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Indicated by consistent capitalization in sources

This sentence Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization) needs changing:

"For details on when to capitalize on Wikipedia, see the manual of style sections on capital letters and, when relevant, on trademarks."

Because the manual of of style (WP:MOS) often contains things that are contary to the WP:AT policy and this causes disharmony.

For example the policy say use sentence case (see WP:TITLEFORMAT), but it depends on surveying usage in reliable sources and the policy "generally prefers the name that is most commonly used (as determined by its prevalence in a significant majority ..."

However the link on capital letters goes to a MOS page that states in a section called "Military terms "The general rule is that wherever a military term is an accepted proper name, as indicated by consistent capitalization in sources, it should be capitalized"

If this second piece of guidence is use then it would be possible to argue that just one inconsistent source in one hundred is enough to state that the guidence is that it is not a proper name so don't capitalise even though under the AT policy it ought to be.

The MOS is rule based and often contradictory to the AT sourced based approach. So fixing the MOS to conform with the AT policy is pointless. It is better when "see also" is used in the naming conventions to make it clear that the wording in the MOS is not part of the AT guidance. So has anyone else any opinions how to fix this particular problem. -- PBS (talk) 19:08, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

This is backwards. There's no reason we would ever want a title to be styled in conflict with the MOS, nor would we want style guidance that conflicts with title policy. It's better to agree on what our styling guidance should be, make sure it's right in the MOS, and remove any reason for anyone to argue that titles should be styled differently from how the same terms would be styled in headings in the articles (which is the same as styled in article text but sentence-case). Many discussions have come down reaffirming the fact that choosing a title per the WP:CRITERIA and styling the title per WP:MOS are just different phases, not in conflict except where we have have gotten some of the guidance out of sync. Things like MOS:TM, MOS:CAPS, MOS:DASH, and MOS:JR play frequent roles in title styling decisions, and have done so happily for many years (with the occasional complaint from PBS and few others). Dicklyon (talk) 20:56, 1 July 2019 (UTC)
p.s. Nobody has ever argued "that just one inconsistent source in one hundred is enough" to get around the "consistently capitalized" criterion. The criterion is specifically not quantified, and is obviously about studying sources, so the complaint is purely hypothetical. In practice, it is easy to find articles in WP with titles capped when sources do not support that, and very hard to find any off in the other direction that PBS is hypothesizing. I volunteer to provide numerous examples of over-capitalized titles per example that PBS can find of the problem he's imagining. Dicklyon (talk) 21:01, 1 July 2019 (UTC)
Whatever fixes Four past Midnight. Randy Kryn (talk) 21:09, 1 July 2019 (UTC)
If MOS guidance conflicts with policy, we should change the MOS guidance. Blueboar (talk) 21:12, 1 July 2019 (UTC)
Four past Midnight has an n-gram history second to none (because when it comes to sources, there are none). Randy Kryn (talk) 21:16, 1 July 2019 (UTC)
Randy, just to be clear, you're not arguing that we'd want "Four Past Midnight" as the title and "Four past Midnight" in the text, right? That is, your beef is not a conflict between MOS and Titles like PBS says, but rather just a disagreement with the MOS, right? Dicklyon (talk) 23:28, 1 July 2019 (UTC)
Yes, MOS:CT says "In titles (including subtitles, if any) of English-language works, every word except for definite and indefinite articles, short coordinating conjunctions, and short prepositions is capitalized. This is known as title case." And yes, if that conflicts with policy, or people don't like it for some reason, it should be changed. But as long as this is the stable concensus style, why not follow it? In the case that Randy complains about, there was no consensus to capitalize. This is not the clause that PBS was speaking of, but is an example of how the MOS is typically invoked in deciding on title style. Dicklyon (talk) 22:41, 1 July 2019 (UTC)
  • Concur with DickLyon. PBS is engaged in a fantasy; no one actually presents a "one source didn't capitalize, so WP can't either" argument, and it wouldn't be accepted if someone tried that. Nothing broken, nothing to fix. Randy Krin presents a red herring; per an RfC several months ago, and conforming update to MOS:5LETTER, "past" as a preposition in a title of a work may be capitalized here if most sources do so. Nothing broken, nothing to fix. 24.23.169.45 (talk) 21:05, 2 July 2019 (UTC)
    You sound like someone we know who forgot to log in. Dicklyon (talk) 21:20, 2 July 2019 (UTC)
    Didn't forget; I don't login as SMcCandlish from machines I don't control (I have advanced bits like PageMover and TemplateEditor). This old alt. acct. is probably okay, though. — AReaderOutThataway t/c 02:33, 4 July 2019 (UTC)
  • I'm principle, PBS and Blueboar are correct. WP:AT is a policy, and has had greater participation and scrutiny down the years than the MOS. Don't get me wrong, the MOS guys like Dick do a great job, and I love the MOS, but they tend to end up slightly out of kilter with actual RM outcomes when it comes to the edge cases. That said, though, I don't really think the above change is really necessary. Things kind of mostly function as you'd expect already. (And, as an aside, since MILTERMS was brought up, it's worth noting that that is already a big outlier to anything else... articles like Syrian Civil War, or even my own FA at Rwandan Civil War, should not be capped the way they are, but there we go). Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 21:34, 2 July 2019 (UTC)
    Indeed, the milhist/milterms stuff is an odd anomaly in the MOS, where there's a list of things they say should be capped, which is sometimes interpreted as meaning even when sources don't. But this thing about WP:AT being "a policy" is just silly; there's very little policy and lot of guideline and convention there, and little if any conflict with the MOS. People trot out that line for COMMONNAME when they want to let sources vote on style, but that doesn't often carry in discussions. Dicklyon (talk) 21:59, 2 July 2019 (UTC)
    Part of the problem with the "greater participation and scrutiny down the years" at AT was the great upheaval of September 2009 where Born2Count demoted the value of recognizability and precision to zero in favor of conciseness. During that mess of fighting between Kotniski, B2C, and Pmanderson, and others, a great deal of good stuff was lost and new bad stuff inserted. For example, in this edit Kotniski inserted the exception for bird name capitalization (which took years to recover from), while removing the "policy" that now lives on only in the MOS that we "Do not capitalize the second and subsequent words in a title, unless the title is almost always capitalized in English (for example, as in proper names and book titles)." This "almost always" criterion was well known and often followed, and nobody noticed at the time when he replaced it with the wimpier "subsequent words in a title are not capitalized unless they would be in normal text", which provides really no advice based on style or sources. We haven't fully recovered from that. And his edit summary noted "(details are at the linked guideline pages anyway)"; some of these being style guidelines. A lot was done before then to factor out style stuff from AT because it applied also elsewhere. Now PBS wants us to go back the other way? Backwards, I say. And PBS was in there, too, arguing at the time that a lot of what he calls policy should be known as guidelines and conventions. I wonder why the change of heart. Dicklyon (talk) 23:01, 2 July 2019 (UTC)
    Well, I think part of the issue there is that you apply absolute adjectives "good" and "bad" to things, which I think stems from a theory that uppercase titles are ipso facto wrong, and that lowercase is objectively better. I respect your view on that matter, and I find it useful for the 50/50 cases, but I don't think it's an empirical truth. Personally I think that if an article is at around the 70% capitalised point in sources, then we should capitalise, and there's no reason to think that's a bad thing. It fits with the philosophy that Wikipedia exists to report the world, not to rewrite it.  — Amakuru (talk) 23:50, 2 July 2019 (UTC)
    Well, I don't see how my choice of adjective is "part of the issue here". And I don't think I've argued for lowercase any time 70% of sources use uppercase. Call me on that if I'm wrong. Dicklyon (talk) 05:26, 3 July 2019 (UTC)
    Indeed, Dicklyon. And what we don't want is creeping capitalisation of article titles and article text, or MOS and AT saying different things. Tony (talk) 02:39, 4 July 2019 (UTC)
    @User:Dicklyon you wrote above "And PBS was in there, too, arguing at the time that a lot of what he calls policy should be known as guidelines and conventions. I wonder why the change of heart." I do change my opinions when I think that the argument put forwards is a sound one. However if you look at that edit in 2009 to which you link, my position on this has remained the same. At the time that policy was named "naming conventions'" and the guidelines to which I refer were the guidelines in the Category:Wikipedia naming conventions (to which the word guidelines in my edit linked). So no change there (as the edit history comment this edit in September 2009 confirms). The period to which you refer was a turbulent one, because up to June 2008 the policy and its guidelines (naming conventions) had been rule based. user:Pmanderson and I with others discussed for some time what should be done about inconsistencies between about 5% or so of "article names" (the use of "article titles" came later) where sources within article used different name for a subject that was generated by the rules in the conventions. These rules had been developed because the "common name" used in all sources was not always considered to be encyclopaedic, and was not used in reliable sources about the subject. A good example of this was the rule based WP:NCROY (May 2008), which protected articles names such as Mary I of England from being named Bloody Mary, but then had to have exceptions (" overwhelmingly known [as]") for article names like Alfred the Great. Once user:Pmanderson introduced the concept "Wikipedia determines the recognizability of a name by seeing what verifiable reliable sources in English call the subject" (27 June 2008) to WP:AT. This at a stroke meant that much of the rule based naming conventions became redundant. However it took a couple of years to get custodians of the various naming convention guidelines to accept this change, as many of them were wedded to the rules in their particular area of Wikipedia (eg Fauna) and were worried that mere anarchy had been loosed upon their naming convention. As a point of fact User:Born2cycle remain unconvinced by this for a long time and insisted that common name should mean the name commonly used across all sources. -- PBS (talk) 13:11, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

WP:AT is a policy and the policy states among other things "Use sentence case" so by default this section is not about a question of which case to use, it is a question of when sentences in the MOS contains things that are contrary to the WP:AT policy, and what to do about the disharmony this causes. User:Dicklyon you write " It's better to agree on what our styling guidance should be, make sure it's right in the MOS..." then why does the sentence "Military terms "The general rule is that wherever a military term is an accepted proper name, as indicated by consistent capitalization in sources, it should be capitalized" exists in WP:MOSCAP? The point is that those few editors actively involved in writing the MOS tend to base their rules on those of American style guides, while the WP:AT policy tends to be based on usage in reliable sources. Even if there was harmony today the MOS is very large and inevitably contradictions emerge, because those writing the MOS are primarily thinking about article content and not article titles when they make a change. You User:Dicklyon are a prime example of how people confuse the two when you make an requested move of an article title using WP:MOSCAP instead of WP:LOWERCASE when there is a sentence in WP:MOSCAP that contradicts the WP:AT policy. For example when you requested the move of Burma Campaign to Burma campaign if the MOS and the policy are in harmony why did you write "Per WP:NCCAPS and MOS:CAPS," instead of writing "Per WP:LOWERCASE and WP:NCCAPS,"? If you had used the link to the policy and its guidelines any contradictions (such as the one I highlighted here) between MOS and AT policy would have been irrelevant. -- PBS (talk) 13:11, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

I would definitely get behind fixing weird project-specific irrelevant and sometimes contradictory style advice like the "military terms" that don't belong in the MOS. The MOS should in all cases support, and not contradict, our naming guidelines (which, oddly enough, are on a page called "policy" even though they don't resemble much that's policy-like). I don't think this is, or should be, a conflict between "those few editors actively involved in writing the MOS" and those writing the title guidelines. Let's just work together and get it right, starting by agreeing that the MOS applies to titles as it does to text. Dicklyon (talk) 19:41, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

About having the redirect COMMONNAME here

"Common name" refers to a broader range of instance than what is simply in the address bar. It should have a hat note to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Biography#Names, as this is another aspect of common name methodology which is not covered by title, nor should be. Once the reader realises they have been redirected to a sectiom on a page about what is in the address bar only, they will only navigate to the top of the page if they suspect the appropriate link is not in the appropriate place, i.e., where the appropriate COMMONNAME redirect lands them, already displaying another hatnote to another common name issue which belongs where it is and not here. I don't know what is desirable. I can see the navigation has a bump however, and what is desirable to me is to fix it. I do not believe this to be a complex issue. I explain it because I understand it to be simple, but have been reverted. @JHunterJ and PBS:, it's hardly a major change. Make it appear "desirable", as quickly as you summated your reversions, or why not, thanks. ~ R.T.G 14:51, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

I'm sorry, it seems straightforward and simple to me, so to argue the point feels tense. It's the redirect for guides on common names. There's not a lot of aspects to this issue. The standard method is to link in this manner. It is already almost linked this way. It's just not lined up/navigation is broken. ~ R.T.G 21:43, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
As the reverting editors are regardless, I have continued with my change, and in the process found and used instead, a more directly relevant and informative link for the same purpose:- the common name practices regarding a figure recognised by an individual name rather than their full name (i.e., in this case, Michelangelo a.k.a Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, but broadly relevant). I hope this is satisfactory, thanks o/ ~ R.T.G 16:55, 18 July 2019 (UTC)
I'm not sure what you mean about the "address bar only". The link you added to WP:SINGLENAME is also a guideline that relates specifically to article titles. WP:SINGLENAME does relate to WP:COMMONNAME, but so do a lot of subject-specific naming guidelines. You could just as well link to WP:SUBTITLE, WP:WIAN, WP:NCPARTY, etc. These subject-specific guidelines mostly serve to clarify the application of the general principles from WP:TITLE to certain specific domains. I don't think linking to that specific guideline (on mononymous persons) is helpful to understanding WP:COMMONNAME as a whole. Colin M (talk) 13:36, 19 July 2019 (UTC)
I quote for you the first sentence of this page, "An article title is the large heading displayed above the article's content, and the basis for the article's page name and URL." The address bar is the thing where the URL goes. So not only do you not know what you are talking about... This is not a page of poetry. It's a guide. You blind the guide. It's not a guide to justice. A way should be found to link all. Any other goal is a load of old nonsense. Of course the guidance on "mononymous" names is the most directly relevant of all these options after the titles. Any sort of talk is a load of old bunk. Rationale please. "I think" is not a rationale. Note, my proposed change does not require a rationale... does it? Exactly. There is no shortage of space here. This is not a poem. Apologies if you feel this is confrontational, but it is, but not personally so. There is no rationale here. Of the three reverters, one said a change was "undesirable". This is not Playboy, thanks o/ ~ R.T.G 16:47, 19 July 2019 (UTC)
I'm not going to edit war. If you want to gang up and break it, it's broken. One idea is a DAB. You've no rationale. Change it to suit your sensibilities, but add the guide. Find a way to add all the relevant guidance, is what these pages are about. Nothing else. ~ R.T.G 16:54, 19 July 2019 (UTC)
I now see what you're saying about this page relating to the title of an article (and therefore also what goes in the address bar). But the point I was trying to make above is that, if that's what you object to, then linking to WP:SINGLENAME isn't improving things, because that page also is about "what goes in the address bar". The first sentence of that article is This guideline contains conventions on how to name Wikipedia articles about individual people. Also, you may say you're not being personally confrontational, but your tone says otherwise. I know it can be frustrating to be reverted (especially with little/no explanation), and I can see that you feel ganged up on, but there's no conspiracy going on. It's just three editors who each independently looked at the changes, decided they weren't an improvement, and reverted them. I'm not trying to put you or your ideas down - I'd just like to better understand where you're coming from with these changes, and explain my point of view. But reaching consensus becomes much harder if the discussion is treated like a WP:BATTLEGROUND. Colin M (talk) 17:35, 19 July 2019 (UTC)
I'm not being personal. I see no conspiracy. I followed a change to the Michelangelo article, specifically related to how to treat the mono-naming issue. It seemed to need a slight adjustment. Before adjusting it I wanted to check WP:COMMONNAME to see exactly how to treat this information. It wasn't there. Nor was there a link. There should be linkage to guides on all aspects of common naming, from this redirect, particularly where the agreed style is not instantly apparent (and it never is, is it?) Nope. I haven't been personal here at all. You suggest the information in both areas might be the same. It isn't. It isn't. Not even nearly. Navigation is broken. ~ R.T.G 17:55, 19 July 2019 (UTC)
I don't want to dwell on it, but "So not only do you not know what you are talking about..." is an example of a not-nice thing to say to someone. Even if you believe it to be true, there are better ways to say "I think you're wrong" that are less likely to put the other person on the defensive or make them feel insulted. It's not a big deal, just something to keep in mind.
The current way to navigate to subject-specific naming guidelines that complement WP:AT is to scroll up to the Template:Naming conventions sidebar, which lists guidelines for dozens of different domains. The problem with linking to relevant guidelines from the WP:COMMONNAME section is that there would be a lot. COMMONNAME is one of the core aspects of wikipedia's whole naming policy, so you can find it reflected (implicitly or explicitly) in every subject-specific naming guideline. Even if you just look at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (people), WP:SINGLENAME isn't the only section that relates to COMMONNAME. You would do just as well to also link WP:INITS, WP:MAIDEN, WP:NICKNAME, and WP:TITLESINTITLES. Colin M (talk) 18:25, 19 July 2019 (UTC)
You gave no rationale. And your rationale now that people will navigate to the top of the page is erroneous. The COMMONNAME goes to a specific place. This specific situation is specifically COMMONNAME, not COMMONTITLE. Click this link WP:COMMONTITLE, view what is there, and what page it is on, and come back and tell me there is nothing to discuss. ~ R.T.G 20:41, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

Why is our hypothetical reader visiting WP:COMMONNAME in the first place? If they're following a link to the shortcut that someone left in a discussion, then presumably Wikipedia:Article_titles#Use_commonly_recognizable_names is precisely the content that editor was referring to, and there's no need to navigate to any other page to understand their intention. Colin M (talk) 21:12, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

The link is dropped all over the wiki. It's advertised to everybody long before they click the link. You're just making stuff up. Why bother? Why would they be referring precisely to titles/ when they use common name and why did you ignore WP:COMMONTITLE. Thanks anyway o/ ~ R.T.G 22:15, 19 July 2019 (UTC)
Are you familiar with Check User? Here, try the shortcut for CheckUser... WP:CU. What's the problem with that? ~ R.T.G 13:46, 20 July 2019 (UTC)
Feel free to addbehold WP:COMMONNAME to WP:CN, that would serve the purpose you intend. Agathoclea (talk) 05:14, 22 July 2019 (UTC)
The other way around, Agathoclea, commonname should reach more than it does, rather than be reached by more, and even I feel tongue twisted now but this is so simple and correct. ~ R.T.G 08:25, 22 July 2019 (UTC)
RTG, I have been struggling to understand your concern. Is it just that you would like the redirect to be disambiguated better for people who use the redirect? --Izno (talk) 18:07, 21 July 2019 (UTC)
Indeed, it certainly did not guide me as regards this particular issue, and maybe fixing that opens up a disambiguation, and I know a tonne of people are going to want to complain if such a familiar redirect gets nudged, but get over all that for a minute. I personally am going to get like nothing out of this change, but I am beholden to pointing out that some bit of change is correct here. For me, because this is such a timeless redirect, it should be linked at the top, like anything else in a similar respect. If links at the top are insufficient, they should link to the sufficient area. ~ R.T.G 08:25, 22 July 2019 (UTC)
I've recently been doing some data analysis of RMs that is surprisingly salient here. One of the statistics I looked at was how many times different wikipedia policy shortcuts were invoked by users in RM discussions. The most frequent by far was WP:COMMONNAME, which was mentioned 10,878 times. That's almost twice as much as the next most popular (WP:PRIMARYTOPIC). So yeah, changing the destination of WP:COMMONNAME would affect a lot of users. Colin M (talk) 20:51, 22 July 2019 (UTC)
What was wrong with see also at the top again? Oh yeah, WP:IDLI, WP:IDHT. You took the position, went off, said to yourself wait a minute, that's not my position, and instead of re-assessing your reasoning, you backed it up for 2x. It's not easy to respond to that. It was easy to respond to me though, right? Surely that's a sign. Please read Argument from ignorance. I feel an essay coming on. ~ R.T.G 22:15, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

Primary topic and incomplete disambiguation conflicts RFC

Your comment is requested at WT:Disambiguation#Primary topic and Incomplete disambiguation conflicts. --Izno (talk) 23:04, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

How to disambiguate the Phases in Marvel Cinematic Universe?

Please see and participate in Talk:List_of_Marvel_Cinematic_Universe_films#Naming the phases. AngusWOOF (bark • sniff) 15:21, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

bing/yahoo not updated after an RM - distorts page view counts on redirects from old titles

I've known for years that Google adjusts their links very quickly after a title change on WP. For example, we moved The Americans (2013 TV series) to The Americans on 6/26 and within days if not hours searching for "The Americans" on Google resulted in a link pointing directly to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Americans. But I've been watching bing.com (and Yahoo which uses Bing) and they're still pointing to the old link at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Americans_(2013_TV_series). So I wondered how long it takes Bing to update. Then I checked "Hillary Clinton"... wow, that's still pointing to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_Clinton - and that was moved way back in 2015. So they effectively never update. Now this has little effect on users because of our redirects, but it does effect page view counts. That is, those redirects continue to get page views only because Bing is still sending users through them. For example, Hillary Rodham Clinton is still averaging 179 views per day[1], which is probably distorted due to Bing.

What could be really problematic is if there is a primary topic swap. Anyone know of any recent examples? --В²C ☎ 16:57, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

It wasn't quite a topic swap but a Bing search for "New York state" leads to the dab at New York which was the title of the state article until 2017. I've no idea what Yahoo does; its search page now redirects to a data collection dialog. Certes (talk) 18:51, 3 September 2019 (UTC)
I think this illustrates the problems with PT swaps that I noted at Talk:Homeland#Requested move 26 June 2019 and Talk:Amadeus (film)#Requested move 17 July 2019 if the title is replaced with a DAB owners of external websites can do a query on links to DAB pages on WP (and update the links) if a different article is moved that's more difficult in addition to the fact that I have noted about the confusion cause by landing on the wrong article. Crouch, Swale (talk) 18:56, 3 September 2019 (UTC)
I did a bing search for "New York state" just now. Top result was ny.gov, then some cruft ("Trending Articles", "Travel destinations in New York"), then New York (state), then iloveny.com, more cruft, and then New York. There was also a right-hand infobox which included a "Wikipedia" icon linking to New York (state). That doesn't seem too bad. On the other hand, the same search on yahoo.com returns ny.gov, then New York as the second result, with New York City as the 7th result, and New York (state) nowhere to be found on the first page of results. Good grief, yahoo. Colin M (talk) 16:25, 5 September 2019 (UTC)
How recent an example do we want? For example, Rachel Hawkins moved today but we might want to give the search engines a little more time. Certes (talk) 19:25, 3 September 2019 (UTC)
Bing is getting some topic swaps right. For example, Jesse Root Grant vs Jesse Root Grant politician (title usurped January 2017). I suppose it depends when the bot last crawled that page, and it doesn't seem to complete a pass very quickly. Certes (talk) 19:46, 3 September 2019 (UTC)
We should also bear in mind that Bing has only a 2.63% market share and Yahoo 1.8%.[2] - Station1 (talk) 19:53, 3 September 2019 (UTC)
Also, Hillary Rodham Clinton has over 100 incoming mainspace wikilinks (over 1600 total). It would be interesting to see if the daily average pageviews went down significantly if someone cleaned up all those links, or whether they are really caused by Bing/Yahoo. Station1 (talk) 20:05, 3 September 2019 (UTC)
Station1, I'm doing that experiment with The Americans. Clean up took me over a week. There used to be over 400 internal links to the old title at The Americans (2013 TV series) (usually piped there with "The Americans" displayed) which I've cleaned up now to link directly to The Americans. I'm keeping track of the effects at Talk:The_Americans#Page_view_count_table. --В²C ☎ 01:43, 4 September 2019 (UTC)
Thanks for doing that. That's a valuable experiment. If I'm reading it right, it does seem to show the majority of hits to the old title were coming from internal links. (And the redirect still has about 100 incoming non-mainspace wkilinks, which could be contributing to ongoing hits, although probably not that many.) Station1 (talk) 15:44, 4 September 2019 (UTC)
This query finds some topic swaps made on selected dates, along with many false positives. Is there a better list? Certes (talk) 20:32, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

RFC

I'm thinking we need an RfC on DIFFCAPS. I'm not seeing a lot of support for it in the larger Wiki community. At this point, is there really any point in treating Friendly fire and Friendly Fire differently?

