Talk:Α-Olefin sulfonate

Requested move 12 May 2021

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 

The result of the move request was: moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) ~ Aseleste  (t, e &#124; c, l) 12:16, 20 May 2021 (UTC)

Α-Olefin sulfonate → Alpha-olefin sulfonate – In-line with other examples such as Alpha-olefin. 'α' doesn't render properly in page titles. I did try to make the change myself but was blocked by a technical restriction Project Osprey (talk) 14:16, 12 May 2021 (UTC) The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
 * Support uncontroversial technical request, we do not use non-Latin characters in article titles. –LaundryPizza03 ( d c̄ ) 04:09, 16 May 2021 (UTC)

Requested move 7 September 2021

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 

The result of the move request was: moved. moved to α-Olefin sulfonate (closed by non-admin page mover) Vpab15 (talk) 21:44, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

Alpha-olefin sulfonate → Α-Olefin sulfonate – Since the previous RM discussion (above), there has been discussion at WikiProject Chemicals about how to handle article titles for compounds with Greek letter prefixes and as a result the naming conventions were updated. Accordingly, this page should be moved to allow for use of lowercasetitle to properly display the title as α-Olefin sulfonate. I bring to RM since there was certainly past uncertainty about the name. If for some reason there is not support for the indicated move, a move should at least be made to the proper form of the current name, Alpha-Olefin sulfonate (prefixes are not capitalized, but must be for Wikipedia page names; the first non-prefix letter should be capitalized as well according to the naming conventions). Note: The proposed move target has a Greek capital alpha, not a Latin capital A; this is important for lowercasetitle to work properly. Mdewman6 (talk) 00:49, 7 September 2021 (UTC) — Relisting. Havelock Jones (talk) 16:22, 23 September 2021 (UTC) The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
 * Oppose Α-Olefin sulfonate. The main reason given at the linked discussion is that the use of the Greek letter symbol is the WP:COMMONNAME. At least based on the ever-imperfect Google or Google Scholar ("Alpha-olefin sulfonate", "α-Olefin sulfonate"), I think it's doubtful that the use of α is the common name here. But either way, more importantly, the main point of the WP:COMMONNAME policy is recognizability ("Use commonly recognizable names"). The use of "α" in the title hurts recognizability for non-experts, who indeed may not know the symbol or how to pronounce it. On the other hand, the use of "alpha" in the title does not reduce recognizability for people accustomed to seeing it written as α-olefin sulfonate. In addition, the fact that "α" has to be capitalized as "Α" in the URL is likely to cause confusion. DISPLAYTITLE mitigates this but not completely. It's not the same as cases like EBay and IPod; it's worse, because although EBay and IPod look weird and we accept that, at least the badly capitalized name is still clearly understandable. For these reasons I think Α-Olefin sulfonate is more harm than good. Adumbrativus (talk) 05:14, 14 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Support: α-Olefin sulfonate is the correct name and is not subject to technical restrictions. Obviously this plan would require a full set of redirects. I feel that WP:COMMONNAME should only apply to things that have common names - this stuff is quite obscure. --Project Osprey (talk) 19:43, 23 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Support There was a general discussion on this at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Chemicals/Archive_2021 with agreement that the symbols should be used for titles, and redirects and display-title added. (there can be spelling out as alpha in the lede too). Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:26, 23 September 2021 (UTC)