This discussion was the subject of a close review. The result of the review was endorsed. |
Note that the revised page title says "article titles", while the RfC question is about "article text and titles".
Regarding the issue of whether an RfC can determine consensus on matters of article titles, a plurality (but not a majority) of editors believed that this was the wrong venue and WP:RM would be more suitable. Most of the “Bad Forum” !votes indicated that RM was the only legitimate venue for discussions that may require a page move. As far as policy-based rationales, this is supported by WP:RFCNOT. Looking at the discussion that added that section, it was a conversation among four editors regarding AfD pages being tagged with the RfC template as well, and page moves/article titles were not mentioned in the discussion. A few editors also raised questions regarding advertisement to editors who may be interested. Aside from the Village Pump being well publicized, notifications were sent to several related WikiProjects as well as several of the most recent/active NFL Draft talkpages.
For those supporting the use of an RfC to seek consensus on this issue, the most common argument raised was that using an RfC to determine article titles is something that does happen with some degree of regularity, especially when previous discussions through the usual channels have been especially contentious or failed to achieve a solid consensus. Several past precedents were cited, but the ones most similar to the current issue are [1] [2] [3]. The fact that WP:CONSENSUS#Consensus-building recommends RfC or the Village Pump was also raised, as well as WP:NOTBURO. Those opposing this forum did not have adequate policy-based rebuttals to these arguments.
Analyzing the relative strength of the arguments, those who sided with RfC being a valid venue for this issue have significantly stronger policy-based arguments. However, I would hesitate to call it a clear consensus given the length and breadth of discussion by editors who believe (with some policy backing) that RfC is not valid for this purpose. Taking this into account, there is no consensus that the RfC is invalid or inappropriate. Absent a consensus to overturn what is generally considered a valid process to handle contentious issues, this Request for Comment must be decided on the merits.
Moving on to the actual issue this RfC was created to discuss. Those advocating for lowercase “draft” were the majority of editors who weighed in on the merits of capitalization. However as this is
not a vote, numbers are far less important than the relative strength of the arguments presented. Per
MOS:CAPS, the default rule is only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia
. Among those advocating for uppercase, most arguments were that either “NFL Draft” is a proper noun, or that the NFL Draft is trademarked. For those who supported lowercase, there was disagreement that the event itself was trademarked and disagreement that the draft is a proper noun. A point was also raised that the draft event/process is not a ‘’sport or game’’ in itself, making that particular section of
MOS:CAPS inapplicable.
As far as the sourcing, there was much analysis of a wide variety of different sources and how they capitalize. Many were inconsistent, but a large number of sources do capitalize the D. It is clear that there is not a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources that consistently capitalize.
Based on the arguments presented, there is consensus that “draft” should be lowercase in these NFL articles. The Wordsmith Talk to me 06:24, 6 February 2024 (UTC)
Clarifying per request: there was consensus that the pages should be moved to the lowercase titles. That doesn't mean it has to happen all immediately in a mass pagemove; care should be taken to make sure we don't break templates, categories, transclusions, double redirects etc. The Wordsmith Talk to me 16:28, 9 February 2024 (UTC)Regarding the capitalization in "NFL Draft"/"National Football League draft" etc., should it be capitalized "Draft", or lowercase "draft", in article text and titles? With what exceptions, if any? 03:46, 6 January 2024 (UTC) Dicklyon ( talk) 03:46, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
Note: The order of the subsections below is the result of a refactor, and not to be misunderstood that forum concerns were the first reactions to the RfC. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:38, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
I'm dubious we should be refactoring what people have written, but if we are, the question of a bad forum is definitely preliminary to the question of whether this is a valid RfC and should come firstIt was dubious, esp. from an involved "forum" !voter, to refactor from the prior order within #Survey. Closers are competent, and don't need this extent of spoonfeeding, and the self-prioritized order is non-neutral. Consider self-reverting. Thanks. — Bagumba ( talk) 02:35, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
|ethnicity=
parameter in biographical infoboxes was resolved here (with a firm community consensus against the parameter) after discussions at
Template talk:Infobox person, thinly attended only by template editors and some
WP:BLP and
MOS:BIO regulars, failed to resolve the question. There is nothing unusual about using a VPPOL RfC for this, especially since it's what some of us advised Dicklyon to do. The notion that this is somehow irregular is not supportable, and we do this all the time. One of innumerable examples:
RfC on disambiguation of royalty articles, coming to a clear consensus, and moves enacted as a result. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 03:06, 7 January 2024 (UTC); examples added 20:24, 12 January 2024 (UTC); example added: 17:55, 17 January 2024 (UTC)...interested users may start a fresh RM with due notification on the talk pages of all articles that would be affected.Dicklyon opened a 2023 RM, closed with no consensus. Following up on "no consensus", not to be confused with a consensus of "Not moved" (see WP:THREEOUTCOMES), is not a case of WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT. The spirit of WP:FORUMSHOP is to discourage simultaneous discussions in different venues on the same topic. There is no other current formal discussion on this. At the aformentioned move review, the RM closer, JFG, wrote:
The way forward, if you and others feel strongly about caps, would be to file an RfC at the appropriate wikiproject or sports venueWP:VPP has a wider audience of ~3700 page watchers, and notification was given at WT:NFL.— Bagumba ( talk) 07:51, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
VPP seems like a more neutal and more trafficked venue. — Bagumba ( talk) 06:25, 13 January 2024 (UTC)The way forward, if you and others feel strongly about caps, would be to file an RfC at the appropriate wikiproject or sports venue.
...but it was your idea to do it: @ Randy Kryn, please kindly retract your false statement. I clearly !voted "Procedural oppose" at that RM, and never said "Support and do a covert move of the ~100 draft pages without any notification on the respective pages". — Bagumba ( talk) 16:20, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
in a roundabout way, it was your summarization of the RM that set that ball rolling: Sorry, take responsibility for your own actions. There is no logical reason to believe that my "procedural oppose" was advocating a non-procedural action. — Bagumba ( talk) 17:04, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
And yet you seem fine with it.: @ Randy Kryn Please provide a direct quote. Otherwise, please retract, and kindly stop speaking for me and misrepresenting me. Answer for your own actions, please. Or just make no comment. Thanks.— Bagumba ( talk) 18:06, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
there is no room for doubt here - NFL draft and similar phrases are NOT treated as proper names in sourcesbecause at least three discussions now have come to the consensus outcome that there very much is room for doubt. Thryduulf ( talk) 16:35, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
regulars can tell those who understand and follow the capitalisation guidelines to eff off, is falsebut it is equally false to say that
those who understand and follow the capitalisation guidelines can tell [article] regulars to eff off. Those with subject area knowledge are best placed to understand the context of sources written about that subject, which sources are reliable, etc. And once again, this is not a situation where anybody is trying to
toss out a policy or guideline they don't agreebecause they aren't disagreeing with the policy or guideline. What they are disagreeing with is what evidence is relevant to consider. For comparison, in one discussion about a railway line in the UK (I can't remember which one) there were sources using the exact same three or four words to refer to two different concepts, one of which is a proper noun and one of which is not, but the capitalisation experts did not understand that there were two concepts and so saw only an inconsistency in capitalisation. Thryduulf ( talk) 18:01, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
And once again, this is not a situation where anybody is trying to toss out a policy or guideline they don't agree...I am not convinced yet. MOS:CAPS advises capitalization for terms that are
consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources. Caps-supporters are listing some sources that capitalize the term, perhaps a majority of the sources—at best—but I don't see anyone acknowledging why there should be an exception for the "substantial majority" restriction.— Bagumba ( talk) 02:07, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Supporters of capitalisation are arguing that the "substantial majority" requirement is met: Can you quote examples? At #Survey, I see arguments for forum shopping, proper name, stick with status quo because instances are evenly split, leave it to local consensus, and trademark. I dont see anything resembling a claim of a substantial majority. At #An incomplete list of sources, there's an incomplete sampling, excluding books, which conflicts with ngrams data. — Bagumba ( talk) 13:07, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
The lead of Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters states:Outside Wikipedia, and within certain specific fields (such as medicine), the usage of all-capital terms may be a proper way to feature new or important items. However these cases are typically examples of buzzwords, which by capitalization are (improperly) given special emphasis.
The NFL, not being independent, should not be a factor in this determination. — Bagumba ( talk) 08:02, 6 January 2024 (UTC)Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.
are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources.No "overwhelming majority" of capitalization does not equate to the status quo "prevailing".— Bagumba ( talk) 08:27, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
Is there a conflicting guideline that leaves it toWikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.
the longstanding preferences of the editors who work in those subject areas? — Bagumba ( talk) 02:47, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
Trademarked sports and games are capitalized like any other trademarkswhich would leave us using "NFL Draft" [19] [20]. Either title is fine, valid, and harmless. What I strongly object to is the "us vs. them" hostility from Dicklyon (the OP of the first thread) (
due to the large number of football-fan editors compared to the editors who want to respect our style guidelinesand SMcCandlish
A gaggle of [football-interested] editors will stonewall any attempt to move any of these articles. RM process has too few uninvolved participants to overrule their false-consensusand the second half of [21]. The idea that they represent the true community against some mixed loyalty special interest fraction is a self-important delusion that seeds toxic discussions. The community is a mixed bag; sometimes we agree on case-by-case variances from our guidelines; sometimes we don't agree. No need to act so surprised and outraged. It's the nature of the thing here. Ajpolino ( talk) 13:34, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
Trademarked sports and games are capitalized like any other trademarks...: Except "NFL Draft" is neither a sport nor a game. See also my 09:28, 6 January 2024 comment at #Discussion (below)—the only trademark of "NFL Draft" anyway is for clothing and the logo, not for the event itself nor its broadcast.— Bagumba ( talk) 15:56, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
So I think it would be consistent with this and the exception I noted above, to cap when specifically referring to the broadcast spectacle in those more recent years. But the main article, and all the articles that talk about the draft as a player selection process, not so much as an entertainment event, would still not be covered by that trademark, so would use lowercase draft, just as we find in most reliable sources. Dicklyon ( talk) 18:36, 13 January 2024 (UTC)IC 041. US 100 101 107. G & S Education and entertainment services in the nature of professional football games and exhibitions; providing sports and entertainment information via a global computer network or a commercial on-line computer service, or by cable, satellite, television or radio; arranging and conducting athletic competitions, namely, professional football games and exhibitions; Entertainment services, namely, live musical and dance performances provided during intervals at sports events; educational services, namely, conducting physical education programs; production of radio and television programs; presentation of live shows featuring football games, exhibitions, competitions, and musical and dance performances; entertainment services, namely, an on-going series featuring football provided through cable television, satellite television, and television and radio broadcasts. FIRST USE: 20040000. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20040000.
So what Bagumba said above is more true than I realized, if applied to the words, not the logo: the only trademark of "NFL Draft" anyway is for clothing and the logo, not for the event itself nor its broadcast. Sorry for this being in the survey section; if someone wants to factor it out to trademark discussion place, that would be OK. Dicklyon ( talk) 20:26, 13 January 2024 (UTC)Description of Mark
The mark consists of a shield design containing the stylized letters "NFL" within the bottom portion of the shield, and eight stars and a football contained within the top portion of the shield design; and the word "DRAFT" in a rectangular box design under the shield design; and another larger shield design behind both the smaller shield design and rectangular box design.
Refactored to
#Proper noun section
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---|
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Subject matter experts having a different opinion to style guideline experts does not make the former's opinion wrong...: The SMEs would need to establish a community consensus, not just a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS to ignore a guideline.— Bagumba ( talk) 16:00, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.(Emphasis in original.) And:
Initial capitals or all capitals should not be used for emphasis. ... This includes over-capitalization for signification, i.e. to try to impress upon the reader the importance or specialness of something in a particular context.From MOS:CAPS and its subsection MOS:SIGCAPS.
leave the second and subsequent words in lowercase unless the title phrase is a proper name that would always occur capitalized, even mid-sentence. Outside Wikipedia, and within certain specific fields ... the usage of all-capital terms may be a proper way to feature new or important items. However these cases are typically examples of buzzwords, which by capitalization are (improperly) given special emphasis. ... Note that all style guides conflict on some points; the Wikipedia MoS and naming conventions are a consensus-based balance between them, drawing primarily upon academic style, not journalistic or marketing/business styles, and taking into account Wikipedia-specific concerns.From WP:NCCAPS. To the extent a style matter like this could ever be considered a "different names" matter (which is extremely dubious)
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.From WP:COMMONNAME policy.
examine styles already in use by independent reliable sources. From among those, choose the style that most closely resembles standard English – regardless of the preference of the trademark owner. Exceptions may apply, but Wikipedia relies on sources to determine when an unusual name format has become conventional for a particular trademark; only names that are consistently styled a particular way by a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are styled that way in Wikipedia.(Emphasis in original.) From MOS:TM.
RM can be vote-stacked with trivial ease by a wikiprojectyou keep repeating this claim, but you have never provided any evidence that it is true either in general, that it happened in this particular instance, or that the opinions of members of a WikiProject are less relevant or deserve less weight that the opinions of other editors. Repeating the argument does not make it true. Thryduulf ( talk) 17:39, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Correct is whatever people commonly do, not what some unidentified authority tells them to do.yes and no. Common words, phrases, grammatical constructions, etc. are determined by popular usage (although occasional exceptions may exist). However, many specific names can be correct or incorrect - determined by the person or organisation that owns (for want of a better term) the thing referred to. For example my username is "Thryduulf", if you are referring to me any other form ("thryduulf", "Thrydulf", etc) is incorrect. The same is true of brands - the owners of a brand get to determine what the correct form of that brand's name is and how much they care about that.
It's no surprise that some domains capitalize for emphasis. Is there any difference in meaning between "NFL draft" and "NFL Draft" that would suggest an actual proper noun? In any event per MOS:CAPS, Wikipedia simply goes by what isOutside Wikipedia, and within certain specific fields (such as medicine), the usage of all-capital terms may be a proper way to feature new or important items. However these cases are typically examples of buzzwords, which by capitalization are (improperly) given special emphasis.
consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources. — Bagumba ( talk) 06:43, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
When deciding how to format a trademark, editors should examine styles already in use by independent reliable sources. From among those, choose the style that most closely resembles standard English – regardless of the preference of the trademark owner.Upon examination, there is evidence, already brought up in this RfC, that two different styles are used. We should the lowercase variant, because it most closely resembles standard English.— Alalch E. 13:54, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
Collins defines proper noun as:Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization.
