatini?
    Fourtly in this specific case eSwatini/Swaziland is one of many countries that have English as an official language so does use in Swaziland count for more or is it at the mercy of what some American paper calls it? Would we apply different standards if, say, New Zealand opted to rename itself Aotearoa?
    Finally there seems to be a bit too much political point of view applied to some of these naming debates, treating them as a proxy for approval of regimes and/or their actions - in debates on another country's there was a lot of "Per a then-globally-adored [but now much despised] opposition leader" rather than objective consideration of how the country is best known in English. Again these considerations should be irrelevant.
    In conclusion I think the current common name approach broadly works but there does need to be a firmer hand with discussions to ignore arguments that are ultimately about the origin of a word or opinions on the current regime. Timrollpickering 10:43, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose. With respect to the case of Swaziland itself, the point may be nearing where its become the common name anyway. I've been meaning to circle back to that at some point because it looks like it's taken hold a lot quicker than "Czechia" has for Czech Republic. On the question posed here though, it's an emphatic no to the idea of making a general exception to WP:COMMONNAME or WP:NAMECHANGES that applies only to countries. That way there be dragons. Just stick to the exiting policy and we'll be fine.
  • Oppose Such an exemption would directly violate the "Naturalness" and also potentially the "Recognizability" clauses of the five characteristics. In the case of Swaziland, established media outlets have widely adopted the new name, it is true (See the following discussion if interested: Talk:Swaziland#Survey of reliable sources). However, to the majority of English language speakers the widespread adoption by RS's has not affected their vernacular and natural language use in such a short amount of time. For example: [2] The majority of Google searches for the term "Swaziland" remains dominant over "eSwatini"/"Eswatini", a trend which has not deviated much despite widespread established media adoption. - Wiz9999 (talk) 13:16, 3 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose for all the reasons above. There's no reason to make an exception to our general guideline that the common name should be the article title. This is the same for countries as for anything else. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:19, 3 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Comment Since receiving UN recognition as Timor-Leste in 2002, there have been six East Timor move requests. I am the Nominator in the latest case. Another article exists for East Timor (province). Evidence has been provided that "Timor-Leste" complies with WP:COMMONNAME. WP:MODERNPLACENAME should apply. Still, opposition exists. Engagement slowed after a NAC and relist. WP:CONSENSUS requires judgement of arguments, but I am unsure who makes those judgements or what consensus might look like. I empathise. Te Karere (talk) 04:14, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

The Use of Ellipsis in Article Titles

A discussion over the merging of two articles is occurring over at Talk:There's...Johnny!. The main issue of debate at this moment is the use a space after an ellipsis in the title (see There's... Johnny! and There's...Johnny!). I am inquiring to the Wikipedia community as to whether is a policy or some sort of guideline in the Manual of Style that might give some direction on how this situation should be handled. Is there a proper way of using an ellipsis in an article title or sentence? Is one more grammatically correct than the other. If anyone has any insight into this, I would certainly appreciate their response. – BoogerD (talk) 23:41, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

@BoogerD: MOS:ELLIPSES says that there should be a space on either side of an ellipsis unless adjacent to certain types of punctuation not present in this case. Imzadi 1979 → 04:19, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
@Imzadi1979: Please excuse my ignorance. In this case, we have a situation where there is a "Pause or suspension of speech" as the MOS states. I'm having trouble understanding exactly what it is that the MOS says to do in this situation. The title of the show is named after a popular phrase from The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson where the host was introduced with a drawn-out "There's" and the his name: "Johnny". If you don't mind, could you clear it up for me as to whether the double-space still applies in this situation? – BoogerD (talk) 04:50, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
As a matter of factual correctness: no, Mr. Carson was not introduced on the show with "There's... Johnny!"; he was introduced with "Here's... Johnny!" The title of the TV show that's the subject of the article is a reference to that usage, but not a quote of it. --Nat Gertler (talk) 02:37, 29 August 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for pointing that out Nat! I had a moment this morning when I realized my mistake and meant to go and make a note here but, alas, it fell through he cracks today. Lol, I should've known better (and am quite familiar with the iconic phrase and its use in other aspects of pop culture) but I hope we can chalk my mistake up to having written that note while very, very tired. – BoogerD (talk) 02:46, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

Without opining on the space issue, I'd just like to point out the existence of a single unicode character representing an ellipsis; it's U+2026 ("horizontal ellipsis") and looks like this: …. By comparison, the 3-dot version looks like this: .... Horizontal ellipsis can be used directly: (…) or via an HTML entity, either named (…) decimal (…), or hex (…). Note that the Wikipedia article Ellipsis use the direct unicode character in its definition in the first sentence. Mathglot (talk) 08:21, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

per MOS:ELLIPSIS: "The pre-composed ellipsis character (…), or three dots separated by spaces (. . .), are not recommended." Galobtter (pingó mió) 08:32, 29 August 2018 (UTC)
Right,so... Maybe the article should be titled "There's Johnny!" After all, we are not required to follow the idiosyncratic typography of any entity. So what if they use ellipses on the title card? What if they had a an emoji instead -- "Here's Johnny =)"? Would we required to reproduce *that*? There're various aspects to this. Spelling we generally follow. In this case, I would retain the wow (bang). And if there're enough notable sources, and they use the ellipsis, that's a date point, altho not a big one -- our MOS also matters. This is why our article is titled "Macy's" and not "Macy*s". However, we do use the typography of "eBay", but this is because there are very many highly notable sources that do that, such that the reader would probably be discombobulated to come across an article titled "Ebay". However, "Here's Johhny" is apparently quite obscure, and therefore the reader will be reasonably plussed to come across that title I think. So in this case our internal rules would have much more weight. Herostratus (talk) 23:26, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

Scholarly method article and alternative title

At Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Scholarly method, can we get some opinions on putting "scholarship" in the lead and bolding it as the WP:Alternative title? Of course, you can also weigh in on what to do with the Scholarly method article. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 01:34, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Enacted discussions

There is discussion on if enacted RMs can be reversed pending further discussion even if closed correctly, see Wikipedia talk:Consensus#Enacted discussions. Crouch, Swale (talk) 18:15, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

There is not currently an article at Weierstrass p

The page says "For example, the article on Weierstrass p carries that title rather than the symbol itself, ..." However, there is currently no article at Weierstrass p. Someone converted that to a redirect at 00:01, 18 September 2018‎ (UTC), saying "See the talk page." —BarrelProof (talk) 20:57, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

So just replace it with a similar example.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:59, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
Done [3]. But the entire line-item is redundant with the one immediately above it, and serves no purpose, so it should simply be deleted. A rule to not give an article a symbol name if the symbol is rare is never activated if we already have a rule to not give an article a symbol name.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:15, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

Is PRECISE self-referential?

Without mentioning any names, like SmokeyJoe, I've encountered the claim that WP:PRECISE is self-referential several times now, usually as a rationalization to ignore it or dismiss its importance, and I wish to address it. I presume this is the best place to do that. Let's look at the wording (my bold emphasis):

Usually, titles should be precise enough to unambiguously define the topical scope of the article, but no more precise than that. For instance, Saint Teresa of Calcutta is too precise, as Mother Teresa is precise enough to indicate exactly the same topic. On the other hand, Horowitz would not be precise enough to identify unambiguously the famous classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz.

It's important to not conflate the ordinary dictionary sense of the word "precise" with the WP meaning of the specialized term PRECISE, and to recognize that the latter is defined in terms of the former. Note that for specialized terminology, like in specialized fields like law, math, science, engineering, medicine, etc., it is not unusual to define more specific connotations of a term in terms of the more general dictionary definition of the corresponding word. For a common example, consider the common and scientific meanings of "theory". Or how "impeding" is used more narrowly in traffic law to mean impeding that is in violation of the law, but not impeding that is lawful (when stopped at a red light you're impeding those behind you in a broad sense, but you're not impeding in the narrow sense of a legal violation).

In this definition of PRECISE, WPians have used the word precise multiple times to explain what PRECISE means. There's nothing wrong with that, it's not self-referential since it's not using the specialized term PRECISE to define itself, and is certainly no reason to dismiss its importance. --В²C ☎ 16:48, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

Would I be correct in surmising that you've recently been WP:WIKILAWYERed?
To me, WP:PRECISE is clearly-written, good, practical advice with examples. Use the WP:COMMONNAME, and don't overcomplicate. (Thus, for example, Microsoft not Microsoft Corporation.) "Article titles should be recognizable, concise, natural, precise, and consistent" (quoted from the lead note in WP:TITLE, of which WP:PRECISE is a subsection).
Why are we here? (1) to enforce a set of rules, or, (2) to help readers find what they're looking for?
This discussion overlaps with efforts by some editors in WP:RM discussions to define a WP:PTOPIC. I recently participated in such a discussion in which the proposed PTOPIC got less than 37% of all views to the articles on the DAB page. For Heaven's sake! way to accumulate bad links to the pseudo-PTOPIC which will never be found and fixed, and to annoy a large proportion of readers. Narky Blert (talk) 21:42, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
You’ve never had to do graduate level writing? Even high school? You should not define or explain a term by repeating the term. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:11, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
Yes, of course, but defining PRECISE in terms of "precise" is not explaining a term by repeating a term. They're different. That's why I said It's important to not conflate the ordinary dictionary sense of the word "precise" with the WP meaning of the specialized term PRECISE, which you can't see to avoid doing. You have the same problem at with CONSENSUS/consensus, CONCISE/concise, etc.. As far as I know, you're the only who has trouble making the necessary distinctions. And, yes, it's confusing, because people use "precise" when they mean PRECISE, but you should be able to tell which meaning is intended from the context. --В²C ☎ 00:34, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Disagree that it is OK, let alone desirable, to use in policy words that are needlessly different to standard dictionary meanings as understood by newcomer editors. There is no need for Wikipedia-precise to be a different meaning to "precise". It isn't different. B2C has exactly the same problem with CONSENSUS/consensus, CONCISE/concise, in his mind, alone, he thinks these ALLCAPS shortcuts are different words that mean something different to the encultured Wikipedian, and who knows what he thinks the newcomer editor is meant to make of it. No, barriers to newcomers should be minimised, and there is no worthwhile purpose in making "precise" and "consensus" and "concise" establish Wikipedian terms-of-art. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:30, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Oh please. “Consensus” means unanimous agreement, normally. Not on WP. Don’t shoot the messenger. —В²C ☎ 03:20, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
No it doesn't. Do you have a reliable source? m-w.com includes the word, but you need disingenuous paraphrasing to come up with what you said. "General agreement" is usually stated. More importantly, finding consensus usually involves compromise and modification of the question being asked, you can't force a consensus on a defined question. "Unanimous agreement" is an extreme example of consensus, nor a normal example of consensus. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:56, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Disingenuous paraphrasing? Because I paraphrased "general agreement: UNANIMITY" as "unanimous agreement"? Definition of consensus 1a : general agreement : UNANIMITY [4]. You're holding me to standards that no one can meet. --В²C ☎ 17:53, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
See my comment below, and particularly the second wikilink. Andrewa (talk) 18:12, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Not at all. Consensus is a difficult process to understand but far harder to explain, but someone once said it's a process rather than a destination and I can't do much better. My attempts are here and here. Whenever we cite consensus to support our own POV or are even tempted to so so (and I do it too) we just display a lack o understanding of what it really means. Andrewa (talk) 18:12, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
I'm not sure what the issue is here. WP:PRECISE is not in itself the policy in question, it's a convenience shortcut. The policy is the wording itself that you reach when you click on that shortcut. So talk of it being self referential is irrelevant. "Precise" as used in the policy text follows its usual English meaning.  — Amakuru (talk) 21:52, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Amakuru, the issue here, perhaps in its entirety, are the words "be precise enough to". They are superfluous wordiness and I want to remove them. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:39, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
That's part of the discussion in the section below. Here the issue is whether use of the word "precise" in this policy that is shortcutted with WP:PRECISE is self-referential and therefore problematic and need to be removed. --В²C ☎ 00:05, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
Right, and it does seem to be the case that PRECISE ventures into the territory ideally covered by CONCISE, with its mandate to only be as precise as necessary. I will have a think about whether we need to address that tomorrow. In this instance I was observing that the question of whether PRECISE is self-referential is iny view irrelevant since WP: shortcuts are not intended as dictionary terms in need of a definition, but as convenience links to policy which is described in prose form.  — Amakuru (talk) 00:28, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
The shortcut gets used as a one word summary, so it’s not just a convenient shortcut, and anyway, it’s about “Precision”. “Precision” and “precise” are forms of the same word. “Precision. Usually, titles should be precise enough to ...”. It’s bad writing. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:51, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
It seems this comes down to the question: Is the purpose of WP:Precise to define the term, or to expand on the definition already given at the top of the page (in the list of goals). Blueboar (talk) 11:04, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
It's neither. The purpose is to help editors understand how to title articles to the correct level of precision. --Jayron32 18:06, 2 November 2018 (UTC)
This segment was written in a self-referential manner to be amusing. Its a kind of geeky humor that dates from the era when the early WP was invaded by a horde of people from SlashDot and other nerdy forums, who became the beating heart of the editorial corps for many years. Our editorship is much broader today, and this kind humor may not go over as well. Thus, it would not hurt to reword this, without changing the actual meaning. Start at thesaurus.com and just give it a try. E.g., "titles should be particular enough to unambiguously define the topical scope of the article, but no more explicit than that. Saint Teresa of Calcutta is too detailed ... Mother Teresa is circumscribed enough ... Horowitz would not be specific enough ..." I picked these substitutions almost at random (not random in that I threw out any selection that clearly couldn't work in the context, like "actual" or "correct", and accepted the first choice that did fit). Actually thinking about it could probably produce a more perfect version.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:53, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
Are you being deliberately facetious? Obscure synonyms? Already some think these are terms of art, not readable at face value. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:22, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
Slightly. I'll repeat: "I picked these substitutions almost at random.... Actually thinking about it could probably produce a more perfect version." I.e., it would be easy to propose an actual rewording that would probably be accepted, if anyone cared. The only obscurity in my randomized version was "circumscribed" (I thought it was funny to keep it because it looks a lot like "circumcised" at first glance).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:59, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

Improve WP:PRECISE language

I propose a rewrite of Wikipedia:Article_titles#Precision [5]. User:Blueboar wants to be persuaded[6].

The proposed re-word is not intended to change any intended meaning. Usually, titles should be precise. To explain what precise means, assume the reader doesn't know, therefore you must not use the word "precise" or any variation of it. The only exception is PrimaryTopic. "Over-precise" or "too precise" is still precise, and where it happens it happens for reasons not derived from PRECISE. Anyway, compare the versions, what is agreeable, what is disagreeable? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:20, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

It might be helpful to see the two wordings here:
Current wording:
Usually, titles should be precise enough to unambiguously define the topical scope of the article, but no more precise than that. For instance, Saint Teresa of Calcutta is too precise, as Mother Teresa is precise enough to indicate exactly the same topic. On the other hand, Horowitz would not be precise enough to identify unambiguously the famous classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz.
Exceptions to the precision criterion may sometimes result from the application of some other naming criteria. Most of these exceptions are described in specific Wikipedia guidelines or by Wikipedia projects, such as Primary topic, Geographic names, or Names of royals and nobles. For instance: ...
SmokeyJoe's proposed rewrite:
Usually, titles should unambiguously define the topical scope of the article. The exception is where the title is the primary topic for the term.
...
My initial take is the rewrite is, ironically, too ambiguous. There's no upper bound like there is in the current wording ("but no more precise than that"). That said, I think the overall layout is better. We could probably improve the current with this. How about this:
Usually, titles should be precise enough to unambiguously define the topical scope of the article, but no more precise than that. For example:
  • Saint Teresa of Calcutta is over-precise, as Mother Teresa indicates uniquely exactly the topic.
  • Horowitz is not precise enough because it does not uniquely identify the famous classical pianist from amongst many others known by the same name.
Exceptions to the precision criterion may sometimes result from the application of some other naming criteria. Most of these exceptions are described in specific Wikipedia guidelines or by Wikipedia projects, such as
For instance: ...
--В²C ☎ 00:54, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for the presentation, very nice.
"be precise enough to" is wordiness, contains no information, and breaks the standard advice to not use the term being defined, i.e. is self-referential.
", but no more precise than that" is superfluous. It is not the job of PRECISE to repeat what belongs in CONCISE. It doesn't belong in the defining statement, which should be rigorous. It is enough to have it very soon mentioned examples, with"over-precise".
--SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:23, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Disagree that Geographic names or Names of royals and nobles. are, or should be read as, exceptions to PRECISE. They may advocate for titles that are more precise than required, but the titles do not "fail" the PRECISE criterion. In considering PRECISE, Primary topic uniquely needs to be mentioned immediately as an exception. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:35, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
You can’t have it both ways. Currently PRECISE limits how precise titles are to be. US cities and royalty are exceptions to that. You propose changing PRECISE to not have that limiting connotation. That’s changing the meaning of PRECISE which you claim your rewrite doesn’t do. It does. —В²C ☎ 03:37, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Your logic of what passes or fails a criterion is faulty. Those two guidelines don't advocate for titles that fail precise. Instead, they bump against CONCISE, with the backing of COMMONNAME (NB NCROY has serious problems there). Going back to newcomer barriers, telling someone that a title has a "precise" issue, when it squarely is a "concise" issue, it not helpful. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:00, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
  • I think the following statement

    Usually, titles should unambiguously define the topical scope of the article. The exception is where the title is the primary topic for the term.

    covers what is critically important to communicate, and should be the entirety of the first paragraph. The "precise" versus "primary topic" balance is critical to communicate.
The notion that "precise" means precisely precise, not under-precise, not over-precise, is not unreasonable. I don't think it is critical, and think it doesn't belong in the lede paragraph. Similarly, the interplay between USPLACE and NCROY guidelines (and I expect many others) and the PRECISE policy is nowhere near as important to communicate upfront than the interplay between primary topic and WP:PRECISE. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:48, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
The fact that the current wording puts a limit on precision is exactly its biggest problem, in my opinion. A definition of "precise" without that limit is certainly an improvement. Concise covers that other end already. Dicklyon (talk) 05:09, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
You make my point. For better or worse, the rewrite changes the meaning of that section, contrary to the claimed intent.
Anyway, I recall the limit was included because without it some people were interpreting this section to favor overly precise titles and it created conflict. —В²C ☎ 07:42, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Created conflict? If that was true, it was at least six years ago. I don’t object to mention and discouragement of over-precise, but it is not the main point. The lede of PRECISE should define precise, consistent with the dictionary meaning, without repeating “precise”, and point straight to the sole black and white exception, which is PrimaryTopic. The only person I’ve seen obsess over the slippery slope fallacy of endlessly more precise is you. Just like concise is good, without going overboard, precise is good, without going overboard. I think my rewrite is still better than yours, and definitely so on the points that you have ignored. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 09:31, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

I'd just say "Article titles should clearly define the topic of the article, and should be as concise as possible while avoiding ambiguity". That all seems pure commonsense to me, but this is a radical view I know! Primary Topic was useful in the days when we were creating many articles that were strongly primary (I copied that term from SmokeyJoe but the argument is mine). But those articles (on topics such as Mathematics and London) are now overwhelmingly in existence. Andrewa (talk) 03:19, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

———
The first !vote in this discussion at Toyonaka → Toyonaka, Osaka exemplifies how PRECISE is commonly used to argue against overly precise titles. Such an argument depends on the wording in PRECISE ("but not more precise than that") that SmokeyJoe's proposal seeks to remove, showing again that this proposal does change the meaning of the current wording at PRECISE, whether that's the intent or not. --В²C ☎ 17:35, 31 October 2018 (UTC)

  • Agree it is a good example. It is a good example of how some editors blindly repeat bad policy statements and take it to convoluted nonsense.
Toyonaka, Osaka does not fail any logical definition of “precise”.
Toyonaka does fail “precise” becuase there are both Toyonaka, Osaka and Toyonaka, Kagawa.
The discussion should be couched in terms of WP:PRECISE vs WP:PT, with WP:UCRN needing more attention.
The discussion is a good example for why WP:PRECISE needs improvement. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:29, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
@SmokeyJoe: You linked WP:PT, but that's an internal DAB. My guess is you mean WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, though the DAB lists two matches for titles-related stuff. (Feel free to just delete this comment as no longer relevant if you change the link.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:25, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
  • See my comment toward the bottom of the main/previous thread. Short version: Just use a thesaurus to pick other words, and avoid saying "precise" over and over again, and the problem just goes away. I have no particular opposition to restructuring this as a little bullet list, but I don't see that it's particularly helpful or necessary. Also not opposed to copyediting in other ways as long as the meaning isn't substantively changed at all, but this is more difficult to do than you think it is, and requires running through a whole bunch of potential wikilawyering scenarios in your head, including from outside any topics you normally edit, and from agenda angles you would never hold personally. Imagine the worst. PS: Utterly opposed to even suggesting that wikiprojects create exceptions to policy. That's patently wrong, per WP:CONLEVEL policy. What happens in reality is that consensus sometimes creates exceptions, and sometimes these evolve into a pattern, then wikiprojects to whose scope the exception in question most often applies write them down in their WP:PROJPAGE essays. In other cases, people from a wikiproject may propose a variance they feel necessary/helpful (either via a discussion or a PROJPAGE), and it may get integrated, with broader consensus, into AT or into a guideline like MOS or an NC page. The cause and effect up there have been completely reversed, suggesting that wikiprojects invent policy out of their asses.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:57, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

Tautological/names that the subject isn't

How much weight do we give titles that the name is commonly called but is tautological, or cases where the subject isn't an instance of (or located in) but that is included in the name.

