Wikipedia:Move review/Log/2016 July

2016 July
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 * 2016 NFL Draft – endorse closure but allow fresh RM. JFG closed the original RM correctly given the arguments there and it was within JFG's remit to conclude that result applies to other similar articles. The main dispute raised here concerns whether or not "NFL [D/d]raft" is a proper noun, with an apparent split of opinion. Given that this review was filed well after the RM closure, new arguments are presented but there is no consensus to overturn, interested users may start a fresh RM with due notification on the talk pages of all articles that would be affected. Deryck C. 23:31, 10 August 2016 (UTC)
 * style="text-align:center;" | The following is an archived debate of the move review of the page above. Please do not modify it. 
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While a MOVE decision was supported by the votes, closer's extension of that decision (The result of the move request was: Moving this and similar "20xx NFL Draft" pages) to all the articles in the family was inappropriate. Holding this stealth RM discussion on this one page in the first place was inappropriate, since it was a new article, not on the watchlists yet of people who cared about the rest. In addition, closer provided no rationale. The rationale of the nominator was wrong on several points, about sources and about WP naming policies. Nobody brought up any actual guidelines or policies relevant to capitalization decisions, such as WP:NCCAPS or MOS:CAPS (until the post-close discussion), and nobody provided any useful stats from sources such as these that show that the capitalized forms are too rare to appear in Google's book n-grams corpus and this. The after-close discussion (at the end of the RM section and also below at Talk:2016 NFL Draft) makes it clear that sources overwhelmingly use lowercase "draft", and that more than a few editors were caught by surprise, learning about this only after it propagated from this brand new page to pages on their watchlists. I realize this was in April, but looking at where to go next, it seemed that reviewing this close would be an appropriate step. Dicklyon (talk) 01:53, 26 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Overturn—I agree with Dicklyon's reasoning. I strongly oppose this close and move. It should be left as a one-off, and will need to be recontested (sooner rather than later). Tony   (talk)  05:06, 26 July 2016 (UTC)


 * Overturn and decap all articles. Our policy of WP:NCCAPS means we should not capitalise any "NFL draft" article, since sources do not do so. Now yes, there was a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS in this one move request, but policy was not mentioned, no evidence of proper name status was provided, and WP:CONSISTENCY is violated when other drafts are lowercased. Furthermore, as said above, the decision to go ahead and caps every other article of this nature, when those weren't included in the move request, and have been consistently lower cased down the years, was procedurally flawed and must be reverted. &mdash; Amakuru (talk) 11:13, 26 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Overturn and decap all the related articles, per above. We already have a guideline at NCCAPS and another at MOS:CAPS (from which NCCAPS is derived) against this kind of overcapitalization. Some WP:ILIKEIT attempts at WP:LOCALCONSENSUS by a handful of sports fans who want to engage in the specialized-style fallacy does not overturn site-wide guidelines, especially when their claims about what the sources are doing are clearly nonsense. This is a good example of what is mean by closers being expected to analyze the WP:POLICY and source basis of the arguments presented in discussions, not just do a headcount of which option was more popular among the respondents this time.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  18:57, 27 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment from closer – I was a bit surprised to see a move review pop up almost 3 months after the fact. Nevertheless I'm happy to justify my close. I am no subject expert and therefore relied exclusively on comments from participants in the RM discussion. Here are the factors that weighed into my decision:
 * 1) Discussion time: The discussion was open for 18 days, i.e. 2.5 times the RM minimum. The last comment was more than one week old, therefore I had a reasonable expectation that interested parties had fully expressed themselves.
 * 2) Numeric majority: 7 supporters including OP, 1 dissenter (disagreeing on process, not on merits), 2 non-!voting comments including one visibly supporting the OP's rationale: I think these results are actually in favor of the capital D.
 * 3) Policy arguments: The nominator and most commenters argued that "NFL Draft" was a proper name and had been inappropriately moved to lower case earlier without discussion. WP:NCCAPS says: Do not capitalize the second or subsequent words in an article title, unless the title is a proper name. Nobody in this discussion argued that NFL Draft wasn't a proper name; who was I to second-guess them? Now, I see that proponents of the move review have a different opinion, but this view was not expressed at all in the RM that I closed; do you seriously contend that I should have supervoted against every RM participant??? Some commenters also invoked WP:COMMONNAME and a long-standing consensus on capitalization of "NFL Draft" events.
 * Frankly, I don't see how anyone could have denied this move based on the discussion, therefore I see no grounds to overturn. Obviously, a new RM could be tabled to see if consensus has changed but (interjecting personal opinion here) that would look to me like a pointless title war.