I might suggest splitting like this:

Do you support natural disambiguation via small details if the small detail is:

  1. Diacritics (e.g. The World is Yours)
  2. Spelling variations (e.g., Colored and Coloured)
  3. Punctuation (Airplane!)
  4. Spacing (SeaMonkey)
  5. Capitalization (Red Meat)

And then we "vote" Support 1, 2, and 4; oppose 3 and 5. or something.

I ask this because I really don't think that any of these have broad consensus but I'm almost certain that diacritics and capitalization don't. Most of the arguments in favor of capitalization differentiating titles basically boil down to "because DIFFCAPS says so". Red Slash 23:51, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Maybe I'm wrong, but I would be surprised if there were a consensus around "no" for any of these options, assuming we're treating "yes" as "There exist some cases where natural disambiguation by small detail X is acceptable" and "no" as "We should never disambiguate by X". Capitalization is probably the most contentious one, and the one that comes up most often, but I think the controversy is about where to draw the line, rather than whether it's ever sufficient to disambiguate by caps. Names that are disambiguated by full caps (rather than title case vs. sentence case) seem like some of the cases that most obviously benefit from diffcaps disambiguation. Is anyone arguing that MAVEN, GIMP, ADD, and GOPHER, should go to the same place as Maven, Gimp, Add, and Gopher? Colin M (talk) 01:08, 13 September 2019 (UTC)


I have seen some explicit statements as well as hints, that the broader community is not on par with title minimalism, and holds the never-progressing title battles in disdain. WP:TITLES would benefit from some good kicks in the pants.

DIFFCAPS is a small example. DIFFCAPS, a subset of SMALLDETAILS, has merit, but the guideline errs in not specifying how small is too small. I believe the community, is more on par with the following:

terminal punctuation ".", and ",", is always toosmall
Terminal punctuation "!" and "?" is borderline.
Homoglyphs are toosmall. lI1, O0

The above is easier fixed than DIFFCAPS.

As I argue, including at Talk:Friendly Fire (disambiguation)#Requested move 22 August 2019, many of these titling disputes are a consequence of the bad WP:MALPLACED practice. The biggest problem in many of the argued cases comes from having imprecisely titled DAB pages, meaning DAB pages can be located at what a subset of readers think is a PRIMARYTOPIC. Fix WP:MALPLACED (i.e. repudiate it), and most of the above problems will go away. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:59, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

I almost always would oppose using any of those small diff. E.g. for The Wörld Is Yours, we would conventionally need to redirect the version without diacritics there, but now we can't, because we used it for a disambig page but didn't disambiguate this one with the diacritic, so that's not a good situation. I'm not sure I follow Smokey Joe's point, but I think I probably agree; perhaps he'll explain what MALPLACED should say instead, and what we should do with the Friendly Fire case. Dicklyon (talk) 05:33, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

I too definitely oppose natural disambiguation relying on diacritics alone.

MALPLACED should be repudiated. All disambiguation pages should be sufficed with "(disambiguation)"

Friendly Fire should probably redirect to Friendly Fire (disambiguation), because the second capital F means they are surely looking for a composition title, but the bigger problem is sucking people who misguess that their Friendly Fire is the PT into unexpectedly landing on the DAB page.
As someone enters "Friendly F..." into the Go box, they should NOT see an imprecisely titled disambiguation page as a suggestion. That is what will happen if Friendly Fire (disambiguation) is moved to Friendly Fire. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:18, 13 September 2019 (UTC)
Auto-completion only shows the disambiguation page as a disambiguation page if "(disambigaution)" is part of its title.
E.g. for The Wörld Is Yours, we would conventionally need to redirect the version without diacritics there, but now we can't Why is that an intrinsically bad situation? Let's say that 50% of readers searching for information on this album will search for "The Wörld Is Yours", and 50% will search for "The World Is Yours". We can either send 50% of them straight to where they want to go, and send 50% to a dab page, where they need to spend some time locating the entry they're looking for, or we can send 100% of readers to a dab page, and always require an extra click/scan through the list. The latter scenario seems strictly worse to me than the former. (Percentages are arbitrary - the argument holds as long as >0% of readers are searching for the version with diacritics). Colin M (talk) 16:17, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

Answering the original question, there exist some examples for each of those categories where the small difference is clearly significant and the two titles should lead to different pages (although there should always be a hatnote on all destination pages that are not disambiguations or set indexes), so deprecation would not benefit the encyclopaedia. This is not to say that every current instance of small differences leading to different pages is correct, merely that some are, so discussion needs to be much more focused.
Broadly, the goal should always be to get as many people to the page they want to read directly where possible and with as few clicks as possible where it isn't. To this end, where there is a primary topic for any given term that term should lead directly to the page that best matches that topic, regardless of whether similar terms do or do not have a primary topic and/or whether they have the same primary topic. For example, compare Male, Malé and Małe - nobody using the latter search terms is looking for the article about the physiological sex, but only a small proportion of those using the first one are looking for anything other than that. Thryduulf (talk) 01:20, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

Peerage names

Could I ask for some views, please, on the article title question (regarding a UK peerage) that I've asked at Talk:Michael Howard#Primary topic?. Thank you. Carcharoth (talk) 11:33, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

RfC about articles on three digit numbers

Participants agree that there is no consensus for either proposal.

Those in favor of moving the three digit year articles to AD titles noted the benefits of consistency as well as the precedent set by the 2016 RfC which established the use of AD in one and two digit year articles (whether consensus has changed for one and two digit year articles was not explicitly discussed). Some opposers disagreed with using AD due to its origins in religion, and there is no consensus for its use in this case. Some participants were favorable to disambiguators without overt religious connotations like CE or (year), though neither had much support. Opposition to CE was similar to opposition to AD in that WP:ERA states both AD and CE are equally valid and we should not promote one over the other in article titles. Those against (year) were concerned by its ambiguity as there are alternative calendar systems which the disambiguator (year) would not make clear. There is neither consensus to move three digit year articles nor consensus on what disambiguator should be used if they were moved.

Opinions on whether three digit numbers have a primary topic were more mixed, but no consensus emerged. Those who believe there is generally no primary topic for three digit numbers noted that non-historians rarely encounter three digit years and very few three-digit numbers are actually notable enough to be the primary topic. Those who believe there is a primary topic argued that in most situations the year actually is the primary topic. Given the opposition to moving the year articles, the making the three digit titles into disambiguation pages would not be possible anyway. Instances where a year is not the primary topic should be handled on a case-by-case basis as we have been doing already.

Thank you to everyone who participated! Wug·a·po·des​ 00:06, 25 September 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.

Close requested.[3] — JFG talk 23:33, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

Editors are asked to comment on two questions:

  1. Should all articles on years 101 to 999 (inclusive) be titled with a preceding "AD" as is done for years 1 to 100 (e.g., 777 → AD 777)?
  2. In general, should we assume that three digit numbers have no primary topic as we do for one and two digit numbers (e.g., 777 (disambiguation) → 777)?

22:10, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

Rationale

Two recent requested moves one of which I closed for the articles 911 and 999 found consensus that these numbers have no primary topic (a third is ongoing at Talk:404). Consistent with the format for one and two digit numbers, the years 911 and 999 have been moved to AD 911 and AD 999. This has caused problems with {{Year nav}} (more specifically, the issue is at {{dr-make}}) which assumes that all pages titled with three digit numbers are year articles, rather than disambiguation pages. There likewise has been some discussion about whether ancient years are the primary topics for three digit numbers.

We already have a consistent naming convention (see 2016 RfC) for years 1 through 100 where they are preceded by AD (e.g. AD 77). Consensus of "yes" for question 1 would mean that this naming convention now covers years 1 to 999. This would allow a very simple fix for {{Year nav}}, as opposed to hard coding in these two (and potentially more) exceptions and is motivated by the consistency prong of the article titling criteria. This move would also be supported by a "yes" consensus to the second question as it would allow for the primary topic or dab page to take the bare numeral title. Editors in previous discussion have noted that, unlike 4 digit numbers which cover the current millennium, three digit years are so remote that they readers searching for the number are unlikely to be interested in the year. Others have also pointed out that the current naming scheme is a holdover from when years were wikilinked in text which is no longer part of our MOS. Wug·a·po·des​ 22:10, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

Counter rationale

While there may be some exceptions as noted by the recent RMs, for the vast majority of these titles the year is the most notable title (e.g., 476). In general consistency is one of the weaker prongs of article titling, and the restriction to only numbers up to 1000 weakens this point as years above 1000 will not follow this convention. The technical issues mentioned are surmountable, and in many cases have already been resolved. The addition of a preceding AD is not only problematic for its overt religious connotations, but also opens the door to disputes regarding whether AD or CE is appropriate when both are equally valid. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wugapodes (talk • contribs) 23:38, 29 August 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for doing so! Also, I love your username! (is it an alternate plural of the linguistic "Wug", based on "octopodes"?) Paintspot Infez (talk) 23:01, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
  • This would change the standard practice and guidelines for primary regarding 420. The cannabis culture page has averaged 1,700 views for the last 90 days, and that doesn't take into account its views around the date itself, and surely holds far more than the minimum 51% of total views to be the primary topic for the title. Randy Kryn (talk) 23:25, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Support both – I was involved in the shift from 1…100 to AD 1…AD 100, and I agree that exceptions are unmanageable. I also agree that the titles "101" to "999" do not spontaneously evoke a year, so that the whole range could be assigned to numbers or dab pages, or even to primary topics if there are any. I would also suggest that the titles "100" and "1000" should be assigned to the numbers 100 and 1000 as primary topics. Will launch separate RMs. — JFG talk 23:41, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Question. I am the person who nominated AD 404 for the move request. I'm leaning oppose for this request because I don't think all need to be made into disambugation pages. However, that is neither here nor there. Looking at Special:Permalink/909842395, I'm seeing that every three digit number all already have a redirect prefixed with AD. Why doesn't {{dr-make}} just use those? (edit conflict) –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 23:55, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
    That's worth a try. However I believe this RM has merit independently of the technical issue at hand. — JFG talk 00:20, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
    That's a great list, thanks for putting it together! I'll take a look at implementing that; I don't see a reason why it wouldn't work. I agree with JFG that there's merit here without a technical issue, though it weakens the rationale somewhat per No Great Shaker. Wug·a·po·des​ 00:45, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
    It seems to be working so I've struck that part from the rationale. Thanks for the suggestion! Wug·a·po·des​ 06:11, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
    Ey, glad I helped out! :D –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 02:46, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose 1st if (like 995) there is no conflict then there's no need to move to the unnecessary "AD" natural disambiguator per WP:CONCISE. 2, should be considered just like any other primary topic on WP whee we disambiguate unless it is shown that there is a primary topic. The templates should be changed so that either they accept both the plain number (first) then fall back to "AD Foo" or that we manually add alterations for the years that require disambiguation. The 1 and 2 digit numbers were a bit different in that the numbers would likely be primary if anything while as noted some of the 3 digit numbers don't even have articles. Crouch, Swale (talk) 07:09, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
    Concise: giving a lot of information clearly and in a few words; brief but comprehensive – Conciseness is not less with "AD 750" than with "750". It's arguably more concise by being more clear what it refers to. And there are other cases were we've adopted what some would call "unnecessary disambiguation" to keep things clean and clear and eliminate a bunch of squabbling over what's primary, etc.; e.g. in WP:USPLACES. Personally, I think there would be a huge benefit to the project of always including the AD or BC (or equiv.) on all year article titles. Dicklyon (talk) 14:36, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment We may want to extend the range to include 1000, especially if its current RM succeeds. This change also matches the current breaks in treatment which are between 10 (number) and 11 (dab), and between 100 (dab) and 101 (year). Certes (talk) 10:13, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Support 2nd with caveat that it merely establishes a default ("in general... we assume..."), but not a hard rule. i.e. it doesn't preclude the possibility that, in a few cases a 3-digit number will be found to have a primary topic, through an RM. (Not sure if that was nominator's intent. It's how I initially read it, but it seems like others such as MJL and Randy have interpreted it as "3 digit numbers should never have a primary topic", which I would not support.) Neutral on 1st Colin M (talk) 17:01, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Support, per Dicklyon. Primary topic for a number is/should be the number. A date is incomplete without a reference to the calendar system. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 05:25, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Support both, as hadn't really said so before. Dicklyon (talk) 05:39, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Support. Move all the years to AD yyyy at least. If ever there is a primarytopic, it is the number, but often there is not a primarytopic, and probably it is best to never have naked numbers as primarytopics. Anyone who says AD 2019 fails CONCISE doesn’t understand the difference between concision and brevity. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:48, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Support both. After reading this discussion I agree that 3-digit numbers sometimes (usually?) do not have a primary topic, which then forces us to consider either supporting a system which requires endless primary topic RMs and hard-coding exemptions to the year template, or a simple WP:CONSISTENT system which requires no maintenance and no RMs. For me, it's obvious what the preferred option is. --Gonnym (talk) 07:17, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
    • The template issue was resolved. It already links to the AD number scheme for 1-100, and we can extend it to three digit numbers by using redirects to act like we've implemented the naming scheme. With the redirects, the template can look for the AD number scheme and always find the correct article no matter where the article actually is. You can see an example at 912 and 998 where the page is a bare number and the template is able to navigate to the exceptional page titles AD 911 and AD 999. Wug·a·po·des​ 08:52, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Support both, including AD 1000. The year isn't a clear primary topic for these numbers, and this treatment is consistent both internally and with 11–100. I suspect the main reason for the current arrangement was that we habitually linked text such as Eric the Obscure was born in 123, which no longer happens. I'm not convinced that any three-digit number has a primary topic but, if a few topics such as 100 (number) and 420 (cannabis culture) do move to the base name, that won't wreck anything. 1000 is probably the final limit for this exercise, due to 1066 and all that. Certes (talk) 10:38, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
    I was trying to think of a "primarytopic" example stronger than the 2019 example given above. This is a good one "The year 1066 is probably the best-known date in history — and marks the last successful invasion of England by force" as I found on the web. But it just reinforces my point, I think, that if 4-digit years don't have an AD convention (AD 1066), then we'll have hundreds of more chances to waste time in RM discussions about which ones are so fricking well known that our readers would somehow be better served by making the article title less informative. But that's something we can think about getting to in a later discussion. By the way, Certes, thanks for helping me figure out how to search up large quantities of titles that needed moving, and getting bot help for that, back in 2017. Now they're trying to indef block me for work like that; see WP:AN/I#Hold on here. Dicklyon (talk) 14:35, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Support both. Hyperbolick (talk) 13:33, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose both. Literally I asked for this at 911, I was ignored but now it is important to have consensus? Bullshit. Tbsock (Tbhotch away) (talk) 16:39, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
    You asked for this, but now you Oppose??? — JFG talk 18:56, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Support #1 (and include 1000 as well). For consistency and clarity. If a reader lands on page AD xyz, even through a redirect from xyz, it's immediately clear whether or not they're in the right place; especially if they were actually looking for AH xyz.
I recognise that this may cause problems in some templates. Earlier today, I found bad links to both 911 and 999 buried so deep within a template that an experienced template editor has had to ask for help on the template Talk Page. However: templates are the tail, and articles are the dog.
Comment on #2. For nearly all 3-digit numbers, the year will be not only WP:PTOPIC but the sole topic with an article. Where there is another notable meaning, the solution will usually be to have the base name (number) as a DAB page. That stops bad links accumulating and degrading the encyclopaedia.
For 4-digit numbers, the year is almost always going to be both PTOPIC and sole topic. I can only think of one number which has its own article, duly hatnoted from the year page: 1729 (number). Narky Blert (talk) 20:17, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
There are 31 articles of the form nnnn (number) but over 99% of four-digit numbers have no article. There are 26 articles such as 10,000 about larger numbers, plus several non-numeric titles such as Googol. List: Category:Integers. Certes (talk) 23:30, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
And there are a ton of redirects like AD 1921 that would make better titles than what the year articles currently have. Good naming conventions (like USPLACE) solve a lot of problems, including moving away from the interpretation of shortest as most concise. Dicklyon (talk) 00:46, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment. I just want to say something... and it may be controversial, but I really hate the idea we have hard and fast rules for any number greater than 100. As editors, we are generally told to think about WP:RECENTISM-bias, but there is one place that rule absolutely hits the fan: years and numbers. We need to be honest with ourselves, we are preconditioned as humans living in 2019 to think 2019 (year) not 2019 (number). That quite frankly will be the case for 2020 (year) and every year Wikipedia exists after that. I'm sure if (all other things being equal) the current year was AD 420, we'd be so confused as to how anyone could think of anything other than the year. However, we're not making an encyclopedia for those folks living in 420; we're making one for folks living in 2019 and beyond.
    In my opinion, all numbers greater than 100 should just be handled on a case-by-case basis with the only rule that typing AD #### has to land a user on the page with the year. Quite frankly, things like 2048 shouldn't exist at that title when they're clearly not notable right now, and it should just get you to the video game. If consensus changes so be it. I'm tired of trying to future-proof an online encyclopedia. –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 02:46, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Support adding "AD" to years from 1–999 as those years aren't usually the primary topic. Years past 1000 are primary topics so strong oppose disambiguating years after 1000.  Nixinova  T  C  04:47, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Categorisation requires consistency ... so Strong oppose unless it applies to all years in all namespaces. I can see the case made by the proposer, and I while am not persuaded by it, I am not strongly opposed to it. However, the fundamental problem is that this discussion is being held back-to-front. The few cases which have been recently treated as an exception should not have been allowed on their own to break the consistency of the set.
My concern is that WP:C2D will cause these these changes to cascade into category space, where they will wreak havoc.
However, if we are to make a wider change, then it will have huge consequences for the hundreds of thousand of categories by year, plus the category header templates and modules which build them, and the tools which analyse them. There are three possible scenarios:
  1. Some years are randomly prefixed with AD. That makes it all but impossible for templates such as {{Navseasoncats}} and {{Year in country category}} to function. They require rules-based consistency, and ad hoccery will make it a nightmare.
  2. There are different formats either side of a cut-off-date. That is rule-based, so it can be programmed, but it adds an extra layer of complexity. That reduces the chance that we have well-maintained tools to maintain and navigate the vast sets of year-based categories. (Yes, we currently have a case of format change, but its location at 100 AD is long before most category ranges start)
  3. We apply the same format to all years in all namespaces. That will mean a lot of reprogramming of a lot of templates and modules, and an utterly humungous number of category moves ... but it least the destination would be workable.
But better than any of those three is that we simply overturn these rogue RMs. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:19, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
Totally agree on the consistency thing, which is why I'm suggesting AD in front of all years, not just 3 and fewer digits. The work to implement all this can be planned out and executed mostly by bot. Yes, there will be remaining bugs to fix, but it will converge. Doing for just 3-digit years, or just a few exceptions, is a road to chaos. Dicklyon (talk) 05:30, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
Volunteers have handled the necessary changes for years AD 1 to AD 100, and I don't see how extending this work up to AD 1000 would be any more difficult. In fact, it would be simpler, because the prior issues have been worked out and the relevant coding has been simplified (including thanks to work by yours truly). I do agree that we should not have one-off exceptions, but the formula with a cut-off date of AD 1000 instead of AD 100 would be handled just fine. — JFG talk 07:00, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
@JFG, if you don't see how extending this work up to AD 1000 would be any more difficult, it's simply because you don't know the category trees well enough.
There are vastly more category sets which begin around the year 1000 than which cover 100. That vastly greater number makes it inevitable that there will be issues which were not encountered at 100. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:10, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
Could you illustrate this with some examples, to help me understand the potential issues? — JFG talk 07:14, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
  • I do not think this would be a good move, but for an orthogonal reason: edit warring over whether AD or CE is preferred could become much more likely with a page move that includes only AD in the title (see also WP:ERA). It also makes it more awkward in passing to do [[AD 1999|1999 CE]] than the easier [[1999 (year)|]]. --Izno (talk) 14:53, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Support 1st. There are simply too many numbers in that range that leave us in a tough bind, such as 911. If we keep it as the year, we'd be prioritizing consistency even though there are much more important topics. If we move it out, that breaks a bunch of templates and would require a hard-coded list of exceptions which may become unmanageable. The simplest solution is to just have all years from 1 to 1000 to be prefixed with an AD. (I do not want to get into the whole battle over AD vs. CE vs. (year) again; we've picked one in the 1-100 discussion already so let's stick with it. Or at least, let's finish discussing whether disambiguating years is a good idea first, and then pick a disambiguator.) It doesn't mean that the year cannot be a primary topic; it would mean that we would have e.g. 907 as a primary redirect to AD 907. Yes, it's violates conciseness at a micro level, but it's the best solution given what we have. Of the three Cs of naming and disambiguation (clarity, consistency, and conciseness), in general clarity is the most important, with the importance of the other two depending on the situation. Back in the early days of MediaWiki, date formatting actually depended on the date and year being linked, so technical concerns elevated consistency to the top (above even clarity), and so 1, 2, and 3 were years for the longest time. In the 1-100 discussion we decided that was a dumb idea now that the indiscriminate linking of dates has been repealed on Wikipedia, so we moved them to AD 1-100. Recently, some have been pushing for years like 404 and 911 to be moved to improve clarity. I don't disagree in principle, but consistency is still important (despite no longer being top of the list) given the systematic usage of years in templates, and we can't have a list of exceptions for naming years that changes on a whim based on individual RMs. So conciseness will have to go, and we'll have to accept the unnecessary disambiguation of a couple hundred years for the greater good. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 20:00, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
  • I would think that the easiest thing to do would be to create a redirect from AD XXX to XXX and from AD XXXX to XXXX for all years. There should be no articles about years that are neither at AD x or redirected to from AD x. Therefore, the template can be fixed by training it to always look for AD XXX. Then, we can deal with any individual years with dubious primacy claims on an individual basis, just like we do for literally everything else on Wikipedia.
I don't see protests of the fact that every sovereign state but two on Wikipedia is at the base name, while Republic of Ireland and Georgia (country) are disambiguated (and differently, to boot!). I don't see protests about how all the elements except mercury (element) are at their base names, while mercury is disambiguated. I don't get why it's a problem that all major colors except orange (colour) are at the base title while orange is not. I don't get why it's a problem that AD 911 isn't at the base title but 912 is, so long as a redirect is made for AD 912.
In short, A) Create redirects for all years and use the redirects exclusively in templates. B) Keep years primary for most but not all numbers greater than 100. C) Handle primary topic concerns on an individual basis, just like what we do for color names or country names or anything else on Wikipedia. Red Slash 22:28, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment. Yesterday, I corrected two entries in 'nnnn'-type pages for years. In one, someone was alleged to have died 2035 years before they were born. In the the other, someone was alleged to have had the unusually long lifespan of 2061 years. Plus or minus one, in both cases. Let us never forget what we are here for. That sort of nonsense must be eliminated at all costs, and the guidelines must be practically designed to minimise the risk of that happening; not on abstract principles. Narky Blert (talk) 22:36, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose both per WP:CREEP. The current status quo works very well, where we treat things case by case and stick with what we've always done if there's no other plan. In general a three-digit number is a year (e.g. 468), but in a few cases it's not (e.g. 911). The proposal to stick an irrelevant AD on the front of otherwise unremarkable year numbers will not help readers at all.  — Amakuru (talk) 22:00, 27 August 2019 (UTC)
    • It's not creep because there is a real problem. Whole number titles are ambiguous, so ambiguous as to be confusing. A naked number title could be a number, a year, or some topic, and all three are easily used without distinguishing context. Ultrabrevity serves not reader. Up to about 42 characters, a title doesn't even line wrap in the standard output (PDF download). AD/BC/CE/BCE hurts no reader accessing the year article. "(number)" hurts no reader accessing a number article. Ambiguous titles and hatnotes do hurt. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:53, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment - Why not CE? Daß Wölf 02:50, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
    @Daß Wölf: Consistency, because:
    1. 1 BC through somewhere around 700 BC
    2. AD 1 through AD 100, etc.
    3. Some of the templates used in most year articles have been rewritten to disregard an opening "AD"; rewriting those templates to disregard a closing "CE" might require more work.
    — Arthur Rubin (talk) 05:08, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
    "It might take some work" does not really sound like a good reason to prefer a religious denotation (like "AD") to a non-religious one (like "CE"). Regards SoWhy 07:12, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
    See below on template problems; I'd forgotten how many templates assume 456 (for example) is a year. And, as is pointed out in Common Era, it's still a religious denotation, as it relates to someone's belief as to the birth (or conception) of Jesus. "(year)" is worse, as has been pointed out many times, it's an incomplete disambiguation; 456 (year) could logically be AD 456 or AH 456, among other systems. It would have to be 456 (Julian year). — Arthur Rubin (talk) 09:31, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
    A 2016 RfC found consensus for AD n rather than n CE, n (year), etc. for years 1 to 100. Similar considerations may apply to later years. Certes (talk) 10:45, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose both. #1 is a bad idea, mainly because of what Izno said above, i.e. it would elevate AD over CE when MOS:ERA says both are equally valid. If we want to be neutral, we should instead use "XXX (year)". As for #2, multiple people have pointed out that some numbers have distinct primary topic, so it should be decided on a case-by-case basis. Regards SoWhy 07:16, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
    The notation "AD 123" was preferred to "123 CE" or "123 (year)" in a prior RfC about years 1–100, as it had the most prevalent usage in sources, regardless of religious origins. The decision to move the 101–999 year articles should be independent from the eventual titling of those articles. — JFG talk 07:42, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose both per SoWhy. The AD/CE issue was the first thing that came into my mind seeing the headline. It is not a technical issue per above. Agathoclea (talk) 09:43, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose both per Amakuru and WP:CREEP. Consistency is about the smallest, final factor in article naming - if there's no real distinction between two potential titles but one is consistent with others in the series, sure, be consistent. But sometimes there legit are different primary topics. 911 is the phone number, 912 is AD 912. The year-in-X templates should be updated, yes, but coding ease should take a backseat to reader experience. SnowFire (talk) 17:37, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose there are too many numbers in this range which have no meanings other than the AD year (unlike 11-99, where there are number, BC, AD, and disambiguation pages for every number). Using the AD 911 style links in infoboxes should fix the technical issues here. If we were going to do this, I would rather do it for every year including the current one. power~enwiki (π, ν) 18:36, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
    1. Support Very few non-historians regularly encounter three-digit years, since they all lie more than a millennium in the past, and save for AD 476 there are few three-digit years that most historians can instantly recognize. On the other hand, some numbers carry some sort of recognizable significance in other contexts. For example, the number 137 has a universally identifiable significance in the field of physics – it's the approximate reciprocal of the fine-structure constant. On the other hand, a historian would be hard-pressed to name anything that happened in AD 137. Not surprisingly, the number receives the bulk of the pageviews. Even though this is rare in the later years (examples), WP:CONSISTENCY should apply for all years up to AD 999, especially in light of the remarks about year-related templates. (After AD 999, most people refer only to the years.)
    2. Depends 666 (pageviews) is more recognizable as a number than as a year, while 476 (pageviews) is more recognizable as a year than as a number. Some 3-digit numbers, like 512 (pageviews), are roughly equally important in both contexts, while some, like 187 (pageviews), have more significance in some other context. (Google Ngrams mixes different use cases for the number alone, so I have to rely exclusively on pageviews.) –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 08:38, 29 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose both per Amakuru and SoWhy. I'm shocked by the thought of religious bias being inserted in titles by policy. Nemo 09:35, 29 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose enforcing a religious symbolism. Tony (talk) 09:39, 29 August 2019 (UTC)
    The notation "AD 123" was preferred to "123 CE" or "123 (year)" in a prior RfC about years 1–100, as it had the most prevalent usage in sources, regardless of religious origins. The decision to move the 101–999 year articles should be independent from the eventual titling of those articles. — JFG talk 07:42, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose For the vast majority of 3 digit numbers/years, the year is clearly the primary topic. Indeed, most 3 digit numbers don't even have separate articles. For instance, I randomly checked out 636. The year article 636 gives us a list of things that happened: events, births, deaths, etc. But 636 (number) is a redirect to all the years from 600 to 699. Of those 100 years, as far as I can tell, exactly 4 (600, 613, 616 and 666) have their own separate articles. We shouldn't focus on the few outliers when we are making policy. Just a Rube (talk) 11:33, 29 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment I added a counter rationale up top trying to summarize the arguments of the recent comments. Feel free to edit it as needed to better summarize arguments against the proposal. Wug·a·po·des​ 23:38, 29 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose Disagree with the arbitrary choice of AD here, there is no basis for it as I see it. While consistency is important, it is more important to see which pages should be moved, instead of a blanket RfC where arguments are muddled up across separate use-cases. Looks more to me as a solution in search of a problem. --qedk (t 桜 c) 16:40, 30 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Yes to both. When I see something like "655", my first thought is the number, not the year. Many 3-digit numbers are of course not independently notable themselves, so we have a funny situation where the most obvious primary topic is not actually notable. But I would favour either having 655 be what 655 (number) is today (a redirect to a list of numbers in its range that gives some properties of 655) or having it be a disambiguation page (this solution makes more sense for something like 420). AD seems obvious because of precedent up to AD 100 (already discussed in the previous RfC that got AD 1 through AD 100 moved to their current titles) and all the BC years; at the very least the AD-vs-CE issue is orthogonal to this issue and should not hold up the moves. Double sharp (talk) 05:27, 31 August 2019 (UTC)
    • To clarify, for me the chain of logic runs as follows. Does a 3-digit number like "655" have an obvious primary topic? I would argue that it does not: when a reader searches for "655", it seems that either the number or the year could conceivably be meant, and it's not clear which edges out the other. Now, 655 seems to be a rather uninteresting number, because 655 (number) is a redirect to a section of 600 (number) that normally lists properties for numbers in the 600s, but where the only thing listed for 655 is its prime factorisation 5 × 131. That's fine: so the number is not notable enough for a standalone article, but it's still something that readers could easily be looking for, and there is somewhere to point them to. So if you want the year, there needs to be something that says "yes, I really mean the year when Pope John VI was born, not the number 5 × 131"; ditto for the number. The issue of whether that disambiguation should be AD or CE is completely orthogonal to question 2, which simply asks "should we assume that 3-digit numbers have no primary topic"? If 655 has no primary topic, then it stands to reason that 655 should be a disambiguation page.
    • Now question 1 then asks if we should use "AD" for disambiguation. I still wonder (as I did back at the 2016 RfC at Talk:AD 1/Archive 1#RFC: Should articles "1" to "100" be about numbers instead of years?) why this is an issue: we already have the precedent of all the BC years like 27 BC. There is simply no other consistent approach than to use AD if we are going to disambiguate years AD 1 to AD 100 or AD 999. If we say that we shouldn't be using AD, then we should be relooking at our use of BC as well. And judging from the completely empty move log of 27 BC consensus has probably never been in favour of switching to BCE/CE. But that is a separate issue that IMHO should not hold the pages 101 through 999 hostage, should consensus find that indeed, 3-digit numbers should not have a primary topic and should be by default disambiguation pages. Double sharp (talk) 07:30, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose. We shouldn't be using AD. SarahSV (talk) 04:44, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose as per SoWhy. I don't see a sufficient technical need to push on a neutrality issue. --LukeSurl t c 09:11, 3 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose per the above, we should not be further entrenching the inappropriate use of AD. ~Swarm~ {sting} 17:06, 5 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Partial Support 1st however not utilizing AD or CE, perhaps something homebrew. Also I would recommend expanding it to all CE years ranging from 0 to 1499. Gwenhope (talk) 09:08, 6 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Needless, further entrenches the arbitrary/inappropriate use of AD, and prizes mathematics over history; year is clearly the primary topic in many of these cases. Neutralitytalk 19:41, 6 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose per Neutrality. In nearly all cases the years are primary over the numbers, so for consistency the year should always be reached from the plain title. Thryduulf (talk) 10:21, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

