Talk:List of ministries of transport by country

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What just happened?!

User:Baeksu just did something totally crazy and without any warning---moving Ministry of Transport to transportation ministry, which makes no sense and violates numerous Wikipedia guidelines and policies, starting with WP:NAME. Wikipedia policy is to use the common name whenever possible. No government agency anywhere is titled "transportation ministry." The closest one is the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario. The vast majority of such agencies go under the name Ministry of Transport. Keep it up, Baeksu, and you'll start pissing off administrators until finally you get banned from the project. --Coolcaesar (talk) 07:50, 9 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps this is worth a revert of both of Baeksu's edits? He also pointed the phrase transporation safety to road safety. Roads are only a small part of the transportation picture and MoTs probably oversee the whole transporation picture, not just roads. dygituljunky (talk) 08:12, 9 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, sorry if my actions seemed drastic, I meant them in good faith.

The two articles were overlapping, I think you would grant me that, as not only were they dealing with the same topic, most of the information on both was the same, i.e. list of ministries that oversee transportation issues in different countries.

The reason for moving the stuff to this page was that 1) the information on this page was more complete, and 2) there doesn't seem to be a set standard for naming this type of articles for other types of ministries, either.

I wasn't aware of the WP:NAME rule, or of the other relevant guidelines that seem to have placed me on the wrong side of the law in this case. If you think this article would be better named as "Ministry of Transport[ation]", I have no problem with that.

As to pointing transportation safety to road safety, the reasoning was based on the fact that an article on transportation safety does not exist, and road safety, though it does not cover all of the areas comprising transportation safety, at least exists.

I am sorry to have caused problems. At the same time, I think that a complete revert of my edits would be throwing the baby with the bathwater, as the two articles were overlapping quite a bit.

Baeksu (talk) 08:44, 9 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

RfC: Transport governance article titles

This RfC sought to answer two questions. There is consensus for option B1 - Department of Transport should be a redirect to a merged broad concept article. However question A did not reach a consensus in favour of creating such a merged broad concept article. An internally contradictory RfC result is really not ideal, but this has already been relisted once and there have been no comments for a good three weeks so I don't think leaving this open will result in any more clarity. Ultimately what happens going forward will require further discussion. Thryduulf (talk) 22:46, 10 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion 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.

There are currently two pages acting as ~~government agency concept disambiguation pages~~ government agency broad concept articles at Ministry of Transport and Department of transportation. Should:

A1: Ministry of Transport be merged into Department of transportation; or
A2: Department of transportation be merged into Ministry of Transport; or
A3: both pages left as they are currently; or
something else?

Department of Transport is currently a redirect to Department of transportation. Should:

B1: Department of Transport be a redirect to a merged ~~concept disambiguation page~~ broad concept article; or
B2: Department of Transport be a disambiguation page for agencies by that name; or
something else?

Relisted by Triptothecottage (talk) 12:02, 1 March 2019 (UTC), to try and get some more somments and a consensus.[reply]

Triptothecottage (talk) 01:31, 30 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Survey part A

A2 Although pageviews are about even, the list at Ministry of Transport shows that such agencies in nearly every country except Australia, the US and the UK are known as Ministries. Additionally, this is consistent with most other such concept disambiguation pages, like Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Finance. Triptothecottage (talk) 01:31, 30 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
A2, for consistency across similar topics. bd2412 T 14:14, 2 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
A2, Ministry of Transport is the most widely used term.--Obi2canibe (talk) 18:01, 3 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
A3. Ministries and departments are different from each other, both legally and functionally, in a number of fundamental ways that I don't have time to explain right now. This is fairly basic comparative law (and comparative political science). Department of defense should not have been merged to ministry of defence for the same reason. --Coolcaesar (talk) 04:48, 4 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Coolcaesar: They are both names for a top-level division of executive government. In Australia and the UK at the least the terms are used interchangeably. Triptothecottage (talk) 03:50, 6 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A2 for consistency Qzekrom (talk) 18:05, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
A1, then rename to Transportation department, per WP:COMMONNAME and WP:CONCISE, and use lower-case per MOS:CAPS. N-grams: [1],[2]. See ext. discussion below for details. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:06, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Neither: They appear to contain somewhat different information which may make a merger difficult. Cinderella157 (talk) 06:50, 25 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
- @Cinderella157: I'm curious: what exactly do you think is different about the two pages? They are both composed, essentially, of some brief introductory text and then a list of agencies which fulfil the role described in the introductory text. It's worth noting that neither one lists only agencies which go by a specific name. Triptothecottage (talk) 11:24, 25 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  - One is a list a list of the legislature portfolio (which may include several combined) along with the incumbent Minister or like. The other is a list of the government agency or department - mainly for the US. The two are not necessarily synonymous. Within Queensland, Minister for Transport and the Commonwealth Games (now out of date) is the ministry and Department of Transport and Main Roads. The do not neatly merge into one - not without significant reorganising, at least (let alone how the info is presented). Cinderella157 (talk) 22:29, 25 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Cinderella157: I see what you mean. Thanks for clarifying. Triptothecottage (talk) 23:05, 25 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A2 per Triptothecottage. MrClog (talk) 10:17, 18 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
A3. Better to have two separate pages, given one is predominantly about national ministries and the other is primarily about North American local agencies. -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:14, 20 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Survey part B