For example there was Talk:Handa, Scotland#Requested move 16 September 2018 where is was the case that the island is generally called "Handa Island" (that's what the OS calls it)[7][8][9] except where the context has been established (eg the SWT uses "Handa Island first, but does use "Handa" after, presumably for brevity), see User:Crouch, Swale/Island names. The name "Handa" means "Island at the sandy river" but I don't think that "Handa Island" would look wrong to modern English speakers and sources, see WP:USENGLISH and we do have a large number of similar names at List of redundant place names for example Pendle Hill which means "Hillhill Hill".

In the case of the Isle of Lewis and Isle of Portland, those aren't technically islands, but have "Isle of..." as part of their name (see the OS). The town of Appleby-in-Westmorland isn't located in Westmorland anymore, but that is its formal and printed name.

Likewise Cyngor Bro Dyffryn Cennen[10] was moved for being incorrect.

As far as I'm aware they are acceptable, especially if they are integral part of the name or if WP:COMMONAME/WP:NATURAL apply. I have created User:Crouch, Swale/Called v is and where, which could be expanded with some other examples if anyone has anymore. Crouch, Swale (talk) 21:19, 21 November 2018 (UTC)

Scope of Wikipedia:Naming conventions (books)

There is currectly an RFC on the scope of WP:NCBOOKS which may be of interest. See Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (books)#RFC: Does this guideline cover plays and other literary works? --woodensuperman 13:31, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

Clarifying that UCRN is not a style policy

We really need to succinctly clarify that WP:UCRN (WP:COMMONNAME) is not a style policy.

AT and the naming conventions guidelines regularly defer with big links to WP:Manual of Style and subpages thereof on style matters. We have literally thousands of RM decisions that reject the idea that we should use a capital letter (or whatever the "style fight" is about) just because a numeric majority of sources are doing so. We have very clear line-items in the main MoS, in MOS:CAPS, and in MOS:TM to apply a stylization of some kind (capitalization being the most common kind of dispute) only when the reliable sources use it consistently (which is an intentionally and well-accepted higher standard than UCRN's "a significant majority" of sources for choosing between, say, David Johansen and Buster Poindexter). The MoS style standards are applied at RM every single day, and are why we have an article at Sony instead of SONY. We also obviously do not want titles and article text to use divergent rendering of the same name.

Nevertheless, a handful of individuals simply will not accept this and have spent years pressuring at RM to mimic stylization they see in a bare majority of sources – many of them not independent of the subject, and frequently highly concentrated in writing markets that follow English-usage house styles very different from our own (entertainment magazines, governmentese documents, video-gaming websites, herpetology journal articles, or whatever).

This unnecessary continual rehash at RM is a drain on editorial time and productivity. It is caused simply by the UCRN section, when read in isolation, not saying anything about style matters, and could be resolved simply by adding something like this at the end:

Using the most common name in reliable sources does not necessarily equate to adopting stylization of that name. See WP:Manual of Style for when and when not to apply particular stylization such as capital letters, hyphens, diacritics, symbol-for-letter substitutions, collapsed spacing, etc.

We've really needed to deal with this for several years now. By my reckoning, the actual majority of style-relating pissing matches, and disruption caused by them, are due directly to confusion that UCRN is a style policy as well as a name-selection policy. It's what causes people to try to move articles to titles like "Method Acting", "Gangsta Rap", "Do It Like A Dude", "M16 Rifle", etc., etc., etc. Anyone who sees something capitalized in the kind of specialized, insider stuff they read is apt to argue for it on Wikipedia if they think all that's required is that a bunch of topical sources use that style. This disproportionately affects obscure topics (the less something is covered in mainstream newspapers, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and general-audience books, the higher the proportion of "specialist caps" that will be encountered). And while easily 99% of our editors "get it", the tiny fraction who do not cause a disproportionate amount of strife (which never stops, because new editors arrive all the time and this section's missing cross-reference to MoS easily misleads them into embarking on style-it-my-way-or-else campaigns).
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:15, 15 November 2018 (UTC)

At risk of receiving your insults (an accepted and traditional part of questioning your viewpoints) UCRN appropriately says "However, some topics have multiple names, and some names have multiple topics: this can lead to disagreement about which name should be used for a given article's title. Wikipedia does not necessarily use the subject's "official" name as an article title; it generally prefers the name that is most commonly used (as determined by its prevalence in a significant majority of independent, reliable English-language sources) as such names will usually best fit the five criteria listed above." I think the only discussion is the meaning of 'significant majority'. There is an ongoing discussion of World Heritage Site in that 75% of the n-gram sources use the upper-case and 25% lower-case, and you and some other editors imply that the 25% usage is the one we should go with while others think 75% is a 'significant majority'. 3-1 does seem to carry any topic over that bar. Randy Kryn (talk) 14:42, 15 November 2018 (UTC)
@Randy Kryn: sorry, but you aren't responding to SMcCandlish's central argument, which is that style differences don't change names, so that "World Heritage Site" and "world heritage site" are the same names, merely styled differently. If you accept this argument, then the n-grams you refer to show nothing about names, only styles, which Wikipedia is free to vary in accordance with its own MoS. Although I've never totally accepted the argument, discussions on a variety of topics (most famously on the English names of birds) have shown that it has consensus support. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:37, 15 November 2018 (UTC)
The idea that style differences don't change names is, of course, balderdash and rubbish. If it didn't then English wouldn't have a general rule about capitalizing proper nouns. So no general statement of the sort can be made and any decisions must be on a case-by-case basis. Yet another attempt to change the rules to game the system because someone doesn't like the look of something or is uncomfortable with actually having to use judgement instead of mindlessly following some rubric all formula. oknazevad (talk) 21:48, 15 November 2018 (UTC)
That just doesn't track. We have a rule to capitalize proper nouns because it's how English is written. That's like saying "If I don't get my way, we should just not cite sources". What was that about "balderdash and rubbish"? Decision are made on a case by case basis. That's the entire point. But a tiny handful of editors don't like that. They want everything to be determined by a flat majority approach, which is just an obviously unworkable one-size-fits-all. No "change the rules" proposal of any kind from me is on the table, simply a cross-reference to the rules (or whatever you want to call WP:P&G material) that we actually do apply, consistently, at RM. [However, someone did proposal a policy change, covered below. It is also unworkable.]  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:02, 16 November 2018 (UTC); updated: 10:53, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
Randy, two RMs in a row (i.e. two consensus discussions in a row) "failed" to give you the answer you want, and the MR is clearly headed that direction, too. You're just making a "consensus is simply wrong, no matter what" argument when it doesn't match your preferences. Trying to spin this as "[SMcCandlish] and some other editors" doing something awful is just silly. It's everyone but you and a handful of holdouts agreeing that the case for capital "S" on that one just isn't really there. (And I was not even involved in the RMs at all – I was on wikibreak the entire time. In fact, I have never posted to Talk:World Heritage site in my life. I see you show up in 12 posts in those RMs though. It's not like you didn't get your say.) PS: Your opposition are not making a percentile argument of any kind, since the standard is consistent treatment in the independent RS.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:19, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose. The proposal simply doesn't reflect the consensus of the community, as demonstrated at countless RMs through the years, which use reliable sources to determine the correct way to spell and style the titles. Which, if you think about it, is the way Wikipedia always operates - see WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS etc. The idea that "we need to deal with this" is the OP's personal opinion. A better idea would be to do what we've always done and treat each case on its merits, as Oknazevad suggests. That leads to better outcomes which reflect the real world and not our navel-gazing view of the world.  — Amakuru (talk) 22:26, 15 November 2018 (UTC)
    • Except that's completely backward from reality. We use the MoS rules every single day at RM. The only time we don't seem to (to some people's eyes) is when we actually still are: when it gets shown that RS consistency on something that doesn't match MoS's default is so near-universal that we'd be nuts not to go along with it. Only about half a dozen active editors refuse to acknowledge this, and their proposals at RM get rejected over and over and over again. But they just don't stop. Being tendentious until topic-banned or whatever isn't evidence of any lack of consensus, just of refusal to get the point. Anyway, we already do treat each case on its merits; that's what MoS says to do. Adding a cross-ref to from AT to what we actually do use at RM for style question cannot possibly change that.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:02, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
      My comment here is not at all backward from reality. Rather, it is this proposal that is backward from reality because it attempts to impose a rule on the community that just doesn't correspond to the way actual RMs are conducted day in and day out. I'm on the same page as you, SMcCandlish and Dicklyon, I don't like over-capitalisation either and I've argued against it in several notable RMs such as Syrian Civil War and Civil Rights Movement. But ultimately, when even the most basic and straightforward MOS-based RMs fail to gain consensus, there comes a point where you just have to accept that the community's view isn't the same as ours. And imposing this new restriction on UCRN isn't actually going to change anything on the ground. Thanks  — Amakuru (talk) 12:37, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
      Sorry, but you're just making up weird stuff out of thin air. A cross-reference to a page that we use every day at RM and an observation of the undeniable fact that COMMONNAME is not taken at RM to force adoption of stylization, does not "impose a rule on the community", it observes actual practice. Denying that it is our actual practice is just a fantasy. When the sun rises in the east and you keep claiming it rises in the west just to be contrarian, you are not making an actual argument.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:41, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
      If you actually listened to what I'm saying instead of just accusing it of being weird and made-up, you might actually understand what I'm talking about. The actual practice doesn't match what you say it does, however much you keep saying it does. I just linked to one example there, but there are countless others. The task for us is to summarise the community's views in a form that works for everyone, not just keep beating a dead horse as you are doing. Sorry to be blunt, but we need to get out of our ivory towers sometimes.  — Amakuru (talk) 12:52, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
      Please. You can always find some RM somewhere that ignores policies and guidelines. Just because someone robs a store doesn't mean that we shouldn't have laws against theft or that no one accepts them. Bad RMs get overturned later. The one you highlight above is farcical and will be undone for policy reasons (WP:CONSISTENCY) since it flies in the face of years of RMs about "like" as a preposition, including quite recent ones. What happened there is that commenters at that RM recycled the same invalid arguments (WP:ILIKEIT, "because Youtube", WP:IDONTKNOWIT) they've used to no avail at previous RMs. This constitutes WP:IDHT, WP:FORUMSHOP, and WP:GAMING. They got blindly lucky that no one else happened along and that the non-admin closer obviously erred (in suggesting that a guideline doesn't have consensus on the "basis" of nothing but four people regurgitating invalid arguments that have been consistently rejected at RM). The closer's pagemover bit should be revoked if something like that happens again. On "like" as a preposition, I've been saying for years that if people actually want the MOS:5LETTER rule to change, they can propose that it change. What we don't do is apply it to this article then not that one then to one then not that one. One RM shart like that one is meaningless; an accidental embarrassment, not permanent incontinence.

      To the extent you're trying to make a broader claim, I've already addressed it [11] in response to Blueboar's comparable assertions (he's mistaking RMs that are consistent with MoS rules about when to make an exception to MoS/NC defaults as having been made on UCRN grounds just because someone cited UCRN as their rationale. Our closers are usually much smarter than this, as are most RM respondents. They know that a rationale not actually found in policy is not valid, but that a rationale cited as being at one page but actually found in another is valid. The fact that some editors wrongly cite UCRN as if it's a style policy doesn't mean it is one, and the pages will still move if it's consistent with WP:NCCAPS, MOS:CAP, MOS:TM, etc., and their "make an exception when ..." clauses.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:42, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

  • Support “clarification”, which is not to say that I support making any hard rule. On Wikipedia, “follow the sources” is a rule enshrined in core content policies, WP:V, WP:NPOV, WP:NPOV, but that applies to information. Is styling information? It can be. Allcaps titling is a common style that doesn’t convey information. Star Trek Into Darkness was a contentious case where style, i vs I, conveyed information. Even if there is no consensus, policy can document the lack of consensus. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:22, 15 November 2018 (UTC)
    • Right. No "hard rule" is proposed, just a cross-reference, to the guidelines we actually employ. The purpose of our policies and guidelines is to codify actual practice, not try to change or deny it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:02, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
    • The comments made after mine (23:22, 15 November 2018) I read as broadly agreeable, but not actionable, or moving the discussion forward. In the original post,  User:SMcCandlish proposes modifying the UCRN (Use Commonly Recognizable Names) section by adding something ...
I propose amending his suggestion to:
Using the most common name in reliable sources does not necessarily equate to adopting stylization of that name, if that stylization does not contribute meaning to words that may be read ambiguously, or is not present in the vast majority of quality sources. See WP:Manual of Style for when and when not to apply particular stylization such as capital letters, hyphens, diacritics, symbol-for-letter substitutions, collapsed spacing, etc.
"if that stylization does not contribute meaning to words that may be read ambiguously" "Star Trek Into Darkness" comes to mind, and there are other occasional examples. Note that many composition titles, like STID, may be deliberately ambiguous, and the styling integral to the ambiguity. My word choice "contribute meaning to words" is deliberately vague, as it must be up to editors to consider whether there is a styling-meaning interplay.
"in the vast majority of quality sources". My feeling from the extensive WP:MR discussion and preceding RMs on World Heritage s/Sites is that "follow the sources" implies a vast majority, at least 75%, with some unhappy with 75%. I think all would be happy with 95%. For a subtle styling-meaning interplay, intelligent commentators may miss or ignore the syntactic ambiguity. I use "quality" as an adjective for sources, to avoid "reliable", because "reliable" is not sufficient. Primary and non independent sources tend to be the most "reliable", and they shouldn't dominate anyone's source counting, and neither should they be ignored. Reputable secondary sources are the best quality sources, with some tolerance for non-independence, and some interpretation as to whether the secondary source author cared about the a possible subtle syntactic ambiguity.
I am not sure about "such as capital letters, hyphens, diacritics, symbol-for-letter substitutions, collapsed spacing", not sure whether it is necessary or desirable to raise these specific examples from guideline to policy. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:04, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
That would actually be a major policy change of a kind the community has never come close to accepting (making a style quibble into a policy instead of a guideline); I've addressed this in a separate post below. Here, I'll focus on something else: This talk of percentages is a red herring. It varies on a case-by-case basis, and requires examination of sources across fields, media, and genres. As just one (very common) example, most recent pop-culture topics have nearly zero coverage outside of entertainment journalism, which almost universally uses the four-letter rule for whether to capitalize a preposition in the middle of a title of a work, while WP, most book publishers, and journals do not. So, news cannot be used to "prove" that a title "must" have a capitalized With in it. (In the Star Trek Into Darkness case, we didn't come to keeping Into on that basis, but because the title is a play on words, with Into being used simultaneously as a mid-sentence preposition and the start-word of a subtitle, the latter of which is always capitalized. It's a weird outlier.) Five minutes of looking at non-journalism RS about older works demonstrates that the titles of the exact same works are given with a With in most journalism but a with in most other sources (which are often actually more reliable about both the topic and about how to write formal English than news material is). The idea that a song released this month must always be written With is a silly illusion we must not fall for. As another example, any highly specialized or obscure topic may mostly or even only be found in specialist material following unusual insider-to-insider writing conventions that don't match normal English. You can't use surfing or ballroom dance magazines to "prove" that WP "must" capitalize the names of surf moves like roundhouse cutback or dance steps like back corté (except where they contain a proper name: reverse Fleckeryll).

We'd be cutting of off our own noses if we tried to inject a percentile into our rules (policy or guideline) and this is why we have studiously avoided doing so for 17+ years. Furthermore, the MoS guidelines on when to accept a stylization are for near-uniformity in RS, far beyond 75%. It's intentional (you know – you were there), and even your "vast majority of quality sources" would not be reasonably interpreted as anything in the range of 75%; that's not always even good enough for picking the base name (stylization aside), and we need style matters to be more stringent (thus WP:CONSISTENCY policy). When the whole English-speaking world, across all writing, tells us that our default style doesn't apply to a particular case, then it doesn't apply. This is also an anti-WP:GAMING mechanism. If given a specific target number to hit, it would be trivially easy for someone with time on their hands and access to paywalled source databases to build a bogus and cherry-picked "proof" that their pet style was dominant. It's important to remember that AT was made a policy because moving articles around on a whim was considered disruptive and was a continual problem. We mustn't inject a change that inspires any form of renewed whim-moving.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:53, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

  • UCRN is only part of the issue - The real issue is with Recognizability. Some words are significantly more recognizable with a specific styling (such as capitalization)... to the point that not presenting that way is jarring to our readers. Blueboar (talk) 00:03, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
    • Which is why MoS says to use a "non-MoS" style when the real world consistently does it. Thus iPod not "Ipod". There will always be edge cases, where someone is sure something is less recognizable and someone else will disagree. Adding the cross-reference I proposed will have no effect on that other than a positive one. We actually use MoS to settle these matters and always have – nothing is changing about that – whether this page bothers to say so or not. By not saying so, it perpetuates an enormous amount of dispute and churn (almost all of it with a foregone conclusion). If it did say so, that time-sucking waste of energy that would slow to a trickle, and make fewer editors run away screaming from RM. If we had better and calmer participation at RM, edge cases would get settled quicker, more consistently, and with more consensus on any case-by-case basis.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:02, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
It’s only a time-suck if you insist that things have to be styled a particular way. Blueboar (talk) 01:57, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
Well, of course, but that's never going to stop. We having incoming new editors insisting all the time that WP article titles are "wrong" because they don't match their preferred, insider way of writing/typing (and longer-term editors who campaign for typographic change to suit their senses of traditionalism or nationalism – a different kind of problem and a much less innocent one, since none of them have the noobs' unawareness of our policies and guidelines).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:54, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Support as a common, practical measure in publishing. SMcCandlish and Peter Coxhead make sensible points. I think Blueboar's argument would crumple in a reliable psychological test of the reading process. Tony (talk) 03:58, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Support clarification. There seem to be still a few who think that titles are somehow in a space where the MOS does not apply. I'm frankly surprised at Amakuru's comments, as he's often on the right side in RM discussions about such things, but his inference about "countless RMs through the years" seems rather off. Of course we look to how things are styled in sources when we consider how to style titles for WP, but we don't just pick what's most common. Rather, we pick what's most compatible with our MOS usually, from among styles in use in sources. This is spelled out best probably at MOS:TM and MOS:CAPS. We don't make up proper names, we don't cap unncessarily as judged by whether sources find it necessary, we don't make up styles not in use, but we don't just go with the random styling conventions of our favorite or most common sources, either. The MOS guides us in title styling as in every part of WP text styling. Dicklyon (talk) 04:29, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
Except we quite frequently DO stylize article titles based on how they are styled in sources... applying UCRN. About a third of capitalization RMs are closed that way, and there are other examples. This is a debate that has been argued for years (at least since the great “Deadmou5” debate) and we still don’t have a broad community consensus. I doubt we ever will. Blueboar (talk) 06:54, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
Deadmau5 is exactly the kind of exception that MoS already expects and blesses because nearly zero RS use "Deadmaus". Just for you, I went and "codified" that example into MOS:TM [12], since that segment (unlike the one on camelcase) lacked such examples, and this seems to have much to do with the grandstanding going on here. Anyway, you're erecting some kind of false-dichotomy fantasy, based on a misunderstanding. Yes, some individuals who do not (or pretend not to) understand our P&G will sometimes go to RM and say "per UCRN" on a style matter. Those of us who do understand the P&G – hopefully including all of the regular RM closers – just re-interpret this on the fly as the actually applicable comparable argument, e.g. "per MOS:TM" or "per WP:NCCAPS" or whatever page the real rule can actually be found in (and we sometimes even post the correction directly). The articles that move in such cases do so because MoS's own follow-the-sources points agree with the move, not because of the literal (mistaken) wording of someone's !vote. To suppose otherwise is to imagine that our P&G are all just meaningless and that closers do no analysis at all but count votes.

