User talk:Rich Farmbrough/Archive/2024 February

The "proper names" stuff
I rather belatedly saw your comment at Talk:Connecticut panhandle: The Sussex Downs are far from the only downs in Britain, and yet Kipling's "The Weald is good, the Downs are best" does not do a disservice to English by capitalising both: although, of course, our MoS would write "The Weald is good, the downs are best" because there is only one "Weald". Not actually, even aside from the fact WP wouldn't change the capitalization in a Kipling quotation.

If "the Downs" were used specifically as a shorthand reference to the Sussex Downs as a named geographical feature or broad geological formation, it would remain capitalized, as a short-form proper name. (However, it appears to me that "the Downs" in the UK sense actually is usually used more broadly to collectively refer to the North Downs and South Downs, across Surrey, Kent, Hampshire, and Sussex.) Similarly, "[the] United States" remains capitalized as a conventional short form of "[the] United States of America", despite neither "united" nor "states" being proper names, and despite the fact that there are actually other countries with "United States" in their long/formal names). In both the Downs and United States cases, they would remain capitalized when having the specific referents, because these are demonstrably conventionalized as proper names in the source material, both as to their long and short forms. (Though I suspect that "the Downs" might only take this capitalization, outside of a quote, in the broader regional sense.)

There are many cases of such capitalization. E.g. the Scottish Highlands and the people of them are still "the Highlands" and "the Highlanders" (and "Highland[s]" and "Highlander" as modifiers) in short form, despite the fact that there are many highlands in the world. In the Scottish context, it's a proper name for a particular geographical and (largely former) cultural region, and much later a jurisdictional division, not just a vague description of elevation range, despite originating as one. Various well-defined national regions also take capitalization, despite having descriptive names and not exactly corresponding to legal jurisdictions: the East Coast of the US, despite various countries having a coast that is eastern; Northern England, despite every country having a north; the Pacific Northwest in the US, despite Mexico, Canada, etc., also having northwestern parts with Pacific Ocean coasts, and so on. How these get determined as things to capitalize is entirely and only about whether they are overwhelmingly capitalized across all the source material, never by what sort of notion they are (official or not, current or historical, with a clear boundary or not, descriptive in their form or not, etc., etc.). E.g., there are lots of bridges across bays, and some of them are locally called simply "the Bay Bridge", and in these cases WP usually capitalizes those short-form names despite being not unique (see San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge as probably the best-known example). "The Bay Area" (meaning the SF one) is capitalized here, despite lots of areas with bays, since it is almost uniformly capitalized in sources. By contrast, the local-journalism habit of referring to SF, NYC, London, etc. as "the City" in contrast to suburbs is not mirrored on WP, because sources not local to those places nearly never capitalize that word in reference to them (except in very specific circumstances, usually in reference to municipal government bodies like the City and County of San Francisco, or in an odd case, the historical City of London, now the central business district of London, and by extension, of Greater London, which is notably not "greater London" despite the term being essentially descriptive – the tiresome notion that "if it's descriptive, it's not a proper name, if it's not descriptive it is one" has no applicability on WP beyond the fact of a statistical trend one way or another with regard to capitalization, a trend with frequent exceptions).

The difference: If one were writing about the ecology of highland regions in multiple environments around the world, it would be "highland[s]". If one were writing about downs as a feature across the British countryside, it would be "downs". If one wrote that someone took a walk about the downs, meaning the local hills, it would be "the downs", even if they coincidentally happened to be Sussex or broader regional ones (because the referent is the hills themselves as a local terrain feature, not the Sussex Downs or all of the Downs region as a distinct geographical or geological or historical area). If writing about the area around some bay, it would be a "bay area", and a bridge (not named in long or short form, officially or by convention, "the Bay Bridge") could be called "the bay bridge" as a descriptor.

"The university" is, conceptually speaking, an edge case, but WP is doing what is recommended in all modern major style guides. Same goes for "association", "corporation", "society", "church", etc., etc. The former practice was commonly to capitalize these as shorthands for longer proper names when they were serving such a role ("Jones became President of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades in 1954, but left the Union in 1963"); the modern practice is to not do this (nor capitalize job titles and similar things when not attached to names), because the terms are generically descriptive, and they are not conventionally used outside internal publications to mean any particular referent. Even edge cases are dubious; e.g. "[the] Church" is fairly often used as a shorthand for "the Roman Catholic Church" in some contexts, but WP generally should not because it often means "Christianity in general", sometimes a more specific national church (in England and Wales it more often means the Church of England), and can even mean "religion in general" (e.g. in "separation of church and state" which is sometimes written in off-site materials with signfication capitals as "Separation of Church and State" in the same bombastic style as "Truth and Justice", etc.).