Can someone explain this "consistency" thing to me?

We have never, to my knowledge, demanded consistency with regards to disambiguation. When we made the first color articles, we didn't put orange at the base name just because red and blue are at the base names. Nor did we move red to red (colour) to match orange (colour). Instead, if you look at {{Color topics}} under "Basic terms", every single one of them goes to an article at the base name (e.g., Purple) except for one, orange (colour), and... everyone... just... deals with it.

When we made pages on countries, we realized that while France or Kenya would have primary topic, Ireland and Georgia would be difficult. So we debated, compromised, and decided to move every single country... no wait, no we didn't! We moved Ireland to Republic of Ireland, moved Georgia to Georgia (country), and just decided to deal with the fact that {{Sovereign states of Europe}} has a couple of piped links.

Why are years so different? Why can't people deal with the fact that most years will have primary topic and a few of them won't? Red Slash 22:47, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

A few things:
  • there are various templates that do things about years and want to easily get you to the right article; probably with redirects that wouldn't be so hard to work around inconsistency though.
  • users link years a lot; it needs to be easy to do the right thing, and harder to do the wrong thing.
  • in a big set of similar items like years (unlike countries, states, islands of various sorts), consistency is easy and inconsistency stands out as confusing.
Dicklyon (talk) 23:14, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
I don't think the comparison between numbers and things like colors and countries is particularly relevant. Numbers are a totally ordered, predictable, and infinite sequence. Given the number 76, I know that the next one is 77, and the previous one is 75. Given "The Republic of Ireland" there isn't even a sensible way to figure out what the "next" country in the sequence is and I cannot, knowing just that country name, predict the names of any other country. Colors are slightly more relevant as they are, if we think in terms of wavelengths of light, totally ordered, predictable, and infinite. But our articles are not named after the specific wavelengths of light, they're named after ambiguous words whose boundaries are not well defined and are not totally ordered, predictable, or infinite. I don't think the argument that numbers are just like countries or colors is very good.
To the redirect issue. For the most part that has worked, but there are many templates which have broken in new and exciting ways. For instance, I had to entirely rewrite the template {{Births and deaths by year for decade}} so that it would not break from the inconsistencies. It literally could not be written to account for exceptions without being changed entirely. Certes and I both tried simply changing the expressions so that it would work for three digit numbers, but that didn't work; even for the templates that can accommodate the use of AD for 1-100, it is not guaranteed that just extending their range up to 1000 will work, because it didn't for {{Births and deaths by year for decade}}. Whether any of this is ideal and how we handle years are both worth discussing, but I want to make clear that the template situation is not trivial. It took me hours to track down and fix the problem in {{Births and deaths by year for decade}}. Inconsistencies in the titling of our year articles cause hours of work for editors like me that could quite easily be fixed if we just picked a naming scheme like any normal encyclopedia. Wug·a·po·des​ 23:47, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
Understandably yes consistency would be ideal but its not really possible here and the problems with templates etc are because we haven't addressed this issue. Crouch, Swale (talk) 17:39, 31 August 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.

Proposed close

As the intiator of the RfC, I'm quite obviously involved, but I think the outcome here is apparent. I'd like to propose the following summary of the discussion as the closing statement:

There is no consensus for either proposal.
Those in favor of moving the three digit year articles to AD titles noted the benefits of consistency as well as the precedent set by the 2016 RfC which established the use of AD in one and two digit year articles (whether consensus has changed for one and two digit year articles was not explicitly discussed). Some opposers disagreed with using AD due to its origins in religion, and there is clear consensus against no consensus for its use in this case. Some participants were favorable to disambiguators without overt religious connotations like CE or (year), though neither had much support. Opposition to CE was similar to opposition to AD in that WP:ERA states both AD and CE are equally valid and we should not promote one over the other in article titles. Those against (year) were concerned by its ambiguity as there are alternative calendar systems which the disambiguator (year) would not make clear. There is neither consensus to move three digit year articles nor consensus on what disambiguator should be used if they were moved.
Opinions on whether three digit numbers have a primary topic were more mixed, but no consensus emerged. Those who believe there is generally no primary topic for three digit numbers noted that non-historians rarely encounter three digit years and very few three-digit numbers are actually notable enough to be the primary topic. Those who believe there is a primary topic argued that in most situations the year actually is the primary topic. Given the opposition to moving the year articles, the making the three digit titles into disambiguation pages would not be possible anyway. Instances where a year is not the primary topic should be handled on a case-by-case basis as we have been doing already.

Are there any changes that should be made? Wug·a·po·des​ 17:29, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

Pinging participants @No Great Shaker, Randy Kryn, Paintspot, JFG, MJL, Crouch, Swale, Certes, Colin M, Pbsouthwood, Dicklyon, SmokeyJoe, Gonnym, Hyperbolick, Tbsock, Narky Blert, Nixinova, BrownHairedGirl, Izno, King of Hearts, Red Slash, Narky Blert, Amakuru, Daß Wölf, Arthur Rubin, SoWhy, Agathoclea, SnowFire, Power~enwiki, LaundryPizza03, Tony1, Nemo bis, Just a Rube, QEDK, Double sharp, SlimVirgin, LukeSurl, Swarm, Gwenhope, Neutrality, and Thryduulf: Wug·a·po·des​ 17:29, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

Titles which are foreign-language work of art tiles or organization names

It looks like we do not have guidelines of what to do with titles which do not have known or commonly accepted English translations.

Examples:

Until now I moved such titles into English. But recently user:Piotrus pointed out that I may be not right. Please let us formulate a uniform guideline. Staszek Lem (talk) 17:37, 10 September 2019 (UTC)

As far as works of visual art are concerned WP:VAMOS covers this (normally, use English). Johnbod (talk) 21:58, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
Foreign language titles are generally only to be used if they are used by most art historians or critics writing in English. It sounds as if the above works (except perhaps ABC of Love) wouldn't be referred to by English titles. (And surely that redirect should be called WP:LETSGO...) Certes (talk) 22:18, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
Ho ho! I'm not sure about that - for paintings etc it's about what writers in English call the work, if there are any. And in visual art criticism generally the tendency is to translate titles, whereas for books and films this very often only comes when somebody has translated/dubbed etc the work, clearly much more work and less common. But if there were critical/news writing using an English title, I'd say use that. But for example Category:Tamil-language films shows we normally use the title in Tamil for them, which I think is typical for Indian films. If there's been a dubbed/subtitled release in English it could be different, or if the title is clearly the local version of say a novel with a clear English title that the film adapts. But for Category:Polish science fiction novels we mostly seem to use English, even where no English translation has been published. Johnbod (talk) 01:14, 11 September 2019 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia:Naming conventions (books). I think the issue here is that many of such works have almost no coverage in English, and sometimes there's just a mix of references in social media, blogs, etc. This is related to the move of the book now under Black Oceans. There are a few references using it in English, but Polish title is also used by English sources ex [4]. Goodreads uses original names until an official translation is released ([5]). It is less of an issue in this case, given that English title is very easy, but some other books, where there are multiple ways of translating the title, should IMHO be left alone until there's an official translation (I wouldn't touch Pieprzony los Kataryniarza with a 10-foot pole...). Final thought: years ago I created a page for a book under a title I thought would be correct (Times of Anger), then the official translation chose Times of Contempt (better) [6]. This taught me to be careful and wait for the official translation... --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:47, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

This makes sense. I have found a more relevant guideline, Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English). It must be expanded with what was scattered over other guidelines, such as Wikipedia:Naming conventions (books). Also, the section Wikipedia:Article_titles#English-language_titles must be:

Staszek Lem (talk) 17:40, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

The last is not very relevant - it's about titles in the sense of the names of articles, not titles of works. Johnbod (talk) 20:02, 11 September 2019 (UTC)
Please clarify what is "last". This discussion is about titles of works used as article titles. Staszek Lem (talk) 20:07, 11 September 2019 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Article_titles#English-language_titles - and that isn't about titles of works used as article titles. Johnbod (talk) 20:16, 11 September 2019 (UTC)
Well, it's even worse than I thought. It starts with On the English Wikipedia, article titles are written using the English language, which is plain false. Also it says In deciding whether and how to translate a foreign name into English, follow English-language usage. If there is no established English-language treatment for a name, translate it if this can be done without loss of accuracy and with greater understanding for the English-speaking reader, which is dubious in view of the current discussion. Therefore I am replacing my suggestion below. Staszek Lem (talk) 20:48, 11 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Create new section "Language of article titles".
  • Turn "English-language titles" into its subsection and edit it to fix inconsistencies. For example, the first two sentences must be replaced with: If the article title is in the English language, it must be remembered that <...>
  • Add section "Other languages" with summary of all written elsewhere and add links to exceptions, if any.

Staszek Lem (talk) 20:48, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

If there is no common English translation then we don't invent one but use the title in the original language. Simple as that. Same with any other article title on Wikipedia. Editors are too keen on translating foreign titles even if there is no common English-language title, and given this is often done by editors whose native language is not English it has resulted in some bizarre English constructions. It's not our function to tell the world what we think something should be called; only what it is called. -- Necrothesp (talk) 09:09, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Not so simple as that. To translate "Oceany" into "Oceans" does not require big language guru and may want to use WP:COMMONSENSE. Therefore my point is we have to set up a policy. Staszek Lem (talk) 18:48, 12 September 2019 (UTC)
Why do we "have to set up a policy"? Why should we add yet another WP:CREEPy rule to turn the English Wikipedia into an ever-more bureaucratic place, in violation of WP:NOTBURO? Don't you think that most individual cases could be sorted out by editors using their own common sense? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:50, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
Because (a) some subpolicies already have such rules (b) commonsense discussions in talk page is waste of time (c) there are trivial and nontrivial situations (d) burocracy has both positive and negative sides. In this particular case I dont see how it can be abused, but it will be definitely helpful per item b. (e) We dont have to write 100% foolproof, touch only major bases, and expand if necessary. Staszek Lem (talk) 00:56, 19 September 2019 (UTC)
  • My problem with translating non-English names which have no WP:RS English equivalent is that it's WP:OR. Suppose that À la recherche du temps perdu had never been translated into English: would we title the article In Search of Lost Time (as we do, in line with a RS); or In Search of Wasted Time (an alternative meaning, lost in translation)? I say, stick with the original language unless there's a sound justification for translating.
Similar arguments apply to the names of institutions and so on. How dare we tell them what their name should be? Narky Blert (talk) 17:58, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
Unlike literary title, organization names are mostly plain sentences, and I don't see why we should not dare. If you say this is original research, I say we still translate it in the article body, per common sense, for the article to be informative. "Polska Konferencja z Dejów Dawnych" - every reader will ask "FTF this means". Staszek Lem (talk) 00:55, 19 September 2019 (UTC)
I agree with Staszek that we should better go with translation in non-controversial cases, lest we astonish the readess. I think that people are overusing the WP:NOR argument interpreting that it prevents any kind of editors' creative expression, while its scope is expressly limited to facts, allegations, and ideas, and I don't think translations fit there. Yeah, we should use attested translations where they exist, and refrain from translations of tricky ones (while we're at organizations, political party names can be really challenging), but I wouldn't support a blanket ban on editor-generated translations. (But no, I don't think the approach be codified in policy). No such user (talk) 08:26, 19 September 2019 (UTC)
I agree that many, or most, non-English titles for things other than creative works pose no problem, and should be translated: there will be a clear word-for-word English equivalent. Ambiguities like de:Kloster (which may mean abbey, monastery or priory) can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Nevertheless, things like fr:château and de:Schloss can be trickier. 'Castle' is the obvious, and the correct, translation for something which started off as a fortified building; but would be wrong for, say, a C18 French or German country house.
I haven't come across that political party problem. However, I have come across a couple of academic institutions where it wasn't at all clear what the English version should be. Narky Blert (talk) 18:47, 19 September 2019 (UTC)
@Narky Blert: See a recent case at Talk:Apulia First of All, and I've seen several similar ones: a regional or recently formed party without much English-language coverage, and with a catchy or double-meaning name in the original language (FWIW, I would probably have !voted for the original La Puglia prima di tutto in that case if I had had a chance, virtually no English coverage). No such user (talk) 08:40, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
@No such user: One which worries me somewhat is Ore Mountains, a name I've never seen outside WP. I've known of them as the Erzgebirge for 50 years. The search wouldn't be easy, but it is possible that 'Ore Mountains' may have been popularised in, or even entered into, English usage from WP; which would for me be a problem. Narky Blert (talk) 09:42, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
Well, that's fixable: Talk:Ore Mountains#Requested_move_20_September_2019. No such user (talk) 10:38, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
There are a number of cases where the title of an article on animal is a "common" name invented by Wikipedians. This was discussed explicitly at Talk:Psammoperca waigiensis and Talk:Mbu pufferfish. Neither article is currently at the title discussed on the talk page, although "Mbu pufferfish" may also be a name invented on Wikipedia (it isn't very commonly used, and is not the most commonly used vernacular name for this fish). There are other cases of this; I don't bother fixing them because so many Wikipedians are believe that the term of art "common name" in biology is the same thing as the Wikipedia term of art "COMMONNAME". Plantdrew (talk) 19:01, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
But I fail to see why we should translate words such as Château or Schloss at all when it is much commoner English-language practice now to retain these in the original language. To me it seems extremely old-fashioned to do so unless there is a very well-established usage of "castle" (or whatever) for a particular building. I don't know whether this is a bit of an ENGVAR thing, as I've noticed that Americans tend to prefer translating more than we Brits do (and strangely, some of the most enthusiastic translators on Wikipedia are non-native-English-speakers), but it seems completely unnecessary. Most modern guidebooks that I've seen don't do it any more. -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:03, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
I usually don't translate. See e.g. Schloss Zweibrücken, Kellereischloss, Binnenvaartmuseum and Salto de Roldán. Narky Blert (talk) 16:56, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
I think Schloss, especially for those in cities, is translated into English much more than Château. See eg Category:Castles in the Harz vs Category:Castles in Nouvelle-Aquitaine. Then there's Category:Castles in Switzerland and Category:Castles in Utrecht (province) (mostly "castles"), Category:Castles in Stockholm County (castle & other English terms, Category:Castles in Armenia (mostly "fortress"), and so on. Johnbod (talk) 17:17, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
@Narky Blert: Absolutely agree. We should never translate any article title unless there are substantial reliable English-language sources that do so. I cannot understand why some editors have an obsession with doing this. It is OR and it is not what WP:UE mandates. There's nothing wrong with providing a translation in the article text, but not in the title itself. -- Necrothesp (talk) 10:49, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

Thank you, it was a useful discussion. An additional point favoring non-translation is that it is a not-so-rare practice even in "official" English translations: Al Jazeera rather than The Island, Al Fath, Amu Darya rather than River Amu, Schloss Allner (Allner Castle) etc. Keeping in mind that several subpolicies do have rules about article titles, I will try and summarize the discussion into a (not too prescriptive/proscriptive) suggestion about the policy. Staszek Lem (talk) 16:53, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:Adi Laufitu Malani#Requested move 3 October 2019

 You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Adi Laufitu Malani#Requested move 3 October 2019. -- Marchjuly (talk) 02:06, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

SMALLDETAILS

There is a discussion at Talk:Luccombe, Isle of Wight#Requested move 20 September 2019 where the Isle of Wight one is called "Luccombe Village" but while the Somerset one is a village it has no indication its called "Luccombe Village". Crouch, Swale (talk) 12:20, 12 October 2019 (UTC)

Proposal: Change section title from: Use commonly recognizable names, to use: Use correct names

There is consensus against changing the title or specifics of WP:COMMONNAME to privilege "correct" names. Editors raise a number of concerns such as who gets to determine what the correct name is in a given context and whether it would be recognizable to readers. Some editors point to the guideline on changes in a subject's name for guidance on how to title articles when there is dispute and change in the correct or official name of a subject, and do not believe that guidance needs to be repeated in this section. Wug·a·po·des​ 17:26, 23 October 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.

