Talk:President's Choice Financial/Archives/2019

Requested move 27 August 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: No consensus, and with the two proposed titles returning similar numbers of hits on Google, we should go with the full name as per WP:ACRONYMTITLE. (non-admin closure) Cwmhiraeth (talk) 12:22, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

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President's Choice Financial → PC Financial – Consistent with Wikipedia's Wikipedia:CommonName policy. As part of the name change, a round robin swap will need to occur such that the existing PC Financial #redirect page can be used. As well, consistent with other Canadian banking-related articles on Wikipedia, the lede and opening sentence of this article will need to, and should, be updated to indicate the corporate legal name of the Loblaw Companies, Limited banking subsidiary President's Choice Bank. At the same time, since PC Financial is just the trade name for its credit card and insurance sales operations, we'll need to improve upon this article significantly to indicate that the company sells GICs through deposit broker channels. Doug Mehus (talk) 12:44, 27 August 2019 (UTC) --Relisting. Steel1943 (talk) 22:26, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

• Added commentary in support from page mover - A Google web search result for the proposed name PC Financial returns 427 million results whereas current name President's Choice Financial approximately 28 million results. Crucially, though, the Google infobox for this Wikipedia page comes up on either search, which is crucial for establishing that Google is agnostic to what we call it, meaning that we can simply apply Wikipedia:CommonName and any other applicable policies. At the same time, Loblaw Companies, Limited, its corporate parent company, uses the moniker PC Financial to describe this business division, notwithstanding some in-store signage at a few of its in-store pavilions that have yet to fully receive brand refreshes. Doug Mehus (talk) 12:56, 27 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Statistics are always helpful in making a WP:COMMONNAME argument, but there are some issues with your methodology. The main one is that you should enclose your searches in quotation marks, so they only find pages matching the exact phrase (rather than say "Financial forecasts for the Dell PC division are..."). I would also recommend using Google News over a regular Google web search, because we care most about usage patterns in reliable sources. Finally, you should be aware that the number of results reported at the top of the search results can be highly 'fuzzed' (sometimes it's off by orders of magnitude). You can get the true number of results by paging through to the last page of results. e.g. when I do a search for "President's choice Financial", Google says "About 563 results", but when I click through to the 19th page of results, it shows me that the actual number of results is 182. (For "PC Financial" the number is 230). Colin M (talk) 17:13, 27 August 2019 (UTC)
    • Fair, but to be honest, that was only my initial argument and I wanted to put forth a straight Google web search. Nevertheless, doing a regular Google News search for "PC Financial" and "President's Choice Financial" (both enclosed in quotations), as you suggest, returns 1,600 for the former (the proposed name) and 710 for the latter (the current name). Although less relevant, repeating the same Google News search result (without quotations) produces 15.9 million for the former (the proposed name) and 210,000 for the latter (the current name). Doug Mehus (talk) 17:26, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

• Alternative proposal would be to move this page to President's Choice Bank, with PC Financial described (in a separate section or not) as the direct-to-consumer credit card and insurance brand and operations. Doug Mehus (talk) 13:24, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

• Friendly tags to Nate and Brad, who are both welcome and may want to comment on, either in support of, opposition to, or neutrally of this modest proposal. Doug Mehus (talk) 12:56, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

• Leaning oppose. Given that both names are widely used, I think the full title is preferred over the abbreviation, per the first paragraph of WP:ACRONYMTITLE. Colin M (talk) 17:05, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

• Reply to Colin - If I could ask you that you reconsider to at least leaning support, Colin, simply because President's Choice Financial is much less actively used than PC Financial. Moreover, while PC Financial has historically been both an unofficial and official shorthand for the financial services brand, as of ca. 2016, it's now the official name of the division. Perhaps, at minimum, you might amend your leaning to Indifferent? After all, what's the harm? Doug Mehus (talk) 17:20, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

• My Google News searches found 230 results for PC and 182 for President's Choice. I wouldn't say that's "much less actively used". Also, a few of the results for the former search are false positives on similarly named entities (e.g. "Collins P.C. Financial Group"). Which I think goes back to why WP:ACRONYMTITLE is the way it is - unabbreviated names are generally less ambiguous. I don't feel strongly about the full name being a better title in this case, but I also don't see a good reason to go against WP:NCACRO. So feel free to consider my !vote a 'weak oppose' :) Colin M (talk) 17:34, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

• Arm-twisting reply to Colin - That's why I prefer to use quotation marks for abbreviated titles, for relevancy. When I enclose in quotation marks, both the proposed name (PC Financial) and the current name (President's Choice Financial) using the Google search (www.google.ca) "News" tab from January 1, 2018-present, I get 12 pages (10 results per page) for the proposed name (PC Financial) and 5 pages (10 results per page) for the current name. For clarity, Simplii Financial was rebranded November 1, 2017, so that's why I chose January 1, 2018, so we don't get results for the former consumer banking services. That suggests results are either favouring the proposed title or mixed, which I'd argue for deferring to the company's official preferred name as a tie-breaker. Afterall, redirects cost nothing and should Loblaw ultimately decide a new name is in order in a few years, we can revisit the page name then. Nothing wrong with a dynamically-changing page name with redirects. Doug Mehus (talk) 18:14, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

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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.