A reader seeing NFL Draft does not attach a different meaning to it than when they see NFL draft. It's purely a description in basic English, not any sort of proper noun like Super Bowl (vs a plain super bowl) or White House (vs white house). Capitalization is not necessary for a reader to understand the meaning here. !Voters saying that "it’s a proper noun" seem to be parroting that only because some sources are capitalizing it. However, MOS:CAPS advises:a noun...that is arbitrarily used to denote a particular person, place, or thing without regard to any descriptive meaning the word or phrase may have, as Lincoln, Beth, Pittsburgh. [24]
This is not the case with “NFL Draft”—there is not the "substantial majority" recommended by the MOS, even if there are sources that do capitalize. Note the MOS relies on the frequency of capitalization in sources, not merely that some !voters call it a “proper noun”. Arguments about it being a trademark were countered in detail elsewhere already in this RfC—the trademark is specifically for use on clothing, not for the event or its broadcast. One !voter (and by extension the numerous WP:PERX waves) argued to capitalizeWikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.
based on being a proper name and based on the NFL using this capitalization as well, but that ignores its usage as seen in independent, reliable sources, and the NFL's usage is not even an independent source, and should be ignored. Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization) warns:
Calls for deferring to the preferences of football editors to capitalize is counter to the existing MOS:CAPS guideline and the WP:LOCALCONSENSUS policy:Outside Wikipedia, and within certain specific fields (such as medicine), the usage of all-capital terms may be a proper way to feature new or important items. However these cases are typically examples of buzzwords, which by capitalization are (improperly) given special emphasis.
WP:BATTLEGROUND recommends thatFor instance, unless they can convince the broader community that such action is right, participants in a WikiProject cannot decide that some generally accepted policy or guideline does not apply to articles within its scope.
However, I don't think I've seen capitalization proponents acknowledge the relevant guidance at MOS and provide rationalizations of how Wikipedia is improved by ignoring its advice in this case. Per the WP:CONSENSUS policy:Editors in large disputes should work in good faith to find broad principles of agreement between different viewpoints.
— Bagumba ( talk) 17:26, 28 January 2024 (UTC)Responses indicating individual explanations of positions using Wikipedia policies and guidelines are given the highest weight.
Moreover, the trademarks for NFL Draft are unrelated to the actual event written about on WP: one trademark is applicable only for clothing, the other is for a specific drawing (which includes a shield, football, stars, and the words). This is in contrast to valid WP capitalization for trademarks, like the Super Bowl game's trademarks for the word itself in entertainment events and broadcasting and teleommunications. — Bagumba ( talk) 09:28, 6 January 2024 (UTC)When deciding how to format a trademark, editors should examine styles already in use by independent reliable sources. From among those, choose the style that most closely resembles standard English – regardless of the preference of the trademark owner.
At the subsequent move review, I wrote:Procedural oppose It doesnt make sense to just change this to uppercase without including into this RM the parent article NFL draft, and every other year's draft at Category:National Football League draft.
— Bagumba ( talk) 07:21, 8 January 2024 (UTC)In hindsight, the basis for my procedural oppose are the exact reasons we are here at Move Review now: lack of proper notification at related pages.
Hypothetically, "XYZ Draft" might mostly be capitalized in sources, even if "ABC draft" is not.— Bagumba ( talk) 00:11, 9 January 2024 (UTC)Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia
— Bagumba ( talk) 04:29, 13 January 2024 (UTC)You may not close discussions as an unregistered user, or where implementing the closure would call to use tools or edit permissions you do not have access to.
Note: put survey responses above the #Discussion header, not here.
Dicklyon, regardless of where everyone stands, there appears to be too much concern regarding the location of this discussion and the lack of notification to every page. If you still would like to pursue this proposed move, would you be opposed to archiving this discussion and starting a WP:RM at Talk:National Football League Draft. I know it is daunting to develop the template necessary for the bot to notify all pages, but this appears necessary to ensure that notice is provided, process is followed and help make sure the discussion can hopefully come to some consensus. In that light, I have drafted (pun intended) the necessary template here: User:Gonzo fan2007/DraftRM. All you need to do is copy that text, fill out the "reason" section and substitute the template at the bottom of Talk:National Football League Draft. At the very least, disregarding every other concern, this will move the discussion to a more appropriate venue and allow all editors to focus on the policy and the merits of the proposed move. Cheers, « Gonzo fan2007 (talk) @ 22:59, 11 January 2024 (UTC)
An increasing number of editors are directly/indirectly calling for this RFC to be shut down. Where would one go, to request such a shut down? GoodDay ( talk) 19:42, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
I'll wait a few days & see if the trend has changed or not. If it hasn't changed, then I'll recommend closure & notify this RFC. GoodDay ( talk) 20:11, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
what matters is whether there is an actual policy-based rationale for doing so, and there demonstrably is not. citation needed It is clearly your opinion that there are no policy-based rationales for closing down a discussion that attempts to make an end-run around the lack of consensus for your preferred option at RM, but that doesn't make WP:FORUMSHOPPING any less relevant. Thryduulf ( talk) 21:07, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
Jeez what a mess. We've got (for examples) National Football League Draft (uppercase), including related pages & American Football League draft (lowercase), including related pages. GoodDay ( talk) 19:10, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
— Bagumba ( talk) 00:45, 15 January 2024 (UTC)Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia
only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia(emphasis in original) completely sidesteps the tedious question. It simply does not matter whether editor A thinks something is a proper name and editor B doesn't; if it's consistently capitalized in the independent source material then it will be capitalized on Wikipedia, and if not then not, the end. This is a compromise that works for (and doesn't 100% satisfy) everyone across all topics and wikiprojects. If you think Dicklyon and various other people who are convinced something is not a proper name (under either or both definitional approaches) are happy with the term being capitalized on Wikipedia, you are mistaken. But the big difference is that they accept it and get on with their lives, while a few topically devoted people will not and will keep over-capitalizing no matter what to get their preference until the community shuts that tendentiousness down. It happens all time, across innumerable topics, and Dicklyon and a few other people get demonized the whole lot of the over-capitalizers simply for getting in their way. We have an across-all-topics guideline to default to lower-case on everything, and it should be followed unless the sourcing clearly proves there is cause to capitalize. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:47, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Myself & others have noticed that an editor has been making unilateral page moves from 'uppercase' to 'lowercase', without benefit of RMs & while this RFC is in progress. IMHO those bold moves should be 'reverted'. It's actions like that, that only creates more tension around this topic. Even more frustrating, 'uppercase' redirects are created, which makes reverting more difficult. Perhaps, one should contact an administrator to 'reverse' those page moves. GoodDay ( talk) 20:53, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
at least one partcipant here, Thryduulf, has made completely the oppose argument to Randy Kryn's, suggesting that it may be that specific-year NFL draft events might be proper names ("2022 NFL Draft", etc.), but the main topic not be one ("NFL draft").I have not made that argument. The closest I have come (which is really not that close at all) is to state that it is possible that it is possible that the NFL Draft may be a proper noun at the same time as the AFL draft being a common noun (it is also possible that the reverse is true), and that Wikipedia should not attempt to impose consistency where none exists in the real world.
RM can be easily system-gamed by overrunning it by a single wikiproject's internal canvassingit is also equally possible for RM to be easily system-gamed by overrunning it by internal canvassing by manual of style editors. Unless you have any evidence that any canvassing has actually occurred then you are just casting aspersions (and being listed on article alerts or deletion sorting lists is not evidence of canvassing). Attempting to bias the discussion by including or excluding certain editors (e.g. I note that the initiator(s) of this RFC chose not to notify the talk pages of the articles concerned, and such notification was made only two days later) is at least equally inappropriate as explicit canvassing.
The result of the move request was: no consensus.No consensus is not a "consensus to not move" ( WP:THREEOUTCOMES). Upheld as a good close at DRV. You repeating endlessly that Dicklyon is trying to shop/lawyer his way around a consensus is just false on its face and is what the actual aspersion-casting here is.
Update: There was actually more of this recent poisoning by RK of originally-neutral notice: [40] [41] [42]; it moved from just canvassing, to very pointed doubling down on canvassing, to a pseudo-retraction that states "two sides" that are really just both his side in different wording, so is more canvassing. Similar canvassing of an entire football wikiproject to gang up on a page mover attempting to comply with guidelines (in that case MOS:ABBR) goes all the way back to 2007 [43], and this doesn't represent looking very hard to find more examples. (Whether to use the long or short name is maybe more of a WP:COMMONNAME and WP:CONCISE matter, and still unresolved, with the main article at the long form and the annual ones at the short form. But the point is that trying to stir the entire wikiproject into opposing the changes was canvassing.) Contrast all that with the original neutral notices in those places and this additional one. A world of difference. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:24, 15 January 2024 (UTC); added more diffs: 18:03, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
It's not football, but once again another sports-related unilateral page move, at NBA conference finals, recently NBA Conference Finals, ocurred. Bypassing the RM route, isn't the best way to go. GoodDay ( talk) 17:54, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Update - I've gotten the page move reversed. Next time, please use RM, concerning these sports related pages & uppercase/lowecase. GoodDay ( talk) 18:06, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
It seems unlikely that anyone would reasonably disagree with the move. Based on discussions like this one it seems very likely that there will be reasonable disagreement about moves of such pages, hence my suggestion.
What's the overall situation on the topic-in-general, concerning page titles? Are sports pages the only area, where lowercasing is opposed? GoodDay ( talk) 19:34, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Ambiguity may arise when typographically near-identical expressions have distinct meanings, e.g. iron maiden vs. Iron Maiden [...] The general approach is that whatever readers might type in the search box, they are guided as swiftly as possible to the topic they might reasonably be expected to be looking for, by such disambiguation techniques as hatnotes and/or disambiguation pages. When such navigation aids are in place, small details are often sufficient to distinguish topics [...]. This is an issue that comes up every so often at RfD, and the general principle there is that DIFFCAPS are appropriate only when it is clear that someone searching with one capitalisation is looking for a different topic than someone using a different capitalisation. Without having looked at the evidence, my gut feeling is that this is not the case here and one or both articles should take disambiguation. Thryduulf ( talk) 22:16, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
I may be the only editor who's put significant, sustained time into working the Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked miscapitalizations backlog. One year ago, I had worked it down to just 20 redirect-links. But now, as more and more title-case alternative capitalizations have been declared to be flat-out miscapitalizations, the list has been snowed over with an avalanche of demanded work: over 500 redirect-links as of today many requiring hundreds of edits to fix. You have to sift through this haystack to find the legitimate obvious, non-title-case miscapitalizations. It's rather maddening and demoralizing; I've pretty much abandoned working this as my plate is too full so I have to let go of some things. – wbm1058 ( talk) 01:27, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
{{
R from miscapitalisation}}
and various alternative names of that template, plus there are innumerable instances of {{
R from other capitalisation}}
and {{
R from alternative name}}
and {{
R from modification}}
and so on that are really miscapitalizations that were created as redirects before {{R from miscapitalisation}}
existed, and which have not been switched to the more specific rcat template. I don't think it would be difficult to figure out which severity levels should exist and based on what policy, guideline, and other critiera, though there could be pushback against the entire enterprise on productivity grounds. I'm "processy" enough to not raise that objection myself, and am not into telling people how to spend their volunteer time, so I'm willing to do the template work if someone wants to open a discussion (I guess at
Template talk:R from miscapitalisation about such an implementation. There's already a conceptually related thread over there from 2019–2020.)I do agree that there would be dispute about which level to label particular cases with and even whether the template qualified for a specific case sometimes. E.g, in your examples, I don't agree that Amsterdam, The Netherlands appearing in our article text is harmless and something to ingore until FAC; that's only taking acount of whether it's problematic for a particular article's overall quality and understandablity. It's problematic for other reasons, including wrongly telling readers that this is how to write the Netherlands (to the extent that the prepended the is still in use), and it is likely to inspire editors (especially new ones) to assume this is "Wikipedia style" and to go around "correcting" other instances to read The, and even doing it to other placenames with a leading the ("the Camargue", "the Levant", "the Scottish Highlands", etc.; the only two I know of for which The is conventional are The Hague and The Gambia, and even the latter is very dubious [46] [47]). We had this problem with the overcapitalization of bird vernacular names that was permitted by a consensus stalemate for 8 years; the capitalization crept into mammals and other non-bird subjects, despite a strong consensus to not do that and there existing in some of those topics explicit international standards within particular disciplines to never capitalize in that manner. PS: Having a consensus stalemate just sit around and fester like that with negative consequences is why the RfC on this page is a good idea. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 14:45, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
There's an obvious tension between A) treating a move (or set of moves) as controversial on the basis that someone is controverting it (and especially on the basis of there being an ongoing RfC or RM about the matter), assuming the good faith that there is a legitimate issue as the basis of the disagreement (e.g. someone can prove that RS do uniformly treat a particular case or class of such terms as capitalized proper names, or prove that some other WP:P&G line item pertains to the subject and the mover did not account for it), versus B) system-gaming by throwing up manufactured, stalling "controversy" that ultimately has no basis but WP:ILIKEIT and WP:SSF fallacies. The latter turns rapidly into long-term WP:POINTy stonewalling that wastes lots of community time re-re-re-arguing over something which obviously only has one eventual outcome: if it's not capitalized in the vast majority of independent sources, it won't be capitalized here. We should not continue to entertain the latter sort of "controversy", including for policy reasons covered below. It drains not only volunteer time and attention, but is a vampire on the neck of editorial goodwill. The longer a little topical "rebellion" against any guidleline or policy continues, the more invested in the revolt and its defense at all costs particular editors will become. The last thing we ever need is another years-long fiasco like the species over-capitalization drama cesspool, the outcome of which was entirely predictable but which fomented an unbelievable amount of disruption (which I need not lay out in detail here; better to just let it flow under the bridge).
may move a page without discussion if ... It seems unlikely that anyone would reasonably disagree with the move. The key word here is reasonably. If the rationale for the push-back is demonstrably faulty and not defensible with sources or P&G then the "reasonably" standard is not met.
There has been no previous discussion about the title of the page that expressed any objection to a new title; that is no longer the case now, but it was the case when pages of this sort were originally manually moved back in 2016.
See also WP:MOVE#Reasons for moving a page:
you may request a page move at Wikipedia:Requested moves ... if the retitling is expected to be controversial– this is optional and the key word is "expected"; controversy about making a move compliant with NCCAPS and MOS:CAPS is by definition not "expected" and is contrary to already-established consensus. In case there's somehow any doubt about that, WP:MOVE continues explicitly:
Reasons for moving a page .... The title does not follow Wikipedia's naming conventions .... The title has been misspelled, does not contain standard capitalization or punctuation, or [stuff not pertinent here].The original moves certainly qualified.
