Talk:Drummond—Arthabaska

Requested move 28 August 2019

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: Drummond-Arthabaska moved. On a side note, I don't think dashes really are a common name deciding factor, and personally, as a matter of consistency, I would use endashes for both kinds, using natural bracket disambiguators for when federal and provincial districts share the same name. (closed by non-admin page mover) Sceptre (talk) 20:03, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

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• Drummond—Arthabaska → Drummond–Arthabaska federal electoral district
• Drummond-Arthabaska → Drummond–Arthabaska provincial electoral district

– or Drummond–Arthabaska (Quebec federal electoral district) and Drummond–Arthabaska (Quebec provincial electoral district). Using a distinction between an em dash and a hyphen is a very strange way to distinguish between two articles. My impression is that the appropriate punctuation mark is an en dash (as with Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex and Minneapolis–Saint Paul). —BarrelProof (talk) 16:15, 28 August 2019 (UTC) --Relisting. Steel1943 (talk) 15:00, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose. Emdashes are what is used in the names of Canadian electoral districts by all official government sources. This argument has been made several times before, and always results in the status quo. And emdash is needed because in French names, a normal dash is used to in place names "e.g. "Saint-Hyacinthe" so an emdash is needed to link more than one place, such as the riding in question. -- Earl Andrew - talk 19:46, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Oh, now that you mention it, I do see quite a few em dashes in the List of Canadian federal electoral districts. But what is the rationale for the second article using a hyphen instead of an em dash then? And why isn't an en dash considered sufficiently distinct from a hyphen? This isn't a proposal to use "Drummond-Arthabaska". Either dash type would be distinct from the hyphen of "Saint-Hyacinthe". —BarrelProof (talk) 21:29, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
    • Em dashes are what are used by nearly every federal agency. Adopting an en dash would be original research, and would also not be the "common name", violating two Wikipedia rules.-- Earl Andrew - talk 04:35, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
      • The Elections Canada Style Guide says to use en dash. Most agencies use em dash because they're Windows based, and it's real easy to make an em dash in windows and harder to make an en dash. Copying their error instead of following normal style would be original research. And there's no "normal dash" in French place names—just hyphens. Dicklyon (talk) 15:39, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
        • Hmmm, there is the exception "Certain materials that draw names of electoral districts from a database, such as federal legislation, maps and OVR tables", which also happens to be the types of documents that are the most used as sources.-- Earl Andrew - talk 16:59, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
          • You have to wonder what they're thinking. Dicklyon (talk) 19:29, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
          • I'm not aware of any significant difference in how easy it is to make an em dash versus an en dash in Windows. Word for Windows has special autocorrect tricks for both of them (a double hyphen becomes an em dash and a spaced hyphen becomes an en dash by default, after typing additional characters). —BarrelProof (talk) 22:21, 2 September 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose for now, based on apparent naming conventions. That said, as part of a broader discussion to update the names of all provincial and federal electoral districts to include parenthetical qualifiers, I'd support this move. Doug Mehus (talk) 20:54, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Please see the quoted convention below, which does not support the current disambiguation-by-dash-type found here. —BarrelProof (talk) 23:17, 2 September 2019 (UTC)
• Comment – While I sympathize with the proposal, we ought to address the weird Canadian mispunctuation more generally, if at all, rather than here. Dicklyon (talk) 04:16, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
  • When I launched this RM, I wasn't aware that it was only a symptom of a larger problem. But I think that seeing the pair of these two titles next to each other is a good illustration of the fact that something rather absurd is happening here. Even if we accept the notion that federal electoral districts should generally use em dashes, that does not mean that it is OK for an em dash and a hyphen to lead to two different articles. On the contrary, I believe the guidelines say that redirects should be in place so that the type of dash or hyphen makes no difference to what article the term leads to. —BarrelProof (talk) 22:21, 2 September 2019 (UTC)
    • If that is indeed the rule, then this article should remain as is as the primary topic, and the other article should be moved to Drummond-Arthabaska (provincial electoral district). -- Earl Andrew - talk 22:29, 2 September 2019 (UTC)
      • MOS:CANADA says "All reasonable uses of hyphens and dashes should redirect to the actual article." I think that implies that they should redirect to the same article, and to me it seem very difficult to argue that disambiguation by dash type is appropriate. Furthermore, it says "When federal and provincial riding names differ only in punctuation, one or both should include disambiguation in their titles as if their names were identical (e.g. Edmonton—Strathcona and Edmonton-Strathcona (provincial electoral district))." I think that is directly relevant here, although it suggests a somewhat different form than what I proposed. (I was not aware of what that guideline says until after submitting this RM for discussion.) Based on this, I support Earl Andrew's suggestion to move only the second article, and to move it to Drummond-Arthabaska (provincial electoral district) (for now, pending a more broad cleanup, since both the hyphen and em dash still seem basically grammatically incorrect). —BarrelProof (talk) 22:58, 2 September 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose as constituted, but support a slightly different change that I'll explain below; although the opposes above are partially right about the rules for Canadian federal electoral districts, they're also only giving you half the real story.
  For federal electoral districts, the rule is indeed to use em-dashes where the official Elections Canada name uses em-dashes, precisely because there is the problem of having to use both dashes and hyphens in federal electoral district names — but that rule does not apply to provincial electoral districts, which follow the conventions of provincial election agencies rather than the federal rules. And for provincial electoral districts in Quebec, the rule is actually en-dashes rather than hyphens. And per WP:CANSTYLE, one of the additional rules for electoral districts is that if they differ only in punctuation, such as a federal em-dash vs. a provincial hyphen or en-dash between what are otherwise the same words, then they do need to be disambiguated as if the punctuation were identical. But that's all for future reference, because it's about to become a moot point in this instance: what I'm actually getting when I check outside sources is that the actual name of the provincial district in this instance didn't use punctuation at all, either dashes or hyphens, but the words and in English or et en français. So the provincial district is named wrong, but in a completely different way than has been accounted for above.
  In reality, the name of the federal district should be left alone in this instance, while the name of the provincial district should be moved to Drummond and Arthabaska. Hatnotes should be retained, however. Bearcat (talk) 00:46, 3 September 2019 (UTC)
• Support (en-dashes and not em-dashes) — We don't go to outside sources for style guidance: we follow house style. House style as per MOS:DASH is that we should be using en-dashes. Outside sources are used for determining things like WP:COMMONNAME but there is no equivalent (nor should there be) WP:COMMONSTYLE. This is evident in MOS:TM and MOS:LQ and MOS:CURLY, where we regularly change how text is styled based on Wikipedia's own style guidelines. You can check out the WP:CSF and WP:SSF essays for a lot more examples of why we don't ape outside style conventions. —Joeyconnick (talk) 06:19, 6 September 2019 (UTC)

