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Requested move 2 June 2015

[edit]
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. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Move all Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 09:32, 10 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]



Consistency with Ennstal Mountain Pied cattle, Black Pied Dairy cattle, Siberian Black Pied pig, numerous syntactically similar titles like Small Black pig, Flemish Giant rabbit, etc. We disambiguate in cases of inherently ambiguous article titles (here, pied can apply to any kind of animal), and when possible we do so with natural English, not a parenthetical, per WP:NATURALDIS policy. The usage is reliably sourceable off Wikipedia. In two cases, capitalization is being added where it's the formal name of the standardized breed (sans the species name at end), since this is how we're treating all other such breeds. See also log of previous breed-related RMs.  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  23:53, 2 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  • Nominator's notes:
    1. The previous RM on some of these failed to come to consensus due to FUD concerning several other ongoing RMs; they ultimately concluded, regarding similar articles, with consensus in favor of the all of the changes proposed here: disambiguating innately ambiguous titles, using natural disambiguation, capitalizing the breed name, lower-casing the species name.
    2. The main problem with the current names (other than total inconsistency) is that pied is a general animal coat pattern, so these article names beg the question "pied what?" every time they're used in Wikipedia unless the context is already 100% clear what species is meant. I.e., these names are inherently ambiguous (fail WP:PRECISE) and confusing. Cf. Australian pied cormorant, Pied oystercatcher, African pied wagtail, etc; it's a conventional label in common names of bird species, and occurs in others as well, e.g. Large-eared pied bat. The term is also used in reference to dog coat patterns[1], among others (some quick Googling[2] shows it used in hobbyist breeding of all sorts of exotic pets, from ball pythons to peacocks, parrots and other quasi-domesticated birds).
    3. Even if they were not inherently ambiguous, WP's coverage of animal breeds is very spotty (no pun intended); it's quite possible that any of these names will collide with another article soon enough anyway (e.g. German Black Pied pig, or Belarus Black Pied cattle). People are adding breed articles all the time.
    4. The proposed names are reliably sourceable off Wikipedia: "The Bentheim Black Pied pig is..." [3]; "Breeds of Livestock - Russian Black Pied Cattle" (capitalized title) [4]; "Breeds of Livestock - Bentheim Black Pied Swine" (capitalized title; "swine" is an alternate word for "pigs") [5]; "Breeds of Livestock - Chinese Black-and-White Cattle" (capitalized title; alt. name of Chinese Black Pied cattle) [6]; "German Red Pied cattle, syndactylia in ... 46" [7]; "... a Belarus Black Pied Pig while ..." (capitalization error, but disambiguates) [8]; "Breeds of Livestock - Belarus Black Pied Swine" (capitalized title) [9]; and so on. When these names are not disambiguated, it's because they're already in the cattle or swine context (respectively), which WP titles are not.
    5. The added species common name at the end ("cattle", "pig") is not capitalized, because it's not part of the formal name of the breed (the species is capitalized only in the few cases when it is invariably part of the name, as in American Quarter Horse, Norwegian Forest Cat, Bernese Mountain Dog). It's just a natural disambiguation.
    6. The "(cattle)" parenthetical disambiguation in one of the original names is contraindicated by WP:NATURAL policy, and inconsistent with the rest of the disambiguated cattle and pig article names, as well as numerous previous breed-related RMs.
    7. Even editors who spend a lot of time on breed articles, as I do, have a hard time remembering which of these are pigs or cattle; we cannot reasonably expect readers, and editors who don't focus on animal breeds, to get it straight.
    8. As long as WP:COMMONNAME and WP:USEENGLISH are satisfied, alternative name ideas are fine. Most breeds have alternative names. I suspect we're already at the most common names though. If they're just as inherently ambiguous (e.g. "Chinese Black-and-white"), they still need to be disambiguated. And some raise more problems than they solve; e.g. is it "Chinese Black-and-White" as many cattle breeders and fanciers would have it, or "Chinese Black-and-white" as MOS:CAPS and every off-WP style guide would have it? Why go there? If we used "swine" for some of these, we should do it for all of the pig ones, but this seems iffy; it's a collective plural, and WP article titles are singular.
    9. I'm going on the assumption that we want to capitalize standardized breed names, as WP is presently doing, aside from a few stragglers like two of the titles in this RM. If some object to this practice generally, I would suggest that WT:MOS not WP:RM is the venue for that discussion, so please don't cloud this RM by injecting arguments relating to that perennial debate. Even if it's changed eventually, the titles should be consistent in the interim.
 — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  23:53, 2 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per nom -- 70.51.46.11 (talk) 04:13, 3 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Support per WP:PRECISE and WP:CONSISTENCY. Khestwol (talk) 05:57, 3 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per nom and comments. Randy Kryn 12:00, 3 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support though, as the nom is aware, this has nothing to do with disambiguation but is justified on the basis of valued information. These cases have similar merit as per M-185 (Michigan highway) and Leeds North West (UK Parliament constituency) as mentioned at WP:AT. GregKaye 15:50, 3 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • @GregKaye: I'm glad you agree with the proposal, but I'm not entirely sure I get your meaning (so, "the nom" is not "aware" in this case). If you're arguing that it's not disambiguation because we're not distinguishing one article from another, we've been over this before. Disambiguation is simply removal of ambiguity. We most often do it when two articles are vying for the same title, but we also do it when the name is inherently ambiguous (fails WP:PRECISE), which is the case here. It's still disambiguation. The M-185 and Leeds examples are both based on topical naming conventions. We don't have one for animal breeds, though the last year's worth of work on cleaning up the breed categories is sufficient to easily create one at this point. Aside: I actually drafted one some time ago, off-Wiki in a text editor, and probably have it on my hard drive still. I might post it up. There's one breed-related wikiproject that would probably hold it up indefinitely, though, because several of its more active participants feel they have a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS to ignore WP:NATURAL policy, and don't seem willing to back down on it any time soon. It's more important to work on content than to "pick a fight" with them to push a new naming convention page we may not need. The breed-related RMs are all going in the same direction, so it's probably inevitable that they'll be consistent eventually, without any topical guideline. At some point, probably not very long from now, we'll run out of notable breeds to write articles about anyway, so such a guideline would no longer really be guiding anything. An argument can be made that many of the breed stubs we already have fail WP:GNG, so the pool of applicable articles for such a guideline could actually shrink rather than grow. Thus, I feel a bit conflicted about posting what I drafted. The only use I can think of for it is to store a copy of the reasoning behind RMs like this one, to make it easier to reuse in the few remaining RMs of this sort that need to be performed. It'd be convenient to be able to just copy-paste rationales from a naming convention draft rather than type them out again each time.  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  22:54, 5 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
SMcCandlish Its all good. Whether or not a naming convention has been written down I would hope that one has by now been established. Good work with these moves. GregKaye 11:39, 6 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Aye. I'm quite certain that is the case.  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  21:25, 7 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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.