The same "correct policy translation" process happens when people argue in an RfC to remove something trivial from an article because that something "isn't notable" (WP:N only applies to whether it can have it's own article); what they really meant to cite was WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE and we all understand that. Similarly, if someone at AfD argues "Keep, because it's important and popular, world-famous, and won major national awards in the US and France" we also know this translates into GNG policy-speak: non-trivial coverage in multiple, independent RS (the assertions are meaningless noise if they don't appear in the RS.) If your view were actually correct, then any time an RM involved a stylization that had more than a very slight majority showing in RS, WP would use it – yet this is the opposite of how RM goes. We don't diverge from what the MoS and NC guidelines recommend unless the sourcing for it shows that the MoS/NC style default turns out to be downright aberrant for this particular case's treatment in the real world (i.e., would pose an actual WP:RECOGNIZABLE problem). You seem to be wishing for an "escape valve" that we already have but which you deny exists because it's in a page you like less than this one.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:19, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

  • Support clarification; seems reasonable, it saves us from having to explain the difference between standard English grammar and a logo over and over again. We should default to standard English grammar lacking any particularly specific reason not to, and "They do it this way in this logo" is not a particularly good reason. --Jayron32 12:41, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
    Actually this has nothing to do with logos. Those are governed by MOS:TM and that matter is uncontroversial and almost universally observed. Nobody would ever support a move to SONY or Macy*s or any of that stuff. What this proposal is seeking to do is to WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS by using a local view of style even when actual real reliable sources do something else in 75% of the examples found. If it gets to the point where our article looks different from every other result in a Google search, then something has gone wrong.  — Amakuru (talk) 13:02, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
    There's no such bright line in actual RM debates i.e., in how the relevant P&G are applied. They do not draw a distinction between logo stylization and other forms of name stylization in many, many cases (see dumb example at end). This is why so many of the pop-music-related ones have been total shitshows. E.g. the very tooth-gnashy attempts to have "Do It like a Dude" be at "Do It Like A Dude" were specifically motivated by an urge to mimic the typography on the CD cover (the logo) as "official". People were quite explicit about it. This mimicry idea comes up over and over and over again, always in the same terms, from a mixture of noob editors who don't know we have a style guide, and inveterate "down with MoS" rabble rousers. And they get nowhere with it. (Not on pop songs, not on military jargon, not on species vernacular names, not on anything.) At some point it just has to be wound down as a waste of all of our time. I'm saying we arrived at that point a long time ago and need to act on it with a simple cross-reference for clarity in our internal documentation. PS: If you don't think anyone would fight for SONY type, you'd be very wrong. One of the most common types of RMs I do is decapitalizing ALLCAPS logo/trademark stuff that isn't actually an acronym, and almost every single time at least one person votes to keep it capitalized because it's "official". This crosses all topic lines; see for example the ongoing RM at Talk:AMBER Alert#Requested move 10 November 2018 for more "WP must capitalize because its official" nonsense. It's not an outlying case, it nearly every day that people do this, and they do it because we lack at AT->MoS cross ref in the one place we need one most, despite having other such cross-references elsewhere between the two pages.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:35, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Support – The separation of naming and styling is sensible, logical, and the common practice. Different authors, and indeed, different publications, will use different stylings of the same name. Wikipedia has its own style guide, which is based on the usage of the major English style guides with the Wikipedia-specific context taken into consideration. This is, again, no different from any other publication. There is no inherent conflict between AT and the MoS. The AT policy as written already defers to the MoS on points of style...this is just a clarification of that reality. I find Jayron's argument very convincing, and I would remind Amakuru that AT does not always urge us to use the most common name. Because of Wikipedia-specific considerations, we sometimes use less common names for WP:NATURAL disambiguation, and indeed, because of WP:TITLEVAR, we sometimes use names that, in real terms, are much less common, so as to facilitate the coexisting of different varieties of English on Wikipedia. Whilst that doesn't specifically have anything to do with the style versus naming debate, it does make clear that there is no 'COMMONNAME' absolute rule that forces us to use what Wikipedia refers to as the 'most common name' in all circumstances, and that for Wikipedia-specific reasons, we have the leeway to deviate when it is in the interest of the project to do so. RGloucester — ☎ 14:17, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Support - It's a completely reasonable clarification that would help to avoid endless and pointless debate - styling isn't naming. If I recall correctly, I was actually on the "wrong" side of a few discussions about naming capitalization in the past on song/album titles, and this kind of clarification would have probably avoided that. --tronvillain (talk) 23:33, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose, per the language of the proposal that upper or lower-casing is a style feature and not a part of a title. Of course upper or lower casing is a title decision, and to change the long time language on this policy page to point to a guideline page distorts the concept of what a title is. And if this is going be a formal discussion and decision please start anew with a succinctly worded RfC and not a proposal which isn't spelled out until five paragraphs in. Upper-case or lower-case is not styling, it is a key part of the title, a key component of the title, and this policy page clarifies that. If something is upper-cased in a substantial percentage of sources, and certainly 75% is substantial, the change suggested here that something has to be "consistently" upper-case or it's automatically lower-cased (remember, consistency means 100%, no deviation), so if a handful of sources get it wrong those handful then take precedence over every other source. The proposed language (and notice the "etc." tossed in at the end) solidifies that, and will result in thousands of incorrectly named articles (there is an ongoing attempt now to remove upper-casing from the names of lighthouses, for example). I will stop now so as not to enter the wall-of-text zone which seems to typify these type of discussions. Randy Kryn (talk) 02:20, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
    Randy, are you suggesting that styling in a title might differ from styling of the same name or phrase in article text (other than possible difference of initial cap when it doesn't start a sentence)? I don't think we've ever done anything like that. These are clearly style issues that are independent of whether it's in a title or not. Dicklyon (talk) 03:15, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
    Aye; we have guidelines saying not to make the title and text style differ.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:52, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
    No, not at all. But the wording in this policy supports some common name upper-casing, like World Heritage Site, where at an RM I mistakenly took your word that lower-cased was the common name. That's the type of long-term title which is arguably correct taking the language of this policy into account. Changing that language is a major policy change, and the way it has been defined in the proposed language lumps it in with the other logical and uncontested changes. Separating the upper-and-lower case discussion into a new RfC seems the fair thing to do. Randy Kryn (talk) 16:54, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
    Please don't re-re-re-re-litigate that here. The RM did not go your way. The re-RM did not go your way. The MR is not going your way. Stick needs to be placed on the ground. If three community discussions are not agreeing with you, then your position is not a matter of "common sense", it's a matter of your subjective preference. And it has nothing to do with UCRN at all.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:01, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose. To keep it brief, this feels like an attempt to circumvent prior RMs where consensus went against the will of the proposer here and others who support blind adherence to the MOS. If most reliable sources write a title one way, we should use that stylization, regardless of what the MOS says. Let’s not forget that a policy page trumps the MOS anyway. Calidum 17:13, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
    Yes, agreed. WP:AT has been worked out over countless years, and it both drives and reflects the way the community !votes at RM discussions, quite separately from the evolution of the MOS. WP:COMMONNAME is a vital part of that policy, and probably the one that most RM participants consider ahead of all others. And rightly so, since our policies of WP:NOR and WP:NPOV require us to reflect the way the world is, not attempt to chart some new course or call things by different names than those of the reliable sources. The MOS, as well as more specialist naming conventions etc, are very useful as a backstop in naming discussions, if sources don't give a clear answer as to how the entity is commonly called. And by that I would include cases where there's a "bare majority" for a particular style. With a 55-45 source split, we should go with the 45 if it matches MOS. But not so for a "substantial majority" 75-25 split, as is the case for the World Heritage Site example which seems to have prompted this discussion.  — Amakuru (talk) 17:42, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Support—the debates that arise from the ridiculous idea of relying on "reliable sources" for styling information are unbelievably unproductive timesinks—and I'm surprised nobody has brought up this xkcd strip yet.
    I'd like to see this guideline expanded to cover transliteration as styling as well, so we can put an end to moves over whether there should be a macron in a Japanese person's name, or whether it should be Jinmu or Jimmu. Outside sources conform to their own style guides, rarely the preferences of their writers or subjects, so appealing to "reliable sources" for styling is meaningless. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 03:01, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
    The difference is that the style guides used in those outside sources were written by professional editors, while our guidance was written by amateurs (us). So, when our guidance conflicts with outside guidance, it is our style guidance that should bend to the sources, not the other way around. Blueboar (talk) 11:59, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
    You don't know who at WP does what for a living (absent what they've disclosed). But the premise is faulty for multiple other reasons. WP:P&G material has nothing to do with reliability but with consensus; P&G material isn't an audience, it's a rule set. Third-parties off of Wikipedia do not get to magically dictate what WP decides internally to put into its P&G pages, no matter what kinds of expert they [think they] are. More to the point, a Wikipedian with an axe to grind doesn't get to force WP P&G to change to match the preferences of some external "authority" they like better. (They have tried, and RfCs and other actions have put a stop to it.) E.g., someone who is really enamored of the publications of the American Arbitration Association and American Mediation Association (etc.) cannot lobby incessantly to change how ANI, ArbCom, DR, etc. operate here, because it's editorial consensus that determines what works best on Wikipedia. As you well know, off-site style guides are written for specific media and registers (and often countries), e.g. Scientific Style and Format is for science journals, and Associated Press Stylebook is for American news journalism. Their editors are not in fact experts of any kind in how to best write in an encyclopedic register for a general audience in a global online encyclopedia. There is no better authority for how WP should write WP than WP. Finally, our style guide is already a synthesis of these style guides anyway, especially as to points that the major ones agree on. "Not the other way around" doesn't even make any sense; WP has not asked any other publisher to use our style guide and never would. It does not exist for such a purpose.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:10, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
    Blueboar: You're talking as if "outside sources" followed a single style guide. They each follow their own professional style guides that conflict with each other. Imagine if the monolingual Tarō Itō and his brother Jirō become the subject of five articles each. Tarō appears in three publications whose internal, professional style guides require his name transliterated as Taroh Itoh and two others Tarô Itô. Then Jirō appears in two that require Jiroh Itoh and three with Jirô Itô. Do we place the one article at Taroh Itoh and the other at Jirô Itô? Then what do we do when Tarō appears in another with his name transliterated Tarô Itô? And then another Tarō Itō and another Taro Ito? Do we monitor the "situation" and keep moving the article whenever one form acheives 51% (or plurality)? What an exhausting, pointless exercise that benefits no-one—but this is pretty much exactly what ends up happening. We have a manual of style that saves us from this nonsense, and it provides sensible overrides for situations in which one form is overwhelmingly and stably dominant (which gives us Yoko Ono instead of the MoS-compliant Yōko Ono). Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 21:51, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose Defering to MOS is not helpful when Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters#Proper names is non-definitive: In English, proper names, which can be either single words or phrases, are typically capitalized. Such names are frequently a source of conflict, especially when different cultures, using different names, "claim" someone or something as their own. Wikipedia does not adjudicate such disputes, but as a general rule uses the name which is likely to be most familiar to readers of English. When people cite "COMMONNAME", they are likely saying it is commonly found and would thus be "most familiar to readers". Any changes to not allow "common" requires more objective guidance in MOS.—Bagumba (talk) 11:19, 24 November 2018 (UTC)
    That's an interesting quote. I don't read it the way that Bagumba does, i.e. as meaning that the capitalization of "names" is also subject to conflict, only that the "names" themselves are. However, the conjunction of the first sentence (which I think is a weak effort to pin down what a "proper name" is) and the rest of the text is, I think, unclear. It does go the heart of the issue, which is to what extent changes of stylization change "names". Peter coxhead (talk) 14:59, 24 November 2018 (UTC)
    Of course a name includes how it's cased. A little-known but should be a considerably more-known fact: Wikipedia changing the name 'Civil Rights Movement' to 'civil rights movement' soon resulted in the long-standing Wikipedia topic being redefined, then removed, and now only exists in a popular culture page and a template. A descripable and historically important sourced and definable event, equal in historical impact as a World War, is now mostly gone as a Wikipedia topic - casing titles does have consequences, directly shown by this example. Randy Kryn (talk) 15:12, 24 November 2018 (UTC)
    @Randy Kryn: I agree that in some cases the style applied to a noun phrase, including casing, does affect the semantics of the phrase, and so does change the name. However, that wasn't my point, which was that I don't think that the quoted text above was intended to have the meaning that Bagumba gave it. (As it happens, I entirely agree that the Civil Rights Movement, which happened in the US over a particular time frame, is different from a civil rights movement, of which there have been several, in different countries at different times.) Peter coxhead (talk) 17:53, 24 November 2018 (UTC)
    @Peter coxhead: I was not intending to give a meaning to the quote, per se. The main takeaway should be that MOS currently gives little guidance to objectively determine what Wikipedia considers a proper noun. I cannot support a proposal to explicitly defer to MOS if MOS currently offers little help for this particular case.—Bagumba (talk) 05:33, 25 November 2018 (UTC)
    @Bagumba: it would not be appropriate or indeed possible for the MoS to define "proper name" (here meaning a proper noun or proper noun phrase). The entire Proper noun article doesn't cover it fully. There are objective tests for strong proper names (see Proper noun#Strong and weak proper names), but not for weak proper names, where capitalization is determined by semantics and convention. To quote our article again "there are enough gray areas that it can often be unclear both whether an item qualifies as a proper name and whether it should be capitalized". I don't see this as a fatal objection to the proposal, the first (and key) point of which is to clarify that names, considered as strings of words, and the stylizations applied to them are two connected but different issues. Peter coxhead (talk) 12:26, 25 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Support but I wish SMcCandlish tone down on the rhetorics such as the tiny fraction, a handful of individuals simply [who] will not accept this and have spent years pressuring at RM to mimic stylization because those people simply aren't there. When there's a serious contest, it's normally in gray areas where I just see good-faith disagreement on what constitutes a "vast majority of quality sources". I don't even think that people like Amakuru are really against the essence of the proposal, but are rightly annoyed by approach and rhetorics of the "MOS crowd". No such user (talk) 11:30, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
    second that. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 19:31, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Support – Different publishers/works have different styles, which leads to things like different capitalizations for the same name. It is the way of the (English at least) world. Some people capitalize tons of stuff, others don't. etc. It's fine. Styles change. Publishers usually try to be consistent – they aren't always 100%, but when they're consistent about that sort of thing it is a tiny thing that gives a certain air of legitimacy/polish. We should do that. Wikipedia has largely settled on a certain low-frequency flavor of capitalization (avoid unless necessary, which I take to mean unless common usage in that scenario would find it weird, like "hey mr. mccandlish!" – that would be weird, so we capitalize. Note, I am still using the name "McCandlish", I just didn't capitalize it. erik or Erik – it's the same name! If I insist everyone writes my name as "erik", I haven't changed my name, I'm just asking people to style it differently. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 19:31, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

Addressing an actual attempt to change policy

The idea by Blueboar SmokeyJoe, above, to shoe-horn in something like the confusing and gameable "if that stylization does not contribute meaning to words that may be read ambiguously, or is not present in the vast majority of quality sources" would be an actual major policy change. Every single attempt to date to put style-related nitpicks into policy (not guidelines) has been met with strong community rejection. This might be a reasonable addition to MoS's language (or might not – see below), and it's already consistent with what MoS says, so it would actually be redundant. When a proposal is made to update this page with a cross-reference to match actual practice, the answer isn't to propose subverting this page's purpose to turn it into a style policy. (cf. WP:WINNING). The originally proposed wording is entirely sufficient: "does not necessarily equate to adopting stylization" already means that sometimes stylization is adopted, and the whole point of the cross-reference is to get people to the actual rules by which this is done (which match the clear part of what Blueboar proposed to inject into AT: "in the vast majority of quality sources"). The intent might have been to do a micro-WP:SUMMARY of MoS's general take on it in AT itself, but we don't do that with non-policy material in policies; people would interpret it is as incorporated by reference into policy and thus become policy itself.

The unclear portion, "does not contribute meaning to words that may be read ambiguously" is vague and ambiguous, does not reflect any actual rule WP has, and appears to have been written with the sole purpose of enshrining one particular movie title, an outlying edge case, as if it's generally meaningful and applicable. It isn't, and it has its own consensus record in article talk. Our P&G pages only contain cases which can be broadly extrapolated to other cases, or they would be about 1000% longer and no one would read or understand them. If there's some actual broad class of article titles to which something like this could pertain, that wording isn't how to get at them. Doing so would require a sharp eye to unintended readings and consequences, which is really going to take some "how could this be gamed?" thinking. Nor would it be limited "to words that may be read ambiguously", since the other most fought-over case of this sort was the album "Heroes" (and song "'Heroes'") by David Bowie, a case involving punctuation, not a word (and also snug in its cocoon of extensive consensus record of prior discussion). If adding even a very carefully crafted rule about this were proposed at WT:MOS it would almost certainly be rejected as unnecessary. The policy that "sometimes exceptions may apply" to guidelines already has all of that covered.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:52, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

Inserting a note to go on record as saying that I never proposed what SMcC says I did... perhaps he is confused as to who has said what (Understandable). Blueboar (talk) 23:55, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
Fixed! Sorry about the misattribution.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:06, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
It is, if I remember correctly, a good case of overwhelming use of styling by sources.
Your original proposal is "entirely sufficient". Does that mean that nothing more or nothing less will do, and all who disagree are wrong? I do not normally find you so bombastic. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:03, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
Hah! I just meant that the version proposed (its wording and the cross-reference it provides) already encompasses all of this – even if it were copyedited a bit in some way. On the example: As I recall from the Bowie discussion, it was sourced that the quotation marks were irony/sarcasm and that Bowie definitely intended them to be treated as part of the title. They're serving a semantic purpose (recognized by the average person, not just some field-specific specialist) and aren't simply styling (album/single cover logo stylization, or a record label that doesn't know how use English well).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:53, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
That’s what I’m trying to say. “styling” that serves a semantic process is not simply styling, and is an example of where source styling can/should be followed. I would agree that if the styling does serve a semantic purpose, Wikipedia does not follow source styling. Pretty much, this is what always happens.
There’s still the 75% - 95% quality source use point. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 14:27, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
There will always be edge cases that require careful analysis, and places where the main style guide doesn't work. The "Heroes" example is a perfect one, because we have a wealth of reliable sources that don't just use that name, but also explain, in detail, Bowie's rationale and the importance of the quote marks in that title. That's what makes it different than, say, someone who argues that because a title appears a certain one on the CD cover, we must style it the same way. In the case of the "Heroes" one, we have reliable sources that discuss the semantic importance of the quote marks and we aren't relying on personal interpretation of the importance thereof. --Jayron32 12:10, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
So, would you say, a styling question can be a titling question only if there are sources that provide evidence of semantic importance? Or: Do not follow the sources for styling, unless there are sources that speak explicitly to the semantic importantance of the styling? I don’t much like it, because it doesn’t cover Star Trek Into Darkness well, editor interpretation was important, alongside overwhelming source styling. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 12:51, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
No, what I am saying is that we should default to assuming that non-standard grammar in logos and trademarks and titles of works and the like should be presumed to be mere style choices, and we should default to our own style guide except where there is clear, unambiguous evidence that we shouldn't. The simple existence of a style difference is not enough. We should follow our own style guide, except in cases where we shouldn't, and those should be argued on an individual basis with sources and evidence and reasoning. --Jayron32 12:55, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
Agreed, except drop the word “unambiguous”. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 13:01, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
Why on earth would we rely on ambiguous, alleged evidence? WP doesn't work that way.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:37, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
Concur with Jayron, except on one point (which may just be semantics from his perspective, but which is meaningful in the total context). All this confused oppose venting above is predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding: The Bowie case and similar things are not examples of "places where the style guide doesn't work". The style guide specifically says to make variances like these to the default style rules if we don't find RS using what the default rules say to use. It's important not to confuse a default rule in the style guide with the entire style guide. Beyond that, yes, everything Jayron say is exactly what we do already.

A great example, contra "Heroes", is Gangsta (manga). The cover stylization is GANGSTA., but RS do not consistently use this silliness (neither caps nor dot) when referring to the title of this work. In that case, it's a part of a Japanese fad to inject Latin-script punctuation marks willy-nilly when rendering Latin-script names for things in Japanese, apparently because it looks nifty to Japanese people. There were a bunch of article titles with junk in them like this, including several Japanese band and album names, and we moved all of them to comply with MoS's avoid-extraneous-stylization defaults, because the RS weren't consistent in treating that stuff as part of the proper names. Same goes for Western stuff; it's Client (band), not "CLIEИT".