 * Finally, I will admit that my closure comment saying Moving this and similar "20xx NFL Draft" pages was a bit terse and I could have limited the move effects to the 2016 season. I remember hesitating, then going ahead in light of the strong majority view of discussion participants, many of them explicitly asking for a generalized retitling. It also seemed logical to me that, seeing a strong consensus that "NFL Draft" was a proper name, we should ensure WP:CONSISTENCY among all such articles, especially as some had been de-capped without discussion. Again, I have no personal preference one way or another and I think that rehashing the merits of spelling this "NFL draft" vs "NFL Draft" is a minor concern for Wikipedia as a whole (and I'm a spelling freak!). — JFG talk 07:17, 28 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Well, that's fine, and I don't think you can be too much blamed for this because on the face of it there was a strong consensus, but I still believe it was the wrong close. As a discerning closer, you should always review the arguments made and verify that they are true, even if the entire thing seems slam dunk. It's easy for votes to be piled on on the basis of a flawed original premise, which is what happened here. If I were closing this I would have verified that "NFL Draft" is indeed a proper name, and upon finding that it was not, I would have added an oppose vote to the bottom of the pile, explaining why (that's the thing to do to avoid a supervote - remember that there is never any obligation to close, and a well placed counterargument can change the discussion even if you came there originally with the intention of closing). &mdash; Amakuru (talk) 09:33, 28 July 2016 (UTC)
 * I understand your frustration,, but you can't say with a straight face that it was the wrong close. Sure, the closer must carefully check that arguments are truthful and policy-compliant, especially when there are opposing views, but this case had literally nobody contesting the OP's premise — why should the closer check the validity of a stance that no discussion participant is taking? Had I done this, I could be rightly accused of second-guessing the community, distorting facts, imposing a supervote, abusing my powers, disrupting the encyclopedia and creating a fault in spacetime right under the Niagara Falls. Besides, I was in no position to evaluate whether "NFL Draft" should indeed be considered a proper name; the onus is on discussion participants to make that case, and 8 out of 9 agreed. Having no personal opinion and no desire to develop one, I certainly wasn't going to contribute to this debate; it needed closing and I closed it. The only potential leeway in the close was to limit the change to 2016 or to apply it globally, as requested by many commenters. Given that even changing just the 2016 season would already impact many articles, lists and navboxes, I chose consistency. Respectfully, I would ask you to strike your Overturn stance above. The way forward, if you and others feel strongly about caps, would be to file an RfC at the appropriate wikiproject or sports venue. — JFG talk 16:23, 28 July 2016 (UTC)
 * What made it wrong was primarily the extension to similar "20xx NFL Draft" pages I think. Something that big and impactful ought to have been advertised at the pages it affected, as would have been done with a proper multi-RM.  Dicklyon (talk) 23:46, 28 July 2016 (UTC)
 * "1 dissenter (disagreeing on process, not on merits)": That dissenter would be me. In hindsight, the basis for my procedural oppose are the exact reasons we are here at Move Review now: lack of proper notification at related pages. Would you consider reopening the RM, leaving notification at the affected pages, and see where the final consensus lies? Regards.—Bagumba (talk) 02:19, 29 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Your intuition was correct indeed, and I read below that the RM resulted from a discussion on the NFL wikiproject, so there was a modicum of advertisement. It certainly wouldn't have been practical to list dozens of articles to move, however had I been the nominator, I would have listed the RM at the NFL Draft main page in addition to the current 2016 round. Now, I feel that such a global overturn-and-relist would be disruptive, so proponents of the lowercase spelling should open a new case and see if they can achieve consensus. Again, I don't care either way but I stand firmly by my close given the information that was available to me at the time. — JFG talk 16:42, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
 * I agree a new RM should just be opened if needed, given the circumstances. However, I'd recommend for similar cases in the future that the parent article, e.g. NFL draft, at least be included, and the RM relisted.  I would understand the oversight in the closing in most cases, but the procedural flaw was explicitly noted in the RM and ignored.—Bagumba (talk) 17:39, 7 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Relist and notify each annual NFL Draft article. Procedurally flawed RM where renaming took place on all NFL Draft articles even though notification only occurred at 2016 NFL Draft. However, the close for the specific 2016 article was correct, as it is not the role of the closer to supervote based on guidelines raised here at MR that were never brought up in the RM.  Moreover, exceptions to guidelines are allowed per WP:GUIDES, and some !voters also contended that "NFL Draft" is a proper name.—Bagumba (talk) 08:06, 6 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Do not relist (but second choice would be to otherwise relist and notify every NFL draft article). On second thought, the RM had been closed for almost 3 months prior to this MR. If notification was an issue, presumably the editors who did not have the 2016 article on their watchlist could have seen the eventual page moves after the RM close on articles that were on their watchlist.  Three months seems reasonable to say there was a new consensus established, even if the close was flawed in hindsight. Today, I don't see much to gained by 1) forcing a tedious re-move of 82 article under Category:National Football League Draft and 2) notifying same 82 articles and relisting the discussion.  