Talk:Harbin railway station

Requested move 9 November 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. There is consensus here, that this should conform to our usual station naming guidelines. The discussion at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#RFC on Chinese railway station title/style conventions is also leaning that way too.  — Amakuru (talk) 11:45, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

---

Harbin Railway Station → Harbin railway station – Case norm for stations. Dicklyon (talk) 03:09, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

This is a contested technical request (permalink). Anthony Appleyard (talk) 05:46, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

• The vast majority of Category:Stations on the Beijing–Harbin Railway is cap'd. This probably requires a full discussion where they're discussed in one bundled nom. Jenks24 (talk) 03:42, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
• @Dicklyon and Jenks24: queried move request Anthony Appleyard (talk) 05:47, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

• Support as nom – All station naming conventions that I'm aware of specify lowercase "station" or "railway station" as part of the name. These thinly edited articles on stations in China are not yet in sync with conventions, and should be. The article already states Harbin as the station name in the infobox, and Harbin station in the lead. Railway Station is not part of a proper name. Dicklyon (talk) 05:53, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
• Can we please do this as a centralised discussion somewhere else instead? Looking further, the vast majority of Category:Railway stations in China by line uses "Railway Station" and that is several hundred articles at least. We have been in this sort of situation before and trying to do things piecemeal creates a hell of a lot more work in the long run, both for the editors who end up involved in dozens of discussions repeating the same arguments and the admins who then have to read over each individual discussion and come to a decision. If it really is straightforward then a one-week discussion at some centralised location will garner a clear consensus and you can have them all moved at WP:RM/TR. Jenks24 (talk) 06:58, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

  Most of these are easy to fix, and unique to China (there are 6 more with redirects in the way of fixing, in this cat). There's no reason not to go ahead and fix them, is there? Is more discussion elsewhere really needed? Dicklyon (talk) 07:03, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

  I am saying close this discussion and have a centralised discussion elsewhere. If it's just a fix as you say, then everyone will agree and the discussion will still only take a week – only then you'd have a consensus to move all the articles involved, not just this one. Jenks24 (talk) 07:34, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

  @Jenks24: It's fine for some individual RMs to happen in this category, to help establish precedent to add to the pile of precedent from other categories on the same matter. The more that diverse RM editors weigh in, the better – to counter tendentious bloc voting from WP:TRAINS and related projects. A centralized discussion would need to be an RfC at an actual central location, like a WT:MOSCAPS or WP:VPPOL. The idea that this can just be hashed out at WT:TRAINS can't be taken seriously. But an RfC is kind of a waste of time. WP doesn't capitalize unless the sources do so consistently, and they do not for this, as proven below.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  16:48, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

• Procedural close, since there is a naming guideline affecting all railway stations in Mainland China. @Jenks24: Since it appears Dicklyon did not bother getting consensus before moving dozens of pages again (as well as editing the naming guideline), I have started a discussion at WT:TRAINS and it would ideally be expanded to an RfC. Regardless of whether or not the original guidelines were arbitrary, I think changing them should require consensus. Jc86035 (talk) 11:43, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

  Where is the naming convention that you refer to? Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Australasian stations), or is there one specific to China that I haven't found, that unlike all others suggests caps here? Dicklyon (talk) 06:19, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

  Ah, probably you mean Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Chinese)#Railway stations. They propose a method to make up English names for stations; it should be modified to be consistent with our basic title and style principle that we only cap proper names and we're not in the business of making up proper names; just like station titling conventions in the rest of the world. Dicklyon (talk) 06:31, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

  I linked that for discussion at the centralized RFC that I opened at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#RFC on Chinese railway station title/style conventions. I think it would make sense based on what I see there and here to have a "procedural close" that says to go back to normal procedure, using technical move requests to fix these to align with sitewide guidelines. Dicklyon (talk) 22:33, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

• Support per WP:NCCAPS, MOS:CAPS, and per WP:CONSISTENCY with all the other RMs that have been done to clean up overcapitalization in train-related articles. There is nothing magically special about Chinese stations, and even a WP:ENGVAR argument is impossible. Some WP:PROJPAGE essay by a wikiproject does not trump site-wide guidelines and policies. The rule is we do not apply capitalization or other stylization unless reliable secondary sources do consistently for that particular case, which they do not in this one: [1][2]; usage varies widely between "Harbin railway station", "Harbin Railway Station" (even the weird "Harbin Railway station"), following the house style of the publisher. We have our own house style, and it is not theirs.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  12:46, 9 November 2017 (UTC); link added: 16:48, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
• Withdraw request per Jenks24 & Jc86035. Useddenim (talk) 12:43, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

  ??? What request are you withdrawing? Dicklyon (talk) 21:25, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