Similarly, a counter-point to the Deadmau5 case is Kesha; an attempt to move it to "Ke$ha" to match her marketing failed, since (even when she was using that stylization, which doesn't seem to be the case any more) the real world did not take the character substitution as necessary. A more recent case was Kshmr, moved from "KSHMR" because it is not an acronym but just a stylization of "Kashmir", in the same way Flickr is a stylization of "flicker" (and we do not mimic their all-lowercase "flickr" logo in running prose, either – a very salient fact about a quite notable article subject with a well-known logo: WP:RECOGNIZABILITY arguments for mimicry of "official" styling simply fail.). In the Kshmr case, the majority of (very thin) sourcing – almost entirely entertainment magazines and sites – did mimic his SCREAMING-CAPS logo, but we found newspapers using "Kshmr" – as would any book publisher or journal, but no serious material has been written about this person to date, just news fluff. Which brings me full circle to the common point that if all the coverage is news, it's style is not "proof" that something found only in news and marketing style (e.g. "With" or "At" in the middle of a title) must be imposed on WP, which does not follow news and marketing style guides. It doesn't prove anything other than that news and marketing styles exist and are the same on some points (which was never in doubt; see Associated Press Stylebook and the American Marketing Association's AMA Handbook of Business Writing).
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:37, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

note... the key to using sources to determine styling issues is to look at independent sources... a logo is not an independent source. Blueboar (talk) 13:07, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

I don't think anyone has suggested otherwise in this discussion. However, various editors don't seem to understand this, and perpetually argue for using the logo or other "official" thing because it is official in their eyes. See, e.g., ongoing RM at Talk:AMBER Alert#Requested move 10 November 2018 and innumerable similar cases. The cross-reference proposed here would help, providing not just UCRN but also MOS material on this (especially given that WP:OFFICIALNAME is rather disused, being just a {{Supplement}} essay).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:37, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
  • As I asked earlier, this should go to an RfC, and an RfC with a less biased title ("clarifying that UCRN is not a style policy". that's arguably quite biased, as the final result is already assumed within the title). The language of WP:COMMON has been there for a long time (does it predate or postdate the guideline "consistently" wording - meaning close to 100% if not 100% source compliance), and is reasonable and self-defines its criteria as meeting the policy in which it's contained. To hold this good faith attempt to change the crucial language to deny a title capitalized maybe 75% of the time to be the Wikipedia upper-cased common name of the topic, without a fair and unbiased RfC, does a disservice to editors who good-faithfully respect this policy and its long-time guiding language and who may be unaware of this biasedly titled hidden-in-a-wall-of-text question and discussion. Randy Kryn (talk) 16:43, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
    This effectively is an RfC. Just put an RfC tag on it if you want to. WP:VPPOL and other relevant pages were already notified of it. You do know that RfCs and RfC tags are not required by policy, right? See WP:RFC; it's a request for comments not the Official Wikipedia Voting System. We're already getting comments. PS: Proposals usually aren't RfCs, because proposals specifically advocate making a change, and an RfC must be neutral.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:55, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
    It certainly is not. RfC's are neutral in opening language, the proposal is clear, and the question is spelled out in specifics and is short. This mishmash of a biased opening, a biased conclusion in both the question and first-mention, walls of text aplenty (somewhere you criticized my commenting 12 times in a discussion, do we have an accurate count yet of the times you've commented on this one?). And no, putting an RfC tag on this biased discussion is not the way to go, a new discussion and RfC is called for and I request this approach be followed, that this discussion be ended, and a clear question be formatted. Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 23:16, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
    Repeat: RfCs are not some kind of officially required "voting system", they're a means to get a discussion happening, and a discussion is already happening.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:54, 1 December 2018 (UTC)

DIFFCAPS for title-case terms

I thought I had a moderate leaning restrictive line for when DIFFCAPS / SMALLDETAILS is sufficient disambiguation. I believe that terminal punctuation "." and "," is never enough, other terminal punctual is rarely good enough, plural forms are rarely good enough, leading articles ("the", "a" etc) are not good enough and homoglyphs are not good enough.

At Talk:Mass_Hysteria_(band)#Requested_move_4_September_2018, User:Amakuru 12:09, 3 October 2018, tells us "DIFFCAPS for title-case terms is basically dead". I see the point. Non regular Wikipedians (i.e. most readers) will not instinctively know Wikipedia's slightly unusual disdain for capitalised title case outside of composition titles.

I propose that Amakuru's position be agreed with. Title case DIFFCAPS are not sufficient disambiguation. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:57, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

Request for comment: DIFFCAPS

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

  • This discussion ☒N did not achieve consensus to impose its desired changes over the well articulated rationale of the contingent opposing this proposal. While the opposition did not argue that WP:DIFFCAPS should always prevail, when choosing an article's title, they did reject the insertion of language stating that WP:SMALLDETAILS would never be sufficient to differentiate distinct topics by reminding respondents that the policy's current language allows for the application of common sense exceptions on a case by case basis.

    By contrast, many in support of this proposal offered an impassioned rationale that dispassionately resembled personal preferences based on likes and dislikes. At times original research was included which only serves to weaken an argument irrespective of the author's sincerity when stating his or her opinion. For example, having never seen a valid example where wp:diffcaps is applied does not mean that valid examples do not exist. And decrying that a disservice is being perpetrated against our readers is an empirical claim given without empirical evidence in support. As such, the claim presumes that one possesses a collective knowledge that no single editor could possibly command. Recommending the proposal because editors go against the policy at times challenges the wisdom of WP:OTHERSTUFFEXIST when it's given as a supporting rationale.

    As such, this discussion is closed without prejudice against its filing or restrictions against any future filings where changes to improve this policy may hereafter be proposed. My impartial recommendation should some such commence is to avoid combining multiple considerations under a single request. I have the sense that consensus to change the "red meat" example might have emerged if it were discussed on its merits alone, without the distractions from simultaneously discussing policy changes to wp:diffcaps.

    (non-admin closure) by --John Cline (talk) 22:32, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

Should WP:DIFFCAPS specify that title case alone is insufficient disambiguation and/or eliminate the Red meat vs. Red Meat example? See above discussion for the specific context of this request. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 00:42, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

Survey

  • Oppose. Unless the best title for a given article is identical with the best title for another article, there is no technical requirement to change either title. If two similar but not identical titles might reasonably cause confusion, that is usually best handled by hatnotes, along with disambiguation pages if necessary. Exceptions are best decided on a case by case basis. Red Meat gets fewer than 2% of the views red meat, but most of them want the comic strip,[13] so there's no reason each article should not be at its own best title. Station1 (talk) 04:37, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support as above. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:17, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
    • Expecting newcomers to understand Wikipedia title styling, which is at odds with usual title styling in the wider world, is to accept a newcomer barrier. Newcomer barriers should be minimized as far as reasonable. "Commonsense" is a blithe dismissal of an encultured community ignoring these barriers. DIFFCAPS (titlecase) discussions decide very small matters of disambiguation for articles on topics with ambiguous composition titles, and very frequently, as with "Mass Hysteria", the community agrees that "DIFFCAPS (titlecase)" is not sufficient disambiguation. This policy should not imply at "DIFFCAPS (titlecase)" is sufficient disambiguation, when it is usually agreed otherwise. Red Meat is a contentious case, and as a contentious case it should not be listed as an example, let alone the first example. Indeed, Red Meat is not consistent with the DIFFCAPS rationale, because a reader typing "Red Meat" into the search box and looking for the comic strip would be much better helped by Red Meat (comic strip) appearing as a suggestion, which doesn't happen because of a single bad DIFFCAPS RM decision in which the participants overtly referenced this policy section as questionable. Also, PRECISE titling, titling that doesn't lead some readers into mis-recognition mistakes, means that ugly, prime real estate occupying hatnotes are not needed. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:48, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
      • Where did any of the RM participants here say anything about the policy being questionable? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 19:39, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
        • “I'm sympathetic to the argument, but it's my opinion that sometimes”. This is not supportive of a capital P policy.
          “textbook example of our naming conventions (until such time as the policy is changed)“ alludes to “support the policy because it is policy, not because it is a good idea”.
          —SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:10, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
          • Those are some debatable inferences there. In any case, nowhere is there an overt reference to the policy as questionable in itself. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 05:26, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
            • Quite right, not “overt”, struck. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:49, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
              • Noted. But how exactly does it amount to a "bad" RM decision when the closer sides with three out of four participants (respondents to the request themselves were unanimous)? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 01:22, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
                • Um. I appreciated your careful reading of my words. No, the “decision” or “close” wasn’t “bad”. I’ll have to work out what I meant and rephrase. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:33, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
                • Aside: Closes can be bad in siding even with a supermajority of !voters, if the respondents are not actually presenting valid policy or source arguments, and the closer doesn't notice or account for this and just counts "votes". This doesn't apply to the Red Meat case, nor so much to this discussion, but is relevant to the other one on this page, about cross-referencing MoS. Several respondents there opposing doing so are relying heavily on such bad closes as if they're "smoking gun" proof of something when they are simply outlier errors, often by inexperienced NACs.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:34, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Support - I've been part of many of these discussions lately and have never seen a valid case for this part of the policy. Yes, as Station1 says, there is no technical requirement that blocks two articles with the same title in different caps, but so what? Are computers the intended audience? Human beings, especially ones that aren't knowledgeable of how (read: why) Wikipedia works, won't know that these titles are different articles. In almost all places a reader encounters, there is no distinction between caps. You could write WWW.WIKIPEDIA.ORG or WwW.WikIpeDiA.oRg and reach the same site; create a word document in your computer and it won't let you create another one with different caps; even when speaking you don't know how that person is imagining the spelling style. Then why do we expect our readers to all of sudden realize that something here is different than every other place they know? Also, as can be seen at Talk:Spider-Man: Far From Home/Archive 1#Requested move 14 July 2018 and Talk:Mid90s#Requested move 23 July 2018 - different publications sometimes even use slightly different styles (whether that is a capitalization of one word, or a use of a dash or not). This whole section should be deleted - difference in capitalization, difference in punctuation and difference of articles ("the", "a" etc) are all meaningless differences to readers, our audience. --Gonnym (talk) 12:12, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Title case alone is technically sufficient to differentiate the titles, and hatnotes are sufficient for navigation. Use the best title for an article, and deviate from that only when technically required. There will still be cases where one topic is primary for multiple cap variations, but there will also be cases where different topics are primary for caps variations. -- JHunterJ (talk) 12:15, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support – This is a clear example of a reader unfriendly policy. Different capitalisation does not clearly indicate a different topic, does not satisfy the requirements of WP:CONCISE, and furthermore, there's no reason to send some of our readers to minor topics they don't want merely because they capitalise things differently from us when they type. Natural and parenthetical disambiguation are ALWAYS preferable. RGloucester — ☎ 13:20, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
No, I did not mean WP:PRECISE. I do not think 'Red Meat' contains sufficient information to distinguish it from other topics, even to someone familiar with that topic area. Concision is not merely brevity, the topic must also be clearly identified. If one looks at 'Red Meat' in a vacuum, there is no clear indication that said appellation refers to a comic strip. RGloucester — ☎ 15:25, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose both. Distinguishing title-case and sentence-case terms seems like a common-sense and useful way to keep titles as concise as possible. No sign it creates a serious problem with navigation. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:52, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose. It seems the proposal entails two interrelated changes. These are, to use the red meat example (with some simplification):
    1. Moving Red Meat to Red Meat (comic strip). Taken on its own, this doesn't have much to recommend it: there is a gain in precision and a loss in brevity, I don't know if they balance out, but I would generally want to avoid titles with parenthetical disambiguators whenever possible: these are wikipedia-specific and not part of the natural-language repertoire of most of our readers. If the move is nevertheless performed, the proposal entails the second step:
    2. Retargeting Red Meat (title case) to Red meat (lower case). Now this is more problematic. The vast majority of our readers search using all lower case. Some of them would be looking for the comic strip, and that's why we've got a hatnote at Red meat; if we really wanted to make things even easier, then we should adopt a preference (weighted against WP:PRIMARYTOPIC) for having the article at the lower-case title be a disambiguation page whenever possible. Regardless, these readers are not affected by what happens with the page whose name is in title case. The readers that are affected are those who have searched using title case. Of course, some of them have done so by mistake and are actually looking for the type of meat rather than the comic strip; it's for them that Red Meat has a hatnote pointing to Red meat. But if a reader has taken the trouble to use title case in their search query, then it usually means they expect the difference in case to be significant and to take them to their intended target quicker. That is, readers who search for "Red Meat" (in title case) are most often looking for a proper noun, some published work (presumably the comic strip) rather than the type of meat. We will be doing these readers a disfavour by making Red Meat a redirect to Red meat.
    The distinction between lower case and title case doesn't presuppose any knowledge of wikipedia, it's part of the way the English language is written, and some of our readers make use of it when searching. Overall, the proposal will negatively affect those readers, while making no difference to the rest of our users. – Uanfala (talk) 13:06, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
  • @Randy Kryn, Izno, Amakuru, Dicklyon, and Erik: Pinging people from the above discussion who've not commented here. RGloucester — ☎ 19:17, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support simply because editors are going against policy as they did here even though policy was invoked: Talk:Eighth Grade (film). If this aspect cannot be invoked, then there is no point in having it. Erik (talk | contrib) (ping me) 19:26, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support the proposition "that title case alone is insufficient disambiguation"; say so and remove the Dead Meat example. Dicklyon (talk) 21:50, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support the proposition "that title case alone is insufficient disambiguation". — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 09:59, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support. In most cases title case differences alone are not sufficient to resolve title ambiguity. older ≠ wiser 10:10, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support "that title case alone is insufficient disambiguation". Excess reliance on WP:SMALLDETAILS creates unnecessary headaches and puzzlement. Simple capitalization differences should not be grounds for eschewing disambiguation. — JFG talk 10:43, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support. Absolutely. I've always thought (and argued in RMs) that this is ridiculous and not helpful to disambiguation. -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:20, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Depends We do have Iron Maiden/Iron maiden but Attention Seeker is a redirect. As noted its possible to have titles at different caps by the software (apart from the 1st letter) by contrast Slapton, Buckinghamshire and Slapton, Devon cannot both go at Slapton. Personally I search by capitalizing the 1st letter instinctively when searching. Crouch, Swale (talk) 13:06, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose. I don't how we can say categorically that title case is insufficient. Sometimes it will be, sometimes it won't. Case-by-case discussion - aka the status quo - seems an excellent way to find out which one a particular case is. Dohn joe (talk) 02:31, 21 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Not that I'm a big fan of it, but as Uanfala pointed out, we seem to be seeking a solution for a non-existing problem, and further, we would inconvenience the readers who are aware of proper casing. Perhaps we should amend the wording to further discourage the practice, but it makes perfect sense for a limited set of examples (Iron Maiden / Iron maiden being the most apparent one), and I'm reluctant to deprecate it altogether. No such user (talk) 10:39, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support. Forgot to cast a vote here, but as I've said before, DIFFCAPS is a navel-gazing Wikilawyering policy which depends on the quirks of our internal naming conventions and puts the readers last instead of putting them first. Let's be absolutely clear here, Red Meat would mean a food product to the vast majority of English speakers, and we are not serving anyone by taking them to a page about an obscure comic strip when they select that option from the search box.  — Amakuru (talk) 22:31, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Support: It seems highly unlikely that it would even occur to a reader that capitalization would be a significant distinguishing factor on Wikipedia, web search engines seem to totally ignore capitalization, it tends to be somewhat hard to type with specific capitalization on some devices, and many people (especially younger ones) often don't bother trying to follow capitalization rules in the interest of increasing their typing speed. If the Wikipedia:Article titles policy needs to discuss the question, it should probably say that capitalization alone is ordinarily not considered sufficient for disambiguation. And Red Meat has always seemed too contentious to be the basis of Wikipedia policy. What kid is going to realize that "Eighth Grade" might take them to a different place on Wikipedia than "eighth grade"? —BarrelProof (talk) 16:01, 3 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose both. Not broke; don't fix. There isn't a real problem here, and this has always been handled on a case-by-case basis anyway. WP:Common sense is in fact being applied, even if someone can find a case here and there where it has not prevailed due to who was at that time involved in the discussion. Problems like that just even out over time. Where we have potential issues is usually going to resolve to cases when topic A is usually but not always capitalized and topic B is usually but not always lower-cased. People who make a DIFFCAPS argument in such a case are simply wrong.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:43, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose. The purpose of a title is to tell the reader the name of the subject discussed in the article. It follows that the title should be as close as possible to the actual name of the subject. Disambiguation should be minimal -- only what is required to avoid clashes. The risk of a reader unintentionally capitalizing a letter when he wants the lower cased form is overblown. Parenthetical disambiguation seems to be unique to Wikipedia, so I can't accept the argument that it is what readers expect. FineStructure137 (talk) 23:12, 13 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Support. In its current form, WP:DIFFCAPS hurts the usability of Wikipedia, since popular web search engines are case-insensitive and most readers would be more familiar with a system that treats articles in the same manner. Having two separate articles at the same name (with different capitalizations) is confusing, and the usability impact outweighs the convenience of giving one of the articles a shorter title. — Newslinger talk 09:43, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose. Hatnotes sufficiently serve the purpose of directing readers between topics differ only by capitalization. Contrary to many assertions above, there is significant tendency in the last decade for English publications to move from Title Case to Sentence case titles. Wikipedia may have contributed to this trend. I think we ought to assume that our readers can tell that we sometimes point different capitalizations to different topics when presented with the situation. If there is any confusion, this should be solved by requiring hatnotes where a change in capitalization leads to a different topic, not by forcing all titles that only vary by capitalization to point to the same topic. Deryck C. 15:28, 21 November 2018 (UTC)

Discussion

Table taken from Letter_case#Title_case. Wikipedia's chosen style for composition titles is indicated in the third row "Title case, matches MOS:TITLECAPS"

A comparison of various case styles (from most to least capitals used)
Case style Example Description
All-caps  THE   VITAMINS   ARE   IN   MY   FRESH   CALIFORNIA   RAISINS  All letters uppercase
Start case The Vitamins Are In My Fresh California Raisins All words capitalised regardless of function
Title case, matches MOS:TITLECAPS The Vitamins Are in My Fresh California Raisins The first word and all other words capitalised except for articles and short prepositions and conjunctions
The Vitamins are in My Fresh California Raisins As above but also excepting copulae (forms of "to be")
The Vitamins are in my Fresh California Raisins As above but excepting all closed-class words
German-style sentence case The Vitamins are in my fresh California Raisins The first word and all nouns capitalised
Sentence case The vitamins are in my fresh California raisins The first word, proper nouns and some specified words capitalised
All-lowercase the vitamins are in my fresh california raisins All letters lowercase (unconventional in English)
— Preceding unsigned comment added by SmokeyJoe (talk • contribs) 05:15, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
Title case can reasonably be expected for all Wikipedia articles. A Wikipedia article is a composition, the article title could be considered a composition title, and thus could be expected to be in title case even it is also a descriptive title. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:20, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
I think you've got it backwards. Article titles are normally in sentence case per WP:TITLEFORMAT, unless specifically about a work of art, literature, etc. A cursory perusal of any given topic area should make this obvious. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 06:24, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
You've misunderstood the point. Yes, titles are in sentence case by default, but they could also reasonably be expected to be in title case. Plenty of publications put all titles in title case (hence the name). DIFFCAPS expects readers to be aware of the fact that we title articles in sentence case in order to recognise the article title, which is an unreasonable expectation.  — Amakuru (talk) 06:37, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
I see the point now. However, I'm not sure I agree. The use of title case for all titles within a given publication is mostly done in the U.S., not so much elsewhere. Also, any reader who spends five minutes on Wikipedia can see that most of our article titles are not in title case. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 07:12, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
Mostly, I can't believe we actually have an ad worked into our style guideline as an "example"! Wnt (talk) 22:37, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
This idea keeps cropping up that readers won't understand or know the difference between title case and sentence case. This makes little sense to me. For one thing, the written word exists in more places than the Internet. Most of those places, such as books and newspapers, have definite capitalization rules that readers will be familiar with from experience. DIFFCAPS merely reflects this reality. For another, even written (typed) online communication doesn't use arbitrary capitalization as a general rule. When beginning an email, how many online users will type "DeaR MrS. joNEs" rather than "Dear Mrs. Jones"? Readers who are truly only semi-literate might be momentarily confused by these rules, but then they will be baffled by most written communication. We shouldn't make titles needlessly long and cluttered with disambiguating terms just to placate these few, and I've never seen any evidence that this kind of confusion is a real problem. For the truly borderline cases, hatnotes make the desired page a click away. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 20:28, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
I'm not sure why we're talking about whether WP should have a title-case or sentence-case system for capitalizing our article titles in the middle of a thread about how to treat the name of works of art. But anyway: I arrived here in 2005 or so with the name pro-title-case viewpoint, but have come around and did so pretty quickly. Titles of sub-works (articles, chapters) being given in sentence case is the modern norm in the majority of academic publishing (an encyclopedia is an academic work). It also serves some important functions we care about, like (except for the first word, anyway) making it clearer what is and is not a proper name within the the title. This has the side benefit of not encouraging and spreading over-capitalization (in our prose or around the world), and not having a mismatch between the subject's name as presented in the title and the article body. I don't think the sky would fall if we switched to a title-case system, but today I'd be inclined to oppose on these bases, and because, with over 5 million articles, it would be a tremendous amount of work (much of which could not be automated) for no clear benefit.

