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Requested move 23 April 2019

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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. King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 05:19, 3 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

M3 Scout Car → M3A1 Scout Car – The M3 Scout Car was a limited production (only 64) armoured vehicle that never saw service, the M3A1 Scout Car was a significant upgrade of which 20,894 were produced during WWII and saw combat service with over 30 nations. This article is about the M3A1, 100% of the information in the infobox is entirely about the M3A1, the history section contains very little information about the M3 (originally called the M2A1 Scout Car), whilst the combat history and former operators sections is 100% about the M3A1. Cavalryman V31 (talk) 03:50, 23 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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.

Requested move 20 October 2024

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M3 Scout Car → M3 scout car – Not a proper name; commonly lowercase in sources. Per WP:MILCAPS, use lowercase after the M3 designator. Dicklyon (talk) 16:01, 20 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • I don't think my shelf of 1940s manuals for it were affected. Nor all the '80s copies of Wheels & Tracks.
(And I am trying very hard to believe that you didn't chose this one just after I challenged the others, just to spite me. You know my Dad and I used to have one of these, we've mentioned it before often enough.) Andy Dingley (talk) 14:14, 21 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Tony1, did you view Dick's n-gram example? Pop quiz: which has an overwhelming proportion, uppercase or lowercase? It will be interesting to check how many of the usual lowercasers come by to support this without actually looking at the stats. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:17, 21 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per WP:MILCAPS. Scout car is a description of the function of the vehicle like dual-cab or utility. It is not inherently a proper name like Sherman in M4 Sherman tank, which we would capitalise as such. We have specific guidance (rather than the general guidance at MOS:CAPS) for a reason. Cinderella157 (talk) 01:35, 23 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per MOS:CAPS, WP:NCCAPS, MOS:MILCAPS. What the ngram shows is that usage has always been strongly mixed, with lower-case mostly actually dominating, until very recently when uppercase skyrocketed after WP started capitalizing it. This is one of the most stark examples of WP:CITOGENESIS I have ever seen.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:28, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    SMcCandlish, the overwhelming current uppercasing in the n-grams, which should be determinative per the guidelines you mention, means that you are actually asking for an WP:IAR exception. Just pointing out, while not disagreeing with Dicklyon's nomination, that WP:COMMONSENSE and IAR exceptions are real, and that you, Dicklyon, etc., are evoking them here while not actually using their names or links. Randy Kryn (talk) 03:43, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Nope. For a usage matter like this (versus something that reliable sources on English usage tell us is in radical recent/current flux, like the upsurge in acceptance of singular-they in post-2010 publications), the totality of the published sources matters, and here the ngram shows a very marked influence of WP itself on the most recent material, after many decades of even stability. We don't have a way of examing the source quality with regard to that ngram, either.

    More pertinently than any of this "your view versus mine" stuff, the Google Scholar results even more strongly support lowercasing this [1]. As I suspected, the "car" part is often dropped when it's already clear from the context that the vehicle (or a unit using the vehicle) is meant, and sometimes other terms are used, like "vehicle", so "car" is not an integral part of the name/description.

    More to our point here, the capitalization ratio in high-quality sources is low-middling at best:
    GScholar sources that capitalize (more than the "M3" part): 12
    Sources that do not: 26
    Unknown: 3 (Pulford book, Patton dissertation, and something unidentifiable attributed to Nimmo & Macarthur-Onslow. GScholar preview did not show the relevant text, and I could not find full-text search or download via any means I have available, including the Wikipedia Library and "interesting" websites).
    False positives: 2 (a medical thing, and a 3D-animation thing)
    Irrelevant sources: 3 (1 wiki, 2 non-English)
    Kinda useless sources: 2 (1 capitalized weirdly like "Of" and "To" in mid-heading; another lower-cased weirdly, writing "m3".
    Almost all of these are high-quality sources, a mix of military history books, official military publications, and journals (usually mil-hist focused).

