Talk:Bella Coola

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived 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. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: No consensus, not moved (non-admin closure) DavidLeighEllis (talk) 02:06, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

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• Bella Coola → Bella Coola (disambiguation)
• Bella Coola, British Columbia → Bella Coola

– per WP:CSG#Places unique town names in Canada do not take the comma-province dab. The former and now out-of-date name for the Nuxalk people and/or their language is not the PRIMARYTOPIC as these google searches demonstrate:

• "Bella Coola -wikipedia" gets 2,170,000 results, the first reference to the people is this 1948 title in Google books, occurring on page 2 of that search.
  • This WeatherNetwork mention for "Bella Coola 1", the shorthand form of the main Indian reserve of the Heiltsuk, is synonmous with the town (which is a reserve community, wholly on that reserve).
  • This reference.com entry on page 3 of that search omits mention of the town entirely, calling into question whether that can even be considered a reliable source. Two hits for the language, one a paper in JSTOR the other in Ethnologue, show up on page 5 (along with Bella Coola Beef in San Diego, of all things).
  • This "Bella Coola First Nations K-12 Literacy Program is on page 7, but in that case the reference is not clearly about the people, rather would be in reference to schools in the town of Bella Coola, where there are necessarily/predominantly First Nations students in attendance.
  • On page 8 there is this 1898 paper on the mythology of the Bella Coola people, this advert for a cowl-type piece of modern headgear named "Bella Coola" which upon seeing the link I thought would be for a Nuxalk mask,and this Canadian Encyclopedia entry on "Nuxalk (Bella Coola and this undated paper from MIT, which I see has citations as late as the 1990s, and this World Atlas of Languages entry for the language.
  • This pattern - one or two hits out of ten - continues on successive search pages, often with no mention of the people or language at all. When the do occur as here from native-languages.org, the title is "Nuxalk Indian Language (Bella Coola)", indicating the subordinate nature of the old-era term.
  • excluding "language" from the search still yields 2,150,000 results either about the town or things named for or based in the town (and still that beef company in San Diego, and a chalet in Verbier, Switzerland and of course the river, the valley and the airport.