There's an even stronger reason, though: we already get constant squabbling any time title case is involved. It's like people's brains just fall out on the floor. A diffuse cluster of editors regularly active at RM just cannot seems to understand or will not accept that WP has a title case system that uses the five-letter rule for prepositions, like a lot of mainstream book publishers do ("in", "for", "into", "from", "About", "Along", "Toward", "Alongside"), while newspapers typically have a four-letter rule ("in", "for", "Into", "From", "About", ....), and "high academic" publishers usually follow a capitalize-zero-prepositions rule ("in" ... "from" ... "alongside"). Then their dropped brains melt on the floor when confronted with a word that's usually not a preposition but is being used as one in the case at hand ("Do It like a Dude") or a word commonly a preposition that in this case is something else, like a phrasal verb's particle half ("Call Off Your Dogs"). The liquified brains then evaporate completely, when their "follow the sources" mantra, which they don't understand or will not accept applies to facts in the content not how we write about them, encounters "Do It Like A Dude" on a CD cover (and sometimes in crappy entertainment magazines), leading to the wacky idea that WP "must" write it as "Like A". It boggles the mind [that remained snug in its skull] that some people have this much difficult with it, but they definitely do.

It's become abundantly clear that title case isn't workable as a general approach except within a small organization where everyone has the same understanding about how to capitalize titles, knows enough about language to understand prepositions (or at least the willingness to go look it up), and can be fired for being pains in the ass if they won't follow the house style book. On WP, title case for every article title would be an unmitigated disaster of constant fighting about the same crap over and over again, a huge productivity vacuum – take all our disputes about names of WP articles that are titles of works or other proper names, and multiply it by at least hundreds of thousands (the total of: 5 million or so articles, minus one-word titles, minus multi-word titles with no prepositions).
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:48, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

@Gonnym: you really think that most readers who have ever picked up a book or newspaper won't immediately see a difference in meaning between price of milk and The Price of Milk (definite article, capitalization)? Maybe not the best example; I've just edited both pages recently so they are what springs to mind. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 20:45, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

I think that they won't know what your meaning is. Have you been around WP:RM? Look how many incorrectly titled articles are nominated each day. Just from today you have Talk:French Republican Calendar#Requested move 11 October 2018 which the nominator wants to change "French Republican Calendar" to "French Republican calendar" with one other editor supporting "French republican calendar". Or you could look at Talk:Victoria (Australia)#Requested move 9 October 2018, where the editors can't agree on how that title should be. And again, look at the 2 previous discussions I cited, which all have similar issues. Our -pedia isn't written by experts in their field and we don't have paid professional editors to spell-check common mistakes. How do you expect our readers to know what a random editor wanted the title to represent, when we ourselves can't even adhere to the common naming guidelines or even agree to a common style? And if you are asking about readers being confused then yes, how is Airplane different from Airplane!? When you talk about the film with a friend, do you yell out the name? --Gonnym (talk) 20:57, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
Well, Wikipedia is a written, not spoken, project. Written and spoken language are pretty different; they are to some extent handled in different regions of the brain. Speech contains nonverbal cues that writing doesn't. Thatswhywedontwr­itesentenceswithwor­dsallcrammedtoge­therlikethis even though that's how most of us talk. As for inconsistency in applying the policy, that's to be expected from any group effort. How do we expect readers to know that anything on Wikipedia is correct? The idea is that collaborative editing is a self-correcting process. And readers often won't know the exact meaning of an article title. But most readers looking for a specific article should already have some familiarity with the topic(s), and so any further disambiguation will be unnecessary, or can be handled with hatnotes and DAB pages. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:25, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
Wikipedia also serves the blind. Review Wikipedia:ACCESSIBILITY. Many use screen readers. Ambiguous titles hurt. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:53, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
I respond to your point about users not understanding what an article is by its title by showing you that article choices are in a lot of situations flawed, and you respond by using the "it's a work in progress" argument? If the system is flawed, don't add a clause that acts as if it isn't. Also, your written vs spoken argument is irrelevant. If I tell someone who doesn't know of Airplane! to go check it out on Wikipedia, he'll just type either "Airplane" or "Airplane film" - now let's assume there is another film - "Airplane." - does that make it even more obvious now? Or if you want a real-current-example, see Talk:Bad Lands (1939 film)#Requested move 8 October 2018 - can you tell me which film the 1939 film is? Bad Lands, The Bad Lands, Badlands or The Badlands? Why use a hatnotes or a dab page when a better title option can make it clear? And also, you've completely ignored my point where the same spelling with different caps is unheard of in most daily usages for readers - from browsing online, google searches, word documents and even picking user names in various sites - they don't expect this non-standard approach here either. --Gonnym (talk) 05:10, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
Whether any of the naming choices referenced are/were "flawed" is open to debate. The only example offered that has anything to do with "typographically near-identical expressions" on Wikipedia is the Bad Lands film example. The others deal with basic formatting consistency and adherence to sources. These complaints are really just idle speculation until somebody shows that DIFFCAPS creates a significant problem in practice. I think the most persuasive argument so far is SmokeyJoe's point about screen readers. I believe most would read Red meat and Red Meat as identical. Not sure about punctuation, and all-caps text is apparently often read letter by letter. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 20:15, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
But wouldn't the screen reader then go on read the hatnote next, just like a sighted person would? I thought that was a reason that they are always at the top of the page. Station1 (talk) 23:03, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
Yes, that's true. Ambiguity for screen-reader users seems like it would be a concern mostly with lists of links, such as in "See also" sections or on disambiguation pages that closely follow MoS guidance to omit wordy descriptions. Otherwise, search results and links in running text should normally have enough context/description to distinguish similarly-named titles. @SmokeyJoe: do you have a specific instance in mind where ambiguous titles made navigation difficult for screen-reader users? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 18:27, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
The alternative of using parenthetical disambiguation might create its own accessibility problems. As Uanfala pointed out, such parenthetical terms aren't a very natural-sounding use of language; Red Meat (comic strip) read aloud might sound like two separate items, since screen readers often don't indicate parentheses and other punctuation. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 18:45, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
I don't have anything to add to the brief comments I made the last time this came up. Graham87 02:38, 21 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Comment. Titlecase was designed by compositors for compositors, probably by American compositors, and it often produces what look to me like very ugly or foolish results. The rules can also be difficult to understand and/or unclear. However, titlecase is too well embedded in Wikipedia to change now. (How I envy German Wikipedia, for having a language where the capitalisation rules are crystal clear, and don't vary between quotations and titles of artistic works or organisations!)
Should the song listed on the album label and sleeve as "REFLECTIONS IN A FLAT" be listed as "Reflections in a Flat" or as "Reflections in A flat"? Either loses the pun. That song is unlikely ever to pass WP:NSONG, but the point is more general. Narky Blert (talk) 22:17, 29 October 2018 (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.

"Killer bee" versus "Africanized bee"

Could we get some eyes on Talk:Africanized_bee#Requested_move_7_December_2018? NickCT (talk) 00:44, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

Red meat v Red Meat

There is a discussion at Talk:Red Meat#Requested move 4 December 2018 regarding changing the example from Red meat/Red Meat to Iron maiden/Iron Maiden. Crouch, Swale (talk) 11:46, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

That was closed as move so I have changed the example to Iron Maiden. However we might be better of using an upper case for the less viewed article. Crouch, Swale (talk) 21:42, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
I'm sorry to say that I think that the 'iron maiden' example is even worse than 'red meat'. Amongst those less familiar with these sorts of things, 'Iron Maiden' could easily be construed as a proper name referring to the device. There is more of a precedent for capitalising device names, whereas 'red meat' is a clear common noun... RGloucester — ☎ 21:46, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

Article names of statues of people

We have some articles such as the recently created Louis Agassiz (sculpture) and Alexander von Humboldt (Stanford University) whose titles seem strange to me, as they presume that the name of the subject is the name of the work, even though no cited source supports that interpretation. They open like "Alexander von Humboldt is a statue...". Their creator (@Another Believer:) says this is common, at least for statues in the US, so it's done for consistency. Does anyone have more info on this, or suggested alternatives, or know of a relevant guideline or convention? Dicklyon (talk) 05:01, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

For statues there seems to be a clear split between different countries, or perhaps different sides of the Atlantic: compare Category:Sculptures of men in Germany with Category:Sculptures of men in Canada. UK similar to Germany ("Statue of ..."), US similar to Canada ("... (sculpture)"). Women treated the same, eg (Category:Sculptures of women in the United Kingdom. There's also a question of how these should be sorted - Statue of Millicent Fawcett files under "S" while Statue of Amy Winehouse files at "W". Painted/drawn portraits and photographs are related areas which ought perhaps to be considered alongside any discussion of names of sculptural representations of individuals: compare Catharina Brugmans and Portrait of Baertje Martens. PamD 08:04, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
And looking at Category:Statues in California we have Alexander von Humboldt (Stanford University), Benito Juárez (Tamariz), and Ernest W. Hahn (sculpture) - disambiguated by location, artist and form. And William McKinley statue (Patigian). Maybe some scope for an improvement in consistency?! PamD 17:48, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
OK, looks like a bit of mess. Time for a powwow on some conventions? Dicklyon (talk) 04:16, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
I see little problematic with titles such as "Louis Agassiz (sculpture)". I think it is understandable enough. Alphabetization should follow the person's name, not "s" for "statue". I also find the title "Benito Juárez (Tamariz)" acceptable. When there is an article on the artist it is defensible to put the artist's name in the title. Bus stop (talk) 14:13, 12 October 2018 (UTC)
It's not problematic if the statue is called Louis Agassiz, or Benito Juárez. But are they? Or are we making titles that bear no relation to WP:COMMONNAME? According to the cited ref, that statue of Juárez is named "Benemérito de las Américas." Dicklyon (talk) 02:16, 13 October 2018 (UTC)
I don't know if it is the common-name but Benemérito de las Américas is a geographical location. Bus stop (talk) 03:01, 13 October 2018 (UTC)
True; but if you search for that term you also find that it's an honorific name given to Benito Juárez, and is the name of that statue, as the cited ref in the article says. So something like Benemérito de las Américas (sculpture) would make sense. Dicklyon (talk) 06:33, 13 October 2018 (UTC)
By the same argument all three of our articles on sculptures of Benito Juárez could include "Benemérito de las Américas" in the title. We have Benito Juárez (Martinez), Benito Juárez (Orozco), and Benito Juárez (Tamariz). The image of the pictured plaque at Benito Juárez (Tamariz) doesn't include the language "Benemérito de las Américas". The article merely says In downtown San Diego, meanwhile, dozens of people gathered at Pantoja Park in front of the statue called "Benemérito de las Américas." I don't think that is enough for us to conclude that the title of the sculpture is "Benemérito de las Américas". Bus stop (talk) 07:36, 13 October 2018 (UTC)
Make that four: Benito Juarez (Alciati). Bus stop (talk) 14:28, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

Comments. In the final analysis I don't think it matters as Wikipedia:Redirects are cheap. We are identifying this as a problematic area. Part of our solution should be a slew of WP:REDIRECTS to account for all possible titles, and in the case of related sculptures, such as the four we have on Benito Juárez, WP:HATNOTES linking to the Benito Juárez (disambiguation) page would seem to be important. (I've made some changes at that disambiguation page.) As for alphabetization within a WP:CATEGORY, I'd say all of the statues should be grouped together, therefore under "B" for "Benito Juárez". Bus stop (talk) 14:43, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

Or "J", as it would be for an article on the person? PamD 16:12, 13 October 2018 (UTC)
Yes, you are right—I stand corrected—"J". Bus stop (talk) 16:15, 13 October 2018 (UTC)
Although redirects are cheap the name matters in categories (tail wagging the dog). -- PBS (talk) 10:12, 16 October 2018 (UTC)

I agree with both Blueboar's comment and Dicklyon's observation. In the case of a common name then it obviously goes under that name (although a column and a statue are two different things, to paraphrase an historian "They placed Nelson on a pedestal, the highest one in Britain in his case") -- Nelson's column is like Big Ben, it is the common name, but it is not strictly an accurate one. However for descriptive names, putting part of the title in brackets usually implies disambiguation and I do not think it appropriate to use sculpture/statue as a disambiguation unless the name of the thing is the same as something else. So I suggest that we use natural language for the name in the title if it is descriptive. The only reason to disambiguate in such cases is if there are two statues in which case it can be done using the location.

As to whether the description should include sculpture or statue it rather depends the reason for its creation. If it was intended as a commemoration or celebration of a person or thing then statue is probably more appropriate as its artistic merit is of secondary interest. If on, the other hand it was commissioned to decorate a place then it is likely that its artistic merit is more important, and in such cases I think sculpture would be more appropriate. There are other descriptive terms that may be better than statue depending on type eg column, monument, memorial and (possibly) steles.

Should "equestrian statue" be included in the name of such monuments?

-- PBS (talk) 10:12, 16 October 2018 (UTC)

If we go with the “Statue of X (location)” title formulation, I don’t think it is necessary for the title to specify the type of statue (that can be done in the article text)... an exception could be made if there are multiple statues of X in the same location (to further distinguish which statue we are talking about). Blueboar (talk) 13:49, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
There are various situations under discussion at once and I am partly at fault for that. As I understand it, Dicklyon was raising the understandable point that certain titles seem strange. The examples given were Louis Agassiz (sculpture) and Alexander von Humboldt (Stanford University). I agree they are strange. But I think those titles are acceptable although I think lengthier titles are another reasonable option. And I think that redirects should be used liberally. As concerns "statues" and "sculptures" I think "sculpture" is generally preferable. "Sculpture" is the more general term. "Sculpture" is more inclusive of "statue" than "statue" is of "sculpture". But redirects can account for these variations. A concern that arose in subsequent discussion were the 4 statues/sculptures of Benito Juarez. Article titles differentiating the 4 by location seems appropriate to me. But again, lengthier titles can include more terms. I find that acceptable. But I have to ask: is there a reason lengthier titles are frowned upon? Even the terms "statue/sculpture" can be included in a lengthier title. Bus stop (talk) 14:22, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
It may stem from misunderstanding our goal to have Concise titles ... people thinking that concise means “shortest”. Blueboar (talk) 14:48, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
In both those specific examples I think "statue of ..." is a better format as the article titles are as concise and they meet the requirements of natural word order. -- PBS (talk) 15:37, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
Just to point out that aside from the article Alexander von Humboldt (Stanford University) there is the article Statue of Alexander von Humboldt (Begas). Therefore perhaps the title change there would be to "Statue of Alexander von Humboldt at Stanford University". I would find such a title acceptable. But perhaps others would consider such a title too lengthy. Bus stop (talk) 19:15, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
  • I would definitely go with "Statue of Foo (Fooville)" or "Statue of Foo, Fooville", with parenthetical or comma usage dependent on the usual usage on Wikipedia for the appropriate country. It's far less ambiguous. Obviously if there is another name in common usage (Foo Memorial, Nelson's Column, etc) then that should be used instead. But just the name of the person, even with a parenthetical disambiguator? Definitely not. -- Necrothesp (talk) 10:58, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
  • I also think the standard formulation should be "Statue of XXXX", since almost always that's how statues of people are referred to, by default. There may be times when they aren't, but those exceptions can be handled on a case-by-case basis. If there is more than one statue of that person, then we can add the place name too; I'm agnotstic on the comma-vs-parenthesis method, but it seems like "Statue of XXXX (Anytown)" or "Statue of XXXX, Anytown" is the best way to do it when disambiguation is needed. However, I do feel that our default naming convention (in lieu of any exceptions which are clearly in common usage) is "Statue of XXXX". --Jayron32 16:36, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Comment - the issue here seems to be whether we should use a descriptive title for our articles on statues, or use the name of the work as our article title. There is no “right answer to that. Obviously, some statues are well known by their “name” (examples: “The Thinker” or the various “David”s)... and I have no problem with using this “name” for our article’s title. Others, however, are not well known by their “name”, and we can (and I think should) entitle our articles about them with a descriptive title (Statue of X). Blueboar (talk) 16:03, 4 November 2018 (UTC)

New naming convention

I've started to stub in a new naming convention at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (works of art). After we flesh it out a bit we can call an RFC on it. If we can mostly agree going in, this will be easier. Anyone want to help? Dicklyon (talk) 04:10, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Or anyone want to disagree with what I've said there so far? Dicklyon (talk) 02:48, 22 October 2018 (UTC)
I moved Louis Agassiz (sculpture) to Statue of Louis Agassiz and used it as an example. Any objections? Dicklyon (talk) 03:15, 22 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Articles on statues, I would guess, are likely to proliferate amongst the new articles in the coming decade. Works of art are, in my opinion, under-represented in Wikipedia content. I think statues should not be terribly different from other works of work.
Ideally, Wikipedia titles would be recognisable for consistency and a logical structure of the encyclopedia. This should be desirable, although often in competition with COMMONNAME. That doesn't mean give up. A standard longform, flexibly shortenable would be good. I like:
[[Statue of [Name], [place] (sculptor)]]
"Statue of" will be frequently opposed by the title minimalists, but it has huge recognition benefits. Note that "statue" can be synonymously used with "bust", but other times "statue"/"bust" can be the relative disambiguation (consider Statue of Vibia Sabina[14] & Bust of Vibia Sabina [15]
"Comma, Place" is the very standard real world method for naming places.
Sculptor/author is sometimes done with comma, but this is very much shorthand. "by [author]" is very natural, but not particularly common already in Wikipedia. Disambiguating parenthetically by author would make an easily recognizable style.
Examples would be:
Statue of Alfred the Great, Pewsey
Statue of The Thinker by Auguste Rodin. "The Thinker" is a composition title, but it can be treated the same. --> Statue of The Thinker (Auguste Rodin)
George Washington (Houdon) --> Statue of George Washington (Houdon), Richmond, Virginia.
Buddhas of Bamiyan --> Statues of Buddas, Bamiyan
Bust of Winston Churchill (Epstein)
Oppose disambiguating by a parenthetical place.
--SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:17, 22 October 2018 (UTC)
It's not necessary to rename The Thinker (an incredibly famous piece of art that needs no further disambiguation and is the primary topic for that title) or the Buddhas of Bamiyan (the common name of the statues). -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:27, 22 October 2018 (UTC)
I agree. The Thinker is a well-known actual name. Many (hopefully most) statue articles should not need to be moved when we formulate conventions, as the conventions will mostly encode what we already do, and just nudge us toward more consistency, and avoid the odd problems like the one that brought me here. Dicklyon (talk) 14:49, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
There is plenty of room for you to join PrimaryTopic arguments at Wikipedia_talk:Disambiguation#What_is_the_purpose_of_WP:PRIMARYTOPIC?. My point here should be read as how to disambiguate when disambiguation is wanted. Therefore I suggest the form of a maximally disambiguated case. "<art-type> of <Name>, Place (artist)". Here the thread specifies statues, but the same thing can be applied to other art, especially art that is not ported about much. George Washington (Houdon) would be titled Statue of George Washington, Richmond, Virginia (Houdon), if there were other GW statues in this and other places by this and different artists, and this artist Houdon also made statues of GW erected in different places, as well as other works such as busts. A wordier version would be: Statue of George Washington, at Richmond, Virginia, by Houdon. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:34, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
Thanks! Dicklyon (talk) 14:44, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
I might prefer "Statue name ([artist] statue)". I'd generally oppose 'statue of' as not being part of the actual name of the item. Sticking a place name somewhere in there might be done Statue name ([artist] statue [in place]), but statues can move... --Izno (talk) 14:01, 22 October 2018 (UTC)
It's not part of the name, it's a descriptor of the object. Many statues do not have a formal, proper name, they are just a statue of something or someone. If a statue has a common name, or well-used name, we of course default to that, but many statues don't have one. They are just a statue of (whoever). They are not called "Whoever", they have no names. Because of that, we should not title the article as though it was a proper name. --Jayron32 10:53, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
But that's the point, Jayron32, and Izno beat me to making this point. "Statue of" is not part of the name, but making it part of the title implies it is part of the name. While we do have articles with descriptive titles, usually that's for articles about topics that don't have names. Like "List of ..." or "Murder of ...". To specify in a guideline a descriptive title for articles about topics that do have names is actually quite revolutionary for the WP world, and I really don't see good justification for it. While generally I do prefer natural disambiguation, if a statue's name is ambiguous (and it's not the primary topic for that name) then I do think parenthetic disambiguation is preferable, to keep clear what the name is. In addition, "Statue of xxx" might be the actual name of some statues - and we should reserve that format for those statues. So, I too prefer "Statue name ([artist] statue))", where disambiguation is required. --В²C ☎ 23:54, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
We've all agreed that when a statue has a name we use it. We're talking about statues that don't have a name. Dicklyon (talk) 23:59, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
Many statues have names, non-uniquely. Many statues are called "Queen Victoria". An artist is very likely to title their work after the subject it represents. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:06, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
True, but the question is whether anyone else refers to a given statue by the name the artist gave it... or do they refer to it descriptively? That depends on the specific statue. Blueboar (talk) 00:22, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Comment. Note that the problem with adding the name of the sculptor is that the name of the sculptor of public statuary is very often not that well-known. With a few exceptions, we don't usually say, "oh, that's the statue of Lord Nelson by Joe Bloggs". We say "that's the statue of Lord Nelson in Fooville Square". There are exceptions, of course, but generally this is the case. And I would dispute the whole "statue" not being part of the actual name thing. "Lord Nelson" is no more the actual name of a statue than "Statue of Lord Nelson" is. And in actual fact, the latter is most often the common name and the one that's used in reliable sources. Like Historic England's Listed Building database, for example. -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:13, 22 October 2018 (UTC)
    Okay, that's a good point. But that just suggests we should be flexible in deciding how to disambiguate. Really, it depends on the name, what the other uses of it are, and what is best known about the statue to distinguish it. If it's the artist we should use that. If it's where it's at it, then we should use the place. --В²C ☎ 23:59, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
    Modern statues in museums, the sort of topic for anticipated new articles, usually are strongly associated with the sculptor. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:09, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Comma place convention – is there any reaction to SmokeyJoe's suggestion that place-based disambiguation is best with comma instead of parens? Dicklyon (talk) 05:37, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
    • It feels awkward, but I think it best to consider how the method would go with the worst cases. I do think that Wikipedia is missing a lot of articles on art, including statues, and they are coming. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:34, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Alternatively,
Name statue (place, sculptor) ?
This puts the name first, which may be usually desirable.
Like Carl Nielsen Monument. (Copenhagen, Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen). Monument synonymous with statue.
Statue of Alfred the Great, Pewsey —> Alfred the Great statue (Pewsey) ( not known for sculptor)
NB. It is the yet-to-be written articles that will require more disambiguation. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:39, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
I like Izno's suggestion above: "Statue-name ([artist] statue)", where disambiguation is required, and the artist is required only if there are two statues with the same name. I think artist makes more sense to use for disambiguating pieces of art than where they are. Paintings and many statues do move... but the artist remains the same. --В²C ☎ 23:54, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
I like "Statue-name ([artist] statue)", but "Statue-name ([artist/location] statue)" allows for how many city-commissioned statues are better known for their location than for the sculpture. It is probably very rare to need to use both artist and location. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:12, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
It depends whether you're talking about artworks in museums or other buildings or statues on display in public places (squares, streets, parks, etc). While the latter are sometimes moved, it's not that common, and they are generally far better known by their location than their sculptor. As usual, we should go with common name as used in reliable sources. In many cases, that is clearly Statue of Person, Location. It is generally not Person (Sculptor statue) or even Person (Location statue). -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:51, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
Alfred the Great statue (Pewsey)? Frankly, yuck! To me, Statue of Alfred the Great, Pewsey is vastly better. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:51, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
Statue of Alfred the Great, Pewsey is better, the statue is located in Pewsey, rather than being a "Pewsey", however with companies that are based in a particular place, I think it is common to but the place name in brackets, but I'm not sure. Crouch, Swale (talk) 13:56, 31 October 2018 (UTC)