Extended discussion

@SMcCandlish: Most official sources and signage that I can find refer to Chinese railway stations with "Station" capitalized; e.g. West Kowloon Station, Guangzhou South Railway Station (Guangzhou Metro), Beijing Railway Station, Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station. We usually name stations' article titles based on what the operator calls them, not what we would like to call them. (There are no Commons pictures of English signage at this particular station, though.) If there is an example of lowercase "railway station" then please link it. Jc86035 (talk) 12:57, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Signage and governmentese [note: primary sources, and not reliable for English language usage norms] overcapitalize constantly. You know this. We [i.e., regular RM participants, and WT:TRAINS + sibling/child projects thereof] have been over this a dozen times before. Please stop playing WP:IDHT games. WP has its own style guide. It does not follow that of the government of the PRC, which doesn't even use English as an official or even a "recognized" language anyway. No we do not randomly name station articles that way. That's what a few people at your wikiproject want to do, and when it comes to RM the consensus is against it, because our site-wide style guide and naming conventions don't cater to random topical imitation of cherry-picked sources and house styles.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  14:29, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: I have not participated in any previous RfCs relating to the capitalization of railway station articles and I assumed there was no consensus to capitalization that applied for all station articles, hence why articles of almost every system in East Asia use capitalized "Station". Are you sure you want to have more than 15,000 articles renamed without asking the WikiProjects (Trains and Stations)? I support decapitalization where the capitalization is inappropriate or unnecessary, but it would be better to do this systematically instead of having Dicklyon do these one by one, and to have a firm consensus that it should actually be done. Jc86035 (talk) 14:53, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

The other reason I !voted to close the discussion is that Dicklyon came up against a lot of opposition earlier this year for mass-renaming British railway line articles without consensus, and I thought it would be necessary to have a firmer consensus for/against all of his page moves since he also moved a few dozen Chinese railway line articles this week without a specific consensus. Jc86035 (talk) 14:57, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Firstly, it does not compute to suggest "procedurally" closing an RM as "against consensus" when RM is the consensus discussion. Secondly, the sources show wildly inconsistent usage [3][4], so we use lowercase. The end. We have a rule, just follow it. This kind of dispute is counterproductive. Third, no one suggested excluding anyone. RM is open to all editors who care about page renames. The train and station articles do not belong to wikiprojects. Participants in them have precisely 0% more say than anyone else at RM, which is a site-wide process designed to get broad input, not canvassed bloc votes. So, yes, we are sure that a large number of articles can be moved to comply with actual guidelines without interference from a faction who think that because they're interested in the topic they have a right to control every aspect of it. The last time WP made the mistake of letting a wikiproject do whatever it wanted with article titles and style (not surprisingly, it was more overcapitalization of the same sort), it resulted in 8 F'ing years of disruption that spiraled way beyond the confines of that project.

Moving on: This overcapitalization thing has been discussed before many times in this context, including at the wikiproject, where you're presently finger-pointing at Dicklyon in a personalized way, here. It does not require an RfC or a wikiproject's permission to move or propose moving articles to be in compliance with site-wide norms, or to edit a topical MoS page to stop conflicting with the main one (and it needs more work in that regard; I still see a lot of overcapitalization in it). The only RfC we need to have about this is to propose deleting that trains section at MOS:CHINA, since it's off-topic (there's nothing stylistically special about the combination China + trains) and directly contradicts MOS:CAPS and WP:NCCAPS. Where's the consensus discussion to add that trains section (or any of the transport section at all) to MOS:CHINA, with any wording? Answer: there wasn't one [5]; it was just made up by someone as their personal pet peeves list, without bothering to check if it complied with the rest of MoS (or perhaps in direct defiance of it). It's a personal essay, a bunch of WP:CREEP, and a WP:POLICYFORK. It is not operational against the main MoS pages, per WP:CONLEVEL policy.

Dicklyon experienced some heat at a noticeboard, back when, for manually moving large numbers of articles after objections were raised to the moves, and was instructed to use RM when in doubt. He's doing so, yet the same handful of editors, trying to exert control over train-related articles, are castigating him for it. That's after the same faction already tried the exact the same thing recently, but ANI concluded that the complainants had no basis for their drama filing, because he was following the instructions he was given pursuant to the original complaint, and RM is the process we have for this. Others of us who take the time to do RM on a regular basis are really tired of seeing yet another transit/transport-related RM turn into mudslinging against a specific editor, with tendentious rehash of the same "just 'cause signs and govmint do it that way and we like it" arguments that have already been rejected again and again, and pretense that the preferences of a few people at a wikiproject are a "consensus" – unlike any other consensus – to preclude discussion by Wikipedians at large. RM don't work that way. And these moves are basic, routine cleanup.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  16:48, 9 November 2017 (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.