Next, WP:RM#CM:
The discussion process is used for potentially controversial moves. A move is potentially controversial if either of the following applies: * there has been any past debate about the best title for the page; * someone could reasonably disagree with the move. Use this process if there is any reason to believe a move would be contested. For technical move requests, such as to correct obvious typographical errors ....
When Dicklyon began lower-casing these pages ("to correct obvious typographical errors"), they had not previously been subject to naming dispute. And there was (and still is!) not a basis on which to reasonably disagree with the moves. Later this turned into two RMs and an MRV (covered below), resulting in (sequentially) a WP:FALSECONSENSUS to capitalize (violates various guidelines and a policy, based on false claims about proper-name treatment in sources), then a failure to reach consensus when examined more broadly (largely on the basis of factually wrong claims pertaining to trademark), then an endorsement of the no-consensus closure, leaving us with a long-term unresolved issue, for which a VPPOL RfC is the ideal solution because it is too broad for anyone to game it with false claims, and won't have too narrow a range of editorial input. See below for WP:CONSENSUS policy explicitly recommending RfC and VPPOL to settle such matters.
Neither of the pages quoted above are actually guidelines or policies; one is a procedural-instructions information page and the other a help information page, both with the authority level of essays (per WP:CONLEVEL policy). Hyperbolic claims above that Dicklyon did something "in violation of" WP:BOLDMOVE or WP:RM#CM is wrongheaded at best, a combination of WP:WIKILAWYERING and ad hominem). But taken together this material seems to have general community buy-in, kind of along the acceptance lines of the essays WP:AADD and WP:BRD; we should take them to at least be best practices even if they are not grounds for bureaucratic foot-stomping or trying to punish someone. The manual moves by Dicklyon that started this brouhaha clearly qualify as valid reasons for moving and as (at the time) non-controversial, even if doing more of them while this discussion is open was a poor idea. They are also reasons for the RMs to have concluded in favor of lower-case, reasons which have been controverted by precisely zero P&G arguments or sourcing facts, if only the RMs had not been overrun by people from a wikiproject unreasonably determined to get over-capitalization against NC and MoS guidelines (and in one case misrepresenting a clothing trademark has having something to do with the player-drafting subject; though that was probably an innocent error, it still contributed powerfully to a blatant WP:FALSECONSENSUS).
Back to WP:MOVE:
On Wikipedia, a page can usually be renamed if the already existing title is incorrect or needs to be changed; this is called moving a page. .... you may request a page move at Wikipedia:Requested moves. ... Consider listing pages that you want to have renamed/moved at Wikipedia:Requested moves. List them at Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests if it appears unlikely that anyone would reasonably disagree with the move, and ... You are unable to move the page .... For other cases, follow the instructions for controversial and potentially controversial moves: If you believe the move might be controversial ....
Note carefully that a) this is optional, b) nothing in this can be taken to suggest that broader community input via RfC or other means is somehow forbidden, and c) controversy is tied to the terms "appears unlikely" and "reasonably" and "you [the mover] believe". This cannot in any way be read to require full RM process on the basis that someone else retroactively claims it was controversial, to permit someone to be punished on the basis of a mind-reading exercise claiming the mover "should have realized" something "would be" controversial, or to give license to the manufacturing of a fake "controversy" that cannot be supported by sources or P&G.
WP:NOT#FORUM and WP:NOT#BATTLEGROUND and even WP:NOT#SOAPBOX policies all also have a role to play here: neither WP nor any of its processes exist for the purpose of "Someone is wrong on the Internet" debate-for-sport about whether something philosophically "is" a proper name and "should" in an ideal world be capitalized. We have a really simple rule: capitalize (or do anything else stylistically divergent) only if almost all the sources do it for that specific subject, but don't do it otherwise, even if some of the sources do it. These same WP:NOT policies frequently come up in other style disputes, especially ahead-of-the-curve advocacy for language-change movements that usually pertain to identity politics but also some other subjects such as how to write about suicide, etc. I don't think these policies need to be quoted here; the gist of them is short, and I think everyone remembers what they are.
We also need to consider the WP:DISCARD part of WP:CLOSE in some detail (another information-page essay with high community acceptance):
closers are expected and required to exercise their judgment to ensure that any decision reached is within compliance of the spirit of Wikipedia policy, and complies with the project's goals. ... Consensus is not determined by counting heads or counting votes, nor is it determined by the closer's own views about what action or outcome is most appropriate. The closer is there to judge the consensus of the community, after discarding irrelevant arguments: those that flatly contradict established policy, those based on personal opinion only, those that are logically fallacious, and those that show no understanding of the matter of issue. If the discussion shows that some people think one policy is controlling, and some another, the closer is expected to close by judging which view has the predominant number of responsible Wikipedians supporting it, not personally select which is the better policy. The closer is not expected to decide the issue, just to judge the result of the debate, and is expected to know policy sufficiently to know what arguments are to be excluded as irrelevant.
This did not happen in
the most recent RM: the arguments in favor of capitalization were clearly contrary to both P&G (in spirit and wording alike) and to the sourcing; the capitalization was based on preferences (and sometimes on false "facts"); no argument was ever presented (or in this case could be) that one P&G page contradicted another on the matter; and making fans of a topic happy with over-capitalization or other excessive stylization variances is in no way a project goal of Wikipedia. It should have been closed with consensus for lower-case.
An earlier RM (2016) was attended by nearly no one but people from the NFL and American football wikiprojects, as it had (craftily or otherwise) been opened as effectively a mass-move, but not formatted as one, which necessarily failed to attract the attention a mass-move normally would, on the talk page of a brand new article no one but them could be watchlisting. There was nearly no input other than unchallenged claims that it was a proper name capitalized in sources, so the closer really had little choice but to close it in favor of "Draft". WP:MRV upheld the decision (MRV only exists to determine whether the closer screwed up, not to re-examine pro/con arguments or entertain any new ones. Interestingly,
that MRV concluded with endorse closure but allow fresh RM
. I.e., it was recognized that the issue was not settled. So, trying to pillory Dicklyon for trying again much later to achieve a clear consensus based on evidence and P&G, and trying again through RfC when the new RM resulted in consensus failure, is wrongheaded. Failures to reach consensus should be resolved, and MRV actually encouraged doing so. Somewhat similar situation with regard to NHL [d|D]raft:
RM failed to come to a consensus according to the closer, despite the policy and sourcing argument overwhelmingly supporting lowercase; canvassing in the wikiproject
[48], including personalized venting against Dicklyon by the partisan-on-this-subject admin who recently blocked him (
WP:INVOLVED failure).
a MRV on this one itself came to no consensus, largely because the wording of
MOS:SPORTCAPS was being editwarred in the interim. (It has long since been stable, and has returned to not supporting such capitalization.)
WP:CONSENSUS policy of course also matters, and in a lot of ways that are a bit lengthy to cover:
Editors usually reach consensus as a natural process .... A consensus decision takes into account all of the proper concerns raised.Key word: "proper".
try to work out the dispute through discussion, using reasons based in policy, sources, and common sense. Over-capitalizing "NFL draft" satisfies none of those criteria.
[Edidtors] may still occasionally find themselves at an impasse, either because they cannot find rational grounds to settle a dispute or because one or both sides of the discussion become emotionally or ideologically invested in winning an argumentOur P&G are rational grounds; demanding capitalization of "Draft" despite P&G and despite its common lower-case use even in sports- and football-specific sources, is not rational grounds and is clearly heading in the direction of emotional over-investment in "winning". (There's also an ideological component; not only are NFL fans pushing for capitalization to agree with a primary-source preference, there are a handful of editors who go around topic-to-topic "wikipolitically" supporting subject-specific demands for exceptions from naming conventions, MoS, and title policy, even when they are not defensible).
In determining consensus, consider the quality of the arguments, the history of how they came about, the objections of those who disagree, and existing policies and guidelines. The quality of an argument is more important than whether it represents a minority or a majority view. The arguments "I just don't like it" and "I just like it" usually carry no weight whatsoever.Pretty much every clause of that is relevant here.
Limit article talk page discussions to discussion of sources, article focus, and policy.Pretty much never happens any time topical over-capitalization or other style pecadillo is being addressed; the proponent of the change to comply with the P&G is very likely to be personally attacked, and Dicklyon in particular is frequently subjected to this.
Consensus can be assumed if no editors object to a change.Most moves to correct over-capitalization go unchallenged, even in sports (the P&G and sourcing basis for them is generally sound, so they are not controversial).
Editors who ignore talk page discussions yet continue to edit in or revert disputed material, or who stonewall discussions, may be guilty of disruptive editing and incur sanctions.This had implications for Dicklyon's recent moves and CENT editwarring (he's presently blocked), but what seems to be missed by many of the above commenters is that this also defines their attempts to stonewall the community even being able to discuss this matter at a VPPOL (and now stand-alone) RfC is also disruptive.
The goal of a consensus-building discussion is to resolve disputes in a way that reflects Wikipedia's goals and policies while angering as few editors as possible.That does not mean making everyone perfectly happy. See also, higher up the policy page,
an agreement that may not satisfy everyone completely, but indicates the overall concurrence of the group. What's important here is that there is already a community agreement that we do not capitalize that which is not overwhelmingly capitalized in (treated as a proper name by) independent reliable sources. The "Draft" stuff is an attempt to override a consensus that already exists, but the "Draft" arguments have no actual basis to do that.
Editors with good social skills and good negotiation skills are more likely to be successful than those who are less than civil to others.Both sides of debates of this sort frequently fail at this, but much more often it is the "give me a topic-specific style variance" side. They generally have neither a sourcing nor P&G basis for what they want, and turn to stridency, demonization, threats to quit, doomsaying about WP failing to be good enough, and other WP:HIGHMAINT behavior.
When talk page discussions fail—generally because two editors (or two groups of editors) simply cannot see eye to eye on an issue—Wikipedia has several established processes to attract outside editors to offer opinions. This is often useful to break simple, good-faith deadlocks, because editors uninvolved in the discussion can bring in fresh perspectives, and can help involved editors see middle ground that they cannot see for themselves. The main resources for this are as follows: ...The list includes VPPOL and RfC, by name. It does not include RM, much less any suggestion that it is mandatory.
Many of these discussions will involve polls of one sort or another; but as consensus is determined by the quality of arguments (not by a simple counted majority), polls should be regarded as structured discussions rather than voting. Responses indicating individual explanations of positions using Wikipedia policies and guidelines are given the highest weight.See if you can guess where this leans with regard to this RfC, which has P&G+sources arguments against ILIKEIT and false claims about trademarks and proper names, and a bunch of indefensible claims that VPPOL and now a stand-alone RfC someone cannot address this question.
In some cases, disputes are personal or ideological rather than mere disagreements about content, and these may require the intervention of administrators or the community as a whole. Sysops will not rule on content, but may intervene to enforce policy ... or to impose sanctions on editors who are disrupting the consensus process.Some of that needs to happen. As CONSENSUS suggests later in the same passage, if problems continue they may be a WP:ANI or WP:RFARB matter. We really don't need to have an other MoS/AT-related ArbCom case; we need this topic like all other topics to simply follow the cross-topic style and naming conventions guidelines and article title policy. There is no magical exception to be found here.
Consensus among a limited group of editors, at one place and time, cannot override community consensus on a wider scale. For instance, unless they can convince the broader community that such action is right, participants in a WikiProject cannot decide that some generally accepted policy or guideline does not apply to articles within its scope.This is a rather cut-and-dry case.
Someone in the above discussion (maybe more than one) has made further impassioned and bureaucratic claims that we cannot decide on any of this without first RMing the main subject (presently at National Football League Draft, though it has been moved multiple times, and without an RM about it). But there is no policy, guideline, or even loose community procedural basis for this assertion. There is no magical limit on what community consensus can decide, about what, at what location, through what discussion format, or with regard to what template (or none) is at the top of the discussion, and consensus ultimately exists and is determinable whether or not the discussion was structured a particular way or formally closed by anyone.
Most discussions don't need closure at all, but when they do, any uninvolved editor may close most of them ... most contentious discussions benefit from a formal closing statement– recommended, not required.
It's entirely reasonable for the RfC (or a later mass-RM) to bundle that article up with the others. If someone were to go open an RM on that or a related page right now, while this RfC is running, it would likely be regarded as at least mildly disruptive ( WP:TALKFORK at least).
When editors have a particularly difficult time reaching a consensus, several processes are available for consensus-building, followed by a list of some of them, which doesn't mention RM at all, and makes zero of them mandatory.
PS: For my part, I make guideline/policy compliant moves, manually or through RM/TR all the time. (I'm a PageMover and do not have to use RM/TR but I tend to do it, since it gives opportunity for someone to request a full RM if they think it's warranted.) As soon as I encounter resistance – even if that resistance cannot be justified on P&G or sources bases – I stop and switch to full RM discussions. If that process ultimately fails to produce results that are consistent with policy and with each other from move to move within a set of related RMs, then I'll RfC it. The latter is rare, but the idea that it's somehow procedurally impermissible cannot be defended.
PPS: Wikipedia:Our social policies are not a suicide pact has a bit of pertinence as well:
We need to take due process seriously, but we also need to remember: this is not a democracy, this is not an experiment in anarchy
All the good faith assumption in the world has been and always is extended to people who want to over-capitalize things or engage in other stylization shenanigans on Wikipedia. The desire for stylisitic variance accounts for much of why MoS pages have so much churn and why there are so many RMs that again and again argue for capital letters and such, against the guidelines and without sufficient sourcing, for the same reasons, and do not conclude in favor of such requests. Nearly every subject has specialized or primary-source materials that over-capitalize things (often for signification as "important"), so such requests are never going to stop and just have to be taken in stride and handled as part of our routine. But such desires are also a big part of why MoS discussions are often so awful; everyone wants an exception for something, and when these demands turn tendentious they need to be gently but firmly shut down. When people try to prevent and invalidate the community's own ability to examine these demands and the bases for them, a line has been crossed. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:00, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
Off-topic (about monarchs); personalized discussion that belongs in user talk
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Creating a subsection here to continue a discussion above, because I was away for a few days and if I respond way up there at this point, it will be invisible.
I commented above: The parade of decapitalization crusades in various subject-matter areas, against the longstanding preferences of the editors who work in those subject areas, has had a consistently demoralizing effect for a very long time, and should be strongly discouraged.
I stand by that view.
(The suggestion above that by using the word "crusade" I analogized editors who disagree with me to "violent religious imperialists," and conjured up "historical atrocities," is just frivolous.)