Ugh, I should have read the proposed guideline before commenting above. A lot of my concerns were addressed by Dick. I should have known better. My apologies. --В²C ☎ 00:04, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

No prob. I'm about to be traveling for a few weeks, so hoping that others will jump in and work on the stub of a convention that I started. Dicklyon (talk) 02:59, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Thoughts on the discussions above

As promised below, I am thinking about a draft amendment/addition to WP:VAMOS on this, & to help me, and set out some of my thinking, I'll put some points/reactions to the above discussions here.

  • Some disam is needed - I think we pretty much all agree on this, where the statue has an individual's name as its title.
  • Statues best described as statues, not sculptures - Style of Louis Agassiz (sculpture) etc. As far as I can see, all examples like this are created by User:Another Believer, who uses it as standard on his many stubs. In the case of the conventional statue (as opposed to some more complicated composition), I can see no benefit to this form as opposed to Louis Agassiz (statue) (or .....) and would propose to deprecate this style.
  • If there's a Memorial, monument, column etc in the name, that should normally be enough disam.
  • Starting the article title "Statue of ....". I don't think this should be a default, but it has a place. I think it especially suits prominent outdoor locations where the statue functions as a location, and people naturally use it when arranging meetings etc. Then it can actually meet WP:COMMONNAME. I don't like it for works in museums etc.
  • Generally, I prefer disam after the subject's name, and following the normal VAMOS principles: " If the title is not very specific, or refers to a common subject, add the surname of the artist in parentheses afterwards, e.g. Reading the Letter (Picasso). It is generally better to disambiguate by the artist's name than by medium, as there may be other paintings or sculptures of the same name by other artists. If the artist painted several works with the same, or very similar, titles, add the location of the work if it is in a public collection. For example, Annunciation (van Eyck, Washington), as van Eyck painted several Annunciations. A title such as Madonna and Child (Raphael) is of little use (see Category:Raphael Madonnas), and Battle of Orsha (unknown) is clearly unhelpful. The names of less well-known artists may not be suitable disambiguation terms."
Maybe more later

Johnbod (talk) 19:40, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

@Johnbod: I don't mind you calling me out here, but I should note, I did not make up this naming convention. I just used this because I saw some other articles using the same title format (but, yes, I create many sculpture stubs, so there will be many attributed to me). I'm also not opposed to using the "Statue of XXX" naming convention, if that's what consensus determines is best. I'm really just waiting to see what happens here. ---Another Believer (Talk) 18:05, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
Ok, fair enough - I just looked at several, & all were yours. Johnbod (talk) 18:19, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

RFC on works of art naming convention

The consensus is against adopting the proposed convention at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (works of art).

Cunard (talk) 06:32, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

The following discussion 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.

Should the new proposed convention at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (works of art) be adopted? 17:16, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

  • Support We can tweak a few words along the way as needed, but what's there now looks like a good way to handle things. --Jayron32 18:04, 2 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Strong Oppose This is already covered at WP:VAMOS, part of the MOS, as far as the visual arts are concerned - it seems from the wording that that is the only area intended to be covered, and in fact just statues. Any changes should be raised there, but I don't think there should be any. This is a User:Dicklyon special which has not been raised on any project page or at WP:VAMOS. It is not very coherently expressed, and shows very little awareness of how works of art get their names, a rather complex subject for older works. It contradicts itself between the first and second sections, and also contradicts the existing MOS, which says: "Avoid "Portrait of Fred Foo" titles, if the individual is named – just use "Fred Foo", with disambiguation as necessary, even if the museum uses "Portrait". But titles such "Portrait of a Man" are all right to use. There are exceptions, especially modern works where the title is given by the artist, and others such as the Arnolfini Portrait." One might add that the artist's name should be the normal disam term, and that one is needed, to avoid the article being mistaken for the biography of the subject. Presumably some tiff somewhere has lead to this. WikiProject Visual arts is one of our more active projects, and relevant disputes (let alone new proposed "conventions") should be raised there. Three editors have contributed to the draft, none of whom have afaik significant experience editing in the area, which shows. I actually agree that "Statue of ...." names are often appropriate, especially for large ones that are a local landmark, & this might be added to WP:VAMOS. Johnbod (talk) 02:40, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
    Yes, I see you added that in 2008. Was it discussed (other than the brief recent discussion above?). I admit to being pretty unaware of this area. Dicklyon (talk) 12:51, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
That was when VAMOS was being pulled together. A later version was approved by the community, after various amendments arising from discussion; I can't remember if that area was affected. That should all be on the talk page. As you have noted, the present text has been around for ten years. Johnbod (talk)
  • Comment What works under WP:VAMOS for gallery items (typically paintings, though including photos, sculptures, etc) is not necessarily appropriate for Public Art, statues etc which stand outside and are usually seen in isolation. A proposal to amend VAMOS for titles of public art representations of named individuals (statues, possibly other works such as a mural?) might be our best way forward. And I wonder if there are any extra links or mentions of that policy needed, as its section on article titles hadn't been noticed by those contributing here? And does MOS rule over article titles? PamD 07:39, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
There is generally no useful distinction to be made between "Public Art" (why the caps?) and other sorts. I think VAMOS is sufficiently well-known by those who often edit in that area, but like other specialized policies, won't be by those who don't. More links and references are always welcome though. Johnbod (talk) 15:10, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
Looking further, a naming convention should be accessible from WP:Article title and listed in Category:Naming conventions, so a paragraph in the middle of WP:VAMOS really isn't sufficient. Bring the VA WikiProject members here to the discussion, and the Public Art folk too, and we can make progress. PamD 08:03, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
Category:Naming conventions, a new discovery for me, lists Wikipedia articles of the normal type that record general real-world naming conventions for some subject or other. The proposed draft makes no claim to be that sort of thing, but is an internal WP policy draft, and even if passed would not belong in articlespace or that category at all. If VAMOS is not linked from WP:Article title, it certainly should be, as this issue is only a small part of what it covers regarding titles. Actually, I see the VAMOS article title section is linked exactly where you would expect it to be, piped as "Visual arts" in the sidebar template "Topic-specific naming conventions for article titles", 3rd section "Arts · Entertainment · Media" Johnbod (talk) 16:31, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
Ah, sorry about that, I meant Category:Wikipedia naming conventions.I was working on my phone where it's almost impossible to see contents of categories and templates. Yes, I see that sidebar link (now I'm on the laptop): there should probably also be something in the category, if only a note at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (visual arts) saying "See WP:VAMOS". PamD 23:40, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
Ok, I've done a redirect to the section (Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Visual_arts#Article_titles) there, which I hope all are ok with. Johnbod (talk) 00:44, 5 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Strong Oppose For most notable works of art the existing conventions at WP:VAMOS lead to the best result; e.g., David is the common name of two well-known sculptures, not Statue of David. The work that is the subject of the article that prompted this proposal, Statue of Louis Agassiz, may be an exception—I suspect it has been the subject of relatively little scholarly writing, and neither the article nor the sources it cites say that it even has a title. Cases like this one shouldn't set the standard for naming all articles about works of art. Ewulp (talk) 08:36, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
    Did you not read the proposal? Certainly it does not suggest changing the title of David or anything else that's known by a name. Dicklyon (talk) 12:51, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
I did read it, several times; as others have noted, it is not a model of clarity. If the intended meaning is that in the case of a painting or sculpture that depicts "X" but has no known title, it is inappropriate for Wikipedia to title the article as "X (sculpture)", "X (painting)", and such, then I've already agreed with that. But if reliable sources can provide a title, we should use it. Ewulp (talk) 05:25, 5 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose per above comments. For example, statues of named and known individuals will usually come in under the name of the person, even if not named so by the sculptor (See the articles on the statues at {{National Statuary Hall Collection}}, which would be unnecessarily upended by the proposed language). Randy Kryn (talk) 14:33, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Strong Oppose per WP:CREEP we certainly don't need a new policy page to say things like Use common name when feasible; this should be a proposal to change WP:VAMOS. I also oppose the specific change (discussed above); I believe the intent is to use Statue of John Doe instead of John Doe (statue). This proposal is so convolutedly phrased I'm not confident that's the actual impact. power~enwiki (π, ν) 22:36, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Comment I think the best thing is to let this run a while, but if it keeps going the way it has been, I will suggest a draft addition to VAMOS to cover the "unnamed" portrait statue issue, and put a link to the proposal here. I think my draft would be less prescriptive than the proposal here, but set out options that might be best in particlar cases. Johnbod (talk) 05:43, 5 November 2018 (UTC)
    Yes, we should close as failed proposal, drop back, and try again. Thanks. Dicklyon (talk) 11:27, 5 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose. The page has three points all of which are already covered elsewhere: 1 is covered by WP:UCRN; 2 is covered by MOS:VA; 3 is covered by a combination of WP:AT#DAB and WP:DAB and just general practice at WP:RM. If there's a problem to resolve (like a frequent pattern of "I just don't understand the policies and guidelines" !voting against consensus, or several categories of misnamed articles), we should probably tweak the wording of the existing pages to address it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:21, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
    It's still not clear to me what should be our convention for statues such as those that Randy Kryn brought up, e.g. Samuel Adams (Whitney), that are named as if people. Do any of the prior pages you linked address that? What is your opinion? Is Samuel Adams (Whitney) better than, for example, Statue of Samuel Adams (Whitney)? Dicklyon (talk) 17:57, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
    Well, any time there's a title of a work that coincides with something else we have a potential ambiguity problem. Since "Whitneys" aren't an occupation or the like by which to categorize people, this doesn't seem that big a deal. But it's a further-complicated dispute, because there's a WP:OR assertion embedded in some of these debates that a work that has the name of the subject in big letters on it ("SAMUEL ADAMS") somehow isn't the title of the work (absent some other known title). This is actually completely counterfactual from the perspective of art curation and markets. Labels such as there are in fact treated as titles in the real world. (Though of course if it's a documented fact that the artist actually titled it Golden Sunrise of Calypso that it really has that title instead; but this isn't going to come up often.) If the statue has no known title from the artist's statements or papers, as reported in sources, and known title obviously carved right into it, and no conventional title arrived at by art historians, then something like "statue of Samuel Adams (Whitney)" seems perfectly reasonable. This may just really resolve to WP:UCRN. We wouldn't have an article on the statue (or whatever) if it were not covered in and named by multiple independent reliable sources in the first place.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:55, 21 November 2018 (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.

When the COMMONNAME is never used in English sources... .what am I missing?

Can someone explain to me how a name not used in any English sources qualifies as a title of a Wikipedia article per COMMONNAME?

See: Talk:1._divisjon#Requested_move_27_November_2018.

Thanks, --В²C ☎ 18:39, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

See WP:UE: "If there are too few reliable English-language sources to constitute an established usage, follow the conventions of the language appropriate to the subject". RGloucester — ☎ 18:47, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
However, having taken a cursory glance at Google News and Google Books, it seems that "Norwegian first division" is not an invented name, but actually quite common when referring to this subject...seems that was a pretty bad RM. RGloucester — ☎ 18:55, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
Exactly, and it's being used as a precedent in other cases to justify modifying other titles and references in articles, so I thought rectifying this was a rather urgent matter. But nobody else seems to care. --В²C ☎ 19:07, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
Unfortunately, the available options are either WP:MR or waiting some time...and I don't think MR will produce a desirable result. RGloucester — ☎ 19:11, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
Thankfully, the original closer relented and reverted, so the original RM discussion is open again. Talk:Norwegian_First_Division#Requested_move_27_November_2018. --В²C ☎ 19:36, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
For once, common sense seems to have won the day on Wikipedia... RGloucester — ☎ 20:09, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

Explanatory supplements to this policy. Wikipedia:Specialized-style fallacy

Is Wikipedia:Specialized-style fallacy and explanatory supplement to this policy? If yes, this policy should point to it, prominently. If no, that page should not make that claim. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 14:40, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

  • It's an essay that does not reflect community consensus. It's not explanatory supplement to this policy, and it should not make that claim. --В²C ☎ 17:42, 10 January 2019 (UTC) Reconsidered. See below. --В²C ☎ 17:57, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Upon reading it more carefully I realized I misunderstood what it was saying when I first skimmed it. I think some examples would help make its meaning more obvious. But my understanding now is that when there is a conflict in style about how a particular term is presented between general reliable sources and reliable sources that specialize in the area of the term in question, this essay says WP should follow usage in the general sources. I think that does reflect community consensus and is consistent with this policy page, etc. --В²C ☎ 17:57, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
  • It is a valid essay... but I am not sure if it should be marked as a “supplement”. I note that SmokeyJoe has asked the exact same question at WT:MOS... Come on smokey, you should know better than that... asking the same question in several places opens the door to accusations of forum shopping (not saying you are forum shopping, just saying that double posting gives that impression.) Blueboar (talk) 18:28, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
Whether it's a supplement to MOS is a separate question from whether it's a supplement to WP:AT, and it's appropriate to raise each question at each talk page accordingly. --В²C ☎ 18:49, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
Blueboar, two separate independent questions. Should WP:AT link to the essay? Should WP:MOS link to the essay? I think “possibly yes” for sure, unlike the three claims I removed. The MfD is definitely not going anywhere. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:09, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Yes! – it explains clearly that we put more weight on sources written for a general audience, and pay less attention to "official" and "specialist" sources that have their own odd styles often. Dicklyon (talk) 07:39, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

proposal to change wording

WITHDRAWN
Withdrawn by nom. --Jayron32 20:12, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

The following discussion 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.

  • Although official, scientific, birth, original, or trademarked names are often used for article titles, the term or name most typically used in reliable sources is generally preferred.

altered to

  • Although official, scientific, birth, original, or trademarked names are often used for article titles, a term or name most typically used in reliable sources is generally preferred [also available].
changes: "… reliable sources is generally preferred" [also available]; definite to indefinite article at "term or name". Notes and proposal, cygnis insignis 07:32, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
I see this as inconsistent with the rest of page, a sort of unspoken clause. cygnis insignis 07:38, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Opposed - the point is that we actually do prefer the most commonly used name over less commonly used names... even when the less common name is “official” or “scientific” etc. Blueboar (talk) 11:46, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose per Blueboar. Preferring the "name most typically used" is the current policy. This request is not just a proposal to change the wording, but to upend the policy in favor of, apparently, a free-for-all. bd2412 T 11:52, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose this change; titles must satisfy as far as possible all the criteria of AT, including this one as currently worded; the proposed change is far too open-ended. (However, the current text, Although official, scientific, birth, original, or trademarked names are often used for article titles, the term or name most typically used in reliable sources is generally preferred, carries the implication that the term or name most typically used in reliable source isn't an official, scientific, birth, original, or trademarked name, which just is not true.) Peter coxhead (talk) 11:58, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
    Peter coxhead, thank you, because that is the clause I think is being exploited to a preference of RS. The omission of sources characterised as 'scientific' is at odds with our policies on reliable sourcing. Would you be agreeable to a proposal that omitted 'scientific', which is interpreted as what is, by a populist definition, 'not english'? cygnis insignis 12:42, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose. My experience of RM discussions is that “the term or name most typically used in reliable sources is generally preferred” leaning to “strongly preferred”, quite the opposite direction to the proposal. Official technical and trademarked terms are avoided if there is a common term used in reliable sources. And I think this better suits all readers, matching the RCOGNISABILITY criterion. Technical and narrow experts always know the common terms, and ordinary readers know the technical common terms but not the official technical trademarked terms. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 12:06, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
*WP:RECOGNISABLITY, ftfy cygnis insignis
Constantly fighting with autocorrect on mobile devices, my apologies. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 14:19, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Withdraw proposal, I had not properly considered the impact outside of scientific and verifiable sourcing of nomenclature, and think my concern can be addressed in another way. cygnis insignis 12:48, 14 January 2019 (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.

Advice, please

Do we allow article titles to be rendered solely in non-roman scripts? Ο_Κακός_Ο_Λύκος Tony (talk) 11:15, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

I don’t think it is disallowed ... but it would be extremely rare. What do English language sources that discuss this album do? Do they translate the album title into English (thus using roman script), or do they routinely present it in Greek (using Greek script)? We want our article title to be Recognizable ... so, we should do what the majority of sources do. Blueboar (talk) 12:40, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
It is indeed disallowed. See WP:UE – "Names not originally in a Latin alphabet, such as Greek, Chinese, or Russian names, must be transliterated". There is nothing wrong with an article title in Greek, but it must be transliterated into the Latin alphabet. Our article titles need to be type-able, and indeed, readable. RGloucester — ☎ 16:42, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
Just to clarify, the article should be at the English-language, Latin-alphabet title but may have a redirect from the alternate script title. The primary title, however, should be in English. --Jayron32 20:09, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
If there is no common English name, the transliteration can be used. I suspect that's the case here. RGloucester — ☎ 00:41, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

Four controversial country names

Four countries prefer an English language country name that differs from their English language Wikipedia article name under the ‘’Use commonly recognizable names’’ paragraph. These four countries are:

  1. The Republic of Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) prefers the country name “Côte d'Ivoire”.
  2. The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste (East Timor) prefers the country name “Timor-Leste”.
  3. The Republic of Cabo Verde (Cape Verde) prefers the country name “Cabo Verde”.
  4. The Czech Republic prefers the country name “Czechia”.

I've done some research to determine which of these four preferred country names have attained common use in the English language. I've examined search results from three leading English language search engines: Google Search, Bing, and Yahoo! Search. I've also examined the country name preferences of 14 organizations prominent in international affairs in the English language: The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Global Affairs Canada, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, |the International Organization for Standardization, the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the South African Department of International Relations and Cooperation, the United Nations, the United States Department of State, the United States Central Intelligence Agency, the Universal Postal Union, and the World Trade Organization. The four sections below detail my findings.

Ivory Coast prefers the country name Côte d'Ivoire

Since 1986, the Republic of Côte d'Ivoire has preferred to use its French language country name “Côte d'Ivoire” in the English language rather than a literal translation of its name such as “Ivory Coast”.

