Talk:CAB International

Requested move

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. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: page moved. (non-admin closure) —innotata 05:36, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

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CABI (CAB International) → CABI (organisation) – Current title is not proper disambiguation, but the current name followed by one of mutiple former names. The current WP:OFFICIALNAME name of the organisation, CABI, which also seems to be its WP:COMMONNAME, is an orphaned acronym that now stands for nothing (formerly Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux International, if you cobble it to together from different names in different periods, but they've never actually used that long name; they were Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux or CAB, then CAB International, then CABI).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  15:00, 10 October 2014 (UTC)

Support acronym followed by expansion is never a good title 24.131.80.54 (talk) 12:54, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

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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.

Proposal: Rewrite

This article isn't particularly well written/structured. Would like to have a go at a major rewrite (At a minimum restructure) whilst simultaneously fixing citation issues. Any input? GreenerSky (talk) 13:53, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

have submitted a rewrite for review at Draft:CABI_(organisation) GreenerSky (talk) 15:52, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Based on comments left on the draft, I've edited the page to match the draft. The worst of the marketing speak has been cleared away, I've restructured the article, and added additional secondary sources. GreenerSky (talk) 08:20, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Requested move 28 September 2017

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. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Moved  — Amakuru (talk) 08:57, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

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CABI (organisation) → Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International – It's irregular for us to put an organization at its acronym instead of its name, unless the general public (not just specialists) almost always use the acronym and are mostly unaware of what it stands for (thus UNICEF and NASA), or the organization has repudiated and abandoned the expanded version, as happened with the UNCF. Neither condition applies here. The general public is largely unaware that this organization exists, so we have no reason to compress the name just because biology journals do it a lot.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  20:47, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

• Not sure if this counts for anything, but locally (i.e. on the AA roadsigns and outside the office) the organization is referred to as CABI. It's pretty common that people here don't know what the acronym stands for and might come here to work it out. I'm aware this is anecdotal though. In the event of the name being uncompressed, would 'CABI' still link/direct users towards this page? GreenerSky (talk) 08:32, 29 September 2017 (UTC)
  • It doesn't now. CABI is a disambiguation page. If want to get directly to this article and know only the acronym, you either have to think to type in "CABI (organisation)", or type in "CABI" and pick the entry out of the disambiguation page's list. I.e., the proposed rename would have no effect at all on the matter.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  06:28, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

• In that case Support. If users can still find this page by searching the acronym and ending up at the disambiguation page that removes my only worry about this. --GreenerSky (talk) 08:30, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

• Support per nom, though I see a lot of CAB International refs in books In ictu oculi (talk) 11:19, 29 September 2017 (UTC)
  • The article had "formerly CAB International" in it, but I changed this to say "sometimes also referred to as" that, since I couldn't find any evidence the half-acronym form had been totally abandoned. That said, it seems like the worst choice for article title, since it's a weird style, and helps neither people familiar with the acronym nor with the full name. It seems a bit like using the colloquial "US of A". :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  06:28, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

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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.

From where is the name "Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International"?

As of now, the only source in the article that says that "CABI" stands for "Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International" is the "Global Harmonization Initiative", writing no earlier than 2018 (such that they could have taken the name from us). XTools suggests that this expansion of "CABI" was (approximately) added in Special:Diff/674660257 on 2015-08-05. Searching Google for site:www.cabi.org "Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International" and restricting the search to dates ≤2015-08-05 gives no results; broadening the search to dates ≤2017-10-06 (when our article was renamed to this name) gives one result, which appears to be not CABI themselves using this expansion of their initialism but rather a copy of a report of a consultant to the FAO.

On their "About" page, CABI says that CABI is an inter-governmental, not-for-profit organization established by a United Nations treaty-level agreement between 50 Member Countries and is governed by the membership, an independent board. Slightly deeper into their website, they link to this copy of this "treaty-level agreement", which does not seem to mention "Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International" but says The Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux is hereby reconstituted under the name CAB INTERNATIONAL. The agreement seems to be #25571 at the United Nations Treaty Collection, which provides this older copy, which similarly says The Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux is hereby reconstituted under the name CAB International and doesn't seem to mention "Bioscience".

From where do we understand that "CABI" now stands for "Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International"?

—2d37 (talk) 01:35, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

SMcCandlish, GreenerSky, do you know? —2d37 (talk) 07:43, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

CABI is in my opinion the WP:COMMONNAME still, but there are plenty of instances where Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International is used on their own website e.g. [1] [2] [3]. We should of course mention that CABI used to stand for "Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux [I???]" strangely, that page doesn't explain when it came to be known as the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International. SmartSE (talk) 10:43, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

At this point my recommendation is this: to avoid parenthetic disambiguation (which "CABI" would require), to better agree with CONCISE, to use the actual proper name as it stands now (that we know of), and to avoid having an article title that contains a disputed name, this should move to CAB International. The fact that various abbreviation-happy citations in journals like to use "CABI" is meaningless; they also abbreviate the names of major journals into near-unrecognizable gibberish. "CAB International" is quite frequent in RS, especially in running text, but also in less compression-oriented citations. Next, we should change the lead, using the sources above, to say it was originally named Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux, that it was renamed CAB International in YYYY (whatever year that happened), and that it currently expands the acronym to Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International, though this long name is not much used. And create a Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau redirect (with {{R from misspelling}}), since the French plural bureaux is rare in English and apt to be thought a typo by many, who would look for it without the x.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:59, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
Update: I did that last part (the redir) already.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:18, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure [4] and [5] should count — both appear to be copies of press releases from universities that were written after #Requested move 28 September 2017 finished; their authors might have come to Wikipedia to ask what "CABI" means. However, I see that this expansion of "CABI" appears to have been used by the United Nations Environment Programme [6] (p. 268) and the governments of Switzerland [7] and British Columbia [8] (pp. 1, 34) before Wikipedia existed. The name would appear to be real, but I don't know from where it came or why CABI doesn't mention it in their About pages [9]. —2d37 (talk) 09:22, 3 April 2021 (UTC)