I recognize that deferring to subject-matter specialists on style or formatting issues is not Wikipedia's usual approach. In many areas, where project-wide uniformity is important, it is understandable why it should not be. But if the only issue, as here, is whether a given word in an article title or a phrase should be capitalized or not, the approach of a handful of editors, of moving from one topic-area within the encyclopedia to another and insisting on decapitalizing words that have been up-styled for years, has been proven by years of history to be unhelpful and demoralizing. I have seen this in a number of subject areas; as just one prominent example, the enforced down-styling some time ago of the second words of bird names still sticks in our knowledgeable bird-editors' craws.
One editor prominent in these decapitalization debates writes above that another such editor gets name-called and otherwise attacked for [raising capitalization disputes] very frequently
. Name-calling should be avoided, but: if I found myself consistently being criticized for my approach to editing Wikipedia, then I would carefully reevaluate the desirability and value of what I was doing; and I would do that even if I thought my position to be justified by a style-guide pages.
Newyorkbrad (
talk) 00:19, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
WP:TAGTEAMs of editors. It's worth noting that I'm seeing tendentious, sometimes personalised, arguments against anybody that doesn't agree with downcasing far more than I'm seeing tendentious arguments in the opposite direction. I'm also not seeing anybody claiming they speak for everyone, nor am I seeing anything relevant to CONLEVEL - there is no attempt to undermine the policies and guidelines, just disagreement about what the correct application of the guidelines are in this instance. Thryduulf ( talk) 13:15, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
...but: if I found myself consistently being criticized for my approach to editing Wikipedia, then I would carefully reevaluate the desirability and value of what I was doing@ Newyorkbrad, does "carefully reevaluate" imply that Dicklyon should stop? Otherwise, who's to say they he hasn't already carefully reevaluated and decided that it's best to continue? — Bagumba ( talk) 06:59, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
I suppose it would be impossible to calculate. But, I wonder (in terms of page titles) what the percentage is for how many (currently) are in uppercase style & how many (currently) are in lowercase style. GoodDay ( talk) 16:06, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
I took some time this morning to try to put together a table of what major nationwide sports sites do what. I acknowledge and understand that I may have missed some, but I wanted to show that there's a number of sources that consistently uppercase while also acknowledging that others do not.
Link | Source | Description | Note |
---|---|---|---|
[49] | National Football League Operations | The history of the draft | Upcases "NFL Draft" and downcases exactly where appropriate. |
[50] | National Football League Operations | The rules of the draft | Upcases "NFL Draft" and downcases exactly where appropriate. |
[51] | The Athletic | Draft hub / landing page | News stories listed use either title case or sentence case and capitalize "NFL Draft". |
[52] | CBS Sports | Draft hub / landing page | Consistent usage of "NFL Draft" in articles. |
[53] | Deadspin | Search for "NFL Draft" | Mostly consistent capitalization of "NFL Draft". Some titles have "draft" lowercased, but then the content of the article will have "Draft" uppercased. |
[54] | Fox Sports | Draft hub / landing page | Treats "NFL Draft" as a proper name, not utilizing title case, though sometimes uses all caps. |
[55] | Pro Football Focus | Draft hub / landing page | Stories are consistently capitalizing "2024 NFL Draft". |
Sporting News | No search available on-site, list of recent articles. | Consistent downcasing. Their draft hub isn't updated for 2024 yet and I couldn't utilize a search function on the site. I found 6 articles published in the past week by 4 different authors in their NFL news section. Of those, only the third link contained any downcasing, which was only a single instance of the 6 mentions of "NFL Draft", the other 5 were upcased. The remaining 5 articles were all uppercased consistently. | |
[62] | Sports Illustrated | Draft hub / landing page | Consistent usage of "NFL Draft" in articles. |
[63] | Sportsnet | Search for "NFL Draft" | I had to wade through a little bit, but I want to assess them as capitalizing to "Draft". I'm finding that the instances of downcasing are showing the Associated Press or another outlet as the author. I searched for "NFL Draft" and the 6 most recent articles I could find by Sportsnet writers ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) all upcase to "Draft" |
[64] | Spotrac | Draft tracker with salary values | The various years in the tracker use "NFL Draft". |
[65] | TSN | Search for "NFL Draft" | Content that was authored by TSN is showing uppercased "Draft" but content that is written by others and shared on their website (commonly ESPN and The Canadian Press) use the downcased "draft". I found 7 articles since December 29th that credit TSN staff and they all upcase to "Draft" ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), so I want to assess TSN as consistently using "Draft". |
[66] | Yardbarker | Draft hub / landing page | Consistent usage of "NFL Draft" in articles. |
Link | Source | Description | Note |
---|---|---|---|
[67] | ABC News | Search for "NFL Draft" | Inconsistent capitalizations. |
[68] | NBC Sports | Draft hub / landing page | Leans towards capitalization, especially when using "2024 NFL Draft", but has inconsistencies (even varies between the same writer). |
[69] | SB Nation | Search for "NFL Draft" | Capitalizes YYYY NFL Draft, such as "2023 NFL Draft", but will downcase to "NFL draft" when a year is not included. Seems to treat it as a proper name when a year is included but downcases when simply "NFL draft" or "NFL draft picks". |
[70] | USA Today | Draft hub / landing page | Inconsistent capitalization, even for drafts in the same year. |
[71] | Yahoo Sports | Landing page for NFL news | Inconsistent, seems to weigh a bit more towards capitalization though. Found a lot of sources on site showing capitalization ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) but I also found several that did not ( 1, 2, 3). |
Link | Source | Title | Note |
---|---|---|---|
[72] | AP News | Draft hub / landing page | Consistently downcasing. |
[73] | Bleacher Report | Draft hub / landing page | Consistently downcasing. |
[74] | ESPN | Draft hub / landing page | Consistently downcasing. |
Link | Source | Title | Note |
---|---|---|---|
[75] | Arizona Cardinals | 2023 Media Guide | Largely corrupted, which is weird for a company as big as the NFL, but the part of it that's not corrupted is consistently capitalizing "NFL Draft". |
[76] | Atlanta Falcons | Atlanta Falcons 2023 Media Guide | Consistently and frequently uses "NFL Draft". |
[77] | Baltimore Ravens | 2023 Baltimore Ravens Media Guide | Consistently and frequently uses "NFL Draft". |
[78] | Buffalo Bills | Bills 2023 Media Guide | Doesn't use "NFL Draft" anywhere, but uses "NHL Draft" twice... not really relevant, just amusing. |
[79] | Carolina Panthers | Media Guide 2023 | Consistently and frequently uses "NFL Draft". |
[80] | Cincinnati Bengals | Media Guide 2023 Cincinnati Bengals | Coaching section is at the beginning of the PDF when searching for "NFL Draft", and it has a few instances of being downcased but then the rest of the media guide has 100+ instances of "NFL Draft". Seeming to imply that the intention is to use "NFL Draft" as opposed to the downcased version. |
I didn't get through all of the media guides because, frankly, I'm getting worn out by doing all of this at once and I want a break from it. However, I wanted to share the findings that I have so far. I skewed heavily towards evaluating website's recent usage of "NFL Draft" vs "NFL draft", as opposed to historical, and made general notes (which may need a bit of CE). Hey man im josh ( talk) 17:27, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
At this point, I kind of want to manage this table myself until there's more feedback.@ Hey man im josh: Please add The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian as lowercase sources. Thanks.— Bagumba ( talk) 06:18, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.That would exclude non-indy sources like the NFL and its teams' media guides. — Bagumba ( talk) 18:35, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.They are obviously not independent sources.
The claim above that USA Today is inconsistent can't really be sustained. I tediously went through the entire first page of Google News search results for "NFL Draft" constrained to that site [81], and the usage is overwhelmingly lowercase except in some headlines/headings/headers. There were only a handful of exceptions, mostly confined to a small minority of articles in their DraftWire department, and articles outside it by a couple of particular writers including Demetrius Harvey (not consistent even within the same article), Jordan Mendoza (lowercase most of the time but inconsistent in one article), and Jack McKessy (ditto). USA Today usage, outside of article titles and headings in them, plus links to their own article titles, and a few direct quotations, is at least 99% lowercase; the fraction of 1% of instances that are not are basically just typos.
Here're some additional mainstream news and sports news data points:consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sourcesis provably not met, nowhere even close. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:29, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
You ignored the 11 news sites that I linked above where I found lowercase. Maybe some of them are consistent and some mixed, but most were ignored in favor of the ones you found with uppercase. In any case, usage is mixed. Caps are clearly optional. Dicklyon ( talk) 22:01, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
There's no way you can hallucinate consistent capitalization in independent sources– You guys have been begging for sources, I provided contextually relevant sources to counter those generic references provided, I'm just trying to have a discussion about the sources that we have both provided. This isn't an RM, this is a discussion where we're trying to workshop things, right? As for
.. it is the house style of some major publishers such as ESPN, are you able to find any other sources that are nationwide and focus on sports that consistently downcase? At what point should we chalk up variances in capitalization as just being mistakes or "miscapitalizations" from those unfamiliar with the subject? Obviously with ESPN that's not the case, as they are very much focused on sports and clearly have a style guide that downcases. I don't think we should rely on the capitalization of those unfamiliar with the subject matter what evaluating whether capitalization is proper or not, and I think that's an entirely reasonable point to make which I'm open to discussing. Hey man im josh ( talk) 16:52, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
A reader seeing NFL Draft does not apply a different meaning to it than when they see NFL draft. It's purely a description in basic English, not any sort of proper noun like Super Bowl (vs a plain super bowl).— Bagumba ( talk) 08:45, 19 January 2024 (UTC)a noun...that is arbitrarily used to denote a particular person, place, or thing without regard to any descriptive meaning the word or phrase may have, as Lincoln, Beth, Pittsburgh. [84]
purely a description in basic Englishor something more significant than that seems to be the heart of this dispute, and there doesn't seem to me that the evidence is as clearly for either position as you make out. It is entirely possible (and not inconsistent with the evidence presented here) that the NfL have a draft (common noun) and that draft and surrounding media events, etc are called the NfL Draft (proper noun). Thryduulf ( talk) 09:05, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
...and there doesn't seem to me that the evidence is as clearly for either position as you make out: There might be reasons to capitalize it. It's just not the traditional proper noun case, where the captialized phrase has a completely different meaning than the lowercase basic English description. — Bagumba ( talk) 09:17, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
If there are sources that consistently use different capitalisations (and the evidence is unarguable that there are) it is worth taking the time to understand why they do that and if they are using the term in different ways and/or to mean different things. It could be that they aren't, in which case that's fine and we don't need to worry.I took a glance. It seems the mixed-use sources just capitalize arbitrarily. I'm not noticing any pattern suggesting some distinct meeaning (e.g. broadcast vs process). Does anyone see any distinction? — Bagumba ( talk) 11:04, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
There are several hundred incorrect links to the lowercase NFL draft, as well as several thousand to National Football League draft (many are templates, maybe they have a shortcut) if someone has the tools to fix these it's a job needing to be done, thanks. Randy Kryn ( talk) 13:55, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
BTW - I've opened an RM for the AFL, in relation to this RFC topic. GoodDay ( talk) 15:41, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
...please don't conflate the two: So the why the uproar at #Unilateral page moves, while RFC is ongoing? Or RMs are fine, even for de-captitalization? — Bagumba ( talk) 12:52, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
Why would anyone want to change the NBA Conference Finals?: The rhetoric isn't helpful. There's clearly a potentially conflicting MOS, even if you disagree with it. — Bagumba ( talk) 01:52, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Would like to request that a panel of from three-to-five experienced closers close this poll. Should have been already shut down, but hopefully closers can just read the 'Forum' section and end it there. If this RfC results in a fundamental change to the RM and move review process by overruling an RM and move review outcome after nine months (only the second RM on the topic) then there are other closes I'd like to bring to "Village pump (policy)" from a long time ago. Randy Kryn ( talk) 02:38, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
So this section is for closing arguments to the closers, Randy? Dicklyon ( talk) 04:00, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
I entered a neutral request at Wikipedia:Closure requests#Capitalization of NFL Draft in text and titles. Dicklyon ( talk) 04:14, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
There's still 10+ posts/day, and some are trying to reach that common understanding. There's ones that seem to only bludgeon their point. Given that page titles and MOS are contentious topics, those individuals should ideally be dealt with without shutting down constructive discussion completely.— Bagumba ( talk) 05:11, 21 January 2024 (UTC)Editors in large disputes should work in good faith to find broad principles of agreement between different viewpoints
Being pro-consistency. I've given up on all sports pages being consistently upper-cased or lower-cased. Ironically, they're all consistently inconsistent. GoodDay ( talk) 18:42, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
I'll volunteer to close this one after the 30 days have expired. I've kept an eye on this RfC for a while and read the entire thing (plus many of the other linked discussions), but completely WP:UNINVOLVED for the topic areas and issues discussed. As far as a panel, I'd welcome any other uninvolved admins who want to volunteer. If none materialize I can handle it myself. The Wordsmith Talk to me 22:02, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
Closers are unnecessary as nothing about this conversation has been binding. Users have avoided getting involved because it's not a move discussion, just an open RfC. This whole conversation has been incredibly demoralizing and frankly I'm done with it until the move discussion takes place. There are several editors who want the pages down cased and pretend as if there's some type of cabal that's been fighting the effort this entire time. They create some type of Boogeyman and throw around unfair accusations of LOCALCON when that just simply doesn't exist, and I think that's an incredibly stupid way to argue. I think it's pretty clear that it's a proper name of an event, but that there's inconsistencies in how the media capitalizes it. Yet, there are some that argue without even the slightest consideration that it's a possibility that uppercase is the proper way to go. I approached this with an open mind, but there are definitely others that did not that have bludgeoned this topic to death. The amount of time I've wasted on this discussion is just ridiculous. I've not been having a discussion with people that are willing to budge from their original stance on the issue or even consider it whatsoever. I'd be willing to downcase if I felt like some individuals had actually had a discussion in good faith, which I don't feel like happened. This has been an unhealthy discussion that I regret getting involved in and trying to play devil's advocate in. Hey man im josh ( talk) 01:09, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
There are several editors who want [an option] and pretend as if there's some type of cabal that's been fighting the effort this entire time. They create some type of Boogeymanis precisely the kind of pretense of a cabal and a bogeyman that it complains of. This one-sided "attack while playing victim" stuff is what is actually demoralizing, and its use as a walled-garden defense tactic for some particular topic against P&G and sourcing expectations that apply to all other topics is what is the source of the entire problem. An RfC like this should never have been needed in the first place. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:58, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
FWIW, just adding my opinion that a panel of closers is unnecessary. Single closers are able to handle anything but the most contentious whole-site-impacting discussions. Ajpolino ( talk) 03:13, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
We're getting close to closing time. GoodDay ( talk) 17:54, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
Closing time Cinderella157 ( talk) 23:59, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
This discussion was the subject of a close review. The result of the review was endorsed. |
Note that the revised page title says "article titles", while the RfC question is about "article text and titles".