No prejudice to starting a new RM to form a new consensus to revert the name back. —Bagumba (talk) 16:51, 6 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: Notification has been left to RM participants who have yet to comment here.—Bagumba (talk) 17:02, 6 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Endorse, but allow for another move request if anyone cares to make one with proper notification. This was an obviously correct reading of consensus, and it was advertised at the relevant WikiProject if I recall correctly, so interested editors were notified of the larger impact there. Coming back three months after the fact and listing this at move review without notifying any of the involved editors is a bit absurd. ~ Rob 13 Talk 17:11, 6 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment The entire NFL WikiProject as a whole was notified at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject National Football League/Archive 13 after a short discussion there. So this was not something that only watchers of the 2016 draft page would have seen. Lizard  (talk) 18:05, 6 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Support closer's move to caps, and do, upon reading the articles and looking at some of the references, and rescanning the close, agree with the closer that it was a fair decision about page consensus. And you can do one of these appeals (although it seems to be pretty much the same people, but with closers having to explain and defend their close, which is cool) up to three months later? I was waiting on a couple of RM's to age before opening new ones, does anyone know what a "decent" interval of time should be given before another RM is put up? Thanks. Randy Kryn 18:18, 6 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Support closer's move to caps WP:NCCAPS says "Do not capitalize the second or subsequent words in an article title, unless the title is a proper name", but NFL Draft IS a proper noun, so this argument should be considered invalid. May I ask what is the point if uninvolved editors can hold their own consensus and overturn it? ~ Dissident93  ( talk ) 22:39, 6 August 2016 (UTC)
 * I believe the rationale of this argument is that since the discussion was held only on the 2016 draft page, it's invalid, since only a small portion of editors noticed it occurred. However, the editors in opposition are probably unaware of the discussion at WT:NFL that I linked above, in which Rob put a link to the discussion. Which makes the primary argument invalid, since most interested parties are expected to be a part of that WikiProject if it truly mattered to them. If not, or if they chose to ignore it, oh well. Lizard  (talk) 23:08, 6 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Still, the primary opposition to the move is that NFL Draft (to them) isn't considered a proper noun. This seems to be an WP:IDONTLIKEIT argument in opposition with how many reliable sources that do capitalize it and considered it a proper noun. In case anybody forgot, these articles used to be all capitalized until, assumingly, a single user moved the pages on their own without consensus backing them. ~ Dissident93  ( talk ) 23:12, 6 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Please see the history below. The downcasing was based on evidence and consensus in the light of guidelines. Dicklyon (talk) 23:48, 6 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Support closer's move to caps per WP:NCCAPS, whose first and core statement is "Do not capitalize the second or subsequent words in an article title, unless the title is a proper name". The NFL Draft is a proper name, the official title for the event designated by the NFL. This is an official (NFL-designated), proper name title of a specific, not generic, event, and thus should be capitalized. This is a title, not a description, and thus should be capitalized. The NGRAM results given to claim that lowercase form is preferred is wholly flawed evidence, because it includes descriptive rather than titular mentions. For example, compare the NGRAM results for Space Shuttle, which show that lowercase "space shuttle" is more widely used than capitalized "Space Shuttle", but the Wikipedia article is at capitalized "Space Shuttle", because that is the official name of the vehicle; that is a similar case showing the difference between a descriptive phrase and an official title. Sources that use lowercase are referring to it descriptively (referring to it as an "NFL draft" in the sense that it is a "draft sponsored by the NFL", in the same way that the "space shuttle" is a "shuttle used in space", but there is also an official "Space Shuttle", the formal term for it designated by NASA), but that does not change that event itself is a proper name title. —Lowellian (reply) 16:54, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
 * "The NFL Draft is a proper name, the official name" is precisely the alleged fact that is in serious doubt. Sources appear to indicate that it's actually an informal term for something more properly called the NFL Player Selection Meeting. Whether this particular RM is left as-is or not, the issue will be reopened at some point (probably very soon), because there is no consensus on the matter, and different people have dug up different sourcing, and because this capitalization (possibly overcapitalization) of "draft" as "Draft" has been spreading to other contexts.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  01:50, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
 * I'm not doubting the claim about the technical name, but that still would not change the fact that the "NFL Draft", exactly as this, is considered a proper noun by both the NFL and the sources who cover it. Not to even mention the fact that the NFL Draft is clearly the WP:COMMONNAME in usage over the NFL Player Selection Meeting, so I don't even see why that's being brought up here. ~ Dissident93  ( talk ) 05:10, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

History of draft capitalization
There had been some discussion of the NBA draft moves in 2013, at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_National_Basketball_Association/Archive_22, and a subsequent RM discussion at Talk:NBA_draft, at which the "proper name" position was rejected by consensus.