Background: Over at the BFR (rocket) page, the wrong name has been in use for nearly a year, because of misunderstanding of what wp:commonname is. If we renamed that section to use right name or use correct name, people would be less apt to just read the label and assume that is what policy is. Also if we could somehow emphasize the name change portion that would be great. Currently this text is used:

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.[5] When there is no single, obvious name that is demonstrably the most frequently used for the topic by these sources, editors should reach a consensus as to which title is best by considering these criteria directly.

How about changing it to:

Wikipedia does not always 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). An exception to this is when an official name change has occurred then weight will be given to names used by reliable sources after the name change. Names will usually best fit the five criteria listed above.[5] When there is no single, obvious name that is demonstrably the most frequently used for the topic by these sources, editors should reach a consensus as to which title is best by considering these criteria directly.

What do you think?   Thanks, Daniel.Cardenas (talk) 10:03, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

@Daniel.Cardenas:I have edited WP:NAMECHANGES. Please read it again and tell us what you think. (there was no need for a vote here). ~ R.T.G 06:37, 23 October 2019 (UTC)
  • My edit has been reverted, so instead I should explain your mistake as nobody below seems to have noticed it... There is no "exception to this ... when an official name change has occurred".
  • The current guide seems to stress the phrase "extra weight", but in fact it is supposed to stress the word "after". Extra weight will be given if the new name is published widely enough, in reliable sources, to prove it is now the most commonly recognisable name. (<--this is the key, most commonly recognisable name)
  • The extra weight is never given to a new name because it is new.
  • If a name has been used for 100 years, and it has been changed last year, the number of resources using the 100 year old name will far outweigh the use of the new name, even after the new name has been proven to be accepted well enough, that it can now be assumed to be the most commonly recognisable name for the future. :::*Have you heard of the great artist Michelangelo? His official name is, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni.
  • In the old day, this policy was based largely on the fact it would help search engines. Search engines would have to be configured to cope with names which are official but rarely recognised. Wikipedia is not a money making business, but it is a business. We want as much advertising as possible, as many hits as possible from search engines.
  • It does not affect quality to prefer most commonly recognisable before official. It rejects tradition. Tradition is not reason. Good day, sir. ~ R.T.G 18:01, 23 October 2019 (UTC)
  • I agree Wikipedia should generally use the correct name even it its not "official". We should not use abbreviated/nicknames except for cases when they are widely accepted as correct by reliable sources. Crouch, Swale (talk) 10:07, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
It still means common name. We use correct common names, not incorrect common ones or correct uncommon ones. DrKay (talk) 18:30, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
Except if you are talking about BFR (rocket) which is incorrect common name? Daniel.Cardenas (talk) 18:32, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
I do not understand your comment. I am saying do not use incorrect common names. How is that not clear? DrKay (talk) 18:35, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
What makes you think your original statement is not clear? You said we do not use incorrect common names and I gave you an example where incorrect common name is used. How is that not clear? Daniel.Cardenas (talk) 18:39, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
I'm sorry I thought you didn't want to use BFR (rocket). I must have misunderstood. DrKay (talk) 18:43, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Proposal is completely incomprehensible. BFR was the official name of the rocket and is therefore correct in any normal definition of the word. DrKay (talk) 18:56, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
Yes, "was" the official name , but a new name was announced the prior year and all reputable sources used the new name of starship. The article title failed to follow the name change. Therefore is incorrect per policy. Daniel.Cardenas (talk) 18:59, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
Why have you reinserted "[5]"? Why is there a hanging "</ref>" in the middle of the text? Why did you remove my addition of the word "correct"? I do not understand why you are opposing my summary "We use correct common names, not incorrect common ones or correct uncommon ones" when any reasonable person would assume that was your own view? The links in the sections "Deciding on an article title" and "Name changes" were obviously broken by the change in section heading. Please restore the original text from 26 September while the discussion is in progress. DrKay (talk) 19:24, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
I reverted to the status quo ante bellum. oknazevad (talk) 19:28, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
Why does WP:NAMECHANGES existing lead to oppose? The issue is that people reference wp:commonname and interpret that literally. Daniel.Cardenas (talk) 19:18, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
Because we don't need to change one guildeline when the other already exists that does exactly what the proposed changes would do. We don't need to change COMMONNAME when all you needed to do was point to NAMECHANGES. Just because you can't persuasively argue your position does not mean we need to change a long-standing, widely supported guideline. Also, do not make a change to the guideline again while the matter is under discussion. Doing such will result in you being blocked. oknazevad (talk) 19:24, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose. COMMONNAME is probably the single most important principle of article naming, reflecting the usage in sources, and tying in with the concept of WP:RECOGNIZABILITY. There is absolutely no benefit for readers in switching to a "correct name" concept, (which I presume is a variant of saying we should use official names, something we've always rejected). As noted above, we already have provision for the case where subjects change name, in the form of NAMECHANGES. But again, the goal is to reflect changes in use by reliable sources, not changes in official name. If there's an issue with the naming of BFR, and you think sources are now using a different name, then start an RM and make the case there. But don't come tinkering with long-standing policy just to effect a move which has failed to gain consensus. Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 19:57, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose. All already covered. If an official name change has occurred then we do already usually take this fact into consideration at RMs. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:49, 30 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose. “Correct name” is, depending on the situation, either trivial or far mare subjective than the OP seems to think. When correct name is not trivial, when there are arguments and different perspectives on “correct”, that is exactly when COMMONNAME, pointing to reliable sources, serves its purpose. Of course correct names should be used. That’s a wikt:motherhood statement. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 14:19, 30 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose. As SmokeyJoe notes, the issue would be "whose correct name?" Commonness is subject to some degree of verification, and hence has some degree of objectivity, but in many areas "correctness" is disputed. (Anyone who has articles on their watchlist including names like "Tibet", "Taiwan", "Kashmir", "Palestine" or "Israel" won't be in any doubt about this). Peter coxhead (talk) 14:25, 30 September 2019 (UTC)
  • As an interesting note, can one really say that "State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations" is actually the official name for Rhode Island? in the source cited for that, in the constitution it appears 3x (1 of which "state" appears in lower case) but all census data, maps and primary sources (eg the tourist website) just use "Rhode Island" (a site:visitrhodeisland.com "State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations" search only returns 3 results), Encyclopædia Britannica says "State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations" is its official name though. I'd say that "Rhode Island" is the official name of the state while "State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations" is its official description similar to the Republic of Ireland and many other countries. Its just that ironically because of the ambiguity with the island of Ireland it needed to clarify its name. Talk:United States/FAQ points out The country's name is not explicitly defined as such in the Constitution or in the law. The words "United States of America" only appear three times in the Constitution. "United States" appears 51 times by itself, including in the presidential oath or affirmation. The phrase "of America" is arguably just a prepositional phrase that describes the location of the United States and is not actually part of the country's name so I'd say that that would apply to Rhode Island to its just that the exact phrase "United States of America" is actually common compared to many others. In any case I don't think the government and people of Rhode Island would want the article at State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations anyway so I'd say the current title is (IMO) the official name as well as the one preferred by primary sources etc. Crouch, Swale (talk) 17:25, 30 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose for all of the above reasons. This is a silly WP:GREATWRONGS and WP:TRUTH and WP:SOAPBOX argument. Just hat it as WP:SNOW.  — AReaderOutThataway t/c 11:58, 22 October 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose per the other opposers. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 08:07, 23 October 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.

...And Justice for All.

Hi. There's a discussion at the Film Project regarding the title of the film ...And Justice for All. Please could someone who knows a bit more about the MOS for article titles take a look? Thanks. Lugnuts Fire Walk with Me 13:37, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Neutrality of names vs 'right in political sense'

In the Talk:global warming#Preliminary discussion concerning possible Requested Move of "Global warming" some arguments have been brought forward about possible neutrality issues of global warming versus climate change. People in different demographics respond differently to hearing either of these terms, with both climate denial and concern being a bit higher if the term global warming is used. On the other hand, the word climate change often triggers the ill-guided response: "climate is always changing, so we're not causing it". I'm a bit confused by the naming criteria, which on the one hand state that neutral titles are desired, but on the other hand that the choice of title is not dependent on whether a name is "right" in a moral or political sense. Are these types of arguments valid to determine neutrality or is this a case of us having to disregard 'political' motivation. Femke Nijsse (talk) 10:14, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

Album with slashes in the title

If an editor were to create a Wikipedia article about this album, should the title of the article be Chicago/The Blues/Today!, with no spaces around the slashes, or Chicago / The Blues / Today!, with a space before and after each slash? Looking at the online references for the album, the first title, without the spaces, is much more common, which suggests that it should be used here. On the other hand, I thought I read somewhere that on Wikipedia if the slashes separate single words (e.g. Live/Dead) there should be no spaces, but if they separate multiple words (like "The Blues") there should be spaces. But I can't find that anywhere. — Mudwater (Talk) 12:23, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

MOS:SLASH has the guidance; the way I read it looks like to separate items that include at least one internal space (the NY 31 east / NY 370 exit), where for some reason use of a slash is unavoidable for a spaced slash is preferable, but you could also read where a slash occurs in an expression or abbreviation widely used outside Wikipedia, and a different construction would be inaccurate, unfamiliar, or ambiguous (e.g., his/her, w/o) for an unspaced slash to be preferable. I think in titles I most-often see unspaced... --Izno (talk) 16:03, 28 November 2019 (UTC)
I'd say, do as for AC/DC (not AC / DC): proper names are what they are —"... the NY 31 east / NY 370 exit ..." is not a proper name, but running text. Further, even in running text expressions without leading and trailing space exist, as pointed out, another example being and/or.
More importantly: is this a rhetorical question, or is someone actually considering to write an article on that album? Seems like a selection of various songs by various artists: not every such compilation album would pass WP:GNG/WP:NMUSIC#Albums. --Francis Schonken (talk) 16:24, 28 November 2019 (UTC)
@Francis Schonken: My current plan is to write an article about the album, so your question is relevant. I haven't finished looking for references, but these should be sufficient to establish notability, in my opinion: [7], [8], [9], [10], [11]. As to what the album is, it seems that Samuel Charters at Vanguard Records asked nine different blues artists to come into the studio and record a half-dozen songs each, so that he could produce three LPs (later combined into one) as a sampler of Chicago blues music. According to more than one of the sources, the albums had a significant impact on some now-well-known American and English rock musicians who at the time (1966) did not have a lot of exposure to electric blues. (This doesn't prove anything, but the German and French Wikipedias already have articles for the album.) — Mudwater (Talk) 17:14, 28 November 2019 (UTC)
Here are the German and French articles: de:Chicago/The Blues/Today!, fr:Chicago/The Blues/Today!. It's interesting to note that they have titles with un-spaced slashes. — Mudwater (Talk) 17:20, 28 November 2019 (UTC)
I'd say, go ahead! I read the German and French articles: can't see a problem notability-wise. Would keep the space-less slashes like the other wikis, and like English AC/DC. --Francis Schonken (talk) 17:29, 28 November 2019 (UTC)
@Francis Schonken: Sounds good to me. Thanks! — Mudwater (Talk) 17:35, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

"Descriptive title" disambiguation - is it a thing?

I'm not convinced that WP:DESCRIPDIS is describing an actual disambiguation technique that's distinct from natural disambiguation. None of the examples given (e.g. List of birds of Nicaragua) seem to actually be disambiguating against any other titles. The WP:DESCRIPDIS/WP:DESCRIPTDIS shortcuts have together been invoked about 60 times in their 4 years of existence (mostly by one editor), and all the references that I looked at were referring to either:

  • What most editors would call natural disambiguation. e.g. here, where Siamese cat and Vidalia onion are given as examples.
  • The phenomenon of descriptive titles in general (as described in WP:NDESC), but with no need to disambiguate. e.g. here, here, or even here as part of the Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary policy. (Arguably, we should have a section just about descriptive titles in general, as a link target for contexts like these, perhaps under WP:UCRN. WP:NDESC is close, but it's specifically about neutrality of descriptive titles.)

Objections to removing it from the list? Or alternatively, can someone think of some new examples to use that demonstrate descriptive titles being used specifically for the purpose of disambiguation? Colin M (talk) 19:07, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

--Francis Schonken (talk) 20:36, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
Also, WP:AT is policy, so must mention possibilities that topical naming convention guidelines are allowed to pick up. If the page name difference for disambiguating between a topic (e.g. "dog breed") and a list on that topic (e.g. "List of dog breeds") could only be done "naturally", avoiding all kinds of titles that don't come naturally, then surely naming conventions such as WP:LISTNAME and WP:NCM#Lists would become impossible, while not allowed by the policy, and one would end up with article titles like dog breeds for the list (surely more natural and better for the fourth of the WP:CRITERIA!), which now, however, redirects to the dog breed article. So I couldn't care less how many times the shortcut is linked: if there are thousands of "List of..." articles, most of them disambiguate from the article on the topic of the list, and that is only possible through the policy that sanctions such disambiguation (otherwise the topical guidelines would be in breach of policy, and their guidance on this point would need to be discarded while in breach of policy). --Francis Schonken (talk) 02:17, 5 December 2019 (UTC)

Proper names of organizations

An editor, User:wbm1058, added the following text:

Proper names of organizations use the subject's own spelling (e.g. International Labour Organization, rather than "International Labor Organization" or "International Labour Organisation").

With an edit summary of "Proper names of organizations use the subject's own spelling, e.g. International Labour Organization. Copied from Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Consistency within articles".

This is probably OK I guess, but I don't like to see substantive changes to important rules without consensus. For this one, it could be argued that it either is redundant to the previous paragraph ("If a topic has strong ties to a particular English-speaking nation, the title of its article should use that nation's variety of English (for example, compare Australian Defence Force with United States Secretary of Defense"), in which case its not needed, or else modifies it in some way, in which case it ought to be discussed.

WP:MOS is a guideline and speaks to article text, WP:AT is a policy and speaks to title, so we want to be leery of importing in text from WP:MOS wholesale, as that automatically elevates that text to policy level. If for some reason it was desirable to title an article about an organization differently from the way the organization spells it's own title -- possible, I suppose, if the organization used sporty spelling or orthography ("American PIE! Council" or what have you) -- that'd trump the MOS, which would have to follow the title.

Every change to a rule brings in these subtleties, which probably future generations will parse long after we're gone, so we want to be careful here, especially if this new text is a solution in search of a problem. Do we have consensus for this change, or not? Herostratus (talk) 05:08, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

I think a reference to MOS:TM would be much-preferred here. --Izno (talk) 05:25, 13 December 2019 (UTC)
@Izno: How would you apply MOS:TM in this case? I suppose "Do not "correct" the spelling, punctuation, diacritics, or grammar of trademarks to be different from anything found in reliable sources" applies, but that doesn't address the issue of what to do when the majority of British reliable sources spell an organization's name differently than the majority of American sources. – wbm1058 (talk) 17:01, 13 December 2019 (UTC)
That said, WP:OFFICIAL might be a reasonable read as well. --Izno (talk) 05:26, 13 December 2019 (UTC)
Likewise, Official English names are candidates for what to call an article, because somebody presumably uses them. They should always be considered as possibilities, but should be used only if they are actually the name most commonly used doesn't address how to handle names where the British common use differs from the American. wbm1058 (talk) 17:08, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

For background, see User talk:Wbm1058/Archive 6#"but there are still over 500 linked misspellings to correct". This started on 13 October 2018 when Headbomb flagged World Health Organisation as a misspelling, rather than a valid alternative spelling. I reverted that change, but Headbomb doubled down, so after finding MOS guidance supporting their position, I acquiesced and made this edit which prompted the discussion on my talk. Since I gave in, I hadn't noticed this position being challenged, until now. I was going to make a related "spelling correction", using my usual rationale, "per MOS:CONSISTENCY" in my edit summary, when, to my surprise, I found that now pointed to a disambiguation page, after a discussion I was not made aware of. Many of my prior edit summaries now inconsistently point to that dab. After realizing that the MOS only applied to consistency within articles, and that this was being used as a rationale for changing linked article titles, I added the text highlighted in green above. – wbm1058 (talk) 06:27, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

So if all national varieties of English are acceptable in article titles; Wikipedia does not prefer one in particular, and either "International Labor Organization" (American) or "International Labour Organisation" (British) or International Labour Organization (international hybrid) is acceptable, does it make sense for the MOS to say proper names use the subject's own spelling, e.g. joint project of the United States Department of Defense and the Australian Defence Force; International Labour Organization? We have a scenario where the article may be titled "International Labor Organization" because either consensus determined that the American spelling is the "common" spelling, or MOS:RETAIN prevails and American English was used first... yet all uses in the article body must use the organization's own spelling despite the conflict with the article title. In other words, all national varieties of English are acceptable in the title, but only the title. This does not strike me as very "WP:CONSISTENT" or "MOS:CONSISTENT" (BTW, those links are not "consistent" with either each other or "WP:CONSISTENCY" and "MOS:CONSISTENCY"). And why are we allowing the MOS:RETAIN style guide to dictate article title policy: An article should not be edited or renamed simply to switch from one variety of English to another. The WP:TITLEVAR policy has no such prohibition; it simply says "all national varieties of English are acceptable in article titles" – so if editors want to change titles from one variety to another, title policy is fine with that. Is the MOS in violation of the title policy? – wbm1058 (talk) 14:16, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

Canadian Tire is Canadian Tire, even if the British would want to spell it Canadian Tyre. Organizations choose what to call themselves, spelling nationalists don't get to change those choices. Likewise, Isabel Carrasco doesn't suddenly become Isabelle Carrasco if I write in French. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:31, 13 December 2019 (UTC)
More specifically, you can write Collaborations between the American, Australian, Canadian, and British defences forces..., but you must write A joint collaboration between the American Department of Defense and the Canadian Department of National Defence.... Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:46, 13 December 2019 (UTC)
@Headbomb: the existing guidance covers topics with strong ties to a particular English-speaking nation. At issue here are the titles of international organizations which do not have such strong ties to Canada, or any other country. – wbm1058 (talk) 15:25, 13 December 2019 (UTC)
They still get to pick their own names. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:27, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

The idea that we use organizations' own names dates back to 27 June 2003 in the Manual of Style, making this a 16-year-old style convention. Now this change appears to have been boldly implemented by Andy G, an editor who last contributed in 2008, but it stuck. The example added in 2003 "US Department of Defense and Australian Defence Force" has been retained to this day. Can article title policy credibly allow "Australian Defense Force" to be an article title when the MOS insists that the spelling Australian Defence Force be used consistently throughout the article. Why should the spelling of the title of an article ever be an exception to the consistent spelling used in the article body? wbm1058 (talk) 16:34, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

Weighing using a common name versus an organization's official name only makes sense to me when they are entirely different (consider Government of the United Kingdom versus Her Majesty's Government). Where the only difference is spelling, I believe it is appropriate to give priority to the official name. The style guides of notable reliable sources should not influence the article title; their decisions may balance different concerns than those considered by this community. isaacl (talk) 23:21, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