    Moving on to a general GBooks search [2], the same overall pattern is apparent, but with a smaller gap. Just taking the preview-visible results, and from the first ten pages thereof, the totals are:
    Capitalized: 43
    Lower-case: 48
    Irrelevant (aside from not shown in preview at all): 2, because given in ALL-CAPS.
    False positives: 3
    Weirdness: 1 replacement of "Scout" with "Exploring"
    This second set of data is not ideal because it is very heavily skewed toward recent books, some authors or even books (in different editions) were represented multiple times, some may have been WP:SPS material, and some are using the phrase in unusual ways, such as part of the name of a training certification or full unit name that is entirely given in title case. But it still fits the pattern, and is a statistically signifcant pile. If you pick the "20th century" option, the capitalization rate drops, but not drastically. What this tells us is that the general "English" ngram data pool is not based entirely on books and journals, or at least not ones that Google considers worthy of presenting as Google Books or Google Scholar options, so it's probably websites and self-published e-books, many of which are regurgitating Wikipedia content.

    Interestingly, if you change the ngram to use the American English or British English corpora, suddenly there are no plottable results due to insufficient hits. Those corpora are more heavily based on real books (according to Google, anyway), so this is a further indication that the general English corpus, expanded to 2019 and recently to 2022, has a lot of junk in it. That won't make it useless for all purposes (it'll probably still be a good indicator of pop-culture usages) but for obscure/technical topics like this, GScholar and GBooks stats arrived at by more manual examination, and some idea what the sources actually are, are more indicative of RS usage. It is nowhere even close to "consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources"; doesn't even hit the 50:50 mark.

    We also have WP:CONSISTENT policy to consider. Again and again and again, these military gear RMs go lowercase on the parts that are descriptive and not proper names, so upper-casing this one just on the basis of the random occurrence of an unusual level of citogenesis skew would be highly undesirable. This is another reason (among many) that this "defend over-capitalization at all costs and hope to WP:WIN at an article here and there" behavior pattern needs to come to an end. It is counter to the encyclopedia project's interests, as well as a massive drain on editorial productivity and goodwill.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:52, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

    Thanks for the detailed answer SMcCandlish, an expansion of your reasoning. I was commenting on your first post, which seemed to be relying mainly on the overall swing of n-grams towards capitalization and not on the present n-grams, which clearly show a preference for uppercasing. And as I said, I'm not opposing or supporting this RM, just want to make sure that editors realize that n-grams say one thing and are not being given the weight that they are usually given at these things which, to me, signaled asking for an IAR exception without directly asking for it. Randy Kryn (talk) 02:37, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I have some rambling additional thoughts on IAR, and edge cases, but probably better for user talk.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:57, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. We should treat subjects consistently, and we have WP:MILCAPS for this. This is a topic from the WWII era, and its name hasn't changed, and Ngrams sometimes have weird phenomena (especially when hit counts are low), people read older sources as well as new ones, scholarly sources show more lowercase, and citogenesis is a thing. WP:MILCAPS and WP:MOSCAPS say not to use uppercase unless necessary, and it's not necessary here. Other topics that had recent RMs resulting in names of the form "ModelNumber descriptive phrase" with lowercasing of the descriptive part include Talk:T1 light tank (9 articles), Talk:M6 heavy tank (7 articles), Talk:A7 medium tank (4 articles), Talk:M1918 Ford 3-ton tank (1 article), Talk:M1 armored car (3 articles), Talk:M1126 infantry carrier vehicle (10 articles), Talk:M6 bomb service truck (1 article), and Talk:M1918 Browning automatic rifle (1 article), for example. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 18:58, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose, per Andy Dingley and Randy Kryn's reasonings. (And because if someone doesn't stop Dicklyon (or dicklyon??) and co., we'll end up with "keir starmer" being the "prime minister of the united kingdom" and "joe biden" as "president of the united states of america".) RadiculousJ (talk) 21:57, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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