Talk:Hunter Fracture Zone

Capitalisation discussion has been off page

See Talk:Mendocino Fracture Zone. See also Google books Ngram Viewer: Hunter fracture zone ChaseKiwi (talk) 21:34, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Requested move 11 December 2024

• Hunter Fracture Zone → Hunter fracture zone
• Heirtzler Fracture Zone → Heirtzler fracture zone

– This article was not moved along with the others at Talk:Mendocino fracture zone § requested move 20 November 2024 and administrators are reluctant to move the article as the move is contested. The reason for this request is to align this title with all the others in the series. Dawnseeker2000 22:24, 9 December 2024 (UTC) This is a contested technical request (permalink). (Added Heirtzler to make it a multi with Hunter after RM got under way; need to confirm support for that from editors who already supported.) Dicklyon (talk) 05:56, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Note – This should apply to one more straggler, Heirtzler Fracture Zone, which is in a similar situation except that very few sources mention it (and yes, some of those are lowercase). Dicklyon (talk) 03:57, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

It does not apply to this RM's nomination, but glad that you found other examples of uppercasing which differ from the nom's language 'all the others'. Heirtzler Fraction Zone is the casing given it by the US Geological Survey. Randy Kryn (talk) 04:01, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes, this is the other one that you had capped while the big RM was ongoing. It should be fixed. Should we do a separate RM discussion on it, to make sure it's not done without a lot of extra wasted editor effort? These scholars use lowercase. Dicklyon (talk) 04:42, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

And yes, we agree on the name (assuming we overlook your typo), but the USGS didn't use it in a sentence there, so there's no evidence that they would treat it as a proper name and capitalize it when not a title or list item or heading. Dicklyon (talk) 04:47, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

@ChaseKiwi, Randy Kryn, and Cinderella157: youse already weighed in before I added Heirtzler to the proposal, so take a look and see if you still support or oppose or want to say something more or different in light of this change. Dicklyon (talk) 05:59, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Your comment on questioning the naming of something by the USGS twists the factual data to serve your purpose here. They named it and named it uppercased. It seems that n-grams are used by some editors as definitive when they agree with their point of view and completely (and I mean completely) dismissed when they don't agree with what they want to accomplish. In both of your noms here - the original and then an added entry - n-grams show that uppercasing is by far the norm. I'd think the only question here is should we disregard the rules and lowercase for the sake of site consistency. I'd say no, others say yes, but let's not disregard the n-grams as if they don't exist. Randy Kryn (talk) 08:25, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Support for Heirtzler fracture zone. A much more difficult decision as no nGram evidence. Google Scholar only gives 4 mentions ever, 3 capitals, one sentence case. This is not overwhelming in my personal view but others my perceive things differently, so I will give my full reasoning. In capitals it exists as a proposed geographical name in Marine Gazetteer but is not in the SCAR Composite Gazetteer of Antarctica where if it did exist it would likely be capitalised as Australia capitalises all its geographical names once accepted, as does Marine Gazetteer and say National Geographic maps as matters of their style. However it is also known as the Heirtzler transform fault which has only ever had sentence case mention in Goggle Scholar in its 4 mentions in the academic literature. My personal preference is to use sentence case despite the 3 to 1 capitalisation not only because small numbers and some use of sentence case but because as an editor in this individual case I want to change the articles lead sentence now issue has been brought to my attention. So as a editor I really would like to write the replacement lead prose of say "The Heirtzler fracture zone (also Heirtzler transform fault at 63°30′S 162°30′E)..."rather than "The Heirtzler Fracture Zone (also Heirtzler transform fault at 63°30′S 162°30′E)... By the way User:Randy Kryn is quite right in the observation of inconsistent use of imperfect tools such as Google nGram to support an argument. But as a editor when you consider individual cases in depth, sentence case might win in my personal view for consistency reasons due to Wikipedia guidelines and that the name involved is only a proposed name and not a definite agreed international name. I declare my historical POV in prose has been to use capitalisation because of Australian geographical name influence. (user:Cinderella157 is much more concise below. ChaseKiwi (talk) 10:40, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

• For sentence case. N-Gram has trend to capitalisation as others have noted in other discussion but this is only up to 2022 and only looks at books Google has indexed. I have also looked at Google Scholar from 2020 (N=26) and found 12:7 capitalisation:sentence case where free original text available. I have disregarded the 3 where the only use of the term was in a reference title used as a source in the article - these were all 1990's articles using sentence case. There were 4 articles excluded as behind pay walls. So even in best case for capitalisation the ratio going to be about 2:1 which is not overwhelming. I have also found evidence suggesting that N-Gram is not looking in period 2021-22 at all academic publications as it reported zero cases of construct "the Hunter fracture zone" and I found two. As case for capitalisation can not be claimed to be overwhelming in the recent literature whatever the N-Gram data, I am in favour of reverting to sentence case. (Was that a bit of original research I just did using too many primary sources). ChaseKiwi (talk) 23:51, 9 December 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose, we just went through this. Per the overwhelming uppercased in the n-grams the casing was one of the 'single' pages mentioned in the close of the recent RM (which did not even nominate this page). Randy Kryn (talk) 02:07, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

  That RM "did not even nominate" this page because it was already lowercased at the time. You had it moved back to the over-capitalized title during the discussion. Is that where you want to leave it, as one title-case among the rest in Wikipedia's sentence-case title style? Dicklyon (talk) 03:15, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

  You left out the key timeline fact: you had boldly lowercased it without discussion a few days before your RM. When I noticed I contested your bold move at WP:RM as controversial, and it was re-capitalized. This discussion will decide if site consistency trumps the n-grams, which show that uppercased is correct. Randy Kryn (talk) 03:46, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

• Support The big RM discussion that closed in favor of lowercase "fracture zone" for all the rest should apply to this one, too, but here we are. I took a look at a Google book search, and in the first page of 10 hits, I found 4 with lowercase and 4 with uppercase in sentences, and 2 not using the phrase in sentences (you can't tell from looking at the search snippets; you need to click through to each book and look at the uses). I also saw that several books, including ones using it lowercase in sentences, also had it capitalized in headings, map legends, and such, which explains why the n-gram counts are higher for the capped version. While these stats are not totally clear, it is totally clear, as ChaseKiwi also observes above, that sources show capitalization is unnecessary, just like with the rest of the fracture zones. Leaving this one as an outlier would be silly. Dicklyon (talk) 03:21, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

  also supporting Heirtzler. It's pretty rare in books and scholarly articles, but does appear with lowercase fracture zone in a couple. There's no reason to treat this one as more consistently capitalized than others. Dicklyon (talk) 06:03, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

• Support Per WP:NCCAPS and MOS:CAPS. The review of google book sources by ChaseKiwi indicates that the term is not consistently capped in sources. A review of multi[le pages from google scholar here would support the same conclusion. It is apparent that the term is often replaced by an initialism in prose and, while it is a style to capitalise the expanded term when introducing an initialism, this is not our style per MOS:EXPABBR. This means that when the capitalised term is used in a source to introduce the expanded term, it does not indicate that caps are necessary. The ngram results indicate a very small sample set and statistically, it is well known that small samples may not give representative results as would appear to be the case here. The result of the RM at Talk:Mendocino fracture zone strongly supports that capitalisation of fracture zone in these contexts is not necessary per MOS:CAP. Cinderella157 (talk) 08:50, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Also supporting Heirtzler fracture zone - not consistently capped in sources - eg google scholar. Cinderella157 (talk) 10:11, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

• Support per MOS:CAPS. Theparties (talk)