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@ SounderBruce: In this revert you say "As explained in other playoff articles, the rounds are proper names and referred to as such by media". I don't recall where this was explained, but looking at news media and books, I'm not seeing treatment as a proper name except when in the context of specific conference names. Please fill me in on your thinking. Dicklyon ( talk) 05:28, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
Here are the lower-case examples from that news search: FoxSports.com, ESPN.com, [1] AS.com (a dominant football/soccer news site), [2] TheAthletic.com, Inquirer.com, KING-TV Seattle, WCPO-TV Cincinatti, FrontRowSoccer.com, OrlandoSentinel.com, TechRadar.com (which covers sports and other streaming, not just gadgets), Tennessean.com, BroadwaySportsMedia.com, WCVB-TV Boston, PDXMonthly.com Portland, SocTakes.com (may be an unreliable Indiana U. blog with just two writers). All of them are lower-case except sometimes in headlines/headings. [3] SportingKC.com bounces back and forth between both styles in the same article, in multiple articles (but all-lowercase in others [4]). Nor do all the league teams consistently capitalize or seem to care at all, e.g. Stars and Stripes FC goes lowercase, while Orlando City SC also flips between spellings in the same article, using lowercase in running prose and uppercase in headings, list items, and other things intended to "draw the eye". Exact same pattern in WFAA-TV North Texas, [5] Dispatch.com, and several others. 3rdDegree.net (doesn't look like a reliable source anyway, but some random guy's local-sports blog) varied by article, as did DirtySouthSoccer.com (fan page of Atlanta United FC). MLSMultiplex.com, a ticket-seller, was also inconsistent within the same page, as was BrotherlyGame.com (fansite of Philadelphia Union FC).
All of these links are from the GN search results on 2020 MLS Cup Playoffs semifinal OR semifinals OR semi-final OR semi-finals
[6], and account for all of the independent coverage there, instead of self-published primary material from the league or one of its teams/clubs. There simply were zero actual-news sources using "Semifinals" or "Semi-Finals" outside of headlines and the like. Perhaps surprisingly, Google Scholar has significant hits for a broader MLS Cup semifinal OR semifinals OR semi-final OR semi-finals search
[7], and the running-text capitalization of terms like semi[-]final[s] and final[s] in this context shows up only in roughly 1 source in 20. So, the claims the rounds are proper names and referred to as such by media
and the norm in secondary sources has been to capitalize the round names
are obviously wrong and are improperly defending
POV over-capitalization for
"signification" and marketing, and
OR based on primary-sourced
house style preferences of the league itself. People really need to stop making incorrect claims about sourcing like this in defense of their topic-specific stylization shenanigans; it does not improve our content in any way, and is corrosive to community goodwill, treating other editors as if they're stupid and can't spend a few minutes to verify a claim. Verifying claims is what we do around here. Some very good advice from the above was: tired of the constant edit warring that wastes time that is better spent improving articles and making meaningful contributions to the project .... Just drop the stick.
The entire encyclopedia project (internally and in a reader-facing sense) would be vastly better off if editors trying for unsupportable reasons to get strange style divergences away from every other topic would knock it off and especially stop making completely unsustainable sourcing claims that anyone can dispel in a couple of minutes of looking. Speaking of which, I took a few to go over a search like the above but with ALDS OR ALCS
[8]; semi[-]final[s] is not much used in baseball, and when it is, by independent sources, it is almost uniformly lower-case outside of title-case headings, headlines, etc., as expected, since this is the norm across sports reporting generally. But I could have told you that since I've been editing sports articles here for over 18 years and this is hardly the first time this question has come up.