Regarding the issue of whether an RfC can determine consensus on matters of article titles, a plurality (but not a majority) of editors believed that this was the wrong venue and WP:RM would be more suitable. Most of the “Bad Forum” !votes indicated that RM was the only legitimate venue for discussions that may require a page move. As far as policy-based rationales, this is supported by WP:RFCNOT. Looking at the discussion that added that section, it was a conversation among four editors regarding AfD pages being tagged with the RfC template as well, and page moves/article titles were not mentioned in the discussion. A few editors also raised questions regarding advertisement to editors who may be interested. Aside from the Village Pump being well publicized, notifications were sent to several related WikiProjects as well as several of the most recent/active NFL Draft talkpages.
For those supporting the use of an RfC to seek consensus on this issue, the most common argument raised was that using an RfC to determine article titles is something that does happen with some degree of regularity, especially when previous discussions through the usual channels have been especially contentious or failed to achieve a solid consensus. Several past precedents were cited, but the ones most similar to the current issue are [1] [2] [3]. The fact that WP:CONSENSUS#Consensus-building recommends RfC or the Village Pump was also raised, as well as WP:NOTBURO. Those opposing this forum did not have adequate policy-based rebuttals to these arguments.
Analyzing the relative strength of the arguments, those who sided with RfC being a valid venue for this issue have significantly stronger policy-based arguments. However, I would hesitate to call it a clear consensus given the length and breadth of discussion by editors who believe (with some policy backing) that RfC is not valid for this purpose. Taking this into account, there is no consensus that the RfC is invalid or inappropriate. Absent a consensus to overturn what is generally considered a valid process to handle contentious issues, this Request for Comment must be decided on the merits.
Moving on to the actual issue this RfC was created to discuss. Those advocating for lowercase “draft” were the majority of editors who weighed in on the merits of capitalization. However as this is
not a vote, numbers are far less important than the relative strength of the arguments presented. Per
MOS:CAPS, the default rule is only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia
. Among those advocating for uppercase, most arguments were that either “NFL Draft” is a proper noun, or that the NFL Draft is trademarked. For those who supported lowercase, there was disagreement that the event itself was trademarked and disagreement that the draft is a proper noun. A point was also raised that the draft event/process is not a ‘’sport or game’’ in itself, making that particular section of
MOS:CAPS inapplicable.
As far as the sourcing, there was much analysis of a wide variety of different sources and how they capitalize. Many were inconsistent, but a large number of sources do capitalize the D. It is clear that there is not a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources that consistently capitalize.
Based on the arguments presented, there is consensus that “draft” should be lowercase in these NFL articles. The Wordsmith Talk to me 06:24, 6 February 2024 (UTC)
Clarifying per request: there was consensus that the pages should be moved to the lowercase titles. That doesn't mean it has to happen all immediately in a mass pagemove; care should be taken to make sure we don't break templates, categories, transclusions, double redirects etc. The Wordsmith Talk to me 16:28, 9 February 2024 (UTC)Regarding the capitalization in "NFL Draft"/"National Football League draft" etc., should it be capitalized "Draft", or lowercase "draft", in article text and titles? With what exceptions, if any? 03:46, 6 January 2024 (UTC) Dicklyon ( talk) 03:46, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
Note: The order of the subsections below is the result of a refactor, and not to be misunderstood that forum concerns were the first reactions to the RfC. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:38, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
I'm dubious we should be refactoring what people have written, but if we are, the question of a bad forum is definitely preliminary to the question of whether this is a valid RfC and should come firstIt was dubious, esp. from an involved "forum" !voter, to refactor from the prior order within #Survey. Closers are competent, and don't need this extent of spoonfeeding, and the self-prioritized order is non-neutral. Consider self-reverting. Thanks. — Bagumba ( talk) 02:35, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
|ethnicity=
parameter in biographical infoboxes was resolved here (with a firm community consensus against the parameter) after discussions at
Template talk:Infobox person, thinly attended only by template editors and some
WP:BLP and
MOS:BIO regulars, failed to resolve the question. There is nothing unusual about using a VPPOL RfC for this, especially since it's what some of us advised Dicklyon to do. The notion that this is somehow irregular is not supportable, and we do this all the time. One of innumerable examples:
RfC on disambiguation of royalty articles, coming to a clear consensus, and moves enacted as a result. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 03:06, 7 January 2024 (UTC); examples added 20:24, 12 January 2024 (UTC); example added: 17:55, 17 January 2024 (UTC)...interested users may start a fresh RM with due notification on the talk pages of all articles that would be affected.Dicklyon opened a 2023 RM, closed with no consensus. Following up on "no consensus", not to be confused with a consensus of "Not moved" (see WP:THREEOUTCOMES), is not a case of WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT. The spirit of WP:FORUMSHOP is to discourage simultaneous discussions in different venues on the same topic. There is no other current formal discussion on this. At the aformentioned move review, the RM closer, JFG, wrote:
The way forward, if you and others feel strongly about caps, would be to file an RfC at the appropriate wikiproject or sports venueWP:VPP has a wider audience of ~3700 page watchers, and notification was given at WT:NFL.— Bagumba ( talk) 07:51, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
VPP seems like a more neutal and more trafficked venue. — Bagumba ( talk) 06:25, 13 January 2024 (UTC)The way forward, if you and others feel strongly about caps, would be to file an RfC at the appropriate wikiproject or sports venue.
...but it was your idea to do it: @ Randy Kryn, please kindly retract your false statement. I clearly !voted "Procedural oppose" at that RM, and never said "Support and do a covert move of the ~100 draft pages without any notification on the respective pages". — Bagumba ( talk) 16:20, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
in a roundabout way, it was your summarization of the RM that set that ball rolling: Sorry, take responsibility for your own actions. There is no logical reason to believe that my "procedural oppose" was advocating a non-procedural action. — Bagumba ( talk) 17:04, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
And yet you seem fine with it.: @ Randy Kryn Please provide a direct quote. Otherwise, please retract, and kindly stop speaking for me and misrepresenting me. Answer for your own actions, please. Or just make no comment. Thanks.— Bagumba ( talk) 18:06, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
there is no room for doubt here - NFL draft and similar phrases are NOT treated as proper names in sourcesbecause at least three discussions now have come to the consensus outcome that there very much is room for doubt. Thryduulf ( talk) 16:35, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
regulars can tell those who understand and follow the capitalisation guidelines to eff off, is falsebut it is equally false to say that
those who understand and follow the capitalisation guidelines can tell [article] regulars to eff off. Those with subject area knowledge are best placed to understand the context of sources written about that subject, which sources are reliable, etc. And once again, this is not a situation where anybody is trying to
toss out a policy or guideline they don't agreebecause they aren't disagreeing with the policy or guideline. What they are disagreeing with is what evidence is relevant to consider. For comparison, in one discussion about a railway line in the UK (I can't remember which one) there were sources using the exact same three or four words to refer to two different concepts, one of which is a proper noun and one of which is not, but the capitalisation experts did not understand that there were two concepts and so saw only an inconsistency in capitalisation. Thryduulf ( talk) 18:01, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
And once again, this is not a situation where anybody is trying to toss out a policy or guideline they don't agree...I am not convinced yet. MOS:CAPS advises capitalization for terms that are
consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources. Caps-supporters are listing some sources that capitalize the term, perhaps a majority of the sources—at best—but I don't see anyone acknowledging why there should be an exception for the "substantial majority" restriction.— Bagumba ( talk) 02:07, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Supporters of capitalisation are arguing that the "substantial majority" requirement is met: Can you quote examples? At #Survey, I see arguments for forum shopping, proper name, stick with status quo because instances are evenly split, leave it to local consensus, and trademark. I dont see anything resembling a claim of a substantial majority. At #An incomplete list of sources, there's an incomplete sampling, excluding books, which conflicts with ngrams data. — Bagumba ( talk) 13:07, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
The lead of Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters states:Outside Wikipedia, and within certain specific fields (such as medicine), the usage of all-capital terms may be a proper way to feature new or important items. However these cases are typically examples of buzzwords, which by capitalization are (improperly) given special emphasis.
The NFL, not being independent, should not be a factor in this determination. — Bagumba ( talk) 08:02, 6 January 2024 (UTC)Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.
are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources.No "overwhelming majority" of capitalization does not equate to the status quo "prevailing".— Bagumba ( talk) 08:27, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
Is there a conflicting guideline that leaves it toWikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.
the longstanding preferences of the editors who work in those subject areas? — Bagumba ( talk) 02:47, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
Trademarked sports and games are capitalized like any other trademarkswhich would leave us using "NFL Draft" [19] [20]. Either title is fine, valid, and harmless. What I strongly object to is the "us vs. them" hostility from Dicklyon (the OP of the first thread) (
due to the large number of football-fan editors compared to the editors who want to respect our style guidelinesand SMcCandlish
A gaggle of [football-interested] editors will stonewall any attempt to move any of these articles. RM process has too few uninvolved participants to overrule their false-consensusand the second half of [21]. The idea that they represent the true community against some mixed loyalty special interest fraction is a self-important delusion that seeds toxic discussions. The community is a mixed bag; sometimes we agree on case-by-case variances from our guidelines; sometimes we don't agree. No need to act so surprised and outraged. It's the nature of the thing here. Ajpolino ( talk) 13:34, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
Trademarked sports and games are capitalized like any other trademarks...: Except "NFL Draft" is neither a sport nor a game. See also my 09:28, 6 January 2024 comment at #Discussion (below)—the only trademark of "NFL Draft" anyway is for clothing and the logo, not for the event itself nor its broadcast.— Bagumba ( talk) 15:56, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
So I think it would be consistent with this and the exception I noted above, to cap when specifically referring to the broadcast spectacle in those more recent years. But the main article, and all the articles that talk about the draft as a player selection process, not so much as an entertainment event, would still not be covered by that trademark, so would use lowercase draft, just as we find in most reliable sources. Dicklyon ( talk) 18:36, 13 January 2024 (UTC)IC 041. US 100 101 107. G & S Education and entertainment services in the nature of professional football games and exhibitions; providing sports and entertainment information via a global computer network or a commercial on-line computer service, or by cable, satellite, television or radio; arranging and conducting athletic competitions, namely, professional football games and exhibitions; Entertainment services, namely, live musical and dance performances provided during intervals at sports events; educational services, namely, conducting physical education programs; production of radio and television programs; presentation of live shows featuring football games, exhibitions, competitions, and musical and dance performances; entertainment services, namely, an on-going series featuring football provided through cable television, satellite television, and television and radio broadcasts. FIRST USE: 20040000. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20040000.
So what Bagumba said above is more true than I realized, if applied to the words, not the logo: the only trademark of "NFL Draft" anyway is for clothing and the logo, not for the event itself nor its broadcast. Sorry for this being in the survey section; if someone wants to factor it out to trademark discussion place, that would be OK. Dicklyon ( talk) 20:26, 13 January 2024 (UTC)Description of Mark
The mark consists of a shield design containing the stylized letters "NFL" within the bottom portion of the shield, and eight stars and a football contained within the top portion of the shield design; and the word "DRAFT" in a rectangular box design under the shield design; and another larger shield design behind both the smaller shield design and rectangular box design.
Refactored to
#Proper noun section
|
---|
|
Subject matter experts having a different opinion to style guideline experts does not make the former's opinion wrong...: The SMEs would need to establish a community consensus, not just a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS to ignore a guideline.— Bagumba ( talk) 16:00, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.(Emphasis in original.) And:
Initial capitals or all capitals should not be used for emphasis. ... This includes over-capitalization for signification, i.e. to try to impress upon the reader the importance or specialness of something in a particular context.From MOS:CAPS and its subsection MOS:SIGCAPS.
leave the second and subsequent words in lowercase unless the title phrase is a proper name that would always occur capitalized, even mid-sentence. Outside Wikipedia, and within certain specific fields ... the usage of all-capital terms may be a proper way to feature new or important items. However these cases are typically examples of buzzwords, which by capitalization are (improperly) given special emphasis. ... Note that all style guides conflict on some points; the Wikipedia MoS and naming conventions are a consensus-based balance between them, drawing primarily upon academic style, not journalistic or marketing/business styles, and taking into account Wikipedia-specific concerns.From WP:NCCAPS. To the extent a style matter like this could ever be considered a "different names" matter (which is extremely dubious)
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.From WP:COMMONNAME policy.
examine styles already in use by independent reliable sources. From among those, choose the style that most closely resembles standard English – regardless of the preference of the trademark owner. Exceptions may apply, but Wikipedia relies on sources to determine when an unusual name format has become conventional for a particular trademark; only names that are consistently styled a particular way by a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are styled that way in Wikipedia.(Emphasis in original.) From MOS:TM.
RM can be vote-stacked with trivial ease by a wikiprojectyou keep repeating this claim, but you have never provided any evidence that it is true either in general, that it happened in this particular instance, or that the opinions of members of a WikiProject are less relevant or deserve less weight that the opinions of other editors. Repeating the argument does not make it true. Thryduulf ( talk) 17:39, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Correct is whatever people commonly do, not what some unidentified authority tells them to do.yes and no. Common words, phrases, grammatical constructions, etc. are determined by popular usage (although occasional exceptions may exist). However, many specific names can be correct or incorrect - determined by the person or organisation that owns (for want of a better term) the thing referred to. For example my username is "Thryduulf", if you are referring to me any other form ("thryduulf", "Thrydulf", etc) is incorrect. The same is true of brands - the owners of a brand get to determine what the correct form of that brand's name is and how much they care about that.
It's no surprise that some domains capitalize for emphasis. Is there any difference in meaning between "NFL draft" and "NFL Draft" that would suggest an actual proper noun? In any event per MOS:CAPS, Wikipedia simply goes by what isOutside Wikipedia, and within certain specific fields (such as medicine), the usage of all-capital terms may be a proper way to feature new or important items. However these cases are typically examples of buzzwords, which by capitalization are (improperly) given special emphasis.
consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources. — Bagumba ( talk) 06:43, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
When deciding how to format a trademark, editors should examine styles already in use by independent reliable sources. From among those, choose the style that most closely resembles standard English – regardless of the preference of the trademark owner.Upon examination, there is evidence, already brought up in this RfC, that two different styles are used. We should the lowercase variant, because it most closely resembles standard English.— Alalch E. 13:54, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
Collins defines proper noun as:Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization.
