Talk:S.T.S. (band)

Requested move 13 April 2024

 * 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. (non-admin closure) Toadette Edit! 11:55, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

– Whether an abbreviation is spelled with a terminal period or not is a triviality. In all of these cases the title without the terminal period redirects somewhere else, so the title with the period should do the same. * Pppery * it has begun... 21:50, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
 * S.T.S. → S.T.S. (band)
 * M.A.S.K. → M.A.S.K. (franchise)
 * K.O.D. → K.O.D. (Tech N9ne album)
 * O.D.T. → O.D.T. (video game)
 * A.T.O.M. → A.T.O.M. (TV series)

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 per nom. If there's no primary topic for "ODT", then there's no primary topic for "O.D.T.", etc. Paintspot Infez (talk) 05:54, 14 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Oppose, this is a shaky rationale. No evidence shown to justify primary/no primary for any of these.  The existence of a redirect is not a justification. 162 etc. (talk) 16:25, 14 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Support all This is too minor for SMALLDETAILS to apply and none of these seem obviously primary. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 20:34, 14 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Oppose. I agree that the terminal period alone is too trivial even for WP:SMALLDETAILS – but we need to also consider periods vs. no-periods in a broader sense. In my experience, it's relatively rare to see period-separated initialisms in contemporary day-to-day usage. There are some specific initialisms where the periods remain in widespread usage (such as Q.E.D. or N.B.), but outside of these narrow cases I think we shouldn't expect that readers would proactively insert period separation into acronyms they're searching for. No one sticks periods into, say, PBS. The reason I bring this up is because, since readers are unlikely to use period-separated disambiguators where they're not already conventional, I don't think we should assume that (for instance) any given entry at STS is a title match for S.T.S.Following on this premise, a review of the relevant DAB pages suggests that there are virtually no other articles contesting the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC status for each period-separated initialism. (There exists M.A.S.K. (TV series), but it seems sensible for the franchise to hold the primary title above a series within it; Atom (disambiguation) also mentions an album called A.T.O.M, but that album doesn't have its own article, making it a nonissue.) Therefore, I believe the best approach is to leave the articles at their current titles, and to retarget the no-terminal-period redirects to point to these topics. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 14:42, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
 * The use of periods to separate acronyms might have become somewhat dated and "old hat", probably due to companies forever in search of a more "streamlined" name, but I refuse to believe that no one would ever use dots in acronyms anymore unless they're searching for a specific band. At most, there's no way to know what they're looking for and we shouldn't presume to know. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 19:30, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
 * My thinking on this one is that periods vs. no-periods is a textbook SMALLDETAILS case: if a reader goes to the trouble of entering a title in a less common, more work-intensive style, I feel it's fairly safe to assume that they have a specific reason for doing so. It's analogous to how we assume that a reader searching Ice Cube has capitalized the C on purpose, and so we don't redirect that title to ice cube. I don't believe that literally nobody would use dots simply to indicate the acronym in general, but I believe it's rare enough that a hatnote will be the best overall solution here. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 19:23, 18 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Support per nom. Cfls (talk) 21:14, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Support per nom. None of these are primary topic for these abbreviations. -- Necrothesp (talk) 12:25, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Support per nom. Any abbreviation of STS, MASK, KOD, ODT, or ATOM could be written with periods, which is the nature of abbreviations. BD2412  T 03:48, 21 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Support grammatical pedantry would insist on the periods. Further, S.T.S. is the Space Shuttle, as much documentation has full-stops -- 65.92.247.66 (talk) 11:34, 24 April 2024 (UTC)