Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Italy/Archives/2007/March

Prime minister of Italy
How do people here feel about whether the "M" should be capitalized? I think it should not be, a maggior ragione because "prime minister" is not even the official title. Note that the last person to move the article, User:OCNative, has blocked it from being moved back by editing the redirect at prime minister of Italy so that it has a history; the redirect will have to be admin deleted to accomplish the move. --Trovatore 16:56, 7 March 2007 (UTC)


 * "Prime Minister" is an English term and as such it should be treated following the rules of the English language; if it was left untranslated, as "primo ministro", I would agree on keeping it lowercase. To give an example, we don't write "italian" instead of "Italian" even if in Italian it doesn't need capitalization. --Εξαίρετος (msg) 19:09, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, but I'm not convinced it should be capitalized in English. The guidelines at WP:MOS are somewhat confused on this point (I've left a note on the talk page there). Note that we don't capitalize "president" unless used with a name ("Today, President Bush, the American president, said..."). Capitlizing "Prime Minister" strikes me as a British usage, which is fine at Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. But in the case of Italy, since it's neither American nor part of the Commonwealth and none of the other spelling criteria apply, the fallback would be to the first non-stub version of the article, which uses a lowercase m. --Trovatore 19:14, 7 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Btw, what about using the official name (Presidente del Consiglio dei Ministri, it should at least be a redirect)? "Primo ministro" and "premier" are common, but people generally refer to the prime minister as "Presidente del Consiglio". Actually, it's funny, the article on it.wiki is at it:Presidente del Consiglio dei ministri: the user Gp 1980 moved it saying it should be lowercase, but I'm not convinced. On the official page it's capitalized; I guess I'll move it. --Εξαίρετος (msg) 19:25, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
 * That should be a redirect, as should presidente del consiglio dei ministri and president of the council of ministers (note that President of the Council of Ministers is already there as a redirect), but first, I think, we ought to settle what they should redirect to. Otherwise it's just more cleanup in the case of a move. It is really peculiar that the it.wiki article would have "Consiglio" uppercase but "ministri" lowercase; that should certainly be fixed if nothing else. But I don't think the capitalization on the official site of the presidency is particularly relevant; WP is entitled to its own capitalization style (though clearly it shouldn't make one up out of whole cloth, and it should make logical sense and be consistent to the extent possible). --Trovatore 20:02, 7 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Even as a Briton I would use a lower-case “M” in this case as it is not an official title. But, as usual with naming questions, the content seems to raise more questions than the name. It describes the prime thingie (aka Prime Thingie) as holding the “fourth-most important state office”. That seems very odd. Even if we accept that Napolitano ‘comes above’ Prodi (which is sometimes true, sometimes not), who are the two chaps (or chicks) who come between them? —Ian Spackman 19:02, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Wow, I never thought about it in depth; from googling around a bit, it seems that the the order is as follows: The order is the one of the presidency, not that of their actual power: if the President of the Republic dies or is unable to do his job, the President of the Senate becomes temporarily President of the Republic, and so on. The President of the Republic is "above" the prime minister because he represents the State (il Presidente della Repubblica è il capo dello Stato e rappresenta l'unità nazionale - quote from the Italian Constitution). --Εξαίρετος (msg) 21:02, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
 * 1) Presidente della Repubblica
 * 2) Presidente del Senato della Repubblica
 * 3) Presidente della Camera dei Deputati
 * 4) Presidente del Consiglio dei Ministri
 * Wow, that’s clear! Thanks. —Ian Spackman 09:58, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

I have started the "requested moves" process at talk:Prime Minister of Italy; please feel free to contribute. --Trovatore 08:52, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Italian film titles
In film titles, the foreign version often becomes the title of the article, so we are having a discussion in Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (films), trying to establish what is correct for each language. We would appreciate if you could drop us a line about it. Hoverfish Talk 21:27, 9 March 2007 (UTC)