  Whoops... sorry... didn't note the extra "federal electoral district" bits. Obviously we should work towards brevity where possible. —Joeyconnick (talk) 06:21, 6 September 2019 (UTC)

  Em-dashes vs. en-dashes is not just a stylistic matter here; it's actually a matter of the districts' real official names. Bearcat (talk) 15:06, 6 September 2019 (UTC)

• Not really. See, for example, the Elections Canada Style Guide, which says to use en dashes unless extracting information automatically from a database (see above by Dicklyon). Even if considered "official", we override self-published punctuation choices routinely on Wikipedia when we see fit to do so. That's what WP:OFFICIAL says. In any case, the distinction between the two is not sufficient for disambiguation, because many ordinary people who read Wikipedia don't even notice the difference. Indeed, many people who read Wikipedia probably don't know what en dashes and em dashes even are. —BarrelProof (talk) 22:51, 6 September 2019 (UTC)

• If you want to mount an argument that we need to change our established naming conventions for Canadian electoral districts, you'll need to keep in mind that this has implications for literally thousands of articles about Canadian electoral districts: not only would every article about a federal district that has em-dashes in its title need to be moved, it would also sometimes force completely new collisions with provincial electoral districts that would also have to get moved. So you'll need to mount a centralized discussion about the naming convention across the board, resulting in a comprehensive project to get every electoral district in Canada moved en masse to whatever new naming convention results from that — you cannot backdoor it by pushing one electoral district out of phase with it. Whether you agree with what the long-established naming convention for Canadian electoral districts is or not, the consensus naming convention is what it is, and these articles must stay in line with the existing convention until such time as a new one is established to replace it — until every single article about a Canadian electoral district gets moved right across the board as a comprehensive project of implementing a new consensus naming convention, these articles are not special and must not diverge one iota from the way any other Canadian electoral districts are titled. Bearcat (talk) 20:05, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

• This is not a change of "our established naming convention for Canadian electoral districts". The established naming convention says that says "All reasonable uses of hyphens and dashes should redirect to the actual article.", i.e., the choice of the hyphen or dash should not affect the topic that the reader encounters. —BarrelProof (talk) 20:49, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

• Support. I'm a noted sceptic of WP:SMALLDETAILS generally, unless they are very clear and recognisable to readers. But this one must be the smallest of small details ever. Length of dash as a disambiguator?! And not only that, from the evidence above the "difference" is more to do with styling in sources than an actual difference anyway. This move should go ahead immediately, and then other examples fixed in a similar way as a result, there is no need to go through a lengthy RFC to fix something that's obviously silly.  — Amakuru (talk) 14:40, 13 September 2019 (UTC)
• Support addition of some kind of disambiguator; the dash length is not disambiguating. bd2412 T 03:34, 6 October 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose moving this article to include a disambiguation because it is the primary topic. -- Earl Andrew - talk 14:11, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

If you look at the pageview history, this article does get more page views than the other one, but not dramatically more. The ratio for the last three years is roughly 2x. That seems sort of borderline for a WP:TWODABS situation. —BarrelProof (talk) 14:47, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

This is the current federal riding vs. a defunct provincial riding. This is obviously the primary topic. Plus, this is how we've been disambiguating electoral districts across the country. Just look at all the ridings in Ontario (most of which have the same boundaries). Federal electoral districts get a disambiguator only when necessary, but provincial districts always do (except for the 2 far north districts) -- Earl Andrew - talk 15:14, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

I don't really mind if the federal district is considered primary, but I believe that at least the provincial district should be disambiguated, and that redirects should be used so that all reasonable uses of hyphens and dashes should either redirect to the same article or to a dab page. The punctuation type should not make any difference to which article is encountered by readers. —BarrelProof (talk) 17:38, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

Note: This may be ready to be closed. Given the views so far, the best plan might be to let Drummond—Arthabaska (i.e. Drummond (emdash) Arthabaska), the federal district, be the primary topic, while Drummond (hyphen) Arthabaska would be moved to Drummond–Arthabaska provincial electoral district. This would postpone for a future discussion the issue about emdashes in Canadian electoral districts, but it would end usage of the style of dash for disambiguation. Redirects would be created for the other styles of dash. EdJohnston (talk) 15:10, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

No, it should be Drummond-Arthabaska (provincial electoral district) to match the dab style of every other provincial electoral district in the country. -- Earl Andrew - talk 15:33, 15 October 2019 (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.