Well, in the overwhelming majority of cases, ENGVAR and the name of the organization will both require the same spelling.
If there's an English organization called "Britons for Defence", no problem -- that's the name of the organization, and also the preferred ENGVAR name. An article "List of British organizations advocated defence" would be spelled that because of ENGVAR (there's no proper name in the title). If -- as a thought experiment -- there were an organization called "Britons for Defense" (with that spelling)... what then?
We would go with the actual title of the organization, trumping ENGVAR, would we not? I would think so unless the "Britons for Defence" with that spelling was used in most sources, which would be extremely unlikely since it'd be wrong. So on that basis, the proposed change might be an improvement. But cases like this -- "Britons for Defense" -- would be vanishingly rare I would think. So this might be a solution in search of a problem, so best not to increase verbiage. Herostratus (talk) 02:07, 14 December 2019 (UTC)
I'm not certain a change is necessary, as it seems everyone agrees on using the official title. However as mentioned above, international organizations would not fall under the guidance to use the variant of English most associated with the organization. A hypothetical, somewhat similar example: imagine most reliable sources chose to follow the New York Times stylebook, where acronyms longer than five letters are spelled with only an initial uppercase letter, such as Unesco, and periods are always used with initialisms, such as N.A.A.C.P. It could be argued that this was common usage and should be preferred over the official organization titles. I think once upon a time I read William Safire write something about the New York Times' use of "defence" vs "defense", but can't remember now; a quick search, though, turns up hits where it refers to Canada's "Department of National Defense". If all US newspapers did this, then by numbers it could be considered to be the most prevalent usage (though in this situation, using Canadian English for the title would be preferred). isaacl (talk) 04:21, 14 December 2019 (UTC)
We use sources for facts, not presentation. For the latter, we have our own MOS. For instance, if most sources use "December 7th, 1941" we still would use "December 7, 1941" because our MOS prescribes cardinal numbers for dates. Our article is spelled "Macy's" not "Macy*s". And so forth. On the other hand, eBay. So... preponderance of spelling and orthography is is a data point worth being aware of, but no more than that.
We use "eBay" because that's what most readers will expect and understand. We know this because that's what they usually see in sources outside of Wikipedia.
We use NAACP because that's our style book, and it is also what (we think) most readers will mostly expect and most easily recognize. Othography used by most sources is only a way to help us figure out what what most readers will mostly expect and most easily understand. We use Médecins Sans Frontières instead of "Doctors Without Borders" for the same reason I guess (or at least people who work on that article think that most readers of the English Wikipedia will mostly expect and most easily understand, I assume.)
For the issue at hand -- how to deal with "International Labour Organization" and cases like that... it's not going to be super shocking to use "Labor" or "Organisation", nor would it cause readers to puzzle over what entity is being described, so it doesn't matter. If I thought there should be a rule I'd state it like this:
  1. If a preponderance of the Five Virtues (e.g. Naturalness and Recognizability and Consistency) supports one version, use that version.
  2. If two or more spellings meet this criteria about the same, use preponderance of sources.
  3. If there's no clear preponderance of sources, use the subject's own orthography UNLESS 1) The subjects orthography is idiosyncratic (camel case or whatever), and 2) this is not widely accepted and used by sources.
  4. If the subject's own orthography can't be used (either because of the immediately above rule, or because the subject's own spelling is in doubt because the subject is not consistent), and if it's a WP:ENGVAR issue, and the subject is by history, location, or other nature tied substantially more to one of the two main English versions (British or American), use the appropriate version of English.
  5. If none of the above, search our MOS for any rule that would apply to article text, and use that, assuming there's no conflicting rule. (Thus, we would use (for example) use "ADVANTO" not "A.D.V.A.N.T.O" or "advanto" etc., providing we have had to drill down this far.)
  6. All of the above being subject to common sense and good practice.
I we needed more guidance on this issue, we should use something like this, and *not* just drag in whatever the MOS has for article text. Thus on consideration, I reject the editor's contribution and it should be rolled back. Herostratus (talk) 12:07, 15 December 2019 (UTC)
I appreciate the considered analysis! One thing: although you said that sources were used for facts, and not presentation, and then preponderance of spelling and orthography is is a data point worth being aware of, but no more than that, you then placed preponderance of sources as #2 on your list. Thus absent any special exceptions about the idiosyncratic nature of the orthography, you are recommending that a preponderance of sources be used when the candidate article titles meet all five characteristics (as is the case for "labour" and "labor"). I feel this cedes the decision to a preponderance of style guides from the sources, and would personally prefer priority to be given to the official spelling (again, absent any special idiosyncratic exceptions). isaacl (talk) 16:12, 15 December 2019 (UTC)
Right, good point. Perhaps #2 and #3 should be flipped.
Thing is, it's going to be pretty rare when there is a clear preponderance of one spelling in sources, and that spelling is not be the most Recognizable and Natural, and there's 2 Virtues right there. It's possible I suppose, but if most sources call an entity "Bill's Daycare", then why would most readers expect to find it under "Bill's Day Care" or whatever.
So, if an entity is formally named "Bill's Day Care" and that's what Bill calls it and what they say on their website, but the great majority the reviews, and articles, and mentions in books and speeches and so on spell it "Bill's Daycare", well... which one should we use?
Well, "Daycare" would be more Natural and more Recognizable, and consequently probably more Consistent (after all, our articles are named like Dog daycare, not "Dog day care"). So that's three of the 5 Virtues, and so therefore we would be required -- not allowed, or suggested, but required by policy -- to use "Bill's Daycare", notwithstanding that the subject spells it differently.
So... probably, flipping #2 and #3 would not make a difference in the great preponderance of cases. Herostratus (talk) 17:57, 15 December 2019 (UTC)
I think both "daycare" and "day care" are equally recognizable: "someone familiar with... the subject area will recognize" both as denoting the subject in question. I also think both meet the naturalness characteristic as likely search terms and link text terms. I think this applies even more so for "defense" versus "defence", or "labour" versus "labor". So I don't think this is as uncommon as you suggest. isaacl (talk) 22:12, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

The need for redirects

All the discussion above brings home (to me, anyway) how important it is to make redirects from all plausible alternative titles, both for the sake of the reader looking for the article and to reduce the chance of an enthusiastic but careless editor creating a "new" (duplicate) article at a different version of the title. This applies throughout all considerations of article titles. There is currently a sentence saying "Redirects should be created to articles that may reasonably be searched for or linked to under two or more names (such as different spellings or former names)." but I wonder if this should be made more prominent? Or reworded as "Redirects to articles should be created from all plausible alternative titles such as different spellings or former names, to help readers find the article and to reduce the likelihood of accidental duplicate article creation"? PamD 22:40, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

I've always though that the search engines (either Wikipedia's or external ones) should bear the responsibility of finding matches for the many possible variants. That said, I agree with the existing practice of having redirects from common alternatives. isaacl (talk) 22:46, 15 December 2019 (UTC)
Redirects were important when search engines were not very good, and that is now very long ago. If you go to a redlink title, you get the excellent Wikipedia internal search engine result for that title. If you follow the option to create the page, you get large clear text "Before creating an article, please ..."
When people create redirects, the redirect hijacks the reader from the search engine and takes to the redirect target. If it was a bad redirect, including if the term is ambiguous, then the reader may be disserviced.
Search engines, using dynamic AI learning, are very very good at resolving plausible alternatives, different spelling, former names, and misspellings. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:27, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
Yes redirects are good. The fact that we have redirects makes most article title discussions a lot less fraught and important than they would be.
Altho, I suppose too many redirects can clog our search engine with false positives I guess. If, on the grounds of "can't hurt to have plenty of redirects, let's put in any remotely plausible ones" you create "Hanks, Tom" and "Hankster" and "Hankman" as redirects to Tom Hanks, that makes it harder to find Hank Aaron among the dross, I would think.
And the actual title still matters, for when a reader accesses an article, we want her to see the title that would most quickly inform her what the article is about. If she has to puzzle about it for half a second while her mind switches gears -- well, half a second isn't much for one reader, but it adds up. Much worse is if the reader has to read the first sentence of that article to figure out what it's about -- that's a worst case, and we want to pick a title that will minimize that.
Most of the examples in this thread don't really impact instantaneousness of understanding much. If an article is accessed 100,000 times in a year, and 70,000 thousand aren't affected in the least by "labor" vs "labour", 20,000 need a half-second to mentally translate "labour" to "labor", and 10,000 need a half-second to mentally translate "labour" to "labor"... the net cost of using "labour" is 10,000 x 0.5 = 5,000 seconds = 14 hours over the course of ten years. The equivalent of an entire human waking day lost... it's not nothing, but it's not a huge deal either.
Differences that do impact instantaneousness of understanding more -- such as whether to title an article "First French Empire" or "Empire Français" etc. -- are pretty much handled by the Five Virtues before you even get down to figuring out what is the official legal name or counting sources.
So this is why the proposed change is not justified by the increase in verbiage and other downsides. Herostratus (talk) 04:59, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
@SmokeyJoe: But a reader who has used Wikipedia before "knows" that a red link means there is no article, so they won't click on it to reach the search engine. And if the link is to the "Foo and Foo Society" but the article is at "Foo & Foo Society" they need a redirect. PamD 05:34, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
Redlinks are not returned by either internal nor external search engines to click on. If Foo and Foo Society is a redlink, and they type that text into a search engine, internal or external, Foo & Foo Society will be the top result, surely. They do not need the redirect. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:12, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
I'm thinking of actual red links in articles or lists, created either before the target article existed or carelessly afterwards by an editor with a different idea of the title. eg I create a redirect from someone's full name, with the middle name they rarely use, and find that it turns blue a longstanding red link in list of winners of an award.  PamD 06:50, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

Try again

Ick, I'm seeing a wall of rambling text rejecting my addition without addressing the narrow issue I'm trying to resolve. My questions aren't answered, while the discussion wanders off on irrelevant tangents.

Let me try one more time. HERE is another example of the conflict I want to resolve. MOS:ARTCON (consistency within articles) says "Within a given article the conventions of one particular variety of English should be followed consistently, except proper names use the subject's own spelling, e.g. joint project of the United States Department of Defense and the Australian Defence Force; International Labour Organization. If proper names always use the subject's own spelling, then we tag World Trade Organisation with {{R from misspelling}} because that is not the subject's own spelling.

If, on the other hand, World Trade Organisation is a valid {{R from British English}}, then the manual of style instruction "proper names use the subject's own spelling", which has existed in some form since June 2003, is in conflict with article title policy, and thus should be removed, because it goes against policy. I'm hesitant to make that call based on this limited participation, rambling discussion. @Paine Ellsworth: Help! – wbm1058 (talk) 14:56, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

Further explanation: the tag {{R from misspelling}} is a command for gnomes to correct the misspelling by editing the links to change them to the correct spelling. – wbm1058 (talk) 15:08, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

To editor ­wbm1058: thank you very much for the call! Briefly on the policy addition, I think it may be necessary because I've seen editors read "consistency within articles" to mean that it does not apply to article titles, only to article content, which is incorrect IMHO. This is a case of updating a policy to reflect the long-standing community consensus of a guideline.
To the meat, which is whether or not any redirect like World Trade Organisation is a {{redirect from misspelling}}, a {{redirect from British English}} or possibly both. Again IMHO, redirects from a different variety of any language have never, nor should ever, be thought of as misspellings. They are variants, they are alternative spellings (Category:Redirects from British spelling is a subcategory of Category:Redirects from alternative spellings, and not a subcat of the Redirects from misspellings cat), and should never be thought of as "misspellings" – not under any circumstances. And I think the tag {{R from British English}} is a suggestion for gnomes to check and possibly alter the links to change them to consistently used varieties of English. Again, thank you! PI Ellsworth  ed. put'r there 17:36, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
@Paine Ellsworth: is wrong here. The official name of the World Trade Organization is the World Trade Organization, not the World Trade Organisation, as can be seen from their logo, legal documents, and every material produced by the WTO. World Trade Organisation is a misspelling of the organization's actual name. Just like Canadian Tyre is a misspelling of Canadian Tire. Likewise, Systems Research and Behavioural Science is a misspelling of Systems Research and Behavioral Science. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:23, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I won't contest the fact that I could be wrong; however, I still think these are just variants, alternative spellings, which was and is the purpose of such redirect templates as {{R from British English}} and {{R from American English}} in the first place! They have never been thought of as incorrect spellings, and to begin to do so now would be an injustice to the various language spellings, which should not be equated with such true misspellings as langauge, raindeer, Darryl Hannah and so on. I could be rong. PI Ellsworth  ed. put'r there 18:57, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
The purpose of {{R from British English}} is to tag legitimate variants. Behavioral sciences is an American variant of Behavioural sciences. But Systems Research and Behavioral Science will/should never be referred to as Systems Research and Behavioural Science because that is not the actual name of the journal. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:01, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
That does not (IMHO) make your example above a "misspelling", it is still just a variant spelling. There are nearly twenty years of consensus for this, the entire existence of Wikipedia. Good fortune to you! PI Ellsworth  ed. put'r there 19:07, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
It does, because that is not the name of the organization, journal, entity, or whatever. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:10, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
It can also be argued that Behavioral sciences is not the name of the sciences. Hopefully the insanity begins and ends here. PI Ellsworth  ed. put'r there 19:16, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
It cannot. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:24, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
  • "World Trade Organisation" should not be considered a misspelling. Even if the "official" name spells in the American way, numerous sources render this in other languages, including British English. Examples include [13] [14][15]. If there were separate British and American varieties of Wikipedia, then each would spell this name in its own way, just as the Italian, Latvian and Chinese wikis do, and within enwiki, it should not be considered an error any more than other regional spellings are.  — Amakuru (talk) 20:18, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
Yes, people will misspell things sometimes. That does not mean we should. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:23, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
Canadian Tyre is not a misspelling either... see here, here, here and many more. PI Ellsworth  ed. put'r there 20:51, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
It is. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:05, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
That link just shows that the company name can be spelled both ways. Not a misspelling, it is an English variant (Engvar). PI Ellsworth  ed. put'r there 06:02, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

WP:AT is a policy, and should be. The MOS is a guideline. It's a collection of best practices, common practices, suggestions (of various strengths), text to consult to settle a dispute, and strong rules that ought to be followed. (WP:ENGVAR is an example of a strong rule that ought to be followed, for instance).

Common sense tells us that the name used for an entity in article text should be consistent with other article text, and with the title. That's incontrovertible I'd say. And it is WP:AT not ENGVAR or any other guideline, that determines what that name should be.

Taking the World Trade Organization, that article could be titled "World Trade Organisation" or "World Trade Organization". So let's compare them using the Five Virtues:

  • Conciseness: a wash
  • Precision: a wash
  • Recognizability: kind of a wash, altho not exactly. Some readers will do a double-take at "Organisation" (assuming a misspelling, which is distracting and off-putting), and some will do a double-take at "Organization" (likewise assuming a misspelling, which is distracting and off-putting). If you include ESL people (particularly South Asians), let's say its a 50-50 split. So, basically a wash.
  • Consistency: let's see... "intitle:Organization" brings in 3,243 hits, including the actual article Organization itself. brings "intitle:Organization" brings in 1,531 hits. There are redirects and foreign spellings (Organisation internationale de la Francophonie is in French, etc.) in play here, so a full survey would have to be taken, but just off this one data point it looks like there's no super high level of consistency, but 2/3 of articles use "Organization", so to the extent that there is consistency, it leans towards "Organization".
  • Naturalness: well, lets see. Let's start with the "The title is one that.. editors would naturally use to link to the article from other articles" part first. If I'm (say) editing the article Copyright and I want to mention this entity, is it more natural to write "World Trade Organization" (which is what is done in that article) or "World Trade Organisation". It depends on if I'm American or non-American, right?
So let's do some deductive reasoning. Well, about 2/3 of native English speakers are Americans. Native English users of the English Wikipedia must surely edit (as opposed to read) articles at a somewhat higher rate than ESL users. A native French speaker who speaks English well enough to use the English Wikipedia sometimes is more likely,if she chooses to edit, to edit the French Wikipedia. How much difference I don't know, and then you have that Indians edit a lot. Still... 2/3 of native speakers... for the editing part of Naturalness, I'd have to go with "Organization". It's certainly what I'd write if I didn't have the inclination to look it up.
As to the "The title is one that readers are likely to look or search for", well, that's different. We're assuming a 50-50 split in American/non-American English speaking readers. So a wash I guess. Altho you have to factor in those people who already know how the entity itself spells it and use that... so, difficult to say.

Anyway... taken altogether, I'd have to say that WP:AT at least leans toward using American spelling in cases like this.

So... on that basis you could say the text should say

Names of organizations with alternate spellings based on different varieties of English (see WP:ENGVAR) should as a general rule use American spelling (International Labor Organization, rather than "International Labour Organization" or "International Labour Organisation" and so forth), because that is more likely to satisfy the Five Virtues.

Two problems with that are:

  1. Really, WP:AT doesn't make a very strong case for defaulting to American English in these cases. My points above are based on deductions from some assumptions and numbers that may may not be correct or correctly interpeted.
  2. This obviously would cause a number of people's heads to explode (notwithstanding that's its probably correct or if not at least arguably correct). We would need at least one CENT RfC to make this modification, which would hugely affect the text of a fair number of articles and would require ENGVAR to be be changed. Huge effort. Would not recommend.

By the same token, there's no reason to deprecate all other factors except the official title of the organization, so maybe something like

Titles of articles about an organization which has alternate spellings based on different varieties of English are -- unless the Five Virtues clearly and unmistakably militate for one version, which is rare -- generally constructed according to Wikipedia:Official names, which requires balancing legal name, preponderance of sources, strong national ties to the organization if any (see WP:ENGVAR), and other factors.

On the other other hand, it certainly is easier to just say "Use the official name" as the original edit said. Easy is good; fewer conflicts. But we'd need an RfC to make this change I think. Herostratus (talk) 04:41, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

My proposed change is not in the "Five Virtues" section, and if the Virtues determine that the common name is WTO, then §National varieties of English is not applicable. It is only after the Virtues have determined that the common name is the organization's full name that we then proceed to §National varieties of English, because the "Five Virtues" do not address the issue of how to spell the organization's name. For most topics, spelling isn't an issue. This is why it isn't addressed by the Virtues, but rather in a lower section, where exceptions and ambiguities of the Virtues are resolved.
I challenge you to find an article about an organization which is not titled the way the organization spells it. There are exceptions at MOS:TM such as not using all caps, but not for National varieties of English. So, my proposed change would not force the title of any article to be changed; it is simply codifying an already well-established practice. wbm1058 (talk) 06:25, 17 December 2019 (UTC)
I don't think the naturalness characteristic should consider the spelling variations of the entire population of Wikipedia editors. As you noted this would have the perverse effect of mandating the variant of whatever sub-population of editors is dominant at a given time. I see naturalness as applying to the concept of the title (such as "Her Majesty's Government" versus "Government of the United Kingdom"). isaacl (talk) 19:12, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

Redux

  • Having read (most of) the above: Oppose the proposed change. Long and short reasons have been given, here's my short one: WP:AT policy is not for sorting out "R from <whatever>" messages on redirect pages, and even less is the policy page on article titles a suitable venue for steering semi-automated spelling corrections in article text. Find another guidance page: the stated problem is not within the realm of policy-level guidance, and certainly not within the realm of a policy on article titles. WP:TITLETM, part of the AT policy, is clear that article titles don't always use the spelling of the subject (whether it's an organisation or P!NK). If MoS has a problem with that: sort it out at the MoS, that is, AT, as policy, should normally trump MoS, which should be somewhat more flexible than policy. --Francis Schonken (talk) 21:59, 17 December 2019 (UTC)
Right, there is MOS:TITLE which has various suggestions for titles, such as MOS:ITALICTITLE which tells when to italicize titles. That is a good place to handle details of spelling and orthography. WP:AT is more concerned with major differences, such as if a article should be titled "Russia" or "Soviet Union", or "Guinea pig" rather than "Cavia porcellus", etc. etc. So maybe a section with the OP's proposed to text could be added to MOS:TITLE. However, it should be clarified that it's only addressing ENGVAR issues; whether an organization's article should be titled (for instance) Kiwanis (the title we do currently use) or Kiwanis International (the actual proper name of the organization) is an WP:AT issue (e.g., "Kiwanis" is more concise than "Kiwanis International", and that's one of the Five Virtues that no MOS suggestion can trump). Herostratus (talk) 00:04, 18 December 2019 (UTC)
OK, I get your po!nts. Basically, the policy doesn't care what we do. MOS:ARTCON is perfectly fine in saying proper names use the subject's own spelling, e.g. joint project of the United States Department of Defense and the Australian Defence Force; International Labour Organization; however this is not more flexible than policy, it's less flexible. Just like saying "Pink", not "P!NK" is less flexible, and accepted. This policy doesn't mind if the MOS sets more restrictive controls on article titles.
I think we can close this out now; consider my proposal to be withdrawn. wbm1058 (talk) 03:47, 18 December 2019 (UTC)
No, the MoS can ***never*** set more restrictive rules on article titles:
  • Re. "proper names use the subject's own spelling, e.g. joint project of the United States Department of Defense and the Australian Defence Force; International Labour Organization" is less restrictive (in the MoS), while MoS is a guideline with multiple exceptions (exceptions that can be effectuated with piped links, redirects or whatever, in article text, when linking to an article, and might even appear without link, or as an abbreviation, which might be acceptable too, etc. – anyway, Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Trademarks has a truckload of documented exceptions to the "use the subject's own spelling" rule)
  • Re. "Just like saying "Pink", not "P!NK" is less flexible, and accepted": that is not "flexible" nor "less flexible", what you write is just gobbledegook in AT context: "P!NK" redirects to "Pink (singer)", not to "Pink" (which is an article about the colour). Per the WP:AT policy, the article for the singer is at "Pink (singer)", and there is zero flexibility for the article title, that is the title of the article where the content is: it can only be written in one way. Similarly for redirects: they can only go to one page, which is also zero flexibility. Above I wrote: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Trademarks has a truckload of documented exceptions to the "use the subject's own spelling" rule, yet there are again other exceptions to the "don't use the subject's own spelling" examples of that guideline, e.g. the lead sentence of the article of the singer writes both "Pink" *and* "P!nk" (both in boldface), which is more flexible than article titles (which can't handle variant spellings: only one spelling can be the title of the article where the content is, and the others need to be redirects); for clarity: the MoS exception-to-the-exception in the lead sentence of the singer's article is covered by MOS:BOLDSYN.
--Francis Schonken (talk) 05:09, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

Gay or Gay?

Should the title of the Gay article be italicized? I italicized it, based on my understanding of the guidelines. Another editor reverted my change, saying the italicization did not look right to me. Other input may be valuable.

MOS:WORDSASWORDS says Use italics when writing about words as words. MOS:LEADSENTENCE says For articles that are actually about terms, italicize the term [in the lead sentence] to indicate the use–mention distinction. WP:ITALICTITLE says Use italics [for the title] when italics would be used in running text. The Gay article is about the term itself, and the term is italicized in the article lead and body.

