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Talk:List of mayors of Birmingham

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This list has several names that have been randomly linked to people of the same name who were never Mayors of Birmingham, nor resident in Birmingham, and at least one was not even English. Needs a detailed, systematic clean-up. Keomike (talk) 00:21, 17 November 2012 (UTC)Reply

Requested move 26 June 2017

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Latest comment: 7 years ago15 comments7 people in discussion
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: not moved. (non-admin closure) Steven Crossin 02:12, 5 July 2017 (UTC)Reply


– Per recent discussion at Talk:List of mayors of Finsbury, Talk:List of mayors of Bath, and MOS:JOBTITLES: "should be in lower case when used generically: Mitterrand was the French president or There were many presidents at the meeting." In these cases, the term "Lord Mayors" is not followed by a person's name, not referring to a specific person, and not the correct formal title being treated as a proper name. It might be correct to use "List of people who were Lord Mayor of Birmingham", but there is no formal title called "Lord Mayors of Birmingham". If successful, I this RM will achieve consistency within Category:Lists of mayors of places in England and its one subcategory Category:Lists of mayors of London boroughs. Please note that there was a prior revert performed by Proteus at 12:35, 30 June 2008‎ (UTC) of the proposed move of List of Lord Mayors of London. There was also some discussion of "Lord Mayors vs Lords Mayor" in 2006, found at Talk:List of Lord Mayors of London. —BarrelProof (talk) 16:36, 26 June 2017 (UTC)Reply

No I understand perfectly what a proper noun is, you on the other hand appear to not understand that proper nouns can be pluralised. A common noun relates to a generic 'class', however the lord mayor of a specific lord mayorality is never generic; to reiterate my original statement "the page List of lord mayoralties and lord provostships in the United Kingdom isn't capitalised because it is not referring to a specific lord mayorality however the pages in discussion here are specific". In relation to your requestion on whether the recent RMs you mention are correct, they are clearly wrong (unless of course the title 'Mayor of Finsbury' and 'Mayor of Bath' etc are not actual titles in which case they would be correct- but if that were the case then that would make those RMs irrelevant to this discussion). Ebonelm (talk) 12:47, 1 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
  • Oppose - agree with Ebonelm. "Lord Mayor of Birmingham" is a proper noun, similar to "King of France" or "President of the United States", and should be capitalized. This is per MOS. Blueboar (talk) 16:01, 27 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
    Yes, "Lord Mayor of Birmingham" is a proper noun (and so is "King of France" and "President of the United States"), but "lord mayors of Birmingham" is a class of people, and is therefore not a proper noun. —BarrelProof (talk) 16:06, 27 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
No... it is still a proper noun, but in the plural instead of the singular. Suppose the title was: List of people who were Lord Mayor of Burmingham... you would capitalize, wouldn't you? (I realize that this would be a clunky title... I am not proposing it as an alternative... I am just trying to understand your argument). Same thing. Blueboar (talk) 17:07, 27 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
Yes, I would. That is what I said already above in the third sentence of my proposal rationale ("It might be correct to use 'List of people who were Lord Mayor of Birmingham', ..."). I believe that would be a case that MOS:JOBTITLES refers to as using the correct formal title as a proper name. I don't think that the plural form can be a proper noun (unless it is the name of a group of people, e.g., "the Rolling Stones"), as it is not an identification of a unique entity. —BarrelProof (talk) 17:19, 27 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
Ok... then that is where we disagree... I think the plural form of proper nouns are still proper nouns. We are still talking about an individual office (a specific lord mayoralty), as opposed to lord mayors in the generic. Blueboar (talk) 17:36, 27 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
I suppose that means you believe the decisions made in the recent RMs at Talk:List of mayors of Finsbury and Talk:List of mayors of Bath are incorrect? —BarrelProof (talk) 18:32, 27 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
Yes... if I had known of that RM, I would have opposed. Blueboar (talk) 00:25, 28 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
Support: This is a list of people who had or have a title. The title may be capitalized but in the plural it is not talking about one person or one title.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  21:34, 27 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
Not quite... The plural is talking about one title (with sequential holders). Blueboar (talk) 00:25, 28 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
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.
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Latest comment: 7 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Please note that I have submitted another closely related RM request at Talk:List of mayors of Finsbury. The discussion should take place there, rather than here. —BarrelProof (talk) 16:22, 29 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

So some people argues that "Lord Mayor" is like "President of the United States", and even though both of those violate our usual style, you figure now that "Mayor" should be in that category, too. Where would this stop? Why don't we go back and fix "president" instead? Dicklyon (talk) 05:41, 30 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
The failure to downcase, above, is inconsistent with WP's long-established style. Tony (talk) 05:58, 30 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

Requested move 5 September 2017

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Latest comment: 7 years ago37 comments11 people in discussion
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 to List of mayors of Birmingham etc. per Amakuru, a proposal which also achieved a support of other editors and has a virtue of being WP:CONCISE and overarching. This also elegantly eschews (but does not solve) the underlying issue of capitalization of "lord mayors"... to be decided in another round. No such user (talk) 14:09, 21 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

...addendum: except List of Lord Mayors of London: the supposed target, List of mayors of London redirects to Mayor_of_London#List_of_Mayors about the new office. This is outside of remit of this RM, so a merge/scope debate is in order. No such user (talk) 14:19, 21 September 2017 (UTC)Reply


– Sorry to reopen this, but two months have gone by and we seem to be stuck with an undesirable direct conflict between the format of our "List of mayors of X" and "List of Lord Mayors of X" articles. In the most recent RM discussion at Talk:List of mayors of Finsbury, there was a conclusion that the "Consensus in this RM and previous ones is clearly against" using the uppercase "M" for "mayor" in such titles. If that is so, then how can these other articles persist in differing from that consensus? The RM suggesting to achieve consistency by moving in the other direction basically went down in flames. This move would achieve consistency within Category:Lists of mayors of places in England and Category:Lists of mayors of London boroughs. See also MOS:JOBTITLES and Talk:List of mayors of Bath —BarrelProof (talk) 19:10, 5 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

Ping @Ham II, SchreiberBike, Tony1, In ictu oculi, V2Blast, Ebonelm, Blueboar, Amakuru, Anarchyte, Steven Crossin, X4n6, SMcCandlish, Keith D, Dicklyon, and DrStrauss: from prior relevant discussions listed above. —BarrelProof (talk) 19:10, 5 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
@BarrelProof: so why List of Presidents of the United States and not "List of presidents of the United States? A 'rule' that all plural forms of job titles should be lower case makes some sense, and would at least be consistent. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:10, 6 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
Please don't ask me to explain some "other stuff" that I have had nothing to do with. I see no good justification for the inconsistency of that other article's title either. Also, you may be able to observe from the discussion recorded at Talk:List of mayors of Finsbury that I would also be open to the other way of achieving consistency (as noted in my proposal summary here), but there was a clear consensus against that approach (i.e., consistently using uppercase in plurals of titled positions). —BarrelProof (talk) 13:17, 6 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
  • Too soon ... we just closed an RM on this. Just because it gave a result you don't like is no reason to reopen it. We actually do have consistency... Lord Mayors are capitalized while other mayors are not. Blueboar (talk) 20:19, 5 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Tony1