A reader seeing NFL Draft does not attach a different meaning to it than when they see NFL draft. It's purely a description in basic English, not any sort of proper noun like Super Bowl (vs a plain super bowl) or White House (vs white house). Capitalization is not necessary for a reader to understand the meaning here. !Voters saying that "it’s a proper noun" seem to be parroting that only because some sources are capitalizing it. However, MOS:CAPS advises:a noun...that is arbitrarily used to denote a particular person, place, or thing without regard to any descriptive meaning the word or phrase may have, as Lincoln, Beth, Pittsburgh. [24]
This is not the case with “NFL Draft”—there is not the "substantial majority" recommended by the MOS, even if there are sources that do capitalize. Note the MOS relies on the frequency of capitalization in sources, not merely that some !voters call it a “proper noun”. Arguments about it being a trademark were countered in detail elsewhere already in this RfC—the trademark is specifically for use on clothing, not for the event or its broadcast. One !voter (and by extension the numerous WP:PERX waves) argued to capitalizeWikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.
based on being a proper name and based on the NFL using this capitalization as well, but that ignores its usage as seen in independent, reliable sources, and the NFL's usage is not even an independent source, and should be ignored. Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization) warns:
Calls for deferring to the preferences of football editors to capitalize is counter to the existing MOS:CAPS guideline and the WP:LOCALCONSENSUS policy:Outside Wikipedia, and within certain specific fields (such as medicine), the usage of all-capital terms may be a proper way to feature new or important items. However these cases are typically examples of buzzwords, which by capitalization are (improperly) given special emphasis.
WP:BATTLEGROUND recommends thatFor instance, unless they can convince the broader community that such action is right, participants in a WikiProject cannot decide that some generally accepted policy or guideline does not apply to articles within its scope.
However, I don't think I've seen capitalization proponents acknowledge the relevant guidance at MOS and provide rationalizations of how Wikipedia is improved by ignoring its advice in this case. Per the WP:CONSENSUS policy:Editors in large disputes should work in good faith to find broad principles of agreement between different viewpoints.
— Bagumba ( talk) 17:26, 28 January 2024 (UTC)Responses indicating individual explanations of positions using Wikipedia policies and guidelines are given the highest weight.
Moreover, the trademarks for NFL Draft are unrelated to the actual event written about on WP: one trademark is applicable only for clothing, the other is for a specific drawing (which includes a shield, football, stars, and the words). This is in contrast to valid WP capitalization for trademarks, like the Super Bowl game's trademarks for the word itself in entertainment events and broadcasting and teleommunications. — Bagumba ( talk) 09:28, 6 January 2024 (UTC)When deciding how to format a trademark, editors should examine styles already in use by independent reliable sources. From among those, choose the style that most closely resembles standard English – regardless of the preference of the trademark owner.
At the subsequent move review, I wrote:Procedural oppose It doesnt make sense to just change this to uppercase without including into this RM the parent article NFL draft, and every other year's draft at Category:National Football League draft.
— Bagumba ( talk) 07:21, 8 January 2024 (UTC)In hindsight, the basis for my procedural oppose are the exact reasons we are here at Move Review now: lack of proper notification at related pages.
Hypothetically, "XYZ Draft" might mostly be capitalized in sources, even if "ABC draft" is not.— Bagumba ( talk) 00:11, 9 January 2024 (UTC)Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia
— Bagumba ( talk) 04:29, 13 January 2024 (UTC)You may not close discussions as an unregistered user, or where implementing the closure would call to use tools or edit permissions you do not have access to.
Note: put survey responses above the #Discussion header, not here.
Dicklyon, regardless of where everyone stands, there appears to be too much concern regarding the location of this discussion and the lack of notification to every page. If you still would like to pursue this proposed move, would you be opposed to archiving this discussion and starting a WP:RM at Talk:National Football League Draft. I know it is daunting to develop the template necessary for the bot to notify all pages, but this appears necessary to ensure that notice is provided, process is followed and help make sure the discussion can hopefully come to some consensus. In that light, I have drafted (pun intended) the necessary template here: User:Gonzo fan2007/DraftRM. All you need to do is copy that text, fill out the "reason" section and substitute the template at the bottom of Talk:National Football League Draft. At the very least, disregarding every other concern, this will move the discussion to a more appropriate venue and allow all editors to focus on the policy and the merits of the proposed move. Cheers, « Gonzo fan2007 (talk) @ 22:59, 11 January 2024 (UTC)
An increasing number of editors are directly/indirectly calling for this RFC to be shut down. Where would one go, to request such a shut down? GoodDay ( talk) 19:42, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
I'll wait a few days & see if the trend has changed or not. If it hasn't changed, then I'll recommend closure & notify this RFC. GoodDay ( talk) 20:11, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
what matters is whether there is an actual policy-based rationale for doing so, and there demonstrably is not. citation needed It is clearly your opinion that there are no policy-based rationales for closing down a discussion that attempts to make an end-run around the lack of consensus for your preferred option at RM, but that doesn't make WP:FORUMSHOPPING any less relevant. Thryduulf ( talk) 21:07, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
Jeez what a mess. We've got (for examples) National Football League Draft (uppercase), including related pages & American Football League draft (lowercase), including related pages. GoodDay ( talk) 19:10, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
— Bagumba ( talk) 00:45, 15 January 2024 (UTC)Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia
only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia(emphasis in original) completely sidesteps the tedious question. It simply does not matter whether editor A thinks something is a proper name and editor B doesn't; if it's consistently capitalized in the independent source material then it will be capitalized on Wikipedia, and if not then not, the end. This is a compromise that works for (and doesn't 100% satisfy) everyone across all topics and wikiprojects. If you think Dicklyon and various other people who are convinced something is not a proper name (under either or both definitional approaches) are happy with the term being capitalized on Wikipedia, you are mistaken. But the big difference is that they accept it and get on with their lives, while a few topically devoted people will not and will keep over-capitalizing no matter what to get their preference until the community shuts that tendentiousness down. It happens all time, across innumerable topics, and Dicklyon and a few other people get demonized the whole lot of the over-capitalizers simply for getting in their way. We have an across-all-topics guideline to default to lower-case on everything, and it should be followed unless the sourcing clearly proves there is cause to capitalize. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:47, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Myself & others have noticed that an editor has been making unilateral page moves from 'uppercase' to 'lowercase', without benefit of RMs & while this RFC is in progress. IMHO those bold moves should be 'reverted'. It's actions like that, that only creates more tension around this topic. Even more frustrating, 'uppercase' redirects are created, which makes reverting more difficult. Perhaps, one should contact an administrator to 'reverse' those page moves. GoodDay ( talk) 20:53, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
at least one partcipant here, Thryduulf, has made completely the oppose argument to Randy Kryn's, suggesting that it may be that specific-year NFL draft events might be proper names ("2022 NFL Draft", etc.), but the main topic not be one ("NFL draft").I have not made that argument. The closest I have come (which is really not that close at all) is to state that it is possible that it is possible that the NFL Draft may be a proper noun at the same time as the AFL draft being a common noun (it is also possible that the reverse is true), and that Wikipedia should not attempt to impose consistency where none exists in the real world.
RM can be easily system-gamed by overrunning it by a single wikiproject's internal canvassingit is also equally possible for RM to be easily system-gamed by overrunning it by internal canvassing by manual of style editors. Unless you have any evidence that any canvassing has actually occurred then you are just casting aspersions (and being listed on article alerts or deletion sorting lists is not evidence of canvassing). Attempting to bias the discussion by including or excluding certain editors (e.g. I note that the initiator(s) of this RFC chose not to notify the talk pages of the articles concerned, and such notification was made only two days later) is at least equally inappropriate as explicit canvassing.
The result of the move request was: no consensus.No consensus is not a "consensus to not move" ( WP:THREEOUTCOMES). Upheld as a good close at DRV. You repeating endlessly that Dicklyon is trying to shop/lawyer his way around a consensus is just false on its face and is what the actual aspersion-casting here is.
Update: There was actually more of this recent poisoning by RK of originally-neutral notice: [40] [41] [42]; it moved from just canvassing, to very pointed doubling down on canvassing, to a pseudo-retraction that states "two sides" that are really just both his side in different wording, so is more canvassing. Similar canvassing of an entire football wikiproject to gang up on a page mover attempting to comply with guidelines (in that case MOS:ABBR) goes all the way back to 2007 [43], and this doesn't represent looking very hard to find more examples. (Whether to use the long or short name is maybe more of a WP:COMMONNAME and WP:CONCISE matter, and still unresolved, with the main article at the long form and the annual ones at the short form. But the point is that trying to stir the entire wikiproject into opposing the changes was canvassing.) Contrast all that with the original neutral notices in those places and this additional one. A world of difference. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:24, 15 January 2024 (UTC); added more diffs: 18:03, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
It's not football, but once again another sports-related unilateral page move, at NBA conference finals, recently NBA Conference Finals, ocurred. Bypassing the RM route, isn't the best way to go. GoodDay ( talk) 17:54, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Update - I've gotten the page move reversed. Next time, please use RM, concerning these sports related pages & uppercase/lowecase. GoodDay ( talk) 18:06, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
It seems unlikely that anyone would reasonably disagree with the move. Based on discussions like this one it seems very likely that there will be reasonable disagreement about moves of such pages, hence my suggestion.
What's the overall situation on the topic-in-general, concerning page titles? Are sports pages the only area, where lowercasing is opposed? GoodDay ( talk) 19:34, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Ambiguity may arise when typographically near-identical expressions have distinct meanings, e.g. iron maiden vs. Iron Maiden [...] The general approach is that whatever readers might type in the search box, they are guided as swiftly as possible to the topic they might reasonably be expected to be looking for, by such disambiguation techniques as hatnotes and/or disambiguation pages. When such navigation aids are in place, small details are often sufficient to distinguish topics [...]. This is an issue that comes up every so often at RfD, and the general principle there is that DIFFCAPS are appropriate only when it is clear that someone searching with one capitalisation is looking for a different topic than someone using a different capitalisation. Without having looked at the evidence, my gut feeling is that this is not the case here and one or both articles should take disambiguation. Thryduulf ( talk) 22:16, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
I may be the only editor who's put significant, sustained time into working the Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked miscapitalizations backlog. One year ago, I had worked it down to just 20 redirect-links. But now, as more and more title-case alternative capitalizations have been declared to be flat-out miscapitalizations, the list has been snowed over with an avalanche of demanded work: over 500 redirect-links as of today many requiring hundreds of edits to fix. You have to sift through this haystack to find the legitimate obvious, non-title-case miscapitalizations. It's rather maddening and demoralizing; I've pretty much abandoned working this as my plate is too full so I have to let go of some things. – wbm1058 ( talk) 01:27, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
{{
R from miscapitalisation}}
and various alternative names of that template, plus there are innumerable instances of {{
R from other capitalisation}}
and {{
R from alternative name}}
and {{
R from modification}}
and so on that are really miscapitalizations that were created as redirects before {{R from miscapitalisation}}
existed, and which have not been switched to the more specific rcat template. I don't think it would be difficult to figure out which severity levels should exist and based on what policy, guideline, and other critiera, though there could be pushback against the entire enterprise on productivity grounds. I'm "processy" enough to not raise that objection myself, and am not into telling people how to spend their volunteer time, so I'm willing to do the template work if someone wants to open a discussion (I guess at
Template talk:R from miscapitalisation about such an implementation. There's already a conceptually related thread over there from 2019–2020.)I do agree that there would be dispute about which level to label particular cases with and even whether the template qualified for a specific case sometimes. E.g, in your examples, I don't agree that Amsterdam, The Netherlands appearing in our article text is harmless and something to ingore until FAC; that's only taking acount of whether it's problematic for a particular article's overall quality and understandablity. It's problematic for other reasons, including wrongly telling readers that this is how to write the Netherlands (to the extent that the prepended the is still in use), and it is likely to inspire editors (especially new ones) to assume this is "Wikipedia style" and to go around "correcting" other instances to read The, and even doing it to other placenames with a leading the ("the Camargue", "the Levant", "the Scottish Highlands", etc.; the only two I know of for which The is conventional are The Hague and The Gambia, and even the latter is very dubious [46] [47]). We had this problem with the overcapitalization of bird vernacular names that was permitted by a consensus stalemate for 8 years; the capitalization crept into mammals and other non-bird subjects, despite a strong consensus to not do that and there existing in some of those topics explicit international standards within particular disciplines to never capitalize in that manner. PS: Having a consensus stalemate just sit around and fester like that with negative consequences is why the RfC on this page is a good idea. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 14:45, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
There's an obvious tension between A) treating a move (or set of moves) as controversial on the basis that someone is controverting it (and especially on the basis of there being an ongoing RfC or RM about the matter), assuming the good faith that there is a legitimate issue as the basis of the disagreement (e.g. someone can prove that RS do uniformly treat a particular case or class of such terms as capitalized proper names, or prove that some other WP:P&G line item pertains to the subject and the mover did not account for it), versus B) system-gaming by throwing up manufactured, stalling "controversy" that ultimately has no basis but WP:ILIKEIT and WP:SSF fallacies. The latter turns rapidly into long-term WP:POINTy stonewalling that wastes lots of community time re-re-re-arguing over something which obviously only has one eventual outcome: if it's not capitalized in the vast majority of independent sources, it won't be capitalized here. We should not continue to entertain the latter sort of "controversy", including for policy reasons covered below. It drains not only volunteer time and attention, but is a vampire on the neck of editorial goodwill. The longer a little topical "rebellion" against any guidleline or policy continues, the more invested in the revolt and its defense at all costs particular editors will become. The last thing we ever need is another years-long fiasco like the species over-capitalization drama cesspool, the outcome of which was entirely predictable but which fomented an unbelievable amount of disruption (which I need not lay out in detail here; better to just let it flow under the bridge).
may move a page without discussion if ... It seems unlikely that anyone would reasonably disagree with the move. The key word here is reasonably. If the rationale for the push-back is demonstrably faulty and not defensible with sources or P&G then the "reasonably" standard is not met.
There has been no previous discussion about the title of the page that expressed any objection to a new title; that is no longer the case now, but it was the case when pages of this sort were originally manually moved back in 2016.
See also WP:MOVE#Reasons for moving a page:
you may request a page move at Wikipedia:Requested moves ... if the retitling is expected to be controversial– this is optional and the key word is "expected"; controversy about making a move compliant with NCCAPS and MOS:CAPS is by definition not "expected" and is contrary to already-established consensus. In case there's somehow any doubt about that, WP:MOVE continues explicitly:
Reasons for moving a page .... The title does not follow Wikipedia's naming conventions .... The title has been misspelled, does not contain standard capitalization or punctuation, or [stuff not pertinent here].The original moves certainly qualified.