I am alerting the Gay talk page to this discussion. WanderingWanda (talk) 06:05, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

I de-italiced, but considering the reasons not to. I see this in long-view, the word is weighted since its former usage [for which there is no adequate synonym], and I do not see the sexuality of the term as special usage. ~ cygnis insignis 12:03, 9 September 2019 (UTC)
Huh? Never mind. The hat-note says "This article is about gay as an English-language term", which seems clear enough, and to bring it firmly under MOS:WORDSASWORDS. Johnbod (talk) 14:08, 9 September 2019 (UTC)
My first reaction would also be "doesn't look quite right", but I can't fault the reasoning for it. Looking at articles in Category:English words, there are many that use italic titles, e.g. Groovy, Folx (term), Femme. They might even be the majority. So yeah, I see no reason not to italicize. Colin M (talk) 15:02, 9 September 2019 (UTC)
  • I understand the logic, but I wouldn't italicize the title. I agree with the above sentiments that it just doesn't look right. The italicized title rule is basically so that the title of things that are always italicized (such as book titles or movie titles) look right aesthetically. The term "gay" isn't always italicized, and there isn't any context within a one-word title that signifies that it should be italicized, as italicizing a word as a word is context specific within a sentence itself. Rreagan007 (talk) 02:30, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
MOS:WORDSASWORDS is nothing to do with titles of works, nor about words that are normally italicised (as foreign etc). It's to show it's an article about the word, not the thing(s) the word means. An article called plain "Gay" might begin "A gay is a male homosexual ....". But this is not that article. Johnbod (talk) 03:04, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
I wasn't talking about MOS:WORDSASWORDS. I was talking about WP:ITALICTITLE. Every example given at WP:ITALICTITLE are words that are always italicized in running text (books, ships, etc.). The word "gay" is not always italicized when in running text, so I think it's a misuse of WP:ITALICTITLE to apply it to this situation. Rreagan007 (talk) 04:54, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
Well, even if you ignore ITALICTITLE, surely MOS:WORDSASWORDS applies to titles just as it does anywhere else? And since the article is about a term, not a concept, I feel like the title also refers to the term, rather than the concept. *Shrug*. WanderingWanda (talk) 04:41, 13 September 2019 (UTC) Ah, I see WORDSASWORDS has been updated in light of this dispute. Well, if that's the consensus that's fine by me. WanderingWanda (talk) 04:43, 13 September 2019 (UTC)
  • I would not italicise the title but I would italicise the first sentence: "Gay is a term primarily used ..." Re: running text, I'd interpret that as whether italics appear when the word is used to refer to the concept rather than the word itself. For instance: "In this film, John Doe portrayed the gay writer whose last work was criticised for its deus ex machina ending." Daß Wölf 06:39, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
  • We should not italicize titles of things that would not be italicized in running text. Red Slash 23:53, 12 September 2019 (UTC)
    • That wording is ambiguous. In an article that's about a word or phrase, the term would be italicized in the running text in that specific article, so the guideline arguably applies. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 10:52, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
  • After some searching, I found this discussion from 2017 about adding words-as-words to the list of cases where italics would be used in titles. It was largely opposed, and is probably the best evidence available for consensus being against this practice (though the idea of adding the opposite advice to the guideline - i.e. to not italicize the titles of articles on words - also failed to get consensus in that discussion). The strongest evidence in the opposite direction is the empirical fact that many (maybe even a narrow majority) of the articles in Category:English words currently use italic titles. I also found a few other small related discussions on article talk pages here, and here. Colin M (talk) 16:10, 13 September 2019 (UTC)
    @Colin M: Thanks for that find; I participated in that discussion but almost forgot about it. At that time, my research showed that examining the Category:Interjections or Category:English words, we can see that articles using [italic title] are few and far between but now the situation has apparently changed. On a quick skim, most of those {{italic title}}s were relatively recent additions. For example, Sangdeboeuf italicized As the crow flies in Feb 2018 citing MOS:WORDSASWORDS, and I disagree with that rationale: without a context, an italic title strongly suggests that the topic is a book or film title. I agree with the majority that italicizing such titles is taking it too far, and I continue to advocate that a short sentence should be added to WP:ITALICTITLE to discourage that. No such user (talk) 10:31, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
    I don't think italics necessarily suggest a book or film title. (I doubt anyone thinks that Rhododendron or Queen Elizabeth 2 refer to artistic or literary works when viewed in context.) It's helpful to be able to know at a glance whether an article is about the term(s) mentioned in the title, or whether the term(s) are being used to refer to something else. (As if, say, As the crow flies were a description of actual crows in flight.) While not perfect, the established use of italics to designate words-as-words makes this a straightforward tool for doing just that. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 10:52, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
    "As the crow flies" is hardly a name of a genus or a ship; the first association for me is a work title (cf. As the World Turns). The key difference here is that italics are always used when referring to works, ships and taxonomic genera, but not always when referring to words or phrases: they are only used in running text for the purpose of use-mention distinction. Besides, in our articles about words and phrases, the use-mention distinction is not always straightforward, as the exposition often shifts between the two.
    Obviously, there is not a single "right" answer but, if we want to establish a consistent rule, it seems that majority in this RFC and the 2017 discussion disagrees with your interpretation. No such user (talk) 13:08, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
    The fact that As the crow flies is in sentence case rather than title case seems like it would reduce confusion about it being the title of a work (though this doesn't help for single-word titles like Gay). Colin M (talk) 13:55, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
    Perhaps, but that doesn't make it right. It shouldn't be italicised at all.  — Amakuru (talk) 19:26, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
    Why not? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 10:23, 22 September 2019 (UTC)
    Of course As the crow flies is not a genus or a ship. But any objections on those grounds are completely circular, since the very policy we're talking about is the one that says to italicize those titles. And we don't decide issues on a simple majority/minority vote. Granted that the use-mention distinction is not always clear in articles, but it should be fairly easy to determine case by case which one should be the main topic of any article. In the case of Gay, the italics are an immediate indication that the word is not being used in the normal sense (which I would guess is the rationale for their use in artistic/literary titles as well). They visually set the word apart. Without italics, Gay seems like it could easily be mistaken at first for an article about gayness, i.e. homosexuality, rather than the word itself. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 10:35, 22 September 2019 (UTC)
  • I would support the use of italics for this particular article, for the reasons I outlined above and in the previous discussion. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 10:58, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Not taking a position on the technical correctness, but the italics give it a queer look. EEng 06:45, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Absolutely not. No need to italicise whatsoever. -- Necrothesp (talk) 09:48, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

The article should be italicized, since the guidelines support it. WanderingWanda basically said it all in their intro paragraph, along with the two quotes about why it should be italicized. As a further indication, Sangdeboeuf gave a logical argument for why italics are used for this purpose, namely it gives an immediate indication that the article is not about what you might think (the concept) but about something else (the word); putting it another way, it flags which side of the use-mention distinction you are on. Most of the objections to italicization raised above seem to me to be in the nature of "it just looks funny", which I get. However, the guidelines all back the use of italics.

So let me see if I can address the "looks funny" aspect. When we look at Wiktionary (or a printed dictionary), the headwords are not italicized. Why not? Because in a dictionary; there is no need to flag the entry as being "about a word", every entry in a dictionary is about a word. Conversely, articles in printed encyclopedias are about concepts, not words. They are not italicized, either. At Wikipedia, nearly every article is about a concept; but here and there, when a word itself rises to the notability required for an encyclopedic topic, then the word may have an article about it, and in those cases, the headword is italicized per MOS:WAW, and as Wanda quoted above, the article title follows suit. The reason for the "looks funny", imho, is this: we are not used to seeing italicized words in printed encyclopedias. Part of the reason for that, is that just like at Wikipedia, there are very few, or no entries about a word in printed encyclopedias. (I've been glancing through my Concise Columbia Encyclopedia, and can find no italicized headwords at all; the entry for laissez faire is not capitalized; titles of foreign works are rendered in English. The How to Use section in the front explains in the first sentence: "All articles are arranged alphabetically, with article heads in boldface." So, no exceptions. They use small caps where Wikipedia would use hyperlinks, and italics for titles of works (in the article body, not in the headword). Even if printed encyclopedias do not have articles about words, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia not limited by print considerations, and we do have a few articles about words. (Just like we have a few articles that don't start with a capital letter, or that have internal punctuation.)

The "looks funny" feeling we get, probably comes from the fact that we're just not used to it, as part of the legacy from print encyclopedias and dictionaries: neither one italicizes headwords, because they don't have to. But we're not limited in the way a print encyclopedia is, and there is no reason not to follow the guidelines about how they should appear in Wikipeida when we do have the rare article about a word. In fact, that "looks funny" feeling is an aid to the viewer of the article, as Sangdeboeuf said, to know at a glance that there is something different going on here. (Hopefully, someone would add a hatnote about its use as a term, but the italic title is the starting point, and what the viewer will see first.) The italic title in the rare few articles about words already conforms to existing guidelines. There's no reason to limit the online encyclopedia exclusively to concept articles. When the article is about a word, it needs to be italicized. Mathglot (talk) 22:35, 11 October 2019 (UTC)

I think it just looks weird italicised and doesn't add any clarity. For me, it only raised a further question, namely "Why is it italicised?" --Yhdwww (talk) 21:41, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
Concur with User:Yhdwww. I was unaware of MOS:WAW but that needs to be eliminated as likely vandalism and a violation of WP:NOR and WP:NOT, and whomever introduced that idea in the first place needs to be subject to appropriate sanctions to educate them about Wikipedia policy. Wikipedia follows. It never leads. --Coolcaesar (talk) 05:52, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
That odd mini-rant makes me wonder if Wikipedia:No angry mastodons#Edit when you're at your best should be cited.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:00, 2 January 2020 (UTC)
Historically, we have not been words-as-words italicizing WP article titles that are about terms as such. While my instinct is to support doing so, for consistency, it rapidly comes to mind that our article titles do not serve all the same functions as in-line prose content, and (probably more importantly) there is no guarantee that any given article that is presently about a term as such is going to remain that way and not become more conceptual over time. Indeed, WP:NOTDICT drives us in that direction. I do agree with the observation "neither [print encyclopedias nor dictionaries] italicize headwords, because they don't have to". That is, they don't need to. It's already clear that a headword (i.e., the title of the encyclopedia or dictionary mini-article) is a title about that subject; it's not important even in an encyclopedic context to "pre-indicate" whether the scope of the article will or will not be toward the definitional side (about a term as a term). The principle purpose of italicizing words-as-words constructions in running prose is to difference them from the surrounding text; this concern simply does not apply to titles of our articles. Thus, I'm going to remain neutral on this; I do often favor consistent over inconsistent options in such disputes, but in this case the consistency being sacrificed for simplicity is probably harmless.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:00, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Should we really avoid 'okina in Hawaiian names?

Under Quotation marks (avoid them), we say that we should not only avoid punctuation marks, but alphabetic letters that look like them. But then we give an example where we do use such letters, and just say there should be a rd from the <'> form. That's very confusing. How are we supposed to know if titles such as ʻIolani Palace, Queen Liliʻuokalani, the interstellar asteroid ʻOumuamua, the transneptunian planetoid 229762 Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà, the Kwakʼwala people and their language Kwakwakaʼwakw, etc., are acceptable, when people can argue both ways by quoting WP.AT?

Wouldn't it be clearer to say that quotes/apostrophes and quote/apostrophe-like letters should be avoided when a form without them is the established/common form in English (e.g. "Hawaii"), but acceptable in unassimilated names, like the example we give here?

BTW, the Unicode letters (as opposed to punctuation marks) for such things are now readily available to editors at the end of the Latin section of the character-insert window under the edit window. "O'Brian" is fine with a (straight) apostrophe, because that's a punctuation mark, but per Unicode conventions, words/names with letters that just look like punctuation marks should be typeset with the proper Unicode letters (cased glottal stop, <Ɂɂ>, cased saltillo <Ꞌꞌ>, okina <ʻ>, hamza/ejective <ʼ>, ayin <ʽ>, length <꞉>, etc.). They are defined differently in Unicode and they behave differently -- curly quotation marks & apostrophe behave as punctuation, but hamza, okina and ayin behave like normal alphabetic letters, affecting line breaks, copy-paste, etc.

In the name Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà above, for example, that <ǃ> is not a punctuation mark either, but a letter from the Khoekhoe alphabet with a separate Unicode point. With that letter, the name won't break at the end of a line; with an exclamation mark substituted for it, it will break. I think it would be worth stating that proper Unicode letter points are preferable to substitutions with punctuation marks. — kwami (talk) 08:33, 15 November 2019 (UTC)

Proposed modification

So, maybe,

  • Quotation marks (avoid them): Double ("...") and single quotation marks ('...'), as well as variations such as typographic (curly) quotation marks (“...”), "low-high" quotation marks („...“), guillemets («...»), and angled quotation marks or backticks (`...´) should be avoided in titles. Exceptions can be made when they are part of the proper title (e.g. "A" Is for Alibi) or required by orthography ("Weird Al" Yankovic). The same goes for apostrophes (e.g. Rosemary's Baby, Anthony d'Offay). When such punctuation is used, it should be straight (the simple ASCII character) rather than curly.
Similarly, the various apostrophe-like letters (ʻokina ⟨ʻ⟩, saltillo ⟨ꞌ⟩, hamza ⟨ʼ⟩, ayin ⟨ʽ⟩, etc.) should be used sparingly in page titles, for example not used when a name is well assimilated into English (that is, Hawaii rather than Hawaiʻi, Quran rather than Qurʼān, Sanaa rather than Sanaʽa [if that page is moved]). When such letters are used (e.g. ʻIolani Palace, 229762 Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà), the proper Unicode letter characters rather than punctuation marks should be used. These are &#699; ⟨ʻ⟩ for ʻokina, &#700; ⟨ʼ⟩ for hamza, &#701; ⟨ʽ⟩ for Wehr's ayin, &#42892; ⟨ꞌ⟩ for saltillo. The curly single quotation marks &#8216; ⟨‘⟩ and &#8217; ⟨’⟩ are punctuation marks and should not be used as letters. Unicode defines certain characters as punctuation marks and others as letters; using punctuation marks in place letter characters can cause compatibility issues. The proper Unicode characters are available below your edit window at the end of the Latin subset of insertable characters.
When an apostrophe-like letter is used in a title, a redirect with a straight apostrophe and another without any apostrophe should be created. E.g., 'Iolani Palace and Iolani Palace redirect to ʻIolani Palace.
In the article text, these characters may be inserted via the templates {{okina}}, {{hamza}}, {{ayin}}, {{saltillo}}. See also WP:Manual of Style (punctuation).

Does that work for people? — kwami (talk) 02:51, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

Discussion (proposed modification)

SGTM. Does it work to subst those templates as a way of entering the character in titles? Dicklyon (talk) 04:26, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
No. You can't use { in a title. I struck that out per objection below. — kwami (talk) 21:04, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
  • Re. "using punctuation marks in place letter characters can cause compatibility issues" – How? Seems too vague to me, and the opposite, i.e. using exotic unicode characters instead of the straight apostrophe character, certainly leads to compatibility problems. Let me give an example of that: http://whc.unesco.org/ is UNESCO's official World Heritage Site website: if you go to that website, you'll see a search box: if you copy-paste Sanaʽa into that box (that is the version of the name with the "official" unicode character), and click the little magnifying glass: the search engine returns zero results. Then copy-paste either Sana'a (with apostrophe) or Sanaa into the box: the search engine returns, in both of these cases, the same 55 correct results. Besides, ayin has apparently two recognised unicode characters (see 2nd table at Talk:`Abdu'l-Bahá#Spelling), plus the backtick character which was (and still is, even in Wikipedia) often used as a character to indicate ayin from the era before the two other ayin characters became a more official standard in unicode, plus the apostrophe character which is probably still even more often used instead of an official ayin character: choosing one of these options for usage in article titles, as a single editor's decision because they favour that option is, afaics, a sure recipe for many more compatibility problems. IMHO the apostrophe-like letters, certainly if resulting from a transliteration of a non-Roman script (for which inevitably many variant transliterations exist), may have their use in high-quality printing, but less so in Wikipedia article titles, which are about recognisability by human readers (who on first approach wouldn't discern a ʻ from a ʽ in more than 99% of the cases), and approachability by search engines, and other practical uses.
  • Re. "In the article text, these characters may be inserted via the templates {{okina}}, {{hamza}}, {{ayin}}, {{saltillo}}." – Doesn't belong in the article titles policy. --Francis Schonken (talk) 12:53, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
Agree with the last. I struck that out.
Question: should we diverge from the official orthography (e.g. for Queen Liliuokalani, or many languages in the American Pacific Northwest) because of technical difficulties in our titles? Should we ignore the differences between letters (say ayin and hamza) because readers might not know what they mean? What if standards orgs use one of these characters? ISO 639-3 contrasts them in language names, as the Minor Planet Center does in the names of asteroids. 'Oumuamua, for example, is typeset with the proper 'okina at the MPC.
Whether or not to use curly characters is one thing. *If* we're going to use curly characters, then IMO we should use the proper code points. We already do, in numerous articles where a glottal stop or ejective is used in titles, e.g. 'okina in Hawaiian names, because they're part of the official orthography of the language. As for the compatibility issues, there's a lot of coverage of that in Unicode discussions. The ones I'm aware of are problems with line breaks and copy-paste, but there may be others.
That could mean that there is no reason to use curly apostrophes or quotation marks in titles at all. If we can confirm that, we could add that to AT: curly punctuation marks should *never* appear in article titles; they should either be omitted altogether or, if kept, (a) replaced with straight characters if they're punctuation and (b) replaced with the proper Unicode characters if they're letters. Then a simple search for curly punctuation marks would give editors the titles that need cleanup.
Yes, there are two competing characters (actually three) for ayin. But that's an issue for the style guides. It's irrelevant here. And backtick should never be used, either for ayin or for a quotation mark. That's a 90's-era hack and has no business on WP except perhaps in extraordinary cases.
Sanaa, BTW, might be another example of omitting the characters in the title. I didn't include it because there's a page move under discussion, but it's an obvious choice to include if it is moved. — kwami (talk) 21:04, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
I asked how "using punctuation marks in place letter characters can cause compatibility issues"? Could that be clarified with an example or some such? Avoiding compatibility problems seems a valid rationale, but imho it needs to be established what causes it: thus it would be useful to know how using punctuation marks in place letter characters can cause compatibility issues? --Francis Schonken (talk) 08:37, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
Like I said, what I'm aware of is line-breaking and copy-past issues, because that's what's been relevant to me. Give me a day or two, and I'll try to find out why e.g. the 'okina needed a separate code point from the single quotation mark that looks the same. Partly it might be a language issue -- if you have your language set to Tongan, the 'okina could display differently (a horizontal shape, as is standard in Tongan) but the quotation mark would continue to look the same as it does in English. — kwami (talk) 09:45, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
Sure, both line-breaking and copy-past[e] as possible issues would need clarification:
  • Afaik the simple apostrophe character (') would not trigger a line-break when a letter precedes or follows it without a space: only the space preceding or following the character could trigger a line-break (like with any other character) afaik. Counter-examples (if any) would be welcome. But, please consider, if the apostrophe character potentially triggers a line-break issue for d'Offay, then such issue is unrelated to "in place letter characters" (and shouldn't be portrayed as such), and if the apostrophe character does not trigger a line-break issue for d'Offay I wouldn't see why it would trigger one for Sana'a or any other case where it is used "in place letter characters".
  • Re. copy-paste: I've given an example above where copy-paste of a name with the ayin character triggers a compatibility issue, where the same name with a simple apostrophe instead of the ayin doesn't. That doesn't mean that examples to the contrary don't exist, and I'm looking forward to seeing some.
Anyway, take your time, no policy change seems imminent in the next few weeks or so (and a very broad consensus would be needed for that): I'd rather get the "compatibility issues" right than hurry into something that's only half-right for a policy page. --Francis Schonken (talk) 10:51, 17 November 2019 (UTC) (updated 11:31, 17 November 2019 (UTC))

Just to start, this is related to the General Category of the code point. For quotation marks, some of the issues may only be problems when the character falls at the edge of a name, where quotation marks would normally be found. The exclamation mark (as a substitute for a click) causes line-breaking problems when it appears in the middle of a word, an apostrophe does not. But there is a broader issue -- if it's okay to substitute letters with quotation marks in an AT, because it doesn't cause a problem in a particular word, does it follow that it's okay to substitute them in other words where it does cause a problem, or to substitute with other punctuation marks like colons (for vowel length or tone) or exclamation marks as well? The latter are not nearly as common, but the question remains.

This rant on why Unicode got it wrong in conflating the English apostrophe with the single closing quotation mark covers some of the more general practical issues. — kwami (talk) 02:48, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

No, vaguish without substantiating "using punctuation marks in place letter characters can cause compatibility issues": no actual problem is indicated. The rant is pretty useless: it is a blog of an individual claiming to know better than the entire Unicode committee, and all instances of so-called "problems" indicated by the blogger don't apply to Wikipedia. --Francis Schonken (talk) 06:06, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
The only (potential) problem I see is with ǃ vs ! in a page name like 229762 Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà (229762 G!kúnǁʼhòmdímà if the click is replaced by an exclamation mark). But that is very far from illustrating that "using punctuation marks in place letter characters can cause compatibility issues" would make a good policy-level rationale: it may be correct in a few instances, but the opposite is certainly correct in many other instances. The policy-level description would better be something in the sense of "when deciding which glyphs are used in an article title try to use the glyphs that cause the least compatibility issues", for which Al Shohada Mosque (Sana'a) (not Al Shohada Mosque (Sanaʽa)) and 229762 Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà (not 229762 G!kúnǁʼhòmdímà), or some such, could be used as examples. --Francis Schonken (talk) 08:18, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
Note, however, that neither ǃ nor ! are by any stretch a quotation mark or apostrophe(-like) character: guidance on ǃ and ! should thus not be coatracked in the guidance that is specifically about quotation marks and apostrophe(-like) characters (and that also makes 229762 Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà a not very suitable example in these paragraphs). I don't say that the general recommendation on punctuation marks vs letter characters in article titles (if there is to be any) can not be inscribed in the WP:TSC section, but not in the paragraphs that are specifically about various types of quotation marks and apostrophe(-like) characters. --Francis Schonken (talk) 08:53, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

Alternative resolution (removing rather than adding)

Here's a bold counter-proposal in the spirit of WP:ANTICREEP: instead of adding to this bullet (which is already overfreighted with 2 paragraphs), subtract. I think the point could be greatly signified to something like...

Quotation marks and apostrophes (follow MoS): Apostrophes and quotation marks should be rendered according to the manual of style, using straight rather than curly variants. For example, "A" Is for Alibi rather than “A” Is for Alibi. Apostrophe-like characters should be represented by their proper Unicode character - for example, Kwakʼwala rather than Kwak'wala.

Here's what we lose by shortening the text like this:

  • The recommendation to avoid quotation marks in general. I'm not sure that advice is necessary. Are we worried that editors are going to try to create articles at titles like "Apple" instead of Apple, unless we tell them not to? The only scenario I can see this happening is with names of songs/poems/episodes which would be surrounded in quotation marks in running text. But this is already explicitly covered immediately below in WP:ITALICTITLE
  • The recommendation that if an article title uses an apostrophe-like special character, a redirect should be created for a version with a plain apostrophe. But this is already covered by the previous bullet ("provide redirects from versions of the title that use only standard keyboard characters")
  • The recommendation to avoid apostrophe-like characters. The proposed bullet tells us how to choose between Hawaiʻi and Hawai'i, but it doesn't help with the question of Hawaiʻi vs. Hawaii. Absent any explicit instructions, the default would be to follow the WP:COMMONNAME. i.e. decide between Hawaii vs. Hawaiʻi according to usage in RS. I think this is a sensible policy, and is consistent with the advice at WP:DIACRITICS. Deciding between ʻIolani Palace vs. Iolani Palace seems like a problem of similar character to deciding between Côte d'Azur vs. Cote d'Azur, so I think it makes sense to follow the same procedure.