I see no way - or reason - to exclude the town from a search for common global usage in the course of claiming the language or the people are the PRIMARYTOPIC. It's a given that Canadian usages of the name are going to predominantly be about the town, which is a "major" regional centre; it's also a given that Canadian usage is a part of global usage (though many have said Canadian usages are not part of global English, however that works...). If there is a way to show mentions of the language or people are more common than references to the town, I'll be curious to see the nature of any such search. This applies even if older citations are included; unless there are 2,150,000 results for the language or people, this seems an open-and-shut case in favour of the town. I welcome attempts to disprove that. Skookum1 (talk) 01:43, 29 March 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose – you can add Bella Coola Valley and Bella Coola Heliskiing to the topics with lots of web hits among those you counted, but that makes it look even more ambiguous. The 600-person town has no particularly good primary topic claim compared to the language, people, valley, and river. Using the natural British Columbia disambiguator works perfectly here, so why push for a more ambiguous title? Dicklyon (talk) 06:47, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
  • Reply Population figures have been used in other RMs to try and discredit and downplay the primarytopic nature of important regional centres such as this one. I will run the search again with "Bella Coola Valley" and "Bella Coola River" excluded, the heli-skiing outfit is named for the town and is therefore a usage about the town, like other companies and insitutions based there. The people and language articles are now titled differently/correctly and IMO are not real candidates for PRIMARYTOPIC, as with other now-obsolete names. See Floydian's comments and Hwy43's endorsement of same on Lillooet, British Columbia#Requested move on the PRIMARYTOPIC dispute there; Bella Coola is a well-known town on the Canadian landscape with very significant roles in BC history and is the terminus of a major inter-regional highway and important Central Coast ferry port, and uses concerning it will always overwhelm academic papers and old-era publications using the Heiltsuk exonym for the people and their language. Note also the support votes and comments on Talk:Comox people#Requested move.Skookum1 (talk) 06:55, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
    • Refined googles - per your complaint about the river and the valley and the heli-skiing company, I have re-run the first search excluding all of those and Bella Coola Air and also Verbier, San Diego and "language" as well and there are still 1,120,000 results. Do you want me to take out Bella Coola Hospital, Bella Coola Elementary School, the library and anything else in the town too?? where are there 1,120,000 academic research papers to show any equally prevalent use of the town's name for the people and language? Do you want me to take out weather reports and airport listings and tide charts too? I couldn't add "Bella Coola people" or "Bella Coola Nation" or other variables to the exclusions due to the word-limit on google searches.
    • View statistics:
      • Bella Coola, British Columbia - 2484 times in 201403 (i.e. so far this month)
      • Bella Coola - 288 times
      • Nuxalk people - 252 times
        • NB currently has an open RM to move it to Nuxalk, as per WP:UNDAB and WP:PRECISION it does not need disambiguation
      • Nuxalk language - 119 times
    • Perhaps you would care to find some way to prove your assertion that the town is not the primarytopic and not the most-searched for of the items, two of which do not even have "Bella Coola" in their titles?Skookum1 (talk) 07:29, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
      • I have made no assertions about what is most sought, and can accept that it is the community. As for primarytopic, that is what we are to decide. I oppose choosing a primarytopic for a term with so many common uses, especially one like this where the topic you want to make primary gets less than half of the web hits and book hits. Dicklyon (talk) 16:37, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
        • Which webhits are you referring to?? And how do you propose culling mentions of the Nuxalk people from search results for the town? I will rerun the last one with the language exclusion and add on those various terms for the Nuxalk which are now obsolete and not even a title matching the town's name.Skookum1 (talk) 03:21, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
          • the user stats are very clear on a nearly 10:1 basis that the town is the primary topic.Skookum1 (talk) 03:23, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
      • Also note what the disambig page says: When referring to this area of geography without a definite article (geographically, "The Bella Coola" would normally imply the river), the entire valley is usually encompassed by the term. When there is a need to specify the community at the mouth of the river, a specifier is usually used, such as "Bella Coola proper", "downtown Bella Coola" or "the Bella Coola townsite". This strongly suggests that a bare Bella Coola fails on precision. Dicklyon (talk) 16:40, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
        • "Bella Bella" without "the" in front of it is very precise and given the stats above, very clearly the primarytopic. Your equivocation re PRECISION is laughable when you are actually attempting to justify or equivocate ignoring it.Skookum1 (talk) 02:44, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
          • re that passage, which I don't think I inserted but may have, but is likely a local contributors's input, the answer is simple. When out of the area people from Burnaby, Coquitlam, Vancouver and even farther exurbs will simplify answer as to where they're from by saying "Vancouver". Same as with Dragon Lake or Red Bluff re Quesnel, or people from unincorporated areas adjacent to the District of Mission - Hatzic Prairie, McConnell Creek, Dewdney etc. - who will say, to not have to explain too much, "Mission" as is also the case with people answering "Lillooet" when they actually live on one of the Indian reserves adjacent to town or in the rural unincorporated areas nearby, such as Texas Creek; as also with residents of the Shishalh First Nation's Indian Government Districts surrounding the town of Sechelt saying the town's name instead of, for example, SGID No. 24. Stuie and other locations within the Bella Coola Valley are obscure names even within BC, it is just simpler to say "Bella Coola" for them than to have to describe the particulars.Skookum1 (talk) 12:50, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

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.

Comment on close

A full sets of stats and googles pointing to the town as PRIMARYTOPIC, and only one disssenting vote that is made up of suggestions that heli-skiing company named for the town, and Bella Coola Valley, which isn't even an article, are possible PRIMARYTOPICS, an irrelevant nostrum about the small size of the town, and suggestions that items with different titles are competing PRIMARYTOPICS. Stats/googles vs specious logic and no evidence pointing to any other title - and this was called "no consensus, not moved"?? This should have been at least relisted, if not closed with an eye to the stats provided and the shallow and unsubstantiated claims in the sole oppose vote.Skookum1 (talk) 08:25, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

When I said "you can add Bella Coola Valley and Bella Coola Heliskiing to the topics with lots of web hits among those you counted," I certainly did not mean to suggest a possible primarytopic. I'm sorry you misread me. I don't see this as an issue of competing primarytopics. No primarytopic is a better outcome. Dicklyon (talk) 16:18, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

For you, given your lack of geographic competence re Canadian locations, perhaps. Why did you even bother to posit impossible/inviable candidates then? "no primarytopic is a better outcome" belies the FACT that there is a PRIMARYTOPIC for the stand-alone term "Bella Coola", and the suggestions that differently-titled article Nuxalk and Nuxalk language are candidates is totally contrary to disambiguation rules/parameters. Your speciousness and wikilawyering on all these dabs, given you don't know anything about these places or their profile on the landscape, is rather breathtaking in its gall.Skookum1 (talk) 06:17, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

I really wish that I'd discovered this proposal earlier. This has, I think, done a disservice to the clarity of this article, and its reflection of the reality. "Bella Coola" is the entire valley. However, this may be able to be rectified with some edits to the disambiguation page. I'm going to try. AshleyMorton (talk) 12:27, 28 April 2014 (UTC)