Next, WP:RM#CM:
The discussion process is used for potentially controversial moves. A move is potentially controversial if either of the following applies: * there has been any past debate about the best title for the page; * someone could reasonably disagree with the move. Use this process if there is any reason to believe a move would be contested. For technical move requests, such as to correct obvious typographical errors ....
When Dicklyon began lower-casing these pages ("to correct obvious typographical errors"), they had not previously been subject to naming dispute. And there was (and still is!) not a basis on which to reasonably disagree with the moves. Later this turned into two RMs and an MRV (covered below), resulting in (sequentially) a WP:FALSECONSENSUS to capitalize (violates various guidelines and a policy, based on false claims about proper-name treatment in sources), then a failure to reach consensus when examined more broadly (largely on the basis of factually wrong claims pertaining to trademark), then an endorsement of the no-consensus closure, leaving us with a long-term unresolved issue, for which a VPPOL RfC is the ideal solution because it is too broad for anyone to game it with false claims, and won't have too narrow a range of editorial input. See below for WP:CONSENSUS policy explicitly recommending RfC and VPPOL to settle such matters.
Neither of the pages quoted above are actually guidelines or policies; one is a procedural-instructions information page and the other a help information page, both with the authority level of essays (per WP:CONLEVEL policy). Hyperbolic claims above that Dicklyon did something "in violation of" WP:BOLDMOVE or WP:RM#CM is wrongheaded at best, a combination of WP:WIKILAWYERING and ad hominem). But taken together this material seems to have general community buy-in, kind of along the acceptance lines of the essays WP:AADD and WP:BRD; we should take them to at least be best practices even if they are not grounds for bureaucratic foot-stomping or trying to punish someone. The manual moves by Dicklyon that started this brouhaha clearly qualify as valid reasons for moving and as (at the time) non-controversial, even if doing more of them while this discussion is open was a poor idea. They are also reasons for the RMs to have concluded in favor of lower-case, reasons which have been controverted by precisely zero P&G arguments or sourcing facts, if only the RMs had not been overrun by people from a wikiproject unreasonably determined to get over-capitalization against NC and MoS guidelines (and in one case misrepresenting a clothing trademark has having something to do with the player-drafting subject; though that was probably an innocent error, it still contributed powerfully to a blatant WP:FALSECONSENSUS).
Back to WP:MOVE:
On Wikipedia, a page can usually be renamed if the already existing title is incorrect or needs to be changed; this is called moving a page. .... you may request a page move at Wikipedia:Requested moves. ... Consider listing pages that you want to have renamed/moved at Wikipedia:Requested moves. List them at Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests if it appears unlikely that anyone would reasonably disagree with the move, and ... You are unable to move the page .... For other cases, follow the instructions for controversial and potentially controversial moves: If you believe the move might be controversial ....
Note carefully that a) this is optional, b) nothing in this can be taken to suggest that broader community input via RfC or other means is somehow forbidden, and c) controversy is tied to the terms "appears unlikely" and "reasonably" and "you [the mover] believe". This cannot in any way be read to require full RM process on the basis that someone else retroactively claims it was controversial, to permit someone to be punished on the basis of a mind-reading exercise claiming the mover "should have realized" something "would be" controversial, or to give license to the manufacturing of a fake "controversy" that cannot be supported by sources or P&G.
WP:NOT#FORUM and WP:NOT#BATTLEGROUND and even WP:NOT#SOAPBOX policies all also have a role to play here: neither WP nor any of its processes exist for the purpose of "Someone is wrong on the Internet" debate-for-sport about whether something philosophically "is" a proper name and "should" in an ideal world be capitalized. We have a really simple rule: capitalize (or do anything else stylistically divergent) only if almost all the sources do it for that specific subject, but don't do it otherwise, even if some of the sources do it. These same WP:NOT policies frequently come up in other style disputes, especially ahead-of-the-curve advocacy for language-change movements that usually pertain to identity politics but also some other subjects such as how to write about suicide, etc. I don't think these policies need to be quoted here; the gist of them is short, and I think everyone remembers what they are.
We also need to consider the WP:DISCARD part of WP:CLOSE in some detail (another information-page essay with high community acceptance):
closers are expected and required to exercise their judgment to ensure that any decision reached is within compliance of the spirit of Wikipedia policy, and complies with the project's goals. ... Consensus is not determined by counting heads or counting votes, nor is it determined by the closer's own views about what action or outcome is most appropriate. The closer is there to judge the consensus of the community, after discarding irrelevant arguments: those that flatly contradict established policy, those based on personal opinion only, those that are logically fallacious, and those that show no understanding of the matter of issue. If the discussion shows that some people think one policy is controlling, and some another, the closer is expected to close by judging which view has the predominant number of responsible Wikipedians supporting it, not personally select which is the better policy. The closer is not expected to decide the issue, just to judge the result of the debate, and is expected to know policy sufficiently to know what arguments are to be excluded as irrelevant.
This did not happen in
the most recent RM: the arguments in favor of capitalization were clearly contrary to both P&G (in spirit and wording alike) and to the sourcing; the capitalization was based on preferences (and sometimes on false "facts"); no argument was ever presented (or in this case could be) that one P&G page contradicted another on the matter; and making fans of a topic happy with over-capitalization or other excessive stylization variances is in no way a project goal of Wikipedia. It should have been closed with consensus for lower-case.
An earlier RM (2016) was attended by nearly no one but people from the NFL and American football wikiprojects, as it had (craftily or otherwise) been opened as effectively a mass-move, but not formatted as one, which necessarily failed to attract the attention a mass-move normally would, on the talk page of a brand new article no one but them could be watchlisting. There was nearly no input other than unchallenged claims that it was a proper name capitalized in sources, so the closer really had little choice but to close it in favor of "Draft". WP:MRV upheld the decision (MRV only exists to determine whether the closer screwed up, not to re-examine pro/con arguments or entertain any new ones. Interestingly,
that MRV concluded with endorse closure but allow fresh RM
. I.e., it was recognized that the issue was not settled. So, trying to pillory Dicklyon for trying again much later to achieve a clear consensus based on evidence and P&G, and trying again through RfC when the new RM resulted in consensus failure, is wrongheaded. Failures to reach consensus should be resolved, and MRV actually encouraged doing so. Somewhat similar situation with regard to NHL [d|D]raft:
RM failed to come to a consensus according to the closer, despite the policy and sourcing argument overwhelmingly supporting lowercase; canvassing in the wikiproject
[48], including personalized venting against Dicklyon by the partisan-on-this-subject admin who recently blocked him (
WP:INVOLVED failure).
a MRV on this one itself came to no consensus, largely because the wording of
MOS:SPORTCAPS was being editwarred in the interim. (It has long since been stable, and has returned to not supporting such capitalization.)
WP:CONSENSUS policy of course also matters, and in a lot of ways that are a bit lengthy to cover:
Editors usually reach consensus as a natural process .... A consensus decision takes into account all of the proper concerns raised.Key word: "proper".
try to work out the dispute through discussion, using reasons based in policy, sources, and common sense. Over-capitalizing "NFL draft" satisfies none of those criteria.
[Edidtors] may still occasionally find themselves at an impasse, either because they cannot find rational grounds to settle a dispute or because one or both sides of the discussion become emotionally or ideologically invested in winning an argumentOur P&G are rational grounds; demanding capitalization of "Draft" despite P&G and despite its common lower-case use even in sports- and football-specific sources, is not rational grounds and is clearly heading in the direction of emotional over-investment in "winning". (There's also an ideological component; not only are NFL fans pushing for capitalization to agree with a primary-source preference, there are a handful of editors who go around topic-to-topic "wikipolitically" supporting subject-specific demands for exceptions from naming conventions, MoS, and title policy, even when they are not defensible).
In determining consensus, consider the quality of the arguments, the history of how they came about, the objections of those who disagree, and existing policies and guidelines. The quality of an argument is more important than whether it represents a minority or a majority view. The arguments "I just don't like it" and "I just like it" usually carry no weight whatsoever.Pretty much every clause of that is relevant here.
Limit article talk page discussions to discussion of sources, article focus, and policy.Pretty much never happens any time topical over-capitalization or other style pecadillo is being addressed; the proponent of the change to comply with the P&G is very likely to be personally attacked, and Dicklyon in particular is frequently subjected to this.
Consensus can be assumed if no editors object to a change.Most moves to correct over-capitalization go unchallenged, even in sports (the P&G and sourcing basis for them is generally sound, so they are not controversial).
Editors who ignore talk page discussions yet continue to edit in or revert disputed material, or who stonewall discussions, may be guilty of disruptive editing and incur sanctions.This had implications for Dicklyon's recent moves and CENT editwarring (he's presently blocked), but what seems to be missed by many of the above commenters is that this also defines their attempts to stonewall the community even being able to discuss this matter at a VPPOL (and now stand-alone) RfC is also disruptive.
The goal of a consensus-building discussion is to resolve disputes in a way that reflects Wikipedia's goals and policies while angering as few editors as possible.That does not mean making everyone perfectly happy. See also, higher up the policy page,
an agreement that may not satisfy everyone completely, but indicates the overall concurrence of the group. What's important here is that there is already a community agreement that we do not capitalize that which is not overwhelmingly capitalized in (treated as a proper name by) independent reliable sources. The "Draft" stuff is an attempt to override a consensus that already exists, but the "Draft" arguments have no actual basis to do that.
Editors with good social skills and good negotiation skills are more likely to be successful than those who are less than civil to others.Both sides of debates of this sort frequently fail at this, but much more often it is the "give me a topic-specific style variance" side. They generally have neither a sourcing nor P&G basis for what they want, and turn to stridency, demonization, threats to quit, doomsaying about WP failing to be good enough, and other WP:HIGHMAINT behavior.
When talk page discussions fail—generally because two editors (or two groups of editors) simply cannot see eye to eye on an issue—Wikipedia has several established processes to attract outside editors to offer opinions. This is often useful to break simple, good-faith deadlocks, because editors uninvolved in the discussion can bring in fresh perspectives, and can help involved editors see middle ground that they cannot see for themselves. The main resources for this are as follows: ...The list includes VPPOL and RfC, by name. It does not include RM, much less any suggestion that it is mandatory.
Many of these discussions will involve polls of one sort or another; but as consensus is determined by the quality of arguments (not by a simple counted majority), polls should be regarded as structured discussions rather than voting. Responses indicating individual explanations of positions using Wikipedia policies and guidelines are given the highest weight.See if you can guess where this leans with regard to this RfC, which has P&G+sources arguments against ILIKEIT and false claims about trademarks and proper names, and a bunch of indefensible claims that VPPOL and now a stand-alone RfC someone cannot address this question.
In some cases, disputes are personal or ideological rather than mere disagreements about content, and these may require the intervention of administrators or the community as a whole. Sysops will not rule on content, but may intervene to enforce policy ... or to impose sanctions on editors who are disrupting the consensus process.Some of that needs to happen. As CONSENSUS suggests later in the same passage, if problems continue they may be a WP:ANI or WP:RFARB matter. We really don't need to have an other MoS/AT-related ArbCom case; we need this topic like all other topics to simply follow the cross-topic style and naming conventions guidelines and article title policy. There is no magical exception to be found here.
Consensus among a limited group of editors, at one place and time, cannot override community consensus on a wider scale. For instance, unless they can convince the broader community that such action is right, participants in a WikiProject cannot decide that some generally accepted policy or guideline does not apply to articles within its scope.This is a rather cut-and-dry case.
Someone in the above discussion (maybe more than one) has made further impassioned and bureaucratic claims that we cannot decide on any of this without first RMing the main subject (presently at National Football League Draft, though it has been moved multiple times, and without an RM about it). But there is no policy, guideline, or even loose community procedural basis for this assertion. There is no magical limit on what community consensus can decide, about what, at what location, through what discussion format, or with regard to what template (or none) is at the top of the discussion, and consensus ultimately exists and is determinable whether or not the discussion was structured a particular way or formally closed by anyone.
Most discussions don't need closure at all, but when they do, any uninvolved editor may close most of them ... most contentious discussions benefit from a formal closing statement– recommended, not required.
It's entirely reasonable for the RfC (or a later mass-RM) to bundle that article up with the others. If someone were to go open an RM on that or a related page right now, while this RfC is running, it would likely be regarded as at least mildly disruptive ( WP:TALKFORK at least).
When editors have a particularly difficult time reaching a consensus, several processes are available for consensus-building, followed by a list of some of them, which doesn't mention RM at all, and makes zero of them mandatory.
PS: For my part, I make guideline/policy compliant moves, manually or through RM/TR all the time. (I'm a PageMover and do not have to use RM/TR but I tend to do it, since it gives opportunity for someone to request a full RM if they think it's warranted.) As soon as I encounter resistance – even if that resistance cannot be justified on P&G or sources bases – I stop and switch to full RM discussions. If that process ultimately fails to produce results that are consistent with policy and with each other from move to move within a set of related RMs, then I'll RfC it. The latter is rare, but the idea that it's somehow procedurally impermissible cannot be defended.
PPS: Wikipedia:Our social policies are not a suicide pact has a bit of pertinence as well:
We need to take due process seriously, but we also need to remember: this is not a democracy, this is not an experiment in anarchy
All the good faith assumption in the world has been and always is extended to people who want to over-capitalize things or engage in other stylization shenanigans on Wikipedia. The desire for stylisitic variance accounts for much of why MoS pages have so much churn and why there are so many RMs that again and again argue for capital letters and such, against the guidelines and without sufficient sourcing, for the same reasons, and do not conclude in favor of such requests. Nearly every subject has specialized or primary-source materials that over-capitalize things (often for signification as "important"), so such requests are never going to stop and just have to be taken in stride and handled as part of our routine. But such desires are also a big part of why MoS discussions are often so awful; everyone wants an exception for something, and when these demands turn tendentious they need to be gently but firmly shut down. When people try to prevent and invalidate the community's own ability to examine these demands and the bases for them, a line has been crossed. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:00, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
Off-topic (about monarchs); personalized discussion that belongs in user talk
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Creating a subsection here to continue a discussion above, because I was away for a few days and if I respond way up there at this point, it will be invisible.
I commented above: The parade of decapitalization crusades in various subject-matter areas, against the longstanding preferences of the editors who work in those subject areas, has had a consistently demoralizing effect for a very long time, and should be strongly discouraged.
I stand by that view.
(The suggestion above that by using the word "crusade" I analogized editors who disagree with me to "violent religious imperialists," and conjured up "historical atrocities," is just frivolous.)
