Talk:Bishop's House

Requested move 18 January 2020

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: not moved to the proposed title at this time, per the discussion below. Dekimasuよ! 15:17, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

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Bishop's House → Bishops House – Move combo dab page for 3 homonyms to "Bishops House", which is simplest and most natural to be central, rather than "Bishop's" or "Bishops'". I think this is non-controversial; there has rarely been interest in similar dab cleanup-type moves in past. Doncram (talk) 04:40, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

This is a contested technical request (permalink). Anthony Appleyard (talk) 09:55, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

• @Doncram and Station1: queried move request Anthony Appleyard (talk) 09:56, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Argh, I started this as a technical requested move, because I could not see why anyone would oppose the improvement (on top of other improvements i did leading up to this, such as moving the Sheffield one to make way for disambiguation). I gather Appleyard or Station1 objected? Okay, whatever. Anyhow, there is no way any one of these has worldwide primaryusage-type importance; they are all obscure. --Doncram (talk) 01:38, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

• There is nothing on the dab page titled "Bishops House". All of them use apostrophes before, or in one case after, the "s". Station1 (talk) 07:59, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Actually some or all of the places are sometimes referred to that way, in real life. I guess i eliminated some or all of those usages within Wikipedia for the Sheffield one at least (where exactly "Bishops House" was used previously in some of Wikipedia's mentions of it). In my editing about the Sheffield one, I uniformly imposed the "Bishops' House" version into multiple Wikipedia articles, replacing "Bishops House", as I deemed it to be the technically most correct version for that place. I may have done similarly for another one or two. Okay, going backwards now, i just now added mention of that form being an alternative usage for the Sheffield one and for the Hong Kong one by my adding the phrase ", sometimes referred to as 'Bishops House' " to those items on this dab page. It would be perfectly fine to append that phrase to every other item, too.

An example from the real world of the Hong Kong one being referred to as "Bishops House" is this usage, by the way.

Here is a usage of "Bishops House" for what wikipedia calls "Bishop's House, Cairns]].

In my browsing it became apparent to me that the three terms are all used interchangeably. They sound exactly the same. So obviously out in the real world people make different assumptions and/or have different levels of grammatical expertise and/or they translate the term from another language differently, and the result is varying usage for each specific place. I prefer to present the three versions at what I perceive to be the simplest and neutral version. I certainly hope everyone wants one combo dab, not 3 separate dab pages (which would serve readers and editors poorly). --Doncram (talk) 01:38, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

• Weak oppose per WP:DABNAME although the simpler term is preferred to those containing punctuation, as noted all use the apostrophes before the "s" apart from the Sheffield one (which could maybe be moved back to the base name per WP:SMALLDETAILS) and "Russian Bishop's House" which includes "Russian" in the name. Crouch, Swale (talk) 11:00, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Could you explain? I literally don't understand what you want. And by my reading, wp:SMALLDETAILS recommends we use a disambiguation page or otherwise help readers, rather than pretending some technical small distinction in our naming suffices. Of course readers will miss the small distinction.

About the Russian one, technically a "partial match" i suppose, okay, i moved that to a "See also" item. However it is highly likely that it is sometimes referred to, at least locally, by some version of "bishops house" omitting "Russian".

FWIW, this Youtube video is titled "The Bishop's House, Sitka, Alaska - Part 1", is one such alt. usage (i do see that the word "Russian" is included in at least some of the usage within the video itself, but the title's and the short descriptive paragraph's usage is still a valid example).

Another example is this City of Sitka document, which is minutes of a historic preservation commission meeting. "Bishop's House" is used without "Russian". Of course people shorten phrases or drop apostrophes when there is no local ambiguity.

This should not be so hard. We should simply be serving readers who are likely to arrive. --Doncram (talk) 01:38, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

There are many cases where there are similarly named subjects which don't require disambiguation such as The World Is Yours/The Wörld Is Yours , Rum/Rùm, Duck sauce/Duck Sauce and The Oa/The OA. The idea is that readers searching for a specific term (namely "Bishops' House" with the apostrophe after the s) are likely to be looking for the one in Sheffield. Crouch, Swale (talk) 22:08, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

I support moving Bishops' House, Sheffield back to Bishops' House (with a hatnote of course). Station1 (talk) 00:25, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

@Station1: I'll file a RMT to do that but I'll wait until this RM is over since it might come to light that another is also called by that name. Crouch, Swale (talk) 10:48, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose. This is indeed controversial: the proposal is to introduce an error. There's nothing wrong with the status quo. The majority of entries have a singular possessive apostrophe. If a use is found without an apostrophe it's probably a grammatical or stylisation error. Note that Bishops House already redirects here. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 12:10, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

What? There's no error; there is variety in practice of usage for each of the items; there is no need to be judgmental about what people do. Nor was there any status quo; I just put this stuff together; there was no previous recognition that a combo dab covering all three homonyms is needed.

I used my intuitive judgment of what is right, informed by other experience, but without knowing about wp:DABNAME guideline. But okay, DABNAME covers the combo dab situation and gives direction:

The simplest form of the term is preferred to those containing punctuation, diacritics and articles; for example SA is preferred to S.A., and Shadow (disambiguation) is preferred to The Shadow (disambiguation).

which is exactly my reasoning to take the simplest form and to avoid punctuation. (DABNAME does give another criterion: "The spelling that reflects the majority of items on the page is preferred to less common alternatives." But simplicity and clarity is more important in this case in my view.)

This is sort of exasperating; I was just proceeding in setting up good disambiguation and I rather think no one else needed to get involved at all. Or if anyone got involved, they should defer to the person (me) who did the work. Yet this has gotten blown up with unexpected outright opposition? --Doncram (talk) 20:18, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

@Doncram: I take your points, and I empathise with your frustration, but Bishop's House is where it needs to be. See also Queen's School, King's College, Queen's House (disambiguation), etc. Also—and this isn't said enough—thank you for your work on enwiki. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 08:50, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose. Almost all the entries have this spelling. Absolutely no need for a change whatsoever. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:14, 22 January 2020 (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.