Talk:Ahmadnagar Sultanate

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Graeme374 (talk) 05:32, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

help

can you help me whit reference! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.209.191.74 (talk) 17:33, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Requested move 5 May 2024

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: no consensus. (closed by non-admin page mover) BilledMammal (talk) 05:06, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

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Ahmadnagar Sultanate → Nizam Shahi dynasty – Per Ngram viewer [3] Nizam Shahi dynasty is more commonly used. Nizam Shahi dynasty is more popularly used in much major reliable publishers. WP:NPOV is another reason for the proposal. Imperial^[AFCND] 13:27, 5 May 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. Toadette^Edit! 15:21, 12 May 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. BilledMammal (talk) 15:24, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

Both are different things. One is about a state, while the other, the ruling royal house. I suggest that you create a separate article if you want about the dynasty. This article is about the kingdom, but also covers the dynasty. PadFoot2008 18:25, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose What do you mean by NPOV? State and dynasty are not the same thing, so a Ngram is not conclusive. See the similar open RM at Talk:Bidar Sultanate, same issue. Johnbod (talk) 20:54, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

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.

Requested move 11 August 2024

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. (closed by non-admin page mover) BilledMammal (talk) 11:41, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

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• Ahmadnagar Sultanate → Ahmadnagar sultanate
• Bahmani Sultanate → Bahmani sultanate
• Bengal Sultanate → Bengal sultanate
• Mamluk Sultanate → Mamluk sultanate
• Marinid Sultanate → Marinid sultanate

– Similar to the recent downcasing move of Berar sultanate, these sultanates are very often referred to with lowercase "sultanate" in sources. Dicklyon (talk) 01:39, 11 August 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. BilledMammal (talk) 14:20, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

• Some source statistics: Here are some n-gram stats from book sources, showing that none of these come close to meeting the criterion in MOS:CAPS for being "consistently capitalized" in sources:
  • Ahmadnagar
  • Bahmani
  • Bengal
  • Mamluk
  • Marinid

  Dicklyon (talk) 01:42, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

  Your ngram results for Bengal Sultanate show it being used 4-5 times more frequently than Bengal sultanate recently, and that the capitalized version has almost always been more common (although the degree of smoothing selected can affect that). What would you expect to see on ngram in order to conclude that the phrase is consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources, as stated in MOS:CAPS? An unscientific inventory of WP:HISTRS books and journal articles in my personal library found 17 authors who consistently capitalized Bengal Sultanate, 6 who consistently made sultanate lowercase, and 2 who were not consistent in how they capitalized it. That's slightly less than a 3:1 ratio, but still seems to me to be a substantial majority. --Worldbruce (talk) 07:01, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

  I don't see the 4-5 times you're talking about. With more smoothing, the n-grams show about 2/3 capped over the last 60 years. This is definitely short of the intent of the "consistently capitalized" criterion in MOS:CAPS. It has never been our policy to follow a "substantial majority"; 6 authors consistently using lowercase is strong evidence that capitalization is unnecessary, and our guideline says to "avoid unnecessary capitalization". Dicklyon (talk) 16:54, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose. More clearly so for Mamluk Sultanate, for which the ngram shows a majority using uppercase and there are plenty of high-quality scholarly sources to follow as examples (e.g. [4], [5]). I'm less familiar with the first three and more agnostic on Marinid (due to other considerations), but in the absence of other arguments I'm inclined to oppose for now on the basis of WP:CONSISTENT with many other articles about similar polities ("sultanates" or otherwise). Ngrams are useful but far from a full picture, considering the results don't discriminate between various contexts of usage and can be tricky to interpret in other ways (e.g. the Marinid ngram would imply no or nearly no usage of uppercase and yet one still easily finds examples of it in scholarly sources, e.g. [6], [7], [8]). It's also likely that individual RMs may be more appropriate for some of these. R Prazeres (talk) 08:45, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

  Surely don't don't mean Mamluk. That one's pretty near half and half. More smoothing makes it more clear. The recent uptick in caps is likely spurred by WP having it capped since 2008 (this "unreasonable effectiveness of WP" is evidence in a lot of such recent capitalization inflections). Dicklyon (talk) 16:54, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

  It's still the majority, so how does this constitute a convincing evidence for Wikipedia to switch to the minority? The names of states and countries are proper nouns (as repeated by MOS:GEOUNITS). So unless there's an argument that the title of these articles are not proper nouns, I don't see how MOS:CAPS even applies here at all. Like I said, when looking at the kind of mainstream scholarly sources that Wikipedia should be following per WP:RS, it's quite common. R Prazeres (talk) 17:36, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

  Have you read the guidelines and policies about capitalization, e.g. at WP:NCCAPS and MOS:CAPS? Even the lead sections should be clear enough, with basic instructions to "leave the second and subsequent words in lowercase unless the title phrase is a proper name that would always occur capitalized, even mid-sentence" and "only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia" (where "always" and "consistently/substantial majority" are trying to say the same thing in different ways). And in the case of "Mamluk" it was not even close to a majority when the capitalized name was first used in Wikipedia, and sadly what WP chooses is "unreasonably effective" at influencing what others do. Dicklyon (talk) 17:41, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

  Yes, so on what basis are you claiming these are not proper names, as that same lead points out? You haven't provided any argument or evidence that these are not proper names, considering "sultanate" can be used as both descriptor and as part of a proper name in different contexts, and an ngram wouldn't clarify that.