I recognize that deferring to subject-matter specialists on style or formatting issues is not Wikipedia's usual approach. In many areas, where project-wide uniformity is important, it is understandable why it should not be. But if the only issue, as here, is whether a given word in an article title or a phrase should be capitalized or not, the approach of a handful of editors, of moving from one topic-area within the encyclopedia to another and insisting on decapitalizing words that have been up-styled for years, has been proven by years of history to be unhelpful and demoralizing. I have seen this in a number of subject areas; as just one prominent example, the enforced down-styling some time ago of the second words of bird names still sticks in our knowledgeable bird-editors' craws.
One editor prominent in these decapitalization debates writes above that another such editor gets name-called and otherwise attacked for [raising capitalization disputes] very frequently
. Name-calling should be avoided, but: if I found myself consistently being criticized for my approach to editing Wikipedia, then I would carefully reevaluate the desirability and value of what I was doing; and I would do that even if I thought my position to be justified by a style-guide pages.
Newyorkbrad (
talk) 00:19, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
WP:TAGTEAMs of editors. It's worth noting that I'm seeing tendentious, sometimes personalised, arguments against anybody that doesn't agree with downcasing far more than I'm seeing tendentious arguments in the opposite direction. I'm also not seeing anybody claiming they speak for everyone, nor am I seeing anything relevant to CONLEVEL - there is no attempt to undermine the policies and guidelines, just disagreement about what the correct application of the guidelines are in this instance. Thryduulf ( talk) 13:15, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
...but: if I found myself consistently being criticized for my approach to editing Wikipedia, then I would carefully reevaluate the desirability and value of what I was doing@ Newyorkbrad, does "carefully reevaluate" imply that Dicklyon should stop? Otherwise, who's to say they he hasn't already carefully reevaluated and decided that it's best to continue? — Bagumba ( talk) 06:59, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
I suppose it would be impossible to calculate. But, I wonder (in terms of page titles) what the percentage is for how many (currently) are in uppercase style & how many (currently) are in lowercase style. GoodDay ( talk) 16:06, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
I took some time this morning to try to put together a table of what major nationwide sports sites do what. I acknowledge and understand that I may have missed some, but I wanted to show that there's a number of sources that consistently uppercase while also acknowledging that others do not.
Link | Source | Description | Note |
---|---|---|---|
[49] | National Football League Operations | The history of the draft | Upcases "NFL Draft" and downcases exactly where appropriate. |
[50] | National Football League Operations | The rules of the draft | Upcases "NFL Draft" and downcases exactly where appropriate. |
[51] | The Athletic | Draft hub / landing page | News stories listed use either title case or sentence case and capitalize "NFL Draft". |
[52] | CBS Sports | Draft hub / landing page | Consistent usage of "NFL Draft" in articles. |
[53] | Deadspin | Search for "NFL Draft" | Mostly consistent capitalization of "NFL Draft". Some titles have "draft" lowercased, but then the content of the article will have "Draft" uppercased. |
[54] | Fox Sports | Draft hub / landing page | Treats "NFL Draft" as a proper name, not utilizing title case, though sometimes uses all caps. |
[55] | Pro Football Focus | Draft hub / landing page | Stories are consistently capitalizing "2024 NFL Draft". |
Sporting News | No search available on-site, list of recent articles. | Consistent downcasing. Their draft hub isn't updated for 2024 yet and I couldn't utilize a search function on the site. I found 6 articles published in the past week by 4 different authors in their NFL news section. Of those, only the third link contained any downcasing, which was only a single instance of the 6 mentions of "NFL Draft", the other 5 were upcased. The remaining 5 articles were all uppercased consistently. | |
[62] | Sports Illustrated | Draft hub / landing page | Consistent usage of "NFL Draft" in articles. |
[63] | Sportsnet | Search for "NFL Draft" | I had to wade through a little bit, but I want to assess them as capitalizing to "Draft". I'm finding that the instances of downcasing are showing the Associated Press or another outlet as the author. I searched for "NFL Draft" and the 6 most recent articles I could find by Sportsnet writers ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) all upcase to "Draft" |
[64] | Spotrac | Draft tracker with salary values | The various years in the tracker use "NFL Draft". |
[65] | TSN | Search for "NFL Draft" | Content that was authored by TSN is showing uppercased "Draft" but content that is written by others and shared on their website (commonly ESPN and The Canadian Press) use the downcased "draft". I found 7 articles since December 29th that credit TSN staff and they all upcase to "Draft" ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), so I want to assess TSN as consistently using "Draft". |
[66] | Yardbarker | Draft hub / landing page | Consistent usage of "NFL Draft" in articles. |
Link | Source | Description | Note |
---|---|---|---|
[67] | ABC News | Search for "NFL Draft" | Inconsistent capitalizations. |
[68] | NBC Sports | Draft hub / landing page | Leans towards capitalization, especially when using "2024 NFL Draft", but has inconsistencies (even varies between the same writer). |
[69] | SB Nation | Search for "NFL Draft" | Capitalizes YYYY NFL Draft, such as "2023 NFL Draft", but will downcase to "NFL draft" when a year is not included. Seems to treat it as a proper name when a year is included but downcases when simply "NFL draft" or "NFL draft picks". |
[70] | USA Today | Draft hub / landing page | Inconsistent capitalization, even for drafts in the same year. |
[71] | Yahoo Sports | Landing page for NFL news | Inconsistent, seems to weigh a bit more towards capitalization though. Found a lot of sources on site showing capitalization ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) but I also found several that did not ( 1, 2, 3). |
Link | Source | Title | Note |
---|---|---|---|
[72] | AP News | Draft hub / landing page | Consistently downcasing. |
[73] | Bleacher Report | Draft hub / landing page | Consistently downcasing. |
[74] | ESPN | Draft hub / landing page | Consistently downcasing. |
Link | Source | Title | Note |
---|---|---|---|
[75] | Arizona Cardinals | 2023 Media Guide | Largely corrupted, which is weird for a company as big as the NFL, but the part of it that's not corrupted is consistently capitalizing "NFL Draft". |
[76] | Atlanta Falcons | Atlanta Falcons 2023 Media Guide | Consistently and frequently uses "NFL Draft". |
[77] | Baltimore Ravens | 2023 Baltimore Ravens Media Guide | Consistently and frequently uses "NFL Draft". |
[78] | Buffalo Bills | Bills 2023 Media Guide | Doesn't use "NFL Draft" anywhere, but uses "NHL Draft" twice... not really relevant, just amusing. |
[79] | Carolina Panthers | Media Guide 2023 | Consistently and frequently uses "NFL Draft". |
[80] | Cincinnati Bengals | Media Guide 2023 Cincinnati Bengals | Coaching section is at the beginning of the PDF when searching for "NFL Draft", and it has a few instances of being downcased but then the rest of the media guide has 100+ instances of "NFL Draft". Seeming to imply that the intention is to use "NFL Draft" as opposed to the downcased version. |
I didn't get through all of the media guides because, frankly, I'm getting worn out by doing all of this at once and I want a break from it. However, I wanted to share the findings that I have so far. I skewed heavily towards evaluating website's recent usage of "NFL Draft" vs "NFL draft", as opposed to historical, and made general notes (which may need a bit of CE). Hey man im josh ( talk) 17:27, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
At this point, I kind of want to manage this table myself until there's more feedback.@ Hey man im josh: Please add The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian as lowercase sources. Thanks.— Bagumba ( talk) 06:18, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.That would exclude non-indy sources like the NFL and its teams' media guides. — Bagumba ( talk) 18:35, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.They are obviously not independent sources.
The claim above that USA Today is inconsistent can't really be sustained. I tediously went through the entire first page of Google News search results for "NFL Draft" constrained to that site [81], and the usage is overwhelmingly lowercase except in some headlines/headings/headers. There were only a handful of exceptions, mostly confined to a small minority of articles in their DraftWire department, and articles outside it by a couple of particular writers including Demetrius Harvey (not consistent even within the same article), Jordan Mendoza (lowercase most of the time but inconsistent in one article), and Jack McKessy (ditto). USA Today usage, outside of article titles and headings in them, plus links to their own article titles, and a few direct quotations, is at least 99% lowercase; the fraction of 1% of instances that are not are basically just typos.
Here're some additional mainstream news and sports news data points:consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sourcesis provably not met, nowhere even close. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:29, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
You ignored the 11 news sites that I linked above where I found lowercase. Maybe some of them are consistent and some mixed, but most were ignored in favor of the ones you found with uppercase. In any case, usage is mixed. Caps are clearly optional. Dicklyon ( talk) 22:01, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
There's no way you can hallucinate consistent capitalization in independent sources– You guys have been begging for sources, I provided contextually relevant sources to counter those generic references provided, I'm just trying to have a discussion about the sources that we have both provided. This isn't an RM, this is a discussion where we're trying to workshop things, right? As for
.. it is the house style of some major publishers such as ESPN, are you able to find any other sources that are nationwide and focus on sports that consistently downcase? At what point should we chalk up variances in capitalization as just being mistakes or "miscapitalizations" from those unfamiliar with the subject? Obviously with ESPN that's not the case, as they are very much focused on sports and clearly have a style guide that downcases. I don't think we should rely on the capitalization of those unfamiliar with the subject matter what evaluating whether capitalization is proper or not, and I think that's an entirely reasonable point to make which I'm open to discussing. Hey man im josh ( talk) 16:52, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
A reader seeing NFL Draft does not apply a different meaning to it than when they see NFL draft. It's purely a description in basic English, not any sort of proper noun like Super Bowl (vs a plain super bowl).— Bagumba ( talk) 08:45, 19 January 2024 (UTC)a noun...that is arbitrarily used to denote a particular person, place, or thing without regard to any descriptive meaning the word or phrase may have, as Lincoln, Beth, Pittsburgh. [84]
purely a description in basic Englishor something more significant than that seems to be the heart of this dispute, and there doesn't seem to me that the evidence is as clearly for either position as you make out. It is entirely possible (and not inconsistent with the evidence presented here) that the NfL have a draft (common noun) and that draft and surrounding media events, etc are called the NfL Draft (proper noun). Thryduulf ( talk) 09:05, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
...and there doesn't seem to me that the evidence is as clearly for either position as you make out: There might be reasons to capitalize it. It's just not the traditional proper noun case, where the captialized phrase has a completely different meaning than the lowercase basic English description. — Bagumba ( talk) 09:17, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
If there are sources that consistently use different capitalisations (and the evidence is unarguable that there are) it is worth taking the time to understand why they do that and if they are using the term in different ways and/or to mean different things. It could be that they aren't, in which case that's fine and we don't need to worry.I took a glance. It seems the mixed-use sources just capitalize arbitrarily. I'm not noticing any pattern suggesting some distinct meeaning (e.g. broadcast vs process). Does anyone see any distinction? — Bagumba ( talk) 11:04, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
There are several hundred incorrect links to the lowercase NFL draft, as well as several thousand to National Football League draft (many are templates, maybe they have a shortcut) if someone has the tools to fix these it's a job needing to be done, thanks. Randy Kryn ( talk) 13:55, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
BTW - I've opened an RM for the AFL, in relation to this RFC topic. GoodDay ( talk) 15:41, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
...please don't conflate the two: So the why the uproar at #Unilateral page moves, while RFC is ongoing? Or RMs are fine, even for de-captitalization? — Bagumba ( talk) 12:52, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
Why would anyone want to change the NBA Conference Finals?: The rhetoric isn't helpful. There's clearly a potentially conflicting MOS, even if you disagree with it. — Bagumba ( talk) 01:52, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Would like to request that a panel of from three-to-five experienced closers close this poll. Should have been already shut down, but hopefully closers can just read the 'Forum' section and end it there. If this RfC results in a fundamental change to the RM and move review process by overruling an RM and move review outcome after nine months (only the second RM on the topic) then there are other closes I'd like to bring to "Village pump (policy)" from a long time ago. Randy Kryn ( talk) 02:38, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
So this section is for closing arguments to the closers, Randy? Dicklyon ( talk) 04:00, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
I entered a neutral request at Wikipedia:Closure requests#Capitalization of NFL Draft in text and titles. Dicklyon ( talk) 04:14, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
There's still 10+ posts/day, and some are trying to reach that common understanding. There's ones that seem to only bludgeon their point. Given that page titles and MOS are contentious topics, those individuals should ideally be dealt with without shutting down constructive discussion completely.— Bagumba ( talk) 05:11, 21 January 2024 (UTC)Editors in large disputes should work in good faith to find broad principles of agreement between different viewpoints
Being pro-consistency. I've given up on all sports pages being consistently upper-cased or lower-cased. Ironically, they're all consistently inconsistent. GoodDay ( talk) 18:42, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
I'll volunteer to close this one after the 30 days have expired. I've kept an eye on this RfC for a while and read the entire thing (plus many of the other linked discussions), but completely WP:UNINVOLVED for the topic areas and issues discussed. As far as a panel, I'd welcome any other uninvolved admins who want to volunteer. If none materialize I can handle it myself. The Wordsmith Talk to me 22:02, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
Closers are unnecessary as nothing about this conversation has been binding. Users have avoided getting involved because it's not a move discussion, just an open RfC. This whole conversation has been incredibly demoralizing and frankly I'm done with it until the move discussion takes place. There are several editors who want the pages down cased and pretend as if there's some type of cabal that's been fighting the effort this entire time. They create some type of Boogeyman and throw around unfair accusations of LOCALCON when that just simply doesn't exist, and I think that's an incredibly stupid way to argue. I think it's pretty clear that it's a proper name of an event, but that there's inconsistencies in how the media capitalizes it. Yet, there are some that argue without even the slightest consideration that it's a possibility that uppercase is the proper way to go. I approached this with an open mind, but there are definitely others that did not that have bludgeoned this topic to death. The amount of time I've wasted on this discussion is just ridiculous. I've not been having a discussion with people that are willing to budge from their original stance on the issue or even consider it whatsoever. I'd be willing to downcase if I felt like some individuals had actually had a discussion in good faith, which I don't feel like happened. This has been an unhealthy discussion that I regret getting involved in and trying to play devil's advocate in. Hey man im josh ( talk) 01:09, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
There are several editors who want [an option] and pretend as if there's some type of cabal that's been fighting the effort this entire time. They create some type of Boogeymanis precisely the kind of pretense of a cabal and a bogeyman that it complains of. This one-sided "attack while playing victim" stuff is what is actually demoralizing, and its use as a walled-garden defense tactic for some particular topic against P&G and sourcing expectations that apply to all other topics is what is the source of the entire problem. An RfC like this should never have been needed in the first place. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:58, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
FWIW, just adding my opinion that a panel of closers is unnecessary. Single closers are able to handle anything but the most contentious whole-site-impacting discussions. Ajpolino ( talk) 03:13, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
We're getting close to closing time. GoodDay ( talk) 17:54, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
Closing time Cinderella157 ( talk) 23:59, 4 February 2024 (UTC)