Talk:Three-man chess

Requested move 28 October 2019

 * 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: Consensus to move all except Game of the three kingdoms, upon which there is no consensus nor prejudice against speedy renomination. Guideline based arguments support the move, should the discussion which has since been started about changing MOS:GAMECAPS result in a change in the guideline, another move discussion can be opened. (closed by non-admin page mover)  SITH   (talk)   14:44, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

– Per MOS:GAMECAPS and MOS:DOCTCAPS and WP:NCCAPS, and to be WP:CONSISTENT with virtually all the other game articles in the chess and related categories, and across games and sports categories generally. There's no evidence any of these are trademarked boardgame publications/products; they're simply chess variations, often with a known inventor. This isn't all of the game articles that need over-capitalization cleanup, but might as well start with 25. The fact that games-focused writers love to captialize these things (and all other game-related terms) is irrelevant; it's just a WP:Specialized style fallacy, and is why MOS:GAMECAPS] says what it does (after a lengthy RfC on the issue). A possible counter-example would be Game of the Generals which appears to be an actual published, trademarked boardgame (though its generic names like salpakan and generals should not be capitalized in the article). But it's likely that the shown board game is a product produced long after the game per se (that is, the article is about the game rule-set, not about that particular published board-and-pieces package, which would not itself be notable). Triangular chess is an article on all chess variants that are triangular, so the one-game article would need to be disambiguated (or the more generic article moved to some other name). And falcon–hunter chess requires an en dash, not a hyphen; its name means 'falcon and hunter chess' not 'hunter-of-falcons chess'. PS: after the move, the text will need to be cleaned up. Many of these articles are rampantly over-capitalizing other names, too, e.g "Three-Handed Xiangqi" (which is also capitalized in ways that we wouldn't even in a proper name, in which case it would be "Three-handed Xiangi"). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:17, 28 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Three-Man Chess → Three-man chess
 * Cross Chess → Cross chess
 * Falcon-Hunter Chess → Falcon–hunter chess
 * Hostage Chess → Hostage chess
 * Cubic Chess → Cubic chess
 * Chancellor Chess → Chancellor chess
 * Rhombic Chess → Rhombic chess
 * Triangular Chess → Triangular chess (game)
 * Wolf Chess → Wolf chess
 * Game of the Three Kingdoms → Game of the three kingdoms
 * Beirut Chess → Beirut chess
 * Parallel Worlds Chess → Parallel worlds chess
 * Double Chess → Double chess
 * Tri-Chess → Tri-chess
 * Chess on a Really Big Board → Chess on a really big board
 * Paulovits's Game → Paulovits's game
 * Wildebeest Chess → Wildebeest chess
 * Transcendental Chess → Transcendental chess
 * Tutti-Frutti Chess → Tutti-frutti chess
 * Capablanca Chess → Capablanca chess
 * Capablanca Random Chess → Capablanca random chess
 * Advanced Chess → Advanced chess
 * Alice Chess → Alice chess
 * Almost Chess → Almost chess
 * Balbo's Game → Balbo's game
 * Masonic Chess → Masonic chess
 * Support—How on earth were these all capped for so long? Let me guess: someone capped a few, and the rest followed like copycats. Time to apply the WP MOSCAPS, Chicago MOS, and New Hart's Rules (Oxford). Tony (talk)  06:00, 28 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Support per nom [EDIT: except Game of the Three Kingdoms and copyrighted games, per below comments] and welcome back SM. Randy Kryn (talk) 09:19, 28 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment: MOS:GAMECAPS also says Sports, games, and other activities that are not trademarked or copyrighted are not capitalized (except where one contains a proper name or acronym, or begins a sentence). (emphesiss mine). As can be seen, games don't need to be trademarked if the name is the proper name. I just checked one article's sources and they do use the capitalize version. Is there any evidence that these are not the proper names of these versions? Regardless, oppose the specific proposal of Triangular chess as I don't think it's sufficient here. --Gonnym (talk) 09:48, 28 October 2019 (UTC)
 * A good point to discuss, as a quick look at Capablanca Chess shows it to be a named game which isn't standard chess, as are many of the others. Have listed this RM at the Wikiproject Chess talk page. Randy Kryn (talk) 10:09, 28 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Support per nom, noting also that the French Wikipedia article for Advanced Chess is at Fr:Échecs avancés.  Crouch, Swale  ( talk ) 12:51, 28 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Support per nom. This appears to be a correct implementation of MOS:GAMECAPS. --LukeSurlt c 16:06, 28 October 2019 (UTC)
 * With the exception of Game of the Three Kingdoms as Three Kingdoms is capitalised. --LukeSurlt c 16:07, 28 October 2019 (UTC)
 * That's a reasonable point but I'm not sure if Three Kingdoms is a proper noun there, therefore neutral on that one.  Crouch, Swale  ( talk ) 09:11, 29 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Move all except Game of the Three Kingdoms per above.  O.N.R.  (talk) 02:11, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Support – with exception of Game of the Three Kingdoms per Luke and O. Yes, even Capablanca chess (which I find is more often "Capablanca's chess"); capped uses are most often "Capablance Chess Club", it looks like.  Dicklyon (talk) 02:22, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment. MOS:GAMECAPS seems to have been written by an incompetent. Standard usage that defies GAMECAPS decrees concerning correct capitalization of games are absurdly easy to find—Card games provide many obvious examples.  You can start with Go Fish and progress to War.  Hearts and Spades are other examples.  There are probably several reasons for the mix of capitalizations found in Category:Chess variants.  Some of it is certainly casual lack of attention to that detail, but I think a bigger factor is the mix of capitalizations found in the sources.  Also sometimes caps are required as clearly "Losing Chess" and "losing chess" are not the same thing.  (Losing Chess is not currently listed in this RM.) The options are either to use caps always or to carefully consider each case.  The example provided by the more numerous card games suggests considering individual cases.  Quale (talk) 03:40, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