In the original RM, nom stated that "This was boldly changed across many draft articles a while back without discussion", which was not true on the article in question, but also not very true on all the related ones that ended up getting moved. These 2014 NFL draft moves were little discussed, but followed the NBA consensus. Considering how many dozens of draft articles I downcased across many sports leagues, there was surprising little notice or reaction, and essentially no pushback. The evidence from then, and stability since then, suggests that these were accepted as uncontroversial (some of them were done for me by the WP:RMT process, without any challenge there). I did have one guy encourage me to get to the NFL (perhaps sarcastically?), and one guy who said he thought the NFL Draft was a proper name, at my talk page, but no followup or argument about that.

Hence my point that the nom's proposal was flawed, not just procedurally by being done on a new unwatched article only, but also factually. In combination, those make the extension of the simple close to many more articles unsupportable. Dicklyon (talk) 23:46, 28 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Is it not extraordinarily ironic that we have people claiming this move must be reversed due to lack of proper notification on every single talk page (despite WikiProject notification) while you're stating the lack of discussion for your moves was fine because it followed consensus from an entirely different sport with zero notification? I can't be the only one to find that argument a bit facetious. The discussion we just had proves that your moves were controversial. We have precious few NFL editors, and I'm not at all surprised that no-one found the time to argue heavily against the moves back in the day. Compare NFL-related articles to any other major sport and you'll be able to plainly see that we hardly have time to upkeep our own content, let alone worry about undiscussed moves regarding capitalization. ~ Rob 13 Talk 01:31, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
 * "Let's not and  about 'oo notified 'oo", to paraphrase a great Cleese scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  As long as the relevant sport wikiprojects, and the relevant processy pages ([{WT:AT]], WT:NCCAPS, WT:MOS, WT:MOSCAPS, I guess) are notified, then a group RM or an RfC about the entire matter can settle it. If the latter, it can even be hosted at WP:VPPOL so no one can make any claims that it wasn't public enough.  It's all going to hinge on whether "NFL [d|D]raft" (and whatever else with a similar name, in some other sport) is a proper name or not, or some informal monicker, as revealed by source research (and the answer may be different for different case; it could even be different at different times within the same sport, e.g. if an informal term later became an official name, or whatever).  Even if we accept that the close in this particular case might, on a technicality, be valid (i.e., the arguments presented were bogus/incomplete, and the closer was not, perhaps, in a position to detect that), there is clearly not a consensus on the underlying question, so it has to be reopened.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  11:41, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
 * I have no axe to grind in this debate. There are cases where I closed in favor of the lowercase house style, and took some flak for it too, see Talk:Syrian civil war/Archive 41, but those are cases where policy-based arguments are presented for both variants and the closer has a duty to evaluate the weight of both sides. In this particular instance, nobody made the case for lowercase and several participants explicitly asked to apply the proper name interpretation to all related articles (as was earlier discussed on the NFL project page); as explained above I chose consistency despite the potentially insufficient advertisement. In those circumstances, arguing the merits of the lowercase version in a move review 3 months later sounds unproductive. I agree that the underlying question might deserve a deeper debate and I wish you luck finding an appropriate venus and reaching consensus on capitalization of all sports leagues… — JFG talk 17:20, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
 * I agree with BU Rob13. Just how much of another sports' guidelines should dictate the NFLs? Of course, they should all follow the WP:MOS, but they still have their own guidelines and policies for a reason. I do not ever recall a debate specially about the NFL Draft before this one, and just because nobody had an issue with the move originally doesn't make it a great argument for keeping it. I wasn't even aware the drafts articles got moved until earlier this year, as I do not watch the the articles (they don't need to be maintained once it's complete), and NFL Draft mentions in player/team articles were never adjusted after the fact, with many of them remaining capitalized. ~ Dissident93  ( talk ) 05:17, 8 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Relist. Clearly there was more to be said.  --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:08, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
 * style="text-align:center;" | The above is an archive of the move review of the page listed in the heading. Please do not modify it. 
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