Talk:Sheepscot Pond

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Should article be titled "Sheepscot Pond" or "Sheepscot Lake"?

This article has been around for six years under the title "Sheepscot Pond", so it shouldn't be retitled without some discussion, right?

The argument given for the move--that Maine defines ponds and lakes in a way that qualifies this one as a lake--is beside the point. First, this is just one of several ways of defining lakes, and there is no universal agreement. See pond for more on that. Second and more importantly, there are a bunch of water bodies in Maine that are more than 100 feet deep--thus qualifying as lakes by Maine's definition--yet are widely called ponds, and thus their Wikipedia articles are titled "...Pond". To find them, read list of lakes in Maine, sort each county's list by volume, and try clicking on the list of larger lakes. The other definitions of ponds are even more restrictive than Maine's, incidentally, and would qualify even more Pond-named water bodies as lakes. In short, whether something is a lake or pond has little actual bearing on whether it is called "...Lake" or "...Pond". So the title of the article should depend on whether this lake (for a lake it certainly is) is commonly called "Sheepscot Pond" or "Sheepscot Lake". All USGS maps I've found call it Sheepscot Pond, as does Google Maps and Bing Maps. Google searches for "Sheepscot Pond" or "Sheepscot Lake" (in quotes) turn up over twice as many pages for Pond than for Lake. And scanning the first several pages of search returns, they all appear to refer to the water body in Waldo County, Maine.

All of that persuades me that the actual name is "Sheepscot Pond". My hunch is that the traditional name for it is Sheepscot Pond (hence the USGS maps, among other things), but that residents have been stumping for calling it a lake because that has allure and dignity, and would probably increase property values. At some point they may succeed in persuading USGS, etc., that the name should be changed. Then I would totally support a name change for this article.

I'd love to hear other arguments along lines I have not considered. Jbening (talk) 14:29, 20 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]