 * If there is an issue with MOS:GAMECAPS it should be discussed at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters, rather than forming a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS here to ignore the style guide. If this happens, we should pause this discussion while the style guide discussion happens. --LukeSurlt c 08:43, 29 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Overturn GAMECAPS and renominate individually. Note that GAMECAPS was apparently only created a year or so ago, long after these articles were originally created and titled by editors who presumably knew the domain and picked capital letters.  Also note that this discussion was apparently linked on Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Capital_letters, which is fine, but should be announced per canvassing concerns.  As it happens, I suspect I might support many of these moves since "chess" is in fact usually lowercased in-line, but it should be on a case-by-case basis of the relevant sources, not from an unneeded style guideline that decrees the answer without even knowing anything about the subject.  Note that in WP:SPORTSCAPS, the original discussion on this, SMcCandlish wrote that "sources do not consistently capitalize them."  Okay, sure, for sports / games / terms that aren't consistently capitalized, I agree that they they shouldn't be capitalized.  But that needs to be shown on a case-by-case basis that capitalization is inconsistent or unclear.  If 80% of sports/games are lowercase, what to do about the 20% that are consistently uppercased, like the Hearts example above?  Lowercasing them as well by osmosis is clearly wrong.  Anyway, checking, a huge number of these variants are sourced to David Pritchard's "Encyclopedia of Chess Variants" and thus not easily checkable, so it sounds like we should be asking what the usage is in that book and other reliable sources.  SnowFire (talk) 23:10, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
 * This is a particularly good venue for considering them one at a time, as we're doing. If you see some that you think are proper names, point them out. Dicklyon (talk) 03:52, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I picked one at random to look into and found on the original article the edit summary includes "(please note: the reason "Chess" is capitalized is because "Parallel Worlds Chess" is the game name/game title)". By a user who is currently blocked, it appears.  I don't see any reason to suspect more than it's the name of a game; that is, nothing suggesting a reason to think it's a proper name. Dicklyon (talk) 04:02, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Most of the current set of nominated articles appear to be obscure variants that should arguably be merged to a "List of chess variants" article anyway, so it's hard to say. The variant everyone has been talking about lately - which just had a technical move request, actually - is Chess960 / Fischer Random Chess.  Checking sources for that, they generally just use "Fischer Random" in running text, but that's because it's obvious chess is being talked about.  When Chess is mentioned, it's usually capitalized, but sometimes this is as part of a tournament name?  I can't find any use of a lowercase chess, oddly enough.  So for this more prominent variant, it tentatively looks like it might actually merit a capital C "chess".  See, .  I don't claim to be familiar with the other variants very well, although LukeSurl's source seems to capitalize them all for whatever reason.  No opinion on if that's one source being odd or the general consensus of sources on the topic.  SnowFire (talk) 22:11, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Here it's "Fischer random chess", and here "Fischer-random". This one has "one of Fischer's ideas – Random Chess". There's not a lot of evidence for proper-name status; most of the sources that cap it cap everything chess related. Dicklyon (talk) 02:20, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
 * "Fischer-random" actually used to be called out in the lede, but that's just an alternative name that didn't catch on. The other sources you found are all really old and back before the variant was popularized, or are just descriptions rather than titles.  When I went looking - cursorily, I could be wrong! - I was only looking at recent sources, e.g. do a normal Google search, and they universally used "Fischer Random Chess" (Or Chess960).  This variant has gotten more publicity in the past 5 years than from 1995-2015 combined, so it's definitely a check the age of the sources matter.  SnowFire (talk) 06:39, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
 * This is likely another example of the unreasonable effectiveness of Wikipedia. We had it capped since 2002, so everyone who looked it up and wrote about it in recent years was likely influenced by that.  I'd say it makes more sense to look to sources from before WP published the capped version. Dicklyon (talk) 19:35, 1 November 2019 (UTC)
 * The Classified Encyclopaedia of Chess Variants (2nd ed.) is available online: PDF here. This capitalises fully (i.e. "Losing Chess). -LukeSurlt c 08:52, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
 * It seems like the MOS isn't working for this case. I've started a discussion towards amending this here. --LukeSurlt c 14:25, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
 * It seems to be working OK. I don't see a reason to think about making exceptions for games.  For trademarked game names, we have MOS:TM which says to cap them; otherwise, not. Dicklyon (talk) 04:49, 4 November 2019 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Case fixing help needed
The above RM was executed, but left lots of articles needing case fixes. I started working on them. More help would be welcome. Dicklyon (talk) 05:57, 6 November 2019 (UTC)