B1 Most government agency ~~disambiguation pages~~ broad concept articles have a list of agencies performing that function in each jurisdiction; since it's possible for a user searching for "Department of Transport" to be looking for either the concept or a specific agency, there is no need to duplicate the information across multiple pages. Triptothecottage (talk) 01:31, 30 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: just to clarify one technical point, broad concept articles are not disambiguation pages. A disambiguation page is limited to a bare list of unrelated topics that share the same name. A broad concept article explains the difference between related topics that are subtopics of the broad topic. In the case of government agencies, the broad topic is the common event of the existence of an agency of government with a specific portfolio, and the agencies listed will include all those that share this portfolio. bd2412 T 14:09, 2 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
- @BD2412: Thanks for that, I've amended the wording where necessary. Triptothecottage (talk) 23:07, 2 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  - Great, thanks. bd2412 T 23:29, 2 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
B1 Department of Transport is just a variant of Department of Transportation.--Obi2canibe (talk) 18:01, 3 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
B1 Redirect Department of transportation to Ministry of Transport Qzekrom (talk) 18:06, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
B1, obviously. Readers are generally coming here looking for information not already in possession of it, so will be confused to find a very short list of agencies using precisely that name. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:06, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Something else "Department of transport" etc might be the name of a particular department for a particular place. Collectively, they are "transportation departments" and "transportation ministries" (or portfolios). Cinderella157 (talk) 06:55, 25 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
B1 given that it is only a slight variation on the topic's full name (department of transportation) or at least a related term that redirects there. --DannyS712 (talk) 04:49, 18 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
B1 Essentially the same page, so merge. MrClog (talk) 10:18, 18 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
B1. Could refer to either of these articles. -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:17, 20 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Extended discussion

My take, in detail:

Do merge them, since the topics are not sufficiently distinguishable. Very well-developed articles could possibly do it, but would still be mostly redundant in content, within nothing very distinct but the lists. Readers generally don't know which country is going to use which term, so splitting the lists is unhelpful and even reader-confusing.
Which name? This is a MOS:ENGVAR matter. If we don't come to an on-the-merits decisions in favor of "ministry" or "department", it comes down to what was used in the first non-stub article development. The earliest non-trivial content (not just a redirect or disambiguation page) at Ministry of Transport was 11 March 2008; the earliest for Department of transportation was 8 July 2006 (there was a proper list article as early as 12 June 2005, but it was confined to US entries, and thus was a stub). So, "department" has precedence, if it comes to "no consensus" on the merits and just defaulting to the ENGVAR used in the the first major contribution to the topic.
However, we can come to a decision on the merits, simply by looking at source usage. N-grams (using lower case to net results talking about the concept generically instead of sub-strings from proper names) shows that "department" predominates (markedly) over "ministry", and further demonstrates that the plain English "transportation department" beats out the long-winded officialism "department of transportation" [3]. If you plug in a capitalized version, "department" still wins, but in the "Department of Transportation" form [4], since this will mostly be from official publications and from books (and the news publications that Google Books also content-indexes) using official names. In the capitalized form, the lead that "Department of Transportation" has over "Ministry of Transport" is just crushing, and has been since ca. 1970. Interestingly, in both cases the probably Australian forms "transport department" and "Department of Transport" rank quite high, and in the lower-case version beats the British "ministry of transport" and "transport ministry". The arguments above in favor of A2 (Ministry of Transport) are faulty, because they are "more countries have a ministry than a department" arguments, which is a WP:OFFICIALNAME failure. WP doesn't care what governments name things, we care what sources call them.
Lower-case must be used per MOS:CAPS; neither the current pages nor the main one are articles about a specific entity (a proper name), but about a general concept, like "legislator" or "train station" or "emperor". The over-capitalization here is a case of "bureaucratese", of capitalizing something just because its government-ish. Furthermore, the N-grams show very clearly that in general English usage, the strongly dominant form is "transportation department" which is fortuitously also consonant with our WP:CONCISE policy.
PS: I don't buy the "departments and ministries are too different to merge" argument. If we took that seriously, we'd have to go split a lot of pages. They're the top-level divisions for the same thing in their respective jurisdictions, and there's probably more procedurally in common with the DoT in the US and the MoT in the UK, than between the MoT in the UK and MoT in Ivory Coast.
PPS: Several other merged ministry/department articles need to be subjected to a COMMONNAME analysis; I strongly suspect that several of them were merged to "ministry" rather than "department" on the same bogus "more governments use 'ministry'" argument without regard for usage in reliable sources. Ergo the WP:CONSISTENCY argument to mimic their current names is almost certainly faulty.

— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:06, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I think your analysis on this point is mostly convincing, except for the PS part. Several components of USDOT don't actually have any real operational authority. In particular, the Federal Highway Administration exists primarily to dispense categorical grants to state and local governments. The only part of FHWA that actually builds and maintains roads is the Office of Federal Lands Highways, but most Americans don't live or work on federal land. FHWA largely exists as a device to reallocate dollars where needed at a national level, to force state governments to implement uniform national standards on basic things that should be standardized like signs and traffic signals, and to disseminate research on best practices. Similarly, the Federal Transit Administration is also primarily a money-dispensing bureaucracy.

There is a fundamental difference between departments in a presidential system and ministries elsewhere. The secretary of a department serves at the pleasure of the president, the chief executive elected by the people. That's not so much the case with ministers of state in constitutional monarchies, especially where those ministers are drawn from a government formed in the parliament. In other words, the source of authority and how that authority is assigned and delegated downwards are completely different. --Coolcaesar (talk) 08:56, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm having difficulty seeing the relevance. The fact that one country's department/ministry/agency/whatever has some divisions that don't serve much purpose doesn't tell us anything about the general nature of such major national entities, and their overall similarity in function.

Moving on: who can fire/sack the minister/director, and how the org chart is drawn and spots in it filled, has little to do with the function served by the organization, the kinds of national problems it deals with, or how it goes about doing it; roads and railways and airports are built and maintained, licenses issued (and developed, security-wise), environmental impact studies performed, etc., in a remarkably similar way in the US and UK (and much more so than in a comparison of the UK and, say, Ivory Coast, which also has a ministry not a department).

The differences between parliamentary systems with ministers selected by parliament and a US-style system with directors appointed by the executive branch and approved by the legislature, are differences between the overall governmental systems, not between their constituent parts; the latter experience effects of these differences but are not the cause of them and are not defined by them.

There's an implicit assumption here that every government for which we use the terms "parliamentary" and "ministry" functions essentially identically, and this isn't true. (I'm skeptical you'd really believe it is, but your argument implies it and to an extent relies on it. This is a terminological fallacy, or difficult to distinguish from one.)

Worse, there's an inherent assumption behind this argument that similarities between parliamentary government systems translate to similarities at the level of all ministries of [transport, taxation, etc., etc.], that are such strong similarities just for being "ministry-ish" that they necessarily eclipse all the operational (topical, problem-solving) similarities of major government bodies that wrestle with a particular set of issues (e.g. transport[ation] in particular). There's no evidence for this and it almost certainly cannot be true.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:56, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Coolcaesar: Everything @SMcCandlish: has said above is true. Your central objection – that "there is a fundamental difference between departments in a presidential system and ministries elsewhere" – simply makes no sense in light of the fact that both the UK Department for Transport and the various Australian entities which have gone by the name Department of Transport have functioned as "ministries" in the sense that you examine. They just happen to be called "departments" by convention (although both jurisdictions oscillate on the matter, see for example the New South Wales Ministry of Health. The name used in a particular jurisdiction encodes no consistent information about the entity. Really, the merged page should be called "Government entity with primary responsibility for transport" but I don't think anyone would be content with that. Triptothecottage (talk) 12:29, 19 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page.