A Google English language search for "Ivory Coast" returns “Côte d’Ivoire” and 82,500,000 results.
A Google English language search for "Côte d’Ivoire" returns “Côte d’Ivoire” and 276,000,000 results.
A Bing English language search for "Ivory Coast" returns “Ivory Coast” and 17,100,000 results.
A Bing English language search for "Côte d’Ivoire" returns “Ivory Coast” 30,000,000 results.
A Yahoo English language search for "Ivory Coast" returns “Ivory Coast” and 17,300,000 results.
A Yahoo English language search for "Côte d’Ivoire" returns “Ivory Coast” and 30,000,000 results.

All of the following 14 organizations use the country name "Côte d’Ivoire":

  1. The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
  2. The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office
  3. Global Affairs Canada
  4. The Indian Ministry of External Affairs
  5. The International Organization for Standardization
  6. The Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
  7. The New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade
  8. The Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs
  9. The South African Department of International Relations and Cooperation
  10. The United Nations
  11. The United States Department of State
  12. The United States Central Intelligence Agency
  13. The Universal Postal Union
  14. The World Trade Organization

None of these 14 organizations use the country name "Ivory Coast":

It appears that the name “Ivory Coast” has been relegated to historical use. The country name “Côte d’Ivoire” has achieved dominate use in the English language despite being French and having a circumflex over the first vowel (although it is sometimes omitted.) I shall make a move request unless a consensus objects.

East Timor prefers the country name Timor-Leste

Since its founding in 2002, the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste has preferred to use its Portuguese language country name “Timor-Leste” in the English language rather than a translated version of its name such as “East Timor”.

A Google English language search for "East Timor" returns “Timor-Leste” and 53,500,000 results.
A Google English language search for "Timor-Leste" returns “Timor-Leste” and 104,000,000 results.
A Bing English language search for "East Timor" returns “Timor-Leste” and 8,700,000 results.
A Bing English language search for "Timor-Leste" returns “Timor-Leste” 10,400,000 results.
A Yahoo English language search for "East Timor" returns “East Timor” and 4,190,000 results.
A Yahoo English language search for "Timor-Leste" returns “East Timor” 5,030,000 results.

The following 11 organizations use the country name "Timor-Leste":

  1. The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
  2. Global Affairs Canada
  3. The Indian Ministry of External Affairs
  4. The International Organization for Standardization
  5. The New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade
  6. The Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs
  7. The United Nations
  8. The United States Department of State
  9. The United States Central Intelligence Agency
  10. The Universal Postal Union
  11. The World Trade Organization

The following two organizations prefer the unhyphenated country name "Timor Leste":

  1. The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office
  2. The Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

The following organization uses both "Timor Leste" and "East Timor":

  1. The South African Department of International Relations and Cooperation

It appears that the country name “Timor-Leste” is more commonly used in the English language than “East Timor”. The British and Irish governments do not like to use a hyphen, but this does not seem to be a major problem. I shall make a move request unless a consensus objects.

Cape Verde prefers the country name Cabo Verde

Since its founding in 1975, the Republic of Cabo Verde has preferred to use its Portuguese country name “Cabo Verde” in the English language rather than a fully or partially translated version of its name such as “Cape Green” or “Cape Verde”.

A Google English language search for "Cape Verde" returns “Cape Verde” and 204,000,000 results.
A Google English language search for "Cabo Verde" returns “Cape Verde” and 64,000,000 results.
A Bing English language search for "Cape Verde" returns “Cape Verde” and 20,100,000 results.
A Bing English language search for "Cabo Verde" returns “Cape Verde” and 10,400,000 results.
A Yahoo English language search for "Cape Verde" returns “Cape Verde” and 20,200,000 results.
A Yahoo English language search for "Cabo Verde" returns “Cape Verde” and 10,600,000 results.

The following four organizations use the country name "Cape Verde":

  1. The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office
  2. The Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
  3. The South African Department of International Relations and Cooperation
  4. The Universal Postal Union

The following ten organizations use the country name "Cabo Verde":

  1. The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
  2. Global Affairs Canada
  3. The Indian Ministry of External Affairs
  4. The International Organization for Standardization
  5. The New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade
  6. The Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs
  7. The United Nations
  8. The United States Department of State
  9. The United States Central Intelligence Agency
  10. The World Trade Organization

While the country name “Cabo Verde” has substantial acceptance among governments, the older name “Cape Verde” continues to be more commonly used in the English language. While I find the mixed English/Portuguese hybrid repugnant, I shall make no move request. Hopefully, “Cabo Verde” shall achieve greater use in English.

The Czech Republic prefers the country name Czechia

Since its founding in 1993, the Czech Republic has preferred to use “Czechia” (“Česko” in the Czech language) as the country’s name and reserve the name “Czech Republic” (“Česká republika” in the Czech language) for the country’s government. The Czech language Wikipedia uses the article title Česko for this country.

A Google English language search for "Czech Republic" returns “Czech Republic” and 1,210,000,000 results.
A Google English language search for "Czechia" returns “Czech Republic” and 11,800,000 results.
A Bing English language search for "Czech Republic" returns "Czech Republic" and 29,900,000 results.
A Bing English language search for "Czechia" returns "Czech Republic" and 4,420,000 results.
A Yahoo English language search for "Czech Republic" returns "Czech Republic" and 30,200,000 results.
A Yahoo English language search for "Czechia" returns "Czech Republic" and 4,440,000 results.

The following ten organizations use the country name "Czech Republic":

  1. The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
  2. The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office
  3. Global Affairs Canada
  4. The Indian Ministry of External Affairs
  5. The Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
  6. The New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade
  7. The Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs
  8. The South African Department of International Relations and Cooperation
  9. The Universal Postal Union
  10. The World Trade Organization

The following four organizations use the country name "Czechia":

  1. The International Organization for Standardization
  2. The United Nations
  3. The United States Department of State
  4. The United States Central Intelligence Agency

While the Czech Republic has promoted the use of its country name “Czechia” in the English language, the “Czech Republic” dominates. Why we like “Czech Republic” and “Slovakia” instead of “Czechia” or the “Slovak Republic” is beyond me. I shall make no move request.

Conclusion

My conclusion is that Ivory Coast should be moved to Côte d’Ivoire and that East Timor should be moved to Timor-Leste. I believe that Cape Verde and the Czech Republic should remain as they are for now.

I would appreciate your feedback on these four country names. Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 03:59, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

You were told at the recent thread on VPPOL/VPPRO to use the WP:RM process on the articles concerned if you believe the case is strong to move these articles. Why are you at this page? --Izno (talk) 04:08, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
Simply because I wish to explain my research on all four countries in one place before I go off half-cocked. This posting may also serve as a future reference on this general topic. If you are offended, please ignore this posting.  Buaidh  talk contribs 04:11, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
Thanks, I think you have done good work and explained it well, and I'm likely to support the moves of the two that you find have their preferred names in common use in English sources. Dicklyon (talk) 04:15, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
Thank you for your comments. Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 02:51, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
Regarding search engine results: If website A uses Côte d’Ivoire fifty times and website B uses Ivory Coast once, that might skew the results. If fifty unreliable websites use Ivory Coast once each, but one highly reliable website uses Côte d’Ivoire, that might also skew the results. Station1 (talk) 20:42, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
True enough, but we are looking at billions of websites to get a rough feel for the relative prevalence of two names for the same country. If three prominent search engines show the same preference for one country name, it is probably a good indicator of relative use. Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 02:51, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Station1's point is extremely important. Collecting statistics from Ghits and NGrams is interesting, but is unreliable and can be very unreliable. It is better to consider the best sources most seriously, and the best sources should be the current sources, and if they are not then fixit first, and so titling decisions should be made by considering the article references most importantly. Has this been done. Also, consider WP:TITLECHANGES and the fact that there is already a heavy history of discussions on retitling some of these articles. Have you considered every valid argument made in past discussions, or is this an attempted restart focused solely on your favourite arguments? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:32, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
The results of this study were rather surprising to me. I had guessed that Cabo Verde would qualify and the other three would not. I would change all four of these country names if I had my druthers. These results proved both my guesses and my druthers to be wrong.
English language use is an extremely subjective measure. With the search engine study, we have a rough measure of common English language use. With the poll of authoritative international organizations, we have a rough measure of sophisticated English language use. These evaluations are subject to examination and interpretation. To point out that these evaluations have errors does not invalidate the results. If anyone has more sophisticated techniques for measuring English language use, I would love to hear of them. Thanks for your comments. Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 05:11, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
“If anyone has more sophisticated techniques for measuring English language use, I would love to hear of them“. Well, anything involving any analytical input is more sofisticated that ghits. Seriously, as I already said, analyse the best sources for the topic, where the measure of the best sources are the current sources for the article. Also remember that English is a dog of a language, there are no universal rules, and in Wikipedia WP:ENGVAR and WP:TITLECHANGES are important barriers for title fiddling. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:18, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
That is a good idea, although the references should probably be no more than ten years old. Several sources are in a language other than English and several sources are translated into English from another language. Several sources are referenced multiple times. I wonder if these should be counted more heavily. Many of these sources refer to the country by more than a single name. Thank you for undertaking this task. Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 20:11, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

I agree with your argument, but there isn't consensus for these moves, and several of these pages are currently under move moratoriums. The process that was used for the move to New York (state) may be useful; that proposal was discussed for months at Talk:New York (state)/Proposed move before a formal move proposal was made. power~enwiki (π, ν) 22:20, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

I think that is a very good idea. Thank you,  Buaidh  talk contribs 20:20, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

OK, but on the merits, I care little about what various government agencies have to say or what a country's government or local people's preference is or results from search engines (which are very unreliable). What I do care about is common usage and what is most likely to be most recognizable to the most English-speaking readers. This is impossible to know, but some indicators would be 1) what people use in conversations, 2) what popular newspapers and magazines use, 3) what popular offline and online atlases use, and 4) what popular books use. These are, I would think, likely indicators of common usage, and also producers of common usage going forward.

Conversation would be a very good indicator of course but is basically impossible to know. The others are hard to know, mainly because "popular" is hard to know and weigh (for instance, an atlas that is used by many thousands of people and one that is virtually unused would weigh very differently), altho some data can be gathered. However, for all English-language books (which, statistically, should correlate well with average popularity given enough instances I would suppose), we have Google Ngrams which is very easy to access and pretty reliable. So let's look:

  • This Ngram shows Ivory Coast easily surpassing Côte d'Ivoire. I am surprised, I thought Côte d'Ivoire was the rare exception where the local name is in general English use. But data is data.
But the trend line is odd; it indicates that in the runup to 1960 independence and for 13 years after there was increasing mention of this country, but after 1973 book writers pretty suddenly stopped caring about Côte d'Ivoire. I can't explain this, but it would be consistent with something wrong with the database (altho maybe book writers did stop caring about the Ivory Coast, becase the database is believed to be pretty reliable).
  • This Ngram shows East Timor handily outnumbering Timor-Leste which doesn't even appear before 2000. I'm not surprised, I've never heard of Timor-Leste.
  • Here, Cape Verde tops Cabo Verde by a large margin. Very unsurprising I would think.
  • Here Czechia barely even registers. Also not surprised. Note that the result is case sensitive to "Czech republic" would not appear. Anyway... this is a big political football here, so that's probably a separate discussion.

I'm mostly not surprised -- English speakers commonly use anglicized names for countries (Spain not España, Italy not Italia, and so forth). This is commonly done for populated places which have a common English name (small ones mostly don't). And most any country is written about enough to have an English name.

(Also, FWIW, I disagree that current use matters nearly as much for as people think. For Ngrams, what matters is the area under the line, at least over the last couple-few decades. A lot of readers are coming here from mentions in books and atlases published in 1973 or whenever. For people coming here from newspapers and magazines it would matter.) Herostratus (talk) 10:33, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

I agree with what Heroatratus says here. The above search seems to favour foreign government websites etc. which, while they have their place, are often going to be loaded in the direction of what the countries concerned want, for diplomatic reasons. While independent organs such as the BBC stick to the true common name of Ivory Coast. I know the "yogurt principle" is much derided, but it kind of applies here. Cote d'Ivoire had six RMs in as many years before eventually moving to Ivory Coast in 2012,and has now been stable ever since with no further RMs. I suggest we leave it that way.  — Amakuru (talk) 11:09, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Words as words, and article titles

This article title has a word that it's about in quotes, even though in running article text, it should be in italics, per MOS:WAW (I've started to clean up the article itself, but got sidetracked thinking about the title). My initial thought is that it would be best to move the article to the version without the quotes, and then set the DISPLAYTITLE to have it show italics. But in case things like this have come up before, I thought I'd ask for suggestions here first. Thanks, –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 15:19, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Add: Forgot to mention that I'm unsure if actually having "...the word ___" in the title makes any difference. I'm also tempted to change "about" to "involving", but that's a bit of a separate issue. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 15:23, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

RfC on naming guidelines when a person has plead the Alford plea, whether the parenthetical disambiguator "(criminal)" should be used

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
There is no consensus among the editors participating in this discussion as to the stated RfC questions, "Should those who have plead the Alford plea in a court of law have their articles parenthetically disambiguated with (criminal)?" and "Does pleading the Alford plea make someone a 'criminal' in the eyes of the wiki?". Whether !voting support, oppose, or mooing, the majority of comments were some variation of "it depends" or statements that the questions as framed did not allow for a clear answer. Many editors felt that an Alford plea should not be the only factor in deciding whether or not an article title is disambiguated with (criminal), and there were strong policy-based arguments that the disambiguation used in an article title should be chosen by following reliable sources and not our own understanding of, for example, an Alford plea.

Commenting as an editor and not a closer: the "correct" interpretation of an Alford plea (a.k.a. the "guilty-but-not-guilty plea") is a complicated question debated by scholars and courts; Wikipedia did not answer it in this discussion. It's clear there is still no agreement as to whether the article on Michael Peterson should use the disambiguation (criminal); however, the discussion here was longer than any of the previous discussions on that article's talk page and archive, moving the conversation closer to consensus. What struck me while reading those talk page threads was the lack of links to and quotes from the nearly 40 sources cited in the article. Consensus may be easier to achieve through an examination of what words or phrases are most commonly used by the RSes to describe the article's subject that we can use as a DAB. Leviv ich 05:56, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

Should those who have plead the Alford plea in a court of law have their articles parenthetically disambiguated with (criminal)? 23:52, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

A bit of background:

The Alford plea is a plea in the court of law, which means the defendant pleaded "guilty" to save themselves from worse punishment. This plea is mostly plead in murder or manslaughter cases where. The evidence against them is so convincing, that the court would find them guilty (and the judge does not dismiss the trial) and if they pleaded "not guilty" they may face punishment such as the death penalty, so scared them into pleading guilty for a lesser sentence.

Take the article Michael Peterson (criminal). He was convicted of murder, but then because an expert witness in the case was found to have provided false and inaccurate information on other cases the court gave him a retrial. In this retrail he plead the Alford plea and subsequently was sentenced to 86 months in prison with credit, so was released from jail has he had served longer than that.

Therefore, the defendant has only plead "guilty" to save themselves, but still think they are "not guilty". This raises the question: Does pleading the Alford plea make someone a "criminal" in the eyes of the wiki?

This was brought to my attention through the discussion I had with Gazeboist on my talk page and am opening on their behalf. Some important points in their message to me:

it is not reasonable to describe him as "convicted", despite the Alford plea, due to the nature of an Alford plea and the post-conviction relief process in the United States
The Alford plea theoretically requires that there be enough evidence to convict a defendant, but in practice it merely requires that the prosecution have enough evidence that a judge will not dismiss the case before trial (as happened in this case). It amounts to an agreement to leave the case perpetually in the state it was in after the conviction was thrown out: Peterson asserts his innocence, but the claim has effectively never gone to trial. The assertion that Peterson is a "criminal" or "murderer" has been found *provable* but it has not been *proven*.

Please indicate your support/oppose to having the Alford plea be justification for the "criminal" parenthetical disambiguation. Comments are also welcome.

  • Support: Alford plea IS justification for the "criminal" parenthetical disambiguation
  • Oppose: Alford plea is NOT justification for the "criminal" parenthetical disambiguation

pinging those involved in the recent RM. @Ravensfire, TheGridExe, SnowFire, Born2cycle, Gonnym, and Dlohcierekim: Dreamy Jazz 🎷 talk to me | my contributions 23:52, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