 * , just noticed this, apologies, I'm about halfway through the ones remaining.   SITH   (talk)   13:08, 6 November 2019 (UTC)
 * , the remainder have now been dealt with. Two things to note: firstly, I've left any casing in references and external links as is as I'm on a metered connection at the moment and don't have the bandwidth to check all the sources, I'll leave that for someone who's able to check them.  Secondly, there are still some pages not mentioned in the move discussion such as Template:Chess variants, List of chess variants and V. R. Parton which will need casing fixes.  AWB may be of use as it has a built-in "what links here" option.  Many thanks,   SITH   (talk)   13:28, 6 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks! I'm sure there will be a lot more tweaking needed, especially in links.  But having the leads fixed will help move things in the right direction. Dicklyon (talk) 18:04, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

Also, articles like V. R. Parton are full of over-capitalization. And there are more chess variants still capped that were not listed in this RM discussion; and lots of capped alternative names. Are some of those trademarks, or proper names? Is anyone interested in trying to trying to compile a list of which ones should be capped, so I don't go overboard in fixing them? Dicklyon (talk) 21:40, 6 November 2019 (UTC)
 * I did a bunch of downcasing on V. R. Parton. It could use more eyes to see if I went too far or not far enough. Dicklyon (talk) 18:57, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

And what's up with Fischer Random Chess? Do we have to have the discussion over again, or can we fix it? Dicklyon (talk) 22:12, 6 November 2019 (UTC)