  PS: Also, in the Mamluk case, there are sources cited in the first section that directly discuss how "Mamluk Sultanate" (uppercase included) is the modern historiographical name of the state. Another reason why, at best, this should be devolved to individual RMs, since the sources need to be examined before making generalizations about naming conventions across unrelated historical states. R Prazeres (talk) 17:45, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

  It's no problem if editors want to examine and comment on the cases independently, in this and any multi-RM. In the Mamluk case, there are certainly sources that don't treat this as the name of a state, but as a description of an empire run by a sultan. It's on the basis of frequent lowercase usage in sources, in light of our guideline at MOS:CAPS, that I conclude that from WP's point of view this is not to be considered a proper name. I take no issue with authors who prefer to treat it as the proper name of a state, but it's not WP policy to follow that when the evidence shows caps to be unnecessary. Dicklyon (talk) 19:32, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

• Support per MOS:CAPS, WP:NCCAPS, WP:CONSISTENT. MOS:CAPS: only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia (emphasis in original). No one has ever suggested that no one in any source on earth capitalizes one or more or these terms, so being able to dig up a few that like to do it, following their own house style, demonstrates nothing other than that house styles differ. Even if one or another of these shows a bit of a source lean toward capitals (and the one claimed to do that is actually about 50/50), that is not what "consistently capitalized in a substantial majority" means, and if the n-grams show a spike in capitalizations after WP itself introduced an article on the subject with unnecessarily capitalization, that's clearly "citogenesis". In short, if the real world doen't pretty much uniformly capitalize something as a proper name, then WP will not do it either, even if some people really, really like it capitalized.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:36, 14 August 2024 (UTC)
• Support—This is well-established on WP for this and all such items. Tony (talk) 03:30, 14 August 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose It's more relevant to have capitals like Aceh Sultanate, Delhi Sultanate, etc. --43.134.59.218 (talk) 21:58, 14 August 2024 (UTC)

  What does "more relevant" mean here? How does it relate to guidelines, or to sources? Dicklyon (talk) 22:40, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose all: (see also my comment at the Berar Sultanate RM for a similar argument [9]) A few sources don't capitalize some of these names, but that is nowhere close to "very often", as Dicklyon claimed; as the ngrams show, [10] [11] [12] three of these are consistently capitalized, one shows majority use, [13], and one, using standard settings, shows no lowercase ngram at all [14], showing that to capitalize as a proper name is clearly the WP:COMMONNAME; those arguing that we should discredit all changes in trends after these articles' creations makes zero sense; what changes have happened have already taken place, and just because one doesn't like the means that the capitalization trends have shifted does not mean that the changes have not happened. Additionally, we should not be defaulting to the minority stylistic choice just because of a faulty guideline; WP:COMMONNAME and WP:CONSISTENT are policies, while WP:NCCAPS is only a guideline, and if the hundreds of Wikipedia articles on historical polities have all been treated as proper names (and thus capitalized) for the past 20 years without opposition until now, clearly there's something wrong or misinterpreted about the guideline rather than wrong about the article titles; even a topic which is treated as an example for something that would obviously be capitalized in Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters#Proper names, the Byzantine Empire, would not pass the poorly worded "always occur capitalized, even mid-sentence" of WP:NCCAPS as there are some which don't treat as a proper name; does this mean that every single historical polity article should be downcased because of WP:NCCAPS, which this RM seems to be a blank cheque for? No, because a combination of 99% of such polties being consistently capitalized (see also the hundreds of capitalizations for Sultanates that are not the "Berar sultanate" [15]) in sources, even if a couple sources don't do so, and the policy of WP:CONSISTENT article titles for the 1% of those of which capitalization is only used in 49% of sources, accounts for treating historical polities of this nature as proper names. This is not because "I like it this way and my favorite sources treat these countries as proper names", but because of the above argument for consistency and using the common name, and the lack of a great argument otherwise by the same people who will blindly support any (de-) capitalization-based RM. Flemmish Nietzsche (talk) 10:23, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose per arguments put forward above. PadFoot (talk) 02:11, 20 August 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose blanket move. The names of states are generally regarded as proper nouns. What's next, Ottoman empire? Bensci54 (talk) 16:03, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

  See n-gram stats for Ottoman Empire. It's an excellent example of what we mean by a proper name being consistently capitalized in sources. Nobody would propose to downcase a title with such consistent capitalization in sources. The sultanates are not like that at all. Dicklyon (talk) 05:29, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

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.