Talk:Amnat Charoen province

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Requested move 2 December 2021[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 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: moved. Clear consensus to rename all of these, and the same arguments apply to the other Thai provinces and districts. (closed by non-admin page mover) Elli (talk | contribs) 21:57, 22 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

– Lowercase "province" for provinces of Thailand, like we did with Category:Provinces of Vietnam, Category:Provinces of Cambodia, and Category:Provinces of Laos, after discussions at Talk:An Giang province#Requested move 7 November 2021 and WT:WikiProject Southeast Asia#Downcasing "Province" (where one user thinks Thailand may be different). Only the first 10 provinces of about 78 are listed here, and it seems clear that the result will also apply to "xxx District" articles in these countries as well. It does not seem technically feasible to list all these in a RM, or fair to lay all the work on the closer; I will work on executing moves and cleanups over time if this direction continues to have consensus. This may extend to other countries eventually, with more discussions as needed (or not -- I find no other Southeast Asia countries where this is applicable). Dicklyon (talk) 17:56, 2 December 2021 (UTC) — Relisting. BD2412 T 07:57, 11 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • Nom's rationale extended: English-language sources don't usually cap "Province" for these, as with most other Southeast Asian countries. See for example current news articles mentioning Amnat Charoen province, or any other kind of search – realizing that in web search and book search you'll likely see title hits ranked above others, so look past titles to see whether province is capped in sentences, as suggested at WP:NCCAPS (our title policy) and MOS:CAPS (our style guidelines). Dicklyon (talk) 18:20, 2 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: I'm still not really convinced, given how Google Ngrams show that capitalised Province historically predominated, but would like to hear what others think. I've left a note for Ahoerstemeier, who developed the majority of these articles back in 2004, though he's not very active around here nowadays. --Paul_012 (talk) 18:23, 2 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Also pinging User:Potapt, who's recently been creating a fair amount of tambon articles. --Paul_012 (talk) 18:33, 2 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Update: Consider my position neutral. The proposal seems fine policy-wise, going by the majority of recent sources. I'm still a bit concerned about the implementation, though. (Not that it's impossible; I actually renamed the districts from the Amphoe Foo format back in 2010, and that was done entirely manually.) --Paul_012 (talk) 18:33, 11 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support – Paul, that's the thing: "historically". All major styleguides now say to minimise the use of unnecessary caps. Is "P" necessary to easily recognise these items? Well, no. Tony (talk) 21:27, 2 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Is there a style guide that specifically discusses Thai changwat and says "province" is correct? Can you link it if so? SnowFire (talk) 23:29, 2 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      That seems unlikely. Looking to sources makes it clear the neither capitalization is incorrect. They are just editorial style decisions. We have a style guide about this, at MOS:CAPS, which starts out with "Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization." Dicklyon (talk) 01:21, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      Actually, I found in How to Capitalize Anything, advice to cap Korat "from the Korat province in Thailand". Close enough? Dicklyon (talk) 01:46, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      I think that's self-published – the publisher "Inferno Publishing" is listed on the author Giacomo Giammatteo's LinkedIn as being owned by the author. Adumbrativus (talk) 06:33, 11 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      Notice also that Wikiproject Thailand says they follow our guidelines: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Thailand/Style_guide says The capitalization of terms should follow English-language usage as specified in Wikipedia:Manual of Style (capital letters). Their old superceded variant style guide at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Thailand-related articles said Capitalize suffixes in place names. For example, Chiang Mai Province; Chao Phraya River. which is probably how we got here; I'm not familiar with the history of that arbitrary capping suggestion – looks like it goes back the original 2004 version labeled "(first stab)" in the edit summary. I don't know whether we had robust central style guidance at that time, so Wikiprojects were doing their best. The new version was put in place in 2009, by User:Paul_012, with advice to follow MOS:CAPS from the start. Dicklyon (talk) 01:31, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment / Weak Oppose. This doesn't appear to be well-covered on the Internet, Google Books ngrams gets confused easily and have tiny rates regardless, and a lot of the websites are meh tourist-oriented ones ( https://www.tourismthailand.org/Destinations/Provinces/Nakhon-Ratchasima/580 calls them "p"rovinces, but refers to Khorat Province with a capital, for example. But it doesn't appear to be a good source anyway.). Per Paul 012, I strongly hope editors involved in Thai articles chip in, and I will defer to them on what the standard usage in English is here. The most I can find is this article from The New York Times that uses Ubon Province with a capital P in running text - but it's from 1967, so may not be the most up to date, hence only a weak oppose for now. SnowFire (talk) 23:29, 2 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • As an additional wrinkle - [1] ngrams doesn't choke on that example, and shows capital "P" with a long lead for most of the time period, but "p" tying and taking a very narrow lead in 2018. Unsure what that means, if anything, but it is a bit different than the previously cited RM on Vietnamese provinces, where GBooks clearly favored downcasing the "p", while it's split use here lightly favoring P historically but possibly changing. SnowFire (talk) 23:34, 2 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      Yes, Ubon is robustly represented in the stats, and even when the capping peaked above 2:1 around 1970, that's not near the MOS:CAPS threshold of "consistently capped" in sources. Also note that if you click through to the 1970 book hits, which are just 17 books, the first two with "in the districts of Khemarat and Suvarnavari in Ubon Province , near the Mekong River" are really the same book, with 7 capped occurrences counted twice, which has juked the stats a bit there (most volumes found have only 1 hit). Many provinces are not represented enough in books to give meaningful results in n-grams. Dicklyon (talk) 01:10, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support I sampled a few with news source searches and n-grams. Contemporary usage does not show consistent capping in sources. Cinderella157 (talk) 23:46, 2 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: For now I don't think the proposed change itself would be any problem. I'm more concerned about the consistency though, because apart from the province articles there are around 1,000 or more district and subdistrict articles and categories to be renamed accordingly. That should be done within a short period of time, otherwise it would be confusing and annoying. Maybe the style guides on local administrative organizations (municipalities, subdistrict administrative organizations, etc.) and their jurisdictions should be created too. --Potapt (talk) 02:34, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    Obviously it won't happen instantaneously, but I'm working on it. See Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Southeast_Asia#Districts. Dicklyon (talk) 02:47, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Not consistently capitalized in reliable sources.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:11, 8 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@BarrelProof, 力, Austronesier, and Norewritingofhistory: who had ideas at the previous linked discussions, but haven't weighed in on this as the proposed resolution (limited to Thailand only as far as anyone can see at this point). Now that it's relisted, we could use more input. Dicklyon (talk) 23:14, 11 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support: This doesn't look like a difficult question. Wikipedia's MOS:CAPS says to avoid unnecessary capitalization, and when sources are mixed, to capitalize "only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources", and we've already done the same thing for various other countries when the question has recently come up. Our MOS doesn't say to put a lot of effort into surveying sources – it says to use lowercase unless there is consistent capitalization in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources. SnowFire has noted that recent sources have favored lowercase, and GBooks, which indexes higher quality sources, also favors lowercase. Even if there was roughly an even split in sources, Wikipedia's convention would say to use lowercase. As Cinderella157 said, "contemporary usage does not show consistent capping in sources," so we shouldn't use a capital 'P'. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 23:30, 11 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks, BP. It's not clear why this was even relisted, with 4 in support of the move, 1 neutral, and 1 weak oppose. Your support should help. Dicklyon (talk) 06:40, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. But I think the relisting was reasonable. There's enough work involved that it is important to get this right... which is the main reason I !vote rather than close myself. I note nom's willingness to pitch in with that work, and think all supporters of any move should be prepared to pitch in too (and we generally do). Andrewa (talk) 17:13, 18 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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