Thoughts? I'm generally in favour of trimming this page, and if we can do so while also fixing the ambiguity pointed out by kwami, I think it would be a win-win. Colin M (talk) 21:56, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

  • Support I wasn't thinking this broadly, but this is clearly better than what I suggested. One problem with our guidelines is that they can get overly detailed. Most any reasonable chance to reduce potentially conflicting redundancy should be taken, IMO. In the MOS we could deal with whether to use punctuation marks or dedicated characters for 'okina etc. The only reason I can see that this proposal wouldn't work is if we want to use different orthography in titles and in text, but I suspect that would be a bad idea. — kwami (talk) 01:46, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose quotation marks (especially the ones less standard than the straight ones) and apostrophe(-like) characters (especially the ones unnecessarily deviating from the straight apostrophe character) are (and remain) mostly problematic in article titles (see e.g. compatibility issues outlined above), and should therefore be discouraged where there is a reasonable way to avoid them. Which is different from article text. Hence the difference between the WP:AT policy and various MoS guidelines, which is a sound principle, ever since article titling was (for that reason) split off from MoS. The potential problems are different, hence the guidance is different, and, for good reason, often less flexible (as in "policy-level guidance") for article titles, which due to their conciseness often have less possibility to handle exceptions. I've seen no compelling reason, thus far, to change the AT policy in any way. --Francis Schonken (talk) 08:24, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
    But how does this differ meaningfully from the current policy, which is "avoid quotation marks except when you use them"? Can you give an example where we'd use marks in the text of the article per the MOS, but pel AT not in the title? — kwami (talk) 16:23, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
Easy:

Sanaʽa (Arabic: صَنْعَاء, Ṣanʿāʾ [sˤɑnʕaːʔ], Yemeni Arabic: [ˈsˤɑnʕɑ]), ...

is the current opening of the Sanaʽa article: after the first word four out of seven words contain letters, diacritics and/or apostrophe(-like) characters that are OK (even recommended) by the MoS, but off-limits for article titles. --Francis Schonken (talk) 16:41, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
But none of those seven would appear in the title anyway, because they are not used for the name in running text. Assuming <Sanaʽa> is used both in the title and throughout the text (the normal state of affairs given current AT and MOS, which would be the case even if this section of the AT were simply deleted), how does Colin's proposal differ from current policy?
Plus, the other seven are *not* off limits for article titles! If we used <Ṣanʿāʾ> throughout the article, the article title would also be <Ṣanʿāʾ>. So what is there in the current AT that differs from the MOS and isn't meaningless? — kwami (talk) 17:40, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
There's no "running text" condition in the proposal ("running text" is only mentioned in the first bullet of what is not in the proposal), so it would never work the way it is written. Mind, again: WP:AT is policy-level guidance, so it needs to be iron-clad against unintended interpretation loopholes. --Francis Schonken (talk) 17:56, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
I think parallelism with the running text is pretty strongly implied by the instruction to follow MOS:PUNCT, because the MoS is what governs how to style the name in running text. Colin M (talk) 18:34, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
"pretty strongly implied" does not work well in policy-level guidance: either it is there, or it isn't. If it isn't, "implied" causes more trouble than it addresses in policies. --Francis Schonken (talk) 06:55, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
Thanks for the feedback. But regarding your first sentence: non-straight quotation marks and apostrophe-like characters unnecessarily deviating from the straight apostrophe character would be discouraged under this proposal. Because it says to follow MOS:PUNCT and MOS:PUNCT says to use straight apostrophes and quotation marks. The "A" Is for Alibi example is meant to further reinforce this. But if you think this could be made clearer, I'm open to suggestions. Colin M (talk) 18:20, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
The MoS prescribes single quote marks in Malus domestica 'Golden Delicious'. We don't want article titles such as Malus domestica 'Golden Delicious' or Malus domestica 'Huaguan'. No, the proposed wording is a hack unsuitable for the article titles policy, as well regarding quote marks as regarding apostrophe(-like) characters. Oppose, period. Can, imho, not be salvaged into something useful. --Francis Schonken (talk) 19:59, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
"We don't want", but that's what we have! According to the AT, Malus domestica 'Golden Delicious' is perfectly acceptable! ("Exceptions can be made when they are ... required by orthography," and the quote marks here are just as much a part of the orthography as the italics.) You keep saying that AT disallows things that would be allowed under Colin's wording, but AFAICT it doesn't. Can you give me an actual example of a title that would be banned under AT but allowed if Colin's proposal were added? — kwami (talk) 22:26, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
As kwami says, not only is such a title acceptable under current policy, we have lots of titles just like it! See, for example, Malus 'Evereste', Ulmus 'Arno', and Cucumis melo 'Jenny Lind' (more examples here, though may be slow to load the query). This format is even explicitly endorsed by the naming guideline for flora, at WP:CULTIVAR. (I happen to agree that these titles look ridiculous, but then I'm not a botanist. In any case, this is not a problem introduced by the proposed wording.) Colin M (talk) 19:25, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
Yes, there are hundred of article titles that have cultivar names in single quotes. It's much more prevalent in Category:Ornamental plant cultivars than in Category:Food plant cultivars. I think this likely because people writing articles on ornamental plants tend to have a serious background in gardening, and know about the cultivar quote convention (having seen the quotes on labels of plants sold in nurseries). People writing articles on food plants are more likely to be writing about a new apple cultivar they saw at the grocery store (which doesn't put quotes on labels), or a special variety of tomato or mango that is proudly grown in their hometown (and these local varieties may not be cultivars in a technical sense, so shouldn't necessarily take cultivar quotes anyway). Plantdrew (talk) 20:36, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
Without the quotes the titles would simply be wrong; the naming guideline reflects the formatting mandated by the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:39, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
Re. "... that's what we have! According to the AT, Malus domestica 'Golden Delicious' is perfectly acceptable!" – I wrote "We don't want article titles such as Malus domestica 'Golden Delicious'..." Malus domestica 'Golden Delicious' is a redirect, so we don't have Malus domestica 'Golden Delicious' as an article title (redirects don't italicise any part of an article title). It surprises me that people who want readers to see the difference between ʽ and ' in article titles, don't see the difference between italicised and non-italicised text. Further, redirects are encouraged in this case as well by WP:AT#Special characters (policy) as by Wikipedia:Naming conventions (flora)#Scientific versus vernacular names (guideline, linked from WP:AT). The MoS page does not hold a recommendation to create such redirects, although it links to the flora naming conventions guideline (which seems commonly ignored by MoS=AT proponents). Further,
The current AT policy recommends to avoid the apostrophe and all kinds of quotation marks when they reasonably can be avoided. The WP:NCFLORA guideline is clear that Malus domestica (= apple) should be avoided in article titles, but that a redirect should be created from Malus domestica. So, no, we don't want article titles such as Malus domestica 'Golden Delicious', as I said, but of course we want redirects such as Malus domestica 'Golden Delicious'. None of that is really handled by the MoS, while the MoS is not about article titles. With the assorted cluelessness I got in reply to my previous post, it makes only clear that we should make editors aware about the difference between AT and MoS, not confuse them further. --Francis Schonken (talk) 06:55, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
Golden Delicious as of right now is a poor example of anything, since the text fails to format cultivar names correctly. (The title would be better as "Apple 'Golden Delicious'", in my view; yes, use "Apple" for "Malus domestica", but the cultivar name should be formatted correctly.) Peter coxhead (talk) 09:53, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
WP:AT does not use Golden Delicious, not in any format, as an example; WP:MOS does, as quoted above. Yes we have a problem. A problem with MOS, using a substandard example, not with the AT policy, for which usually more care is taken which examples are used. For solving the problem with MOS, however, you're in the wrong place here, take it to WT:MOS. --Francis Schonken (talk) 10:02, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
@Francis Schonken: sure, but treating AT and MOS guidelines independently has caused many disputes in the past (e.g. the regular "common style" vs. "common name" debates), and definitely confuses newbies. I think it's important to keep them as aligned as possible. Anyway, I think this thread has run its course and distracts from the main issue. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:14, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
Of course they need to be kept aligned: I was just pointing out that for the Golden Delicious example MoS needs to be aligned to AT (and not the other way around), for which WT:MOS is the right place to get it done, not the WT:AT talk page. --Francis Schonken (talk) 10:36, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
The "assorted cluelessness" lies largely on your part. Italic styling in titles is purely a red herring of your own invention, as this discussion has been about quotes and quote-like characters from the outset.
(edit conflict)The "AT is policy but MOS is just a guideline" is another red herring, and the practice in WP:Requested moves has time and again shown that the two are expected to be in strict concordance, and that only read together they determine the proper form of article titles. The AT's WP:TITLEFORMAT already expressly defers to MOS all the fine details that cannot be reasonably covered here: For more guidance, see WP:Manual of Style occurs in several places. No such user (talk) 10:00, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
... and more assorted cluelessness. For them to be "read together" they need to be different (what they are currently), not mere cross-references back and forth (as the proposed replacement would have it). Indeed in concordance:
  • the recommendation to avoid quotation marks and apostrophe(-like) characters as much as reasonably possible in article titles belongs to WP:AT (policy) and related naming conventions guidelines, not to MoS (while MoS is not about article titles)
  • the recommendation to provide redirects from other correct formats also belongs to WP:AT (policy) and related naming conventions guidelines, not to MoS (while MoS is not about article titles)
For these two reasons, removing the AT-specific guidance from AT (while none of it is in the MoS), and referring to the MoS (which does not hold that guidance) as a replacement is something I strongly oppose, because it opens a wide door to assorted cluelessness, of which we have seem ample demonstration thus far. --Francis Schonken (talk) 10:31, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
Changed !vote to "strong" oppose. --Francis Schonken (talk) 10:44, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
  • Support. Most Wikipedia policies and guidelines are descriptive rather than prescriptive, and AT is no exception. Once an AT clause can be reasonably shown to be at variation with the practice, it should be amended or removed. In my opinion, that is clearly the case with the point on quote-like characters, which has so many practical exceptions to be virtually useless. [The other one – Characters not on a standard keyboard (use redirects) – lags some 15 years behind reality, but that's a point for another discussion]. No such user (talk) 10:00, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
Re. "[AT is] descriptive rather than prescriptive" – indeed, let's see some examples found in Category:Apple cultivars:
Afaics, the current AT guidance follows current practice, the proposed replacement does not. --Francis Schonken (talk) 11:34, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
But the proposed replacement does follow current practice. If I'm interpreting you correctly, article titles can be any which way, because the AT doesn't provide any real guideline, and you're opposed to it doing so. (Re. the italics above, I was ignoring them as irrelevant to this discussion.) — kwami (talk) 20:35, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
Re. "If I'm interpreting you correctly..." – you're not. More importantly, your interpretation is incorrect w.r.t. the policy, and the involved guidelines. Taking them at face value would be better than trying to "interpret" them into something they're not. --Francis Schonken (talk) 08:06, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
Your choice of category strongly affects the conclusion of your analysis. If you had instead chosen Category:Hybrid elm cultivar, you would have found evidence pointing to the opposite conclusion - that editors clearly prefer an article title with single quote marks over one with a parenthetical disambiguator!
In any case, I think this line of reasoning is mistaken in its implication that the only thing standing between us and the title Malus domestica 'Golden Delicious' is WP:TSC's advice to avoid single quotation marks. I hypothesize that if you were to open a WP:RM to move Golden Delicious to Malus domestica 'Golden Delicious', or Spartan (apple) to Malus domestica 'Spartan', you would get a lot of opposition, but WP:TSC would not be at the top of the list of reasons cited. Rather, I expect most of the opposition would be based on the much more fundamental principles of WP:NAMINGCRITERIA, particularly recognizability, naturalness, and conciseness. Colin M (talk) 22:33, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
At Category:Hybrid elm cultivar there doesn't seem to be much of an alternative for most of the article titles (either there doesn't seem to be a vernacular name, or multiple but less-used vernacular alternatives). Seven articles with a double name (having " = " in the name) don't seem well-adjusted to policy, naming conventions and practice (meaning: seems unlikely they would get overwhelming support in a WP:RM), so not stable, leave alone conforming to the WP:NCFLORA guideline. The category name also lags behind on guidance and practice: should be Category:Hybrid elm cultivars (like Category:Apple cultivars), so I assume the category (and its content) is not very well attended to from an titling point of view. In other words, not much to be learnt there for WP:AT or WP:MOS guidance. FYI, the high occurrence of hybrid elm cultivars without a vernacular name can easily be explained by Dutch elm disease (see Dutch elm disease#Hybrid cultivars), which is a fairly recent phenomenon, resulting in a surge of development of hybrids as a way to combat that plague: none of the late 20th-century (or later) specialised cultivars had much of a chance to develop a natural vernacular name.
Re. "... the only thing standing between us and the title Malus domestica 'Golden Delicious' is WP:TSC ..." – of course not: WP:TSC needs to be consistent with the rest of WP:AT. Internal consistency of WP:AT is even more important than it being consistent with WP:MOS. Indeed, in WP:RMs participants would usually refer to various parts of WP:AT, naming conventions and what not. When TSC is consistent with MOS but no longer with the rest of WP:AT (as in the proposal under consideration here), there would be more chance to end up with unresolvable disputes (as if MOS people would ply to the general principles of an AT that, in this particular instance, says to follow MoS – compare the Gay or Gay? discussion above: MOS people saying "this is the MOS rule", and many participants saying "but it doesn't seem right" without being able to point to exactly why). --Francis Schonken (talk) 10:01, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
  • Support the removal rather than expansion version. While the expansion version is correct, it's a MoS matter not an AT one. To the extent this will ever come up in RM discussions, it's already covered by WP:COMMONNAME (as to whether the most common form in contemporary English sources does or not not include such a mark), and how to represent it (if necessary) is already covered at MoS. Furthermore, any time we can identify a WP:POLICYFORK we should eliminate it. In this case, it's a trivial guideline matter that doesn't rise to policy level in the first place, so remove it from AT.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:34, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Other consequence of changing punctuation marks into letters: category sorting

Current rules on sorting names in a category include: "Only hyphens, apostrophes and periods/full stops punctuation marks should be kept in sort values. All other punctuation marks should be removed. The only exception is the apostrophe should be removed for names beginning with O'. For example, Eugene O'Neill is sorted {{DEFAULTSORT:ONeill, Eugene}}." which in the guidance at WP:MCSTJR is followed by a reference to the Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago Manual of Style 2003, p. 18.72). Example: currently the DEFAULTSORT at `Abdu'l-Bahá is {{DEFAULTSORT:Abdul-Baha}}. If the first character of the person's name is considered a letter, e.g. when the name would be moved to ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, the sorting would (under current rules) become something along the lines of {{DEFAULTSORT:ʻAbdu'l-Bahá}}, which would throw the name from somewhere at the beginning of the list on a category page (under A), to somewhere at the end, that is, under ʻ. If such namechange would occur (which I think a bad idea for this and many other reasons) either the effect is undesired, in which case the category sorting rules would need to be adapted, or the effect is desired, in which case category sort keys on many pages would need to be updated, and likely a special rule, like the one on Icelandic names, would need to be adopted for category sorting. --Francis Schonken (talk) 11:27, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

But this is nothing new. Take a look at ʻIolani Palace, with an initial 'okina. It's {{DEFAULTSORT:Iolani Palace}}. So it would seem this is another argument about nothing. Punctuation-like letters such as 'okina might be made explicit in the sorting guidelines, but that's irrelevant for article titles. — kwami (talk) 19:59, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

Guidance regarding exceptions for apostrophe(-like) characters

The AT policy defines the exceptions regarding quotation marks in article titles thus:

Exceptions can be made when they are part of the proper title (e.g. "A" Is for Alibi) or required by orthography (e.g. "Weird Al" Yankovic, Fargesia 'Rufa').

For apostrophe(-like) characters, exceptions are mentioned without really making clear in which cases such exceptions are recommended or should be avoided:

A common exception is the simple apostrophe character (', same glyph as the single quotation mark) itself (e.g. Anthony d'Offay), which should, however, be used sparingly (e.g. Quran instead of Qur'an and Bismarck (apple) instead of Malus domestica 'Bismarck'). If, exceptionally, other variants are used, a redirect with the apostrophe variant should be created (e.g. 'Abdu'l-Bahá redirects to `Abdu'l-Bahá).

A first consideration is, of course, that such exceptions should be covered by genenral AT principles (WP:CRITERIA etc). The discussion above makes, however, clear that such general principles are not so easily found, or at least, it is not generally understood how they'd apply in the particular case of apostrophe(-like) characters. A second consideration is that exceptions can be (to a large extent) covered by WP:RMs. But such RMs (and their outcome) are not easily found by someone reading the AT policy, nor is it immediately clear how they would apply to a particular new case under consideration (e.g. how would previous RMs apply to the current Sanaʽa RM? I've seen no previous comparable RMs, and nobody has pointed one out. That is: not a single one, thus I'm little impressed by "the practice in WP:Requested moves has time and again shown ..."-like arguments above which dearly miss concreteness)

So we need a concrete recommendation on usage of apostrophe(-like) characters in article titles, which may consist of, e.g.,

  • an encouragement to look at naming conventions guidelines applicable to certain fields (a link to e.g. WP:NCFLORA should imho not be given in the policy, there may be others for other cases, and it would hardly be possible to enumerate all such guidelines which might come into play – but an encouragement to look for possibly applicable topic-related NCs may be welcome)
  • an illustration of how AT principles apply, e.g. something in this vein: "Whether or not such exception is adopted in an article title is subject to general article titling principles, including:

--Francis Schonken (talk) 09:38, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

As kwami wrote above, the current guidance essentially amounts to "avoid quotation marks [and apostrophe-like characters] except when you use them" which is what makes it non-actionable. Trying to describe the 'exceptions' to this 'rule' leads to restating large chunks of WP:AT. This bullet was, IMO, already too long when this discussion began, but the additions you've made since then have doubled its size. I think this is going in the wrong direction. Colin M (talk) 18:18, 25 November 2019 (UTC)
As I said above: kwami misunderstood, so the clarification seems needed (although it is stating the obvious). If others follow kwami in their misunderstanding (which seems common now), it becomes apparent that the clarification is more than a bit needed. No, this part of the AT policy never amounted to "avoid quotation marks [and apostrophe-like characters] except when you use them". Clueless nonsense. The (obvious) clues are now stated in the policy. --Francis Schonken (talk) 19:13, 25 November 2019 (UTC)
If you think the "try to avoid quotation marks and apostrophes" advice is a load-bearing policy, a good way to convince myself and others would be to produce an example of an article which would have a different title if not for that bit of policy. As I said above, the apple examples you've brought up do not meet this standard. Deleting this bullet would not suddenly compel us to move Golden Delicious to Malus domestica 'Golden Delicious' and so on, because the far more salient WP:NAMINGCRITERIA still favour the current title. Colin M (talk) 19:41, 25 November 2019 (UTC)
Re. "... produce an example of an article which would have a different title if not for that bit of policy ..." – really, how many more times does it need to be repeated that this policy follows practice (as in: results of WP:RMs), not dictate a new practice, after which pages are moved somewhere else. No apparent trouble in getting an article title "right" from the start means that the policy works, and that it avoids convoluted discussions such as at Talk:Shia Islam/Archive 1#Requested move, Talk:Quran/Archive 9#Requested move and Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 171#Confusion on differing Arabic apostrophe like symbols. The result of the second of these is now used as an example in this part of the policy, as is a suggestion taken up from the last of these discussions (namely: `Abdu'l-Bahá). And things have been relatively quiet after that, afaik. That is, until someone called the `Abdu'l-Bahá example "stupid" in a current RM. --Francis Schonken (talk) 21:39, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

Title/content experts needed

Discussion about content splitting as well as title, here: Talk:Timeline_of_Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections#Requested_move_23_December_2019. --В²C ☎ 00:19, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Should television episode article titles default to official names over the common name?

WT:TV#RfC: Should episode article titles default to the broadcaster's official title? czar 01:53, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

WP:Article titles as applied to categories

Wikipedia:Category names#General conventions says that standard article naming conventions apply to categories too. But several times I've had trouble arguing this at WP:CFD. Input would be welcome at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2020 January 10#MPs for UK constituencies by party. Thanks. Opera hat (talk) 10:46, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

RfC on using macrons in article titles

Please note that there is an RfC connected to this policy: a proposal to add macrons to New Zealand naming conventions. - SchroCat (talk) 13:08, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/India-related articles/Archive 1#Legislative Assembly constituency names. Italawar (talk) 14:19, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

names

Based on precedent and experience, parenthetical disambiguators clearly and succinctly tell readers which whatever they're looking at/for. I know that John Radcliffe (died 1568) is about a man named John Radcliffe who died in 1568; 3rd Marine Brigade (Iran) is about an Iranian military unit; Lupus (constellation) is about a formation of stars collectively named Lupus; and Bra (song) is about a song named "Bra".

