Talk:Herdsman

True or false: some registered Wikipedian (it doesn't matter who) knows what this article should be renamed to make it non-sexist. 66.245.72.176 20:16, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

No idea, what would you suggest? Kim Bruning 23:22, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I put herder, a dis-ambiguation page, on Vfd; because I always thought that that was the correct title to move this page to to avoid sexism. It is an important goal of Wikipedia to avoid sexist language. 66.245.124.71 23:23, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Well, it'd be a bad idea to put a disambig page on VfD if you ask me! Maybe we need to rename this to Herder_(somethingsomething) and link that off of the disambig page. What would be best to replace somethingsomething with, do you think? Kim Bruning 23:26, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Actually while I'm looking at it, that disambig page looks rather measly. Tell you what, instead of vfd (let's remove that in a minute), we can make this page a redirect. You do that like so:
 * 1) REDIRECTHerder

and we can cut and paste the text that was here to Herder, and then leave the single disambig that's left on top of the page.

You could call that set of moves inlining after the computer term.

Right, would you like to try that yourself? Else I'd help out if you want.

Kim Bruning 23:31, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Oh, bother, inlining makes very simple things look really complicated, skip that link if you will :-) Kim Bruning 23:32, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Cut-and-paste page moves are generally frowned upon as it makes it difficult to find edit history and attribution (see m:Help:Renaming (moving) a page). -Sean Curtin 03:01, Aug 22, 2004 (UTC)


 * Ah right, that's what I was looking for thank ye! :) Kim Bruning 11:04, 22 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I don't want to sound like a curmudgeon, but based on the evidence available to me now I am opposed to the page move. We do not have a guiding principle of strict gender-neutrality. We do have a guiding principle of neutral point of view which should guide us away from innappropriate gender-specific usage. However, for article titles, that principle is trumped by the principle of most common English usage. The most common name gets to have the article. The less common name gets the redirect. Regardless, both titles stay in the Wikipedia.

Before I can be comfortable with moving the page to Herder, you will have to provide some evidence that it is more widely used and recognized than Herdsman. In addition to my personal experience which suggests that herdsman is the more common term, Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary lists herder as "see herdsman" and puts the full definition at herdsman. I've also found that foreign language dictionaries make a good proxy for the relative commonness of certain words since they will choose to not list the less common form. Neither my German/English nor Latin/English dictionaries list herder while both list herdsman. Google search in this case was unhelpful because herder returned a high propotion of "Herder" as a personal name - false positives in this test. Rossami 02:52, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)