@The Grid: Dreamy Jazz 🎷 talk to me | my contributions 23:53, 7 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose Alford plea being justification i tried to remain neutral in the proposal, but feel that the Alford plea in it's very description is basically the defendant to pleading "guilty but only because i fear worse punishment". Dreamy Jazz 🎷 talk to me | my contributions 23:56, 7 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support Alford plea being justification for using (criminal) in title. I'm open to being persuaded otherwise, but here's my thinking: out job is to reflect the real world, not judge it and override it. If in the real world a person is legitimately known as a criminal, then that justifies our identifying that person as such, even in their title as disambiguation if that is what they are known for. My understanding is that anyone who pleads to a lesser crime is still a criminal. Right? So identifying them as a criminal is fine. --В²C ☎ 01:10, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
    To clarify: Just because someone uses the Alford plea doesn't mean we must, nor does it mean we can't, use criminal as disambiguation. It all depends on what the person is best known for per usage in reliable sources. --В²C ☎ 19:49, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support the proposal, opposing hair splitting until someone finds legal source which do this kind of hair splitting. Merriam-Webster's one of the definitions is "a person who has been convicted of a crime". @Dreamy Jazz: - this may also mean pleading "guilty but only because i was so badly framed and my lawyer sucks" and many other things. Staszek Lem (talk) 01:18, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose. An "I'm actually innocent" plea-bargain deal isn't at all what criminal means except in a very narrow pseudo-legalistic sense (in which a few dictionaries mistakenly treat it as synonymous with convict). This is not the sense by which about 99.99% of readers interpret the word.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:17, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Mu We aren't nearly as interested in what the person says about themselves, as in what reliable sources say about them. If the person plead guilty, and yet reliable sources later write that they didn't actually do it, but said so in order to cover for someone else, or because they were mentally ill, or because they were misled by their lawyer, or a hundred other reasons, we don't call them criminal. If the person was never convicted, or even never tried, and yet reliable sources call them the leader of the Mafia, or the Mexican drug cartel, we do. --GRuban (talk) 02:28, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose per GRuban above. Like everything else on WP, we must bear in mind WP:V and WP:SYNTH. If multiple reliable sources call someone a criminal, we are justified in doing so; otherwise we are not justified in synthesizing Alford plea=criminal. Station1 (talk) 06:07, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose along the lines of SMcCandlish's point. There's a case somewhere in the courts of appeal where it's "guilty but only because the guards beat me up this morning". The ultimate question here is whether we think a "criminal" is (a) someone who has committed a crime or (b) someone who has been convicted of a crime. Someone who takes an Alford plea is (b), but the plea is no more evidence of (a) than the lack of dismissal. And I think that, whatever the opinions of Merriam-Webster, most people read "criminal" (and unfortunately "convict" as well...) as (a). I'd also like to reiterate a note I made over at WP:LAW that the Alford plea article needs some attention from a relevant expert (which I am not, although I do have a casual interest in law), both for readability and for neutrality. (And thanks to @Dreamy Jazz: both for making the RfC and for teaching me how to ping people properly :p)Gazeboist (talk) 07:15, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Clarification - my understanding is if you're voting Oppose you're saying that we cannot use (criminal) in the title for a person use uses the Alford plea. But that doesn't jive with the comments following several Oppose !votes here. This is very confusing. --В²C ☎ 18:13, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Mu, this question is malformed, but if you insist my position is closer to "support" in the sense that I think Peterson's case specifically merits a (criminal) disambiguator per the original RM. What matters, per GRuban, is what reliable sources say about somebody. It's possible to have somebody who was straight-up convinced as guilty, no special plea involved, who would be grossly inappropriate to have a (criminal) modifier; it's possible to have somebody who was never tried in court nor punished justly have a (criminal) modifier. An Alford Plea is evidence in support of a (criminal) disambiguator, weakly; unlike SMcCandlish and Gazeboist, it is not an "I'm actually innocent" plea bargain, it is an admission of guilt. This is more of a footnote, however, that assures the title doesn't fall afoul of WP:BLP; the actual reason the "criminal" modifier is used for Peterson is because that is overwhelmingly his only source for his notability, and how newspapers and reliable sources have covered him - all in relation to the murder which he was convicted of. (And as a side note, he sure seems guilty as hell from my knowledge of the case as well as that of some friends that live in the area, although my feelings are irrelevant.) More importantly, we don't have anything else to use for Peterson - he wasn't notable as anything else. I recommended (born 19XX) as a fallback disambiguator for cases where the only notability is criminal-ness and the relevance of (criminal) is more contested. As an example, there are various bad-old-South "trials" that happened in the Jim Crow era where they hanged random black people in the area of a crime, and regardless of the conviction; such cases would generally be presented by modern reliable sources as more being victims or bystanders in the wrong place, not as actual criminals. So. Reliable sources first (but Alford plea is usually a RS in favor of criminal). SnowFire (talk) 18:44, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
    • An Alford plea is explicitly not an admission of guilt. This is quite literally the only thing that renders it distinct from a regular guilty plea. It is a statement that the accused believes for whatever reason they would lose or are dangerously likely to lose if brought to trial, but claims that they did not commit the crime in question (or sometimes, as in this case, that no crime occurred).Gazeboist (talk) 20:44, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
    • As a further note to Peterson: he is notable not just as someone convicted of murder but as someone whose murder conviction was overturned on evidentiary grounds. It was in this context that I heard about him in the first place, and I at least was trying to emphasize that particular case in the broader Alford plea discussion as well. That said, the goal here is to avoid re-litigating the Peterson article specifically, so I'm not going to get into the weeds on the subject.Gazeboist (talk) 20:48, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Mu The issue is not "do we ourselves decide to call them a criminal based on whether or not we think the Alford plea makes them a criminal". We should use terminology that reliable sources consistently use. We don't make our own decisions, we reflect existing scholarship. I am neither a qualified lawyer or legal expert, nor do I care what an Alford plea is or is not. People who write actual reliable sources do that for me. I just have to write Wikipedia articles to reflect what those reliable sources say. --Jayron32 19:03, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support the criminal classification but I think we knew that already in terms of previous discussions on the Michael Peterson talk page. There's multiple Michael Petersons and not much was really found for his works as an author before the death of his second wife. – The Grid (talk) 19:20, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Close? I suggest this proposal/discussion be closed. Because of how it was presented it's not entirely clear who is supporting/opposing what and drawing anyone else into this quagmire just wastes their time. --01:00, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
Also the question has been unasked twice so far. Herostratus (talk) 01:47, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Moo But I mean what are you going to call the subject (assuming that disambiguation is required)? If the person notability is mainly connected to something else, fine, you have "Pinckney Pruddle (actor)" who also pled to some crimes. But if his main notability is the crime(s), and you don't want to use "(criminal)", what are you going to use? "Pinckney Pruddle (convict)"? Or what? Herostratus (talk) 01:47, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
    • I presume it would be decided on a case-by-case basis but if "criminal" was not acceptable then I don't see how "convict" could be. Never-the-less moot since no one is supporting the idea and I wish somebody would just close this discussion and end the misery. --В²C ☎ 19:38, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support. We label people criminals when they are convicted of a crime. If the vast majority of reliable sources dispute that a crime occurred, we say that, but otherwise we stick to WP:MNA. Many innocent people plead guilty; why would we make an exception for the Alford plea? What is so special about it? This is POV in my opinion, because convicted criminals who had pleaded not guilty are called criminals in their article titles. Therefore, in order to avoid being called a criminal on Wikipedia, you simply have to plead the Alford plea to generate confusion instead of a not guilty plea to exonerate yourself. (I am not watching this page, so please ping me if you want my attention.) wumbolo ^^^ 13:28, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support. The fact that someone maintains their innocence in making a plea is not proof of innocence. It is important to remember the flip-side of the equation, which is that the subject who makes an Alford plea only got to the point of making one because the authorities believed there to be enough evidence to charge them with a crime, and because the subject himself thought the evidence was enough to convict them of the crime. Ergo, this isn't a case of us deciding to label an innocent person as a criminal, but of us deciding to label as a criminal a person against whom there must be fairly strong evidence of a crime. bd2412 T 14:11, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment - Hmmm... I think we may be focusing on the wrong question here. Instead of asking: are we allowed to use the word “criminal” as a disambiguator, we should be asking: is there a better disambiguator that we can use? Most of the time there will be. If nothing else, we should probably be more specific. For example: “XXX (embezzler)” or “YYY (serial killer)”. Blueboar (talk) 14:58, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose per Gazeboist and others. Also, as Jayron32 says, we should be guided by what RS say about people, especially in somewhere as prominent as the title of an article. (Summoned by bot) HouseOfChange (talk) 04:44, 20 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support per bd412. If there are serious doubts about applying the general rule to a particular person, we can decide otherwise, but an Alford plea is a guilty plea legally speaking. Calidum 04:56, 20 January 2019 (UTC)
  • It depends. In many cases - yes. In some cases, in which the Alford plea results in no jail time (i.e. credit serves) it is questionable. I would avoid the criminal disambig for Michael Peterson (criminal), but for most other cases it is probably appropriate. I don't think a hard and fast rule is appropriate here (the same is true for criminal convictions - e.g. stating the Groveland Four were criminal would've been questionable also prior to the 2019 pardon.[16]). Icewhiz (talk) 15:18, 22 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose - I understand that the parenthetic term is used for disambiguation. If my understanding is correct, I think that criminal is too granular a term. For disambiguation purposes I think that "litigant" or "party to litigation" (or similar term) could be used to effectively disambiguate. However, I am ok with the term criminal applied to someone who enters an Alford plea as the law effectively treats that person as having plead guilty. If all persons convicted of crimes but proclaimed their innocence were not deemed "criminal", Wikipedia would have very few persons listed as "criminal". --Rpclod (talk) 19:05, 22 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose - Criminal seems like a weird disambigution for any page. Michael Peterson (criminal) for example, is a novelist who killed his wife. He's famous for the case surrounding him, perhaps, but for his disambiguation to be criminal is an odd one. I'd prefer him just to be written as Michael Peterson (murder trialist). Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 09:24, 23 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment I agree that "criminal" should be used sparingly in an article title. I think that there should be no blanket rule on use of that term. Coretheapple (talk) 15:23, 26 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support (i.e. oppose prohibition on use of "criminal" in this case), however that disambiguator should be used only where it's the most appropriate - e.g. if "(murder defendent)" (or "(widower)"?) is better then use that. DexDor (talk) 16:03, 26 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support per DexDor, Coretheapple, and others (in that I oppose prohibiting the use of "criminal", outright, but do recommend thoughtful prudence in deciding for its use).--John Cline (talk) 01:17, 27 January 2019 (UTC)
Just to clarify, as saw your ping. I don't support or oppose any rule on this. I believe it needs to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Coretheapple (talk) 16:16, 27 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment I am opposed to using "criminal" as a parenthetic, especially for living people. While nominally accurate, there are inherent BLP concerns that should be addressed. --Enos733 (talk) 01:11, 29 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose(ish). I came here to close but since I commented on a RM at Petersen which seems to have precipitated this whole thing, I will jump on the "we should take guidance from RS as to whether any given individual is still a criminal after an Alford plea. The BLP implications are real and the decision on this should be done on a case by case basis. Best wishes, Barkeep49 (talk) 15:29, 9 February 2019 (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.

Ellipses in titles for album and song articles

A discussion is underway at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (music)#Treatment for ellipses in titles for album and song articles. All interested editors, feel free to weigh in. JG66 (talk) 05:57, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Disambiguator for Larry Miller (sports executive)

Need ideas on the existing disambiguator of Larry Miller (sports executive). There are a few problems. First of all, "sports executive" is ambiguous with Larry H. Miller, who was also a sports executive as the longtime owner of the Utah Jazz basketball team in the NBA. Secondly, the current "(sports executive)", Larry G. Miller, only spent five years as a basketball team executive in the NBA. The majority of his career has been in the sports footwear and apparel business with Nike, which I think is more of a business executive than a sports executive.—Bagumba (talk) 05:05, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

principle of least surprise

I was very surprised to notice that WP:SURPRISE is not a WP policy and not even used as a foundation of the policies on this project page and not even mentioned here. Equally weird is that there is no hatnote on Principle of least astonishment referring to any WP editing, not even Wikipedia:Writing better articles. --Espoo (talk) 16:39, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Determining an album title's character set?

Right now there is the article for the album ΝHΠIAΓΩΓEION: Live in Europe 1988 where the characters to the left of the colon are a mix of the roman and the greek alphabet. All characters which only exist in the Greek Alphabet like the Omega are in the greek alphabet, but the ones where the symbol exists in both alphabet (Roman N vs. Greek Ν) are done in the roman alphabet. I believe that it should be moved to the name with all of the characters to the left of the colon should be in the greek alphabet (and have proposed such at the page), but I'd like guidance.Naraht (talk) 14:45, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

Makes sense to me. Do that. --Jayron32 14:55, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
(as an additional note, el:Νηπιαγωγείο is Kindergarden and is the word in the title (capitalized with the addition of a Movable nu)Naraht (talk) 14:58, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

RfC about article naming for biographies whose subjects have frequently changed their names

There is no consensus to make any changes, so this should continue to be handled on a case-by-case basis.

Cunard (talk) 23:45, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

The following discussion 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.

In cases in which the subject of a biography has changed their name or stage name enough that there is no clear primary name by which they're known, how should that biography be titled? RfC relisted by Cunard (talk) at 01:14, 25 March 2019 (UTC). Smith(talk) 18:32, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

I would like a consensus to clarify WP:NAMECHANGES. This came up in the requested move of Marina and the Diamonds - she no longer performs under that name, but the name she does perform under, MARINA, has been used by other people. Marina (Welsh singer) was felt to be a mouthful, Marina (singer) too ambiguous, and Marina and the Diamonds is no longer accurate, as WP:NAMECHANGES says to favour high-quality sources after the change of a name. One suggestion was Marina Diamandis, her legal name, though she does not perform under that name. In situations where stage names are unclear, is there a preference for legal names? Smith(talk)
I Note that there have been two recent RMs on this issue... the result of both was “no consensus”. My advice would be to WAIT a bit... give the sources time catch up to the fact that this singer has changed her stage name. Usually, the sources will eventually settle such questions for us, indicating what name we should use as our article title. Yes, that does mean that the article title will remain at the obsolete name for a while... but at the moment, that obsolete name is still quite recognizable (and probably still what most readers would look for). There is no need to change the policy. Blueboar (talk) 18:56, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
I'm sure that will settle itself shortly, but I'm asking in a more general sense as well. I faced that issue with Claire Rachel Wilkinson, who was formerly referred to as Clairity and now goes by 7Chariot for some music; at the time, there weren't enough high quality sources to confirm that that would remain her name going forward, so the best thing I could come up with was to name the article after her legal name. Smith(talk)
Another recent RM to consider is the one at Talk:Teddy Sinclair, where most people agreed that the previous title was bad (as it was a name she never used), but disagreed over whether it should be at Natalia Kills (her old name) or Teddy Sinclair (her new name). I don't think there's an issue with the policy, just with how consistently it's applied. Iffy★Chat -- 13:40, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
In the case of a performer who has changed their stage name, we should use the name used by the preponderance of the sources throughout their public career. We should avoid recentism, the tendency to go with the very latest stage name. Evaluate the full range of sources throughout the performer's career, and use their best known stage name. Cullen328 Let's discuss it 05:29, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
(Summoned by bot) I agree with Cullen328 above, and would add that "use common names""" is an official policy. I think the trouble is when there's conflict on what that "common name" is.  I dream of horses  If you reply here, please ping me by adding {{U|I dream of horses}} to your message  (talk to me) (My edits) @ 02:54, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
The only caveat is that (as with any name change) we should give more weight to sources written after the change was announced. This is already outlined in the policy. Blueboar (talk) 13:41, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
It's very difficult to have a blanket rule for all cases such as these, as they tend to be quite different. There should probably be a case by case decision when this happens. Other than the above advice of "following the sources", I don't think we'll be able to make a decision that covers all instances. I agree that we shouldn't automatically go for the more recent change. Sometimes (see Snoop Dogg / Snoop Lion) the name change is just a fad that will revert to the original rather quickly and WP would look foolish trying to keep up with artistic whims. In other cases (see ANOHNI), the name change is indicative of a gender transition or an identity change as a whole, where things go deeper than a mere different name under which they perform and should be used as such on WP. PraiseVivec (talk) 10:31, 29 March 2019 (UTC)

I've added the RfC to the "style and naming" section of RfCs, to broaden the scope of people who will be summoned by the bot.  I dream of horses  If you reply here, please ping me by adding {{U|I dream of horses}} to your message  (talk to me) (My edits) @ 02:57, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

  • (Invited by the bot) The RFC is probably good to expand a discussion, but I can't see it coming to any conclusion....it's really a case by case basis, I.E. leave it to editor decisions. North8000 (talk) 19:09, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
  • The crux of the problem is that some name changes are ephemeral and some are persistent. The Snoop Dogg/Snoop Lion example from above is a great example: Snoop announced a name change, and then... pretty quickly everyone ignored it, and kept calling him Snoop Dogg, even himself. Sean Combs bewildering number of variations of the Puff Daddy theme also comes to mind. In the other direction, we have name changes like Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali, which clearly stuck. The deal is, the difference between an ephemeral name change and a persistent name change can only be seen through time. You don't know if some change is going to stay and become common and persistent (i.e. Prince vs. Symbol) or not. And sometimes a name sticks and becomes persistent, and then the person changes it back and that becomes persistent too, c.f. Chad Johnson/Chad Ochocinco. People have unrealistic expectations that we will know, in advance, whether a new name will become a common name, and instantly change our article to reflect that. Sometimes we know pretty quickly, and for various reasons, we will change an article quickly (especially when dealing with issues of gender identity, for example), but other times it is more wise to just ride it out for a while and see where it goes. North8000's point about every one of these being a "case by case basis" are important. There are just too many edge cases, and so many of these things are handled in unique ways that require nuance and context. --Jayron32 12:44, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
  • No rules change needed, and basically an invalid RfC question. The correct name by our normal article title policy, disambiguation practices, and naming conventions would in fact be "Marina (Welsh singer)". Unless she changes it to something else next week and gets even more famous under that name, a bridge we'd cross if and when we came to it. Part of the premise of this RfC is also wrong, however, and makes this RfC useless. An article about the Welsh singer Marina (who was still a Welsh singer Marina even when in the band Marina and the Diamonds) is not the same thing as an article on the band. If the band is not independently notable of the singer (whose name did not change) then they might redirect to a section of her bio. If she's not notable apart from the band, then the opposite redirect. There is no actual conflict to resolve here.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:42, 2 April 2019 (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.

Article naming convention

I've moved this back to the original version, since the move has been contested. This is procedural, not endorsing one version or the other. As SMcC says, this is the wrong venue for this discussion. An RM should be started by those who want to lowercase it.  — Amakuru (talk) 08:17, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

The following discussion 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.

Hello, I am the writer of NGHTCRWLRS. It was moved to Nghtcrwlrs and changed at every instance in the article. it has never been printed as such in a source.

If every source (or most) report it as NGHTCRWLRS, it should be reflected here since Wikipedia does not infringe on artistic style, nor allow original research. This is apparent at iPod, Guns N' Roses, NSYNC (supported in its state by backronym), Mötley Crüe, k.d. lang and the existence of {{lowercasetitle}}, instead of Ipod, Guns n' Roses, Nsync, Motley Crue, K.D. Lang. The guideline should allow for this naming. There should be an equivalent {{uppercasetitle}}. This circumstance is not short living; this specific topic is reported at major media outlets such as Paste Magazine, Billboard Magazine - NorthPark1417 (talk) 01:06, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

  • Move back to all caps. This is a good example of how all MOS guidance will have occasional exceptions. Yes, we normally don't put article titles in all caps... but this is an exception. Blueboar (talk) 17:44, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
  • Wrong process (and use lower-case absent some compelling reason to ignore our guidelines). The proper process for this is WP:RM. And be aware of MOS:TM, MOS:TITLE, and WP:NCCAPS (plus WP:COI). Wikipedia does not mimic marketing capitalization gimmicks like "SONY" and "macy's". It'll have to be shown that the capitalization in the title serves some kind of semantic purpose (e.g. is an acronym).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:50, 2 April 2019 (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.

Should titles which differ only by English spelling variations (WP:TITLEVAR/WP:ENGVAR) be made exceptions to the principle of WP:SMALLDETAILS? Some editors feel that the spelling variations are too easily confused in linking and searching, and so the titles should be disambiguated as though there was no spelling difference. Others feel that the variation is distinct enough. To give some current examples:

Would just like to get some discussion about this to see where people stand on general principles. -- Netoholic @ 03:56, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

No, not as a policy. The current policy to allow such WP:SMALLDETAILS works well to handle the cases where it the variation is distinct enough (such as in the first two examples at least). -- JHunterJ (talk) 13:46, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
Yes, I guess that example is fine. Probably best to assess cases on their merits. What we don't do, though, is use ENGVAR differences as disambuators. E. G. :
Even if one is American and the other is British.  — Amakuru (talk) 08:22, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

RfC on disambiguation of TV articles

An RfC has been opened at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (television)#RFC: What disambiguation should shows from the United States and United Kingdom use?. Additional participation is welcomed. -- Netoholic @ 18:52, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

RM discussion about temporally specific disambiguators like "(defunct)"

FYI
 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Talk:KCTY (defunct)#Defunct television station disambiguator changes.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:18, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Argh. This has WP:TALKFORKed into Talk:KAPY-LP (defunct)#Defunct radio station disambiguator changes, too.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:51, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

"fizzy drinks", "soda" and "pop" (and "soda pop")

@Izno: I think you're right in this, but don't the examples we give immediately below appear to disagree with thdm assertion that we are only talking about formal written varieties? If the actual reason we went with Soft drink was the others are not formal enough then the example doesn't really work here... Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:42, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

The second paragraph makes it fairly clear that the MOS:COMMONALITY principle is why we name it soft drink, not necessarily because of formality. --Izno (talk) 13:44, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

Question on using which name for a Chinese company article

Hello folks.

Need a few minutes of your time if I can. I'm deciding on whether I should use (for a Chinese vehicle manufacturer) whose name is officially "Nanjing Golden Dragon Bus". The problem is that it's known as "Nanjing Golden Dragon Skywell".

I made two searches to see which makes sense.

For reference, the official website in English is right here.

Ominae (talk) 00:59, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

I can probably add the latter as a note reference. Ominae (talk) 07:04, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

Nepal Municipalities

I have noticed that municipalities in Nepal are inconsistently titled. E.g., Birtamod and Kankai Municipality. There is a formal definition (Municipality#Municipalities by country. Before doing anything, I'd like to have consensus that they should all be the same and which way. This article would imply "Municipality" should not be included in the name. In some cases, there is another place at the name (e.g. Arjundhara Municipality & Arjundhara which would also have to be sorted out. MB 18:33, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Should Trans and Cis redirect to Transgender and Cisgender?

For a limited time only, we've got two LGBT related move discussions for the price of one!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Trans#Requested_move_4_May_2019

WanderingWanda (talk) 04:09, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Move discussion regarding the Genderqueer article...again

As some here may know, the Genderqueer article has been the subject of multiple move discussions. Just like last last time, we need opinions on the latest one: Talk:Genderqueer#Requested move 1 May 2019. A permalink for it is here. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 05:44, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

If any editors have any opinions on WP:NOUN, that is one aspect addressed in the move discussion. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 19:28, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Given the disambiguation aspect of the discussion, it has occurred to me that leaving a note about the move discussion at Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation might also be beneficial. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 19:32, 5 May 2019 (UTC) Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 19:39, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Requested move: Chairman to Chairperson

In case anyone is interested, see Talk:Chairman#Requested move 8 May 2019. -- Netoholic @ 03:57, 12 May 2019 (UTC)

Requested move: Masculism templates

Hi all, your considered input would be appreciated here:

Talk:Masculism#Requested_move_13_May_2019

One proposal is to move the Masculism templates to Masculinism

A counter-proposal is to move to the templates to Boys and men

WanderingWanda (talk) 03:55, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

Matching commas on attributive nouns in titles

Followers of this page may be interested in WT:MOS#Matching commas on attributive nouns in titles. --Izno (talk) 12:00, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (US stations)/NYC Subway RfC

There is currently an RfC to discuss the naming of articles for NYC Subway stations. StudiesWorld (talk) 01:11, 9 June 2019 (UTC)

And in particular whether ignoring WP:PRECISION for NYC Subway station articles would improve the encyclopedia. -- JHunterJ (talk) 15:12, 18 June 2019 (UTC)

Military campaigns

There is an issue over the move of article titles from "Military Campaign" to "Military campaign" see Wikipedia talk:Requested moves#Military campaigns. -- PBS (talk) 09:17, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

"The" in article titles

Is there any convention for when "the" should or should not lead off an article title? The article in question is Spirit of the Border, which details a book by Zane Gray actually titled The Spirit of the Border. I would move it, but want to ensure there is no guideline saying otherwise before doing so. --Usernameunique (talk) 17:38, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

WP:THE oddly enough. For titles of works, yes it probably should be. Those interested can join the current discussion at Talk:Frick Collection, a more borderline case. Johnbod (talk) 18:05, 29 June 2019 (UTC)
WP:THE... Surprising title, given the subject. Thanks for the heads up, Johnbod, I've made the change accordingly. --Usernameunique (talk) 19:00, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Your feedback is requested at Talk:World history

Your feedback is requested at a disputed title discussion about the article currently known as "World History". Please participate at Talk:World History#Disputed title. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 06:34, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

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