Similarly, I expect Delfino (name) to be an encyclopedic article about the name (sur or given): its meaning, history, etc. Instead, it's a list of people with the given or surname "Delfino"; content I would expect to find at list of people named Delfino. Is there an MOS or guideline to blame for this? — Fourthords | =Λ= | 19:48, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

20th Century Fox / 20th Century Studios is testing NAMECHANGES

At Talk:20th_Century_Fox#Requested_move_17_January_2020 NAMECHANGES is being tested/questioned. Should 20th Century Fox remain and 20th Century Studios be a new article, or should 20th Century Fox be moved to 20th Century Studios? Weigh in at the RM. --В²C ☎ 21:21, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

  • Are you proposing a review and update of WP:Article titles#Name changes? Or are you WP:Canvassing? Calling in help when it is not clear which way the discussion is falling, with you heavily involved? —SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:32, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
    • "In general, it is perfectly acceptable to notify other editors of ongoing discussions, provided that it be done with the intent to improve the quality of the discussion by broadening participation to more fully achieve consensus." (per WP:Canvassing). That's exactly my purpose. I'm curious how others here might weigh in on this unique situation. Yes, I'm heavily involved, but I'm not 100% confident in my position. My gut might be misleading me. But I'm not sure how much weight to give to NAMECHANGES for reasons I explained there. Anyway, I'm sure the only effect of posting this here, if any, is a few more, perhaps including you, will weigh in. How they will weigh in... I have no idea. --В²C ☎ 22:45, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
      • OK good. You're not 100% sure of your position. On policy talk pages, the regulars are likely biased to being stricter on interpretations of the wording of the policy, beware. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:02, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
Having now reviewed WP:Article titles#Name changes aka WP:NAMECHANGES, I don't see it as threatened in any way by this RM. The discussion is well focused from the start on post-namechange sources, which is what the policy section says to look at with greater weighting. I read the second paragraph as superfluous, serving only to remind of the basics of reliable sources. It is actually a brief paraphrasing of what is already written above in WP:Article titles#Use commonly recognizable names. I would cut this second paragraph in the name of concision. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:38, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
@SmokeyJoe: what on earth are you on about? Threatened? Policy pages aren't the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom, which we must defend with armed guards against possible attack from enemy fighters invoking rogue LOCALCONSENSUS. They are living, breathing, entities, which are open to amendment if people later decide they don't fit the ideal way we should be operating. And B2C is raising a genuine question about the relative weighting of highly significant historic names versus new renamed entities in a diminished takeover version of the company. Which came up several times in the Fox RM and is exactly the sort of thing we debate here. I don't think the question was an attempt to influence the RM itself (which is now closed in any case and I eventually supported based on the present policy, even though I had misgivings). Your immediate leap to assuming bad faith is not what I would expect from an experienced editor such as yourself. Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 07:25, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
Yes, I read B2C’s request with bad faith, that was revealed to me by his answer, and I apologise for that. Bh was of explanation, I am always suspicious of a post at a WT page that calls watchers of that page to a discussion elsewhere. Eg “hey, there’s a LOCALCONSENSUS of wrong editors beating me on the numbers, please come and help”. This sort of behaviour I have seen happen at WT:AT, WT:DAB, and MOS talk pages. Also seen on Usercat discussions. Maybe it’s a thing of the distant past and I should relax.
In my defence, “Weigh in at the RM” is very bad looking. If there is an actual issue in mainspace that raises a policy question, it should be discussed on the policy talk page.
Policy and guideline pages overreach being defended by the policy and guideline authors, against the non WT editing mainspace distorts, you bet that happens. As if policy is the Crown Jewels, as if policy enforcement is a fight for the farm. Examples include “Star Trek i/Into Darkness” a few years ago, and WP:JOBTITLES still currently. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 09:07, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
@SmokeyJoe: thanks for the reply and apology, and actually I'll issue one to you too, as I missed the "weigh in on the RM" line.. I read this first thing in the morning when I woke up, and yes that does look a little like attempting to influence the result. Anyway, let's move on from that... I'm not sure if there's anything specific to discuss here - like I said above, it seems counterintuitive to be moving articles away from a title such as 20th Century Fox, an iconic name that pushed out mainstream movies for decades and which in many ways was not the same entity as the current Disney-owned studio, even if the legal corporation and some of the infrastructure remain the same. It's a difficult one to form a judgement on, because it also doesn't make sense to have details of a current extant studio situated at a name it no longer uses.
I don't really agree with your point about defending policy like the farm. Certainly we should use policy as a defence against driveby !votes in discussion by people who don't understand how our existing policies work, and haven't taken the time to understand them. And ditto where a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS emerges somewhere that's totally at odds with sitewide convention. But equally, per WP:5P5 and WP:CONSENSUSCANCHANGE, the policies are not set in stone and if they prove to be not fit for purpose for genuine reasons and there's a strong consensus for change at an RFC, then it's right to change them not just to defend them against all attacks just because they are The Policies™. This talk page is the correct place for testing the waters for such a change, before submitting it to formal RFC. Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 15:03, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
I think I was unclear and we are actually in agreement? I have always been very quick to get agitated when I think I see a small group defending policy against specific cases with arguments citing the history of the wording of policy as opposed for the reasons for the policy. I reacted to a perceived attempt to get NAMESCHANGES authors to defend NAMECHANGES against an emerging article talk page consensus, but which on examination turned out to be much more complicated. NB. On 20th Century Fox, I read all the comments, including yours, and several references before !voting against my initial gut inclination. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:17, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
My original post was poorly worded in (at least) two ways. By "testing" NAMECHANGES I meant the situation was special in a way that NAMECHANGES didn't really address, for reasons I won't repeat here. By "weigh in" I just meant "participate". I did not mean to imply tipping the scales or something. After all the term comes from the required process of participants at certain events. --В²C ☎ 01:35, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
I have no continuing concerns and apologize for the ABF. But just to reply, for me, that "weigh in" does not mean "tip the balance", but to go to the venue in preparation for starting a boxing match. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:40, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Well, the closer found consensus and so now we don't have an article about the entity known as 20th Century Fox for the better part of a century. Instead, it redirects to a new entity evolved from the previous entity owned by Disney called 20th Century Studios. Not really a title issue at this point, but not sure where to address this. Suggestions? --В²C ☎ 16:57, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

The info box’s “ Formerly 20th Century Fox (1935–2020)” is something. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:22, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Naming of governments/cabinets

There is currently no explicit naming convention for government/cabinet articles. This has led to a lot of inconsistency and inevitably disputes. There are three main inconsistencies - capitalisation, numbering format and syntax.

We really need an explicit naming convention to avoid such inconsistency.--Obi2canibe (talk) 17:57, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Many thanks to Obi2canibe for opening this discussion. Also worth nothing is that there is an additional variation such as Government of the 31st Dáil ([Government/Cabinet/Ministry] of the [ordinal number] [legislature]). I basically agree with everything; we need a naming convention or at least some common rules or guides so as to how name these, because a lot of inconsistency exists and it only keeps growing with each new government/cabinet/ministry being formed around the world. Commenting on each of the problems:
  • Capitalization: Interpretation of already existing WP guidelines, conventions and manuals of style proves problematic because of potential conflict between several of them, leading to several different stylings depending on the interpretation. You have WP:NCCAPS, which would generally discourage capitalization; however, the contrary would be true should we try to subsidiarily apply WP:NCGAL (guidelines for government departments, agencies, and officials), WP:COMMONNAME (because, at least in some of these examples, sources do use capitalization) and/or the NCCAPS-bit where it is established that expressions borrowed from other languages without having been adopted as loan words in English are to retain the native language's capitalization. This aside of the issue on whether these should be treated as proper names or not, which only aggravates it further.
  • Numbering format: MOS:NUM does not address this issue at all. As of currently, it would allow for any numbering style to be used: either fully spelled out ordinals, numbers or Roman numerals (which are only discouraged for dates, centuries and millenia).
  • Syntax: I guess that under WP:PRECISE and WP:CONCISE, the [ordinal number] [government/cabinet/ministry] of [Head of government]-style format would be discouraged in favour of the shorter [Ordinal number] [Head of government] [government/cabinet/ministry] or [Head of government] [ordinal number] [government/cabinet/ministry], but again no particularly useful clue that brings any consistency or order here.
It would be interesting to see some input from the community on this issue. Impru20talk 18:35, 26 January 2020 (UTC)
Agreed that existing policies/guidelines don't really help so it would be helpful if we can get consensus for an explicit naming convention that can be added to WP:NCGAL.--Obi2canibe (talk) 20:24, 26 January 2020 (UTC)
This is somewhat stalled. Pinging Ritchie92 so that he can give their view on this too. Probably this should be notified/discussed elsewhere to get more input? Impru20talk 20:00, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
Thanks to Obi2canibe for their post. I am not a big expert of Wikipedia policies with respect to other editors, but I also think a generalized guideline can and should be achieved for articles of this type.
About capitalization, I made my point in the discussion in the Conte II cabinet talk page. I think that, while the name "Government [or Cabinet] of Italy" is indeed the proper noun of an institution, the name "Conte II cabinet" or "second Conte cabinet" is not a proper name, therefore per WP:NCCAPS we should avoid its unnecessary capitalization (and do so also elsewhere in the text on this encyclopedia wherever the cabinet is mentioned).
About the numbering format I have no strong preference. Probably a good compromise could be to use the format that is more common or that is official in the country of which the article is about. Otherwise we should probably stick to the English format (i.e. either "second" or "2nd", but not "II").
About the syntax I think that WP:CONCISE is not really the main guidance to follow, since in none of the cases the title would be excessively or unnecessarily long. So I would go for the syntax that is most correct and natural in the English language.
Some more comments: Probably this should be notified/discussed elsewhere to get more input? I don't think so. This page should be the most visible one concerning decisions about articles titles, so I don't see where else we could move this discussion. --Ritchie92 (talk) 23:51, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
As Ritchie92 has stated, I'm not sure where else we can publicise this discussion to get more input.
My own preference is first example I gave, Fourth Merkel cabinet, simply because currently this format has a slight edge over other formats in terms of use. It is by no means an absolute majority, more like plurality. Ritchie92 makes a good point regarding WP:CONCISE in that this format isn't excessively long.--Obi2canibe (talk) 22:07, 2 February 2020 (UTC)
Probably a good idea would be to reopen this discussion as an WP:RFC with {{rfc|style|pol}} at the top. --Ritchie92 (talk) 08:18, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
I would prefer the "Sánchez I Government"/"Conte II Cabinet" style, for the simple reason that this is the style used across Wikipedia when shortening cabinets/governments, as well as being the most easily identifiable one at a cross-country level (example: Template:EU governments). An RfC could be interesting, but what should the questions asked be? Impru20talk 15:06, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
An RfC does not need to contain a question. It could also be a copy of the first post in this thread, IMHO. --Ritchie92 (talk) 19:50, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
Might be worthwhile trying Rfc. Not sure if a new discussion needs to be started.--Obi2canibe (talk) 19:17, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
@Ritchie92 and Obi2canibe: no, and RfC doesn't need a question, but experience has shown that it's mostly RfCs with clearly defined options that gain traction. This RfC has attained zero comments. I suggest rewriting the top statement and moving all this discussion under a separate Discussion heading. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 14:03, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Changed the name change policy

Changed the name change policy from common sense to actual attestation by two reliable sources using exact same name, to make Wikipedia make more sense when it would be read in future. Comments wanted. Erkin Alp Güney 17:14, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Reverted – that's not how it is done, compare WP:SPNC:
  • Cat Stevens not changed, while considerably more than two reliable sources regarding a name change exits;
  • Jorge Bergoglio changed, with less than two reliable sources in existence
--Francis Schonken (talk) 17:29, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
I am intending to change to self-published name change policy to require attestation by at least two additional external sources too. Erkin Alp Güney 17:35, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
Again, not how it is done. And (in view of Peter coxhead's comment below): the current wording of both the WP:SPNC guideline and the WP:NAMECHANGES policy was the result of substantial consensus-seeking proceedings *prior* to policy/guideline updates, so, consensus needs to be found first for any substantial desired change. --Francis Schonken (talk) 17:41, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
Further, you seem engaged in a current related name change discussion at Talk:2019–20 coronavirus outbreak#Proposed move to SARS 2 outbreak – not a good idea to try a guideline/policy change that would better support your current view in an open discussion. --Francis Schonken (talk) 17:48, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
This change would make my proposed name change harder to pass. Erkin Alp Güney 18:17, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
Can you explain the advantages that would result from the kind of update you are proposing to the guidance? Tx. --Francis Schonken (talk) 18:41, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
Making name change criteria objectively applicable. Erkin Alp Güney 19:00, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
WP:RMs usually give a fairly objective result: rules in policies and guidelines are derived from WP:RMs that resulted in a strong consensus (which is a quite "objective" result). We don't need rules that would be overruled by the next WP:RM: such rules would not be "objectively applicable" while too easily overruled by WP:RMs. The change you proposed would be such non-"objectively applicable" WP:RULECRUFT. So no, what you proposed is not "objectively applicable". --Francis Schonken (talk) 20:11, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
Furthermore, a significant change to a policy like this needs prior discussion and consensus. Peter coxhead (talk) 17:30, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

"gamer" or "video game player" as parenthetical disambiguation?

Watchers of this page may be interested in Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (video games) § RfC: "(gamer)" or "(video game player)"? Izno (talk) 01:18, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

Country name

Is there a convention regarding using initials or the full name for article names? Socialist Workers Party (United States) was recently moved to Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) to match its United Kingdom counterpart. I think it makes more sense to use the full country name but I did not find any guidelines on the issue.--TM 13:55, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

The policy is that abbreviations "may" be used in parenthetical disambiguation (WP:TITLEFORMAT, 3rd header). The guideline is at WP:ACRONYMTITLE. Personally, I favor writing it out in cases like this, where it doesn't make the title too long. Station1 (talk) 00:21, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
Yes, agreed. In most cases we actually do use United Kingdom and United States in disambiguators. But for some bizarre reason political parties have always been an exception. Personally I think it's time to remedy that and bring them in line with other articles. -- Necrothesp (talk) 17:12, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
Yes. That's a good plan. Bring them into line.  — Amakuru (talk) 21:49, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Using WP:COMMONNAME for article titles is wrong

I don't see why we should be using common (to some, or in some regions) name instead of the officially given name. I would understand it if Wikipedia did not have redirects, but it does. This is clearly one-to-many relationship, with one proper name and tons of aliases. Thus, the aliases should refer to the proper name. This ensures that search works, but it also ensures that people and things are called by their given names, which is more dignified (for people) and removes uncertainty (for things). Mikus (talk) 00:01, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

"I don't see why X" is not the same as "X is wrong". You can use the talk archives for reference to the previous discussions on it, but there's no need to repeat them here. If you really want to re-propose the change, it will certainly require an RFC. -- JHunterJ (talk) 11:16, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
Yes, what I mean is using common name for article titles is wrong. Can you advise on the specific actions to propose a change? Mikus (talk) 16:30, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
In many instances Mikus is quite correct, or at least in my opinion. We should be weighing each situation independently, with WP:COMMONNAME only providing a bit of guidance, much like an essay rather than an inviolable rule. As Mikus correctly points out we have redirects providing effortless and foolproof guidance to an article no matter what search term is used, provided the redirects have been created and maintained, which usually isn't a big deal. In my opinion WP:COMMONNAME is one of many considerations in deciding on a title for an article. In my opinion WP:COMMONNAME is too forcefully used in many conversations pertaining to the optimal title for an article. Bus stop (talk) 16:55, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
WP:VPP, which at best will lead you to WP:RFC. -- JHunterJ (talk) 18:35, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

No it isn't. It's entirely right. That's why we do it. -- Necrothesp (talk) 17:06, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Necrothesp—perhaps a nuanced approach concerning article titles vis-à-vis WP:COMMONNAME is in order. Bus stop (talk) 17:12, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
The current situation works perfectly well and has done for many years. If it ain't broke... -- Necrothesp (talk) 17:15, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
For instance, you may want to see Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, 3rd Baronet and Anthony Charles Lynton Blair as article titles, which is presumably what User:Mikus means by given names and "more dignified"; but I'm quite happy with Ranulph Fiennes and Tony Blair with the redirects going the other way. -- Necrothesp (talk) 17:18, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
Mikus, are you really proposing that San Francisco be changed to "City and County of San Francisco" and DuPont be changed to "DuPont de Nemours, Inc." and Rhode Island be changed to "State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations"? If so, I will oppose this every step of the way. Cullen328 Let's discuss it 17:32, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
Cullen328, sure, why not. These are the official names, and for any other name there is a redirect. Maybe this will force Rhode Island administration to revise the official name and remove the plantations from it ;) As I said, this is clearly a one-to-many situation, with one official name and a zillion of unofficial, however common, names. They can be nicely served with redirects. Mikus (talk) 19:27, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
No, you are incorrect, Mikus, and your opinion is not widely shared among editors who have thought about these things. There are not a zillion unofficial common names for San Francisco, Rhode Island and DuPont. Only one each, and it would be utterly bizarre to change those article titles to the official titles. Bizarre and contrary to consensus. Cullen328 Let's discuss it 21:39, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
As with so many decisions concerning optimal title for an article, there are pros and cons. What are the pros to changing "Rhode Island" to State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations? Bus stop (talk) 19:44, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
Because it is the official name. As I said, I find the WP:COMMONNAME rule wrong. For common names and nicknames and monikers and pet-names there is redirect. Mikus (talk) 20:25, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
You are both picking "low-hanging fruit". WP:COMMONNAME can be taken to the point of ridiculousness. Many such discussions involve number of g-hits per competing term with reasoned discourse unwelcome. Bus stop (talk) 17:56, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
They're pointing out the low-hanging fruit because you're on a well-worn path, so the easy counter-arguments are handy. This rehash needn't continue, though, since it will prove fruitless, low-hanging or otherwise. -- JHunterJ (talk) 18:37, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
WP:COMMONNAME can be misused just as some other policies can be misused. Policy doesn't exist to be used as a cudgel to beat opposing opinions into submission. The problem with WP:COMMONNAME is that it shields a discussion from reasoned analysis. WP:COMMONNAME is commonly reduced to number of Google hits per term. Bus stop (talk) 18:51, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
Our common name policy (one of our better policies, imo) is there for a good reason and that is that we want articles to be at the name that is the most recognizable to most of our users. Obviously it can be misused, and sometimes be utterly ridiculous (yogurt anyone?), but, as you point out, so can all our other policies and that doesn't mean we just throw the whole shebang down the drain. If we chuck common name out, everything will just end up at the official name and that's often unrecognizable. --regentspark (comment) 19:43, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
You will still be able to find the article by common name by means of redirects. And if you navigated onto a page via link, you will see the official name in the title and the common names in the very first paragraph. Nothing is lost. Mikus (talk) 20:28, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
The reason we don't do that is that the official name is not easily recognizable. For example, a user who typed Germany in the search box but ended up at Bundesrepublik Deutschland would be taken aback. Everyone recognizes Germany, while very few do Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Official names are not necessarily the best choice for article titles. --regentspark (comment) 20:44, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
No one suggested using native-language names in the English wikipedia. It is called Federal Republic of Germany, and this is what the article should be called. I can see that in some cases the official name is not the "one" in the assumed by me one-to-many relationship. I prefer to name the article with the "one", not with the one out of the "many". In most cases the "one" will be the official name, but sometimes it is not. For example, China: the current official name is the People's Republic of China, but if the article is named like this, it should exclude everything earlier than 1949. During China's history there were many official and common names. So, in this case, "China" as the article's name is better because it is more inclusive, and it is the "one". It should have a subsection titled People's Republic of China, where the "People's Republic of China" name should link to. People's Republic of China has no history before 1949, but China does. Anyway, countries is a touchy subject. When I started this topic I was bothered by more technical and unambiguous names like Compact Cassette. Mikus (talk) 20:49, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
What's wrong is people using COMMONNAME as the sole criterion, rather than considering it just one strategy to support the WP:CRITERIA. As Bus stop says, "WP:COMMONNAME is too forcefully used in many conversations pertaining to the optimal title for an article." I do support the gist of COMMONNAME, but I oppose those who see it the only tool for naming. Dicklyon (talk) 22:22, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
Not everything that is notable also has an official name. COMMONNAME is a generic policy that one should be able to apply to all article titles, that guarantees that one can use the "best-sourced" name for a subject. What would the official names of European migrant crisis, or World War II be then? --Ritchie92 (talk) 23:44, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
I basically endorse the principle of common name on the principle of least astonishment, or WP:SURPRISE. But the principle of common name is not an absolute. There can still be room for discussion and the second most common name or the third most common name can be considered as well. Bus stop (talk) 01:54, 8 April 2020 (UTC)
  • COMMONNAME is pretty good, but not absolute. If reliable secondary sources do not use an OFFICIALNAME, it is not for Wikipedia to correct the world. Wikipedia follows reliable sources and should not try to lead. Wikipedia makes a valiant effort to respect BLP chosen names, and in this area provides an excellent example for how COMMONNAME is not absolute, but that other factors may always be considered, and the ultimate decision making is by WP:Consensus. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:26, 8 April 2020 (UTC)
WP:COMMONNAME is for our readers, and I strongly support it. Going with a barely known new name, even for a BLP subject, can be an issue. Like SmokeyJoe stated, "it is not for Wikipedia to correct the world. Wikipedia follows reliable sources and should not try to lead." But like others also stated, we don't always go by WP:COMMONNAME. One example of this is for medical topics; see WP:NCMED. Our article on heart attack is not titled "Heart attack." And, of course, if a company changes their name, it's not accurate to continue to have the article use the old title. That old name should go in the lead, though, per WP:Alternative title. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 05:36, 8 April 2020 (UTC)
Common name is certainly better than "official name", the latter being chosen by someone else who has no interest in, nor respect for Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and which is thus subject to manipulation, influence, or even misinformation. In a sense, WP:COMMONNAME depends on the core principles of WP:Verifiability and WP:DUEWEIGHT, ascribing an article title to the name that is verifiable by the preponderance of reliable, independent, secondary sources, rather than whatever minority view that the legal owner, or official owner, of the topic in question would wish it to be, for reasons of self-interest. And aligning article title policy with Wikipedia's core principles, is exactly how it should be. Mathglot (talk) 08:35, 8 April 2020 (UTC)
Actually, the exceptions to WP:COMMONNAME are even fewer than the above two comments would suggest:
  • On BLPs' personal preference for how they call themselves, MOS:IDENTITY actually advises us to stick to the common name, and the question of the subject's own preference only kicks in if there's no clear answer as to what the common name is. In reality it's rare for published sources to deviate often from a subject's preference, so in the majority of cases we will be following it anyway. The only exception to this is where there is a MOS:GENDERID issue involved as well. We explicitly do honour a subject's preferred gender-specific designation, but again it's very rare for sources not to do so as well.
  • When companies change their name, we apply WP:NAMECHANGES, which again instructs us to keep following WP:COMMONNAME, except that sources published after the name change carry more weight than those published before.
Overall, to answer the original question in this section, COMMONNAME is absolutely the correct policy to apply for most naming decisions. We are not a specialist resource for in-depth knowledge on topics, we are a resource which collates published information and presents it to ordinary readers using language and terms they can be expected to recognise and understand.  — Amakuru (talk) 09:19, 8 April 2020 (UTC)
By "are even fewer than the above two comments would suggest", I take it you are including my post in that? Like you, I was clear that "COMMONNAME is absolutely the correct policy to apply for most naming decisions" and noted exceptions. With regard to companies, I've seen us change the company title to the new title even without considering the "except that sources published after the name change carry more weight than those published before" aspect of WP:NAMECHANGES. Similar goes for publications and organizations, such as GLAAD. At the time that the GLAAD article title was changed, the organization was mainly known as the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. But the Wikipedia article title was changed anyway. Of course, I'm not stating that we always do that. As for MOS:GENDERID? Although it is at times used by Wikipedians to argue for changing a title, that guideline is not about article titles, WP:Article title is policy, and we have at times waited before changing the title of an article in such cases (including the case of Chelsea Manning). Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 02:17, 9 April 2020 (UTC)
Actually, refreshing my memory on the GLAAD matter, the organization had also already been known as GLAAD for years; so changing the article title to that name wasn't something that could have been argued as causing an issue. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 02:26, 9 April 2020 (UTC)
  • "City and County of San Francisco" isn't the official name for the settlement of San Francisco but only for the administrative territory. Moving it wouldn't make sense anyway for that reason. The article (and the likes of Washington, DC) should probably be edited to reflect that "City and County" only refers to the name of the city (administrative territory) not city (settlement) like Swansea. The fact that WP tends to have combined articles on settlements and administrative territories when they have the same name or are more or less concurrent (which makes sense) doesn't mean that the "official" name applies to the settlement. Crouch, Swale (talk) 18:15, 10 April 2020 (UTC)
    Even that's not really accurate. The City and County of San Francisco isn't any kind of "territory" or "settlement" at all, it's a legal entity, a government body. No one lives in the City and County of San Francisco, unless perhaps they are illegally squatting in a government office. Heh.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:00, 11 April 2020 (UTC)
This is obviously going to be a WP:SNOW failure if floated as an actual proposal, so we might as well just move on.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:02, 11 April 2020 (UTC)
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