In the WP context, what's important here is that sources nearly universally capitalize "Highlands" in the Scottish-region sense. The sources do not near-universally capitalize "panhandle" in reference to any US state sub-region; the capitalization is mainly confined to local publications (and was more common in pre-modern ones). They're arguably edge cases from a philosophy-of-proper-naming perspective, since the terms are descriptive appellations, about the shape of the area on a map, but have taken on something of a "proper name-ish" character, at least regionally. This is very common. E.g. what is technically called the Middle Rio Grande bosque (an ecological zone of riverine shrub forest) in New Mexico is routinely just called "the Bosque" and usually capitalized by regional writers, but WP does not treat it that way, because non-local writers generally don't capitalize it. Bays and the like are routinely called just "the Bay" in local writing, but not in ours (at least not after cleanup; I had to do some at San Francisco Bay, because someone[s] had gone through and capitalized about 20% of the occurrences to satisfy their local-pride urges, and I say that as someone who lives there).

The fact that some of these things are edge cases from a philosophy-of-names perspective is ultimately completely irrelevant at Wikipedia, which has no interest in the centuries of conflicting conceptions of "proper name" in philosophy (except as an article subject of course). WP, for style and titles matters, only has any interest in the linguistic definition, and even that only peripherally, because we have short-circuited most of the tedious and circular debate about what "is" or "isn't" "really" a "proper name" by instituting a very simple rule: Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are are capitalized in Wikipedia. (Emphasis in original.)

It is almost always unhelpful to inject philosophy-of-names arguments into WP titling and writing discussions, as in: I think that in this area between names which present themselves to us as proper nouns (though they are generally derived from common nouns even if at some remove), and names which seem to be common nouns we have to give some consideration to usage. The Northern Panhandle is not the same as the village green, the park, the church, the lake, it is certainly more proper. I've covered in detail why this is problematic at Proper names and proper nouns (an analytical more than advisory essay). In short, the only "consideration to usage" we give is "consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources", and for WP purposes there is no such wiggle room as "more proper": either something passes the test or does not. Various individual editors periodically try to "challenge" this principle of doing what is done across English-language sources generally instead of what specialist, local, or primary sourcing prefers, and this is uniformly a waste of volunteers' time, of community human resources, and too often of editorial goodwill. No new issue is raised in these discussions; they are invariably attempts to apply a magically special "anti-rule" against site-wide practice to over-capitalize in a particular topic to agree with certain topic-specific sources and ignore broader usage.

PS: This came out much longer than intended; I'm chock full o' coffee and typing fast. The point wasn't to browbeat you, but to assuage your concerns that WP would lowercase as much as you seem to think it would, and to dissuade a well-meaning urge to philosophize about proper naming – especially since it can only ever represent a sliver of the philosophy debaters on that subject anyway; they've never agreed and never will, and WP editors who even understand any of those arguments are going to disagree on them regardless, and mire WP discussions in extraneous and OR-laden arguments that simply aren't ultimately relevant to how we write here. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:12, 16 February 2024 (UTC)


 * That coffee must be good stuff :)) &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:04, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I must apologise for letting part of a half-formed essay on the subject of proper nouns leak into a naming debate, and thank you for your comments above as they lay down matters that to a very large extent agree with what I have thinking about.
 * WP style guidelines claim to be of descriptive origin, and by and large this is true. Certainly there is longstanding consensus that, in effect, we should have "as much stylistic uniformity as can reasonably be achieved", and that we should by and large use English as it is widely used by the literate mainstream.  I think the individual decisions on what has gone into MoS are based on several factors, including incredibly persistent editors, what we've "always done", argument from consistency, common usage, and vast collections of style guides.  The birds issue, for example, went with consistency across the encyclopaedia for common names of species, together with the usage of other non-specific sources.  And I think this is, on the whole, an admirable approach.  It avoids egregious decisions, and does not let the perfect be the enemy of the merely very good, achieving a (generally) across-wiki style that is self-reinforcing, non-obtrusive and highly readable.  However I do think that making individual decisions is inevitably going to throw up difficult cases, as it does in pretty much every field of human endeavour.  And moreover I am fully convinced that no person or group of people will always reach the correct decision.  I prefer, particularly on Wikipedia, a down style, though someone reading what you wrote would probably assume the contrary.  Yet in this case I gave lukewarm support to two particular instances of capitalisation.  Funnily enough one reason was a Google search which returned, on page one at least, either all or almost all, caps.  And indeed a few moments is enough to show that Google ngrams (books) shows a slight majority capped version "Northern Panhandle of West Virginia" most recently, and a significant majority over time, whereas with the eastern version the capped version is in a slight minority most recently, while being in the majority over time.  Given this I still don't see this as an easy decision, even with an "acid test" which, to be fair, is primarily (and sensibly) designed to make difficulties go away.  I would still come down on the side of capitalisation here.  And I would also say that it isn't that critical one way or another which way these edge cases fall.  Again I still think this is an edge case, and you may still think it's clearly not.  I don't have a problem with that either.
 * All the best: Rich Farmbrough 20:53, 16 February 2024 (UTC).