Talk:Greenfield

Reason for move

Greenfield, is according to the New Oxford American Dictionary:

An undeveloped site, esp. one being evaluated and considered for commercial development or exploitation.

This is the definition covered in the greenfield land article. I am therefore redirecting greenfield to greenfield land, just like brownfield and greyfield are redirected to brownfield land and greyfield land respectively.

Further discussion on the matter is welcome below.

Cedars 03:13, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

The argument above is very reasonable; all other useage of the word greenfield is either subsidiary to "greenfield land" or a place name, and the unqualified placename "greenfield" is hopelessly ambiguous, so the number of places with that name should not prevent "greenfield land" from being the primary topic (no one expects unqualified "greenfield" to refer to any particular place). Greyfield also should probably redirect to greyfield land, with just a hatnote for the other uses. Why was Cedars's change undone in 2009? Esetzer (talk) 17:20, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

The reason I moved the disambiguation page here back in 2009 was it was a misplaced disambiguation page. The redirect to Greenfield land had been changed in 2008 back toward the dab page, which prompted me to move the dab back to the primary location. It seems unlikely that Greenfield land is the primary topic - for example, that page got slightly over 4,000 page views last month, while Greenfield project got almost 18,000. It doesn't matter that the latter was named after the former; being the original doesn't confer the status of being the primary topic. The dab page is probably best located in its current location.

You probably have a point on grayfield, though; the band got around 150 hits last month and the grayfield land article got slightly less than 1,500, an order of magnitude of difference. The other two entries on the dab page don't have articles. This seems to indicate grayfield land is the primary topic. Parsecboy (talk) 18:20, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Greefield project does not seem to me to be a very coherent topic; It almost looks like it should itself be turned into a disambiguation page with entries like "Greenfield (wireless networking)", "Greenfield (marketing)", and "Greenfield (transportation engineering)". Better than that would probably be to split the text currently on that page, with some going to the main "Greenfield (disambiguation)" page and some going to "greenfield land"... or something like that. "Greenfield investment" as defined on Greenfield project seems to just be another way of looking at the concept of Greenfield land. I do not think that "Greenfield land" is a synonym for open space, because "greenfield" always has the implication of iminant development, but the current definition at greenfield land seems to barely show the distinction from "open space". This whole set of articles could certainly use work, which I might undertake... Esetzer (talk) 18:51, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Another annoyance for me with these articles is the use of "land" after field (as in "greenfield land"); it sounds like "ATM machine" ("automated teller machine machine") since if something is a field (in the relevant sense) then it is fundamentally also land... Do other people get the same impression? Esetzer (talk) 19:04, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

My point is that there doesn't seem to be evidence that "greenfield land" is far and away the primary topic for anything that could be reasonably referred to simply as "greenfield". As such, it seems the best option is to leave the dab page where it is. As for the term itself, there does seem to be common usage of it, see for instance Land, Development & Design and Sustainable communities: the potential for eco-neighbourhoods for a couple of examples. Parsecboy (talk) 21:08, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, after writing that second paragraph I realized that there is value in using the phrase "greenfield land" when the meaning needed is that of a mass noun ("greenfields" cannot be used as a mass noun since it seems like it should only apply when discussing a finite number of "greenfield status" fields, if for no other reason than that mass nouns in English do not usually end in "s"), but that does not mean that I would not prefer that the singular be used for the article titles, just as alveoli redirects to pulmonary alveolus (I think that that is a good example because, like the boundaries of fields within an agricultural landscape, the boundaries of alveoli are fairly well defined but not perfectly well defined). The distinctions between the concepts of greenfield land, greenfield development, greenfield investment, greenfield-equivalent (what greenfield status seems to be used to mean), and greenfield status seem extremely vague (they essentially form a continuum), so I would want to merge all these topics into a single greefield article; to the extent that the term "greenfield investment" may be used for something genuinely different, readers should probably be referred to an article with a less confusing name on the same topic, for example market entry. The remaining uses, other than the wireless communications one, seem to be pretty obscure jargon (no one has written about any of them in depth) that could possibly be referred to Wiktionary or redirected to some other less confusingly-titled article (for example, by analogy to market entry above, greenfield (marketing) could almost be redirected to untapped market, though there is probably a better name for that). Esetzer (talk) 02:26, 5 April 2012 (UTC)