It seems to me that longstanding capitalization consensus, conventions, and guidelines favor going ahead and downcasing things like what SounderBruce reverted. But if there are other objections, how should we best air those first? I don't want to be seen as working contrary to consensus, or without consensus, or using a "stick", but this should just get done, consistently, like in most other (non MLS Cup) articles. Dicklyon ( talk) 03:33, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
the rounds are proper names and referred to as such by media, and
the norm in secondary sources has been to capitalize the round names, and now
[capitalized] round names that conform with American sports tradition). Whether someone got blocked for something unrelated to this is immaterial. You've made claims and continue to make them repeatedly after evidence demonstrates these claims to be wrong. That is the complete and only source of the "drama". It's fairly common for people who prefer to write a particular way about some subject to assume that reliable independent sources also consistently do it, but when this is demonstrated to not be the case, such a person needs to drop the stick and not get tendentious about their subjective and rather promotional style preference. Not being sure what the sources are doing is very different from continuing to defy the reality of what the sources are doing. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:22, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
MOS:CAPS says Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization
. A reader does not interpret a standalone header "Conference semifinals" any differently from "Conference Semifinals". It's not like "White House" having a distinct meaning from "white house". Barring it being shown capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources
, capitalization is unnecessary.—
Bagumba (
talk)
08:23, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
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@ SounderBruce: In this revert you say "As explained in other playoff articles, the rounds are proper names and referred to as such by media". I don't recall where this was explained, but looking at news media and books, I'm not seeing treatment as a proper name except when in the context of specific conference names. Please fill me in on your thinking. Dicklyon ( talk) 05:28, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
Here are the lower-case examples from that news search: FoxSports.com, ESPN.com, [1] AS.com (a dominant football/soccer news site), [2] TheAthletic.com, Inquirer.com, KING-TV Seattle, WCPO-TV Cincinatti, FrontRowSoccer.com, OrlandoSentinel.com, TechRadar.com (which covers sports and other streaming, not just gadgets), Tennessean.com, BroadwaySportsMedia.com, WCVB-TV Boston, PDXMonthly.com Portland, SocTakes.com (may be an unreliable Indiana U. blog with just two writers). All of them are lower-case except sometimes in headlines/headings. [3] SportingKC.com bounces back and forth between both styles in the same article, in multiple articles (but all-lowercase in others [4]). Nor do all the league teams consistently capitalize or seem to care at all, e.g. Stars and Stripes FC goes lowercase, while Orlando City SC also flips between spellings in the same article, using lowercase in running prose and uppercase in headings, list items, and other things intended to "draw the eye". Exact same pattern in WFAA-TV North Texas, [5] Dispatch.com, and several others. 3rdDegree.net (doesn't look like a reliable source anyway, but some random guy's local-sports blog) varied by article, as did DirtySouthSoccer.com (fan page of Atlanta United FC). MLSMultiplex.com, a ticket-seller, was also inconsistent within the same page, as was BrotherlyGame.com (fansite of Philadelphia Union FC).
All of these links are from the GN search results on 2020 MLS Cup Playoffs semifinal OR semifinals OR semi-final OR semi-finals
[6], and account for all of the independent coverage there, instead of self-published primary material from the league or one of its teams/clubs. There simply were zero actual-news sources using "Semifinals" or "Semi-Finals" outside of headlines and the like. Perhaps surprisingly, Google Scholar has significant hits for a broader MLS Cup semifinal OR semifinals OR semi-final OR semi-finals search
[7], and the running-text capitalization of terms like semi[-]final[s] and final[s] in this context shows up only in roughly 1 source in 20. So, the claims the rounds are proper names and referred to as such by media
and the norm in secondary sources has been to capitalize the round names
are obviously wrong and are improperly defending
POV over-capitalization for
"signification" and marketing, and
OR based on primary-sourced
house style preferences of the league itself. People really need to stop making incorrect claims about sourcing like this in defense of their topic-specific stylization shenanigans; it does not improve our content in any way, and is corrosive to community goodwill, treating other editors as if they're stupid and can't spend a few minutes to verify a claim. Verifying claims is what we do around here. Some very good advice from the above was: tired of the constant edit warring that wastes time that is better spent improving articles and making meaningful contributions to the project .... Just drop the stick.
The entire encyclopedia project (internally and in a reader-facing sense) would be vastly better off if editors trying for unsupportable reasons to get strange style divergences away from every other topic would knock it off and especially stop making completely unsustainable sourcing claims that anyone can dispel in a couple of minutes of looking. Speaking of which, I took a few to go over a search like the above but with ALDS OR ALCS
[8]; semi[-]final[s] is not much used in baseball, and when it is, by independent sources, it is almost uniformly lower-case outside of title-case headings, headlines, etc., as expected, since this is the norm across sports reporting generally. But I could have told you that since I've been editing sports articles here for over 18 years and this is hardly the first time this question has come up.
It seems to me that longstanding capitalization consensus, conventions, and guidelines favor going ahead and downcasing things like what SounderBruce reverted. But if there are other objections, how should we best air those first? I don't want to be seen as working contrary to consensus, or without consensus, or using a "stick", but this should just get done, consistently, like in most other (non MLS Cup) articles. Dicklyon ( talk) 03:33, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
the rounds are proper names and referred to as such by media, and
the norm in secondary sources has been to capitalize the round names, and now
[capitalized] round names that conform with American sports tradition). Whether someone got blocked for something unrelated to this is immaterial. You've made claims and continue to make them repeatedly after evidence demonstrates these claims to be wrong. That is the complete and only source of the "drama". It's fairly common for people who prefer to write a particular way about some subject to assume that reliable independent sources also consistently do it, but when this is demonstrated to not be the case, such a person needs to drop the stick and not get tendentious about their subjective and rather promotional style preference. Not being sure what the sources are doing is very different from continuing to defy the reality of what the sources are doing. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:22, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
MOS:CAPS says Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization
. A reader does not interpret a standalone header "Conference semifinals" any differently from "Conference Semifinals". It's not like "White House" having a distinct meaning from "white house". Barring it being shown capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources
, capitalization is unnecessary.—
Bagumba (
talk)
08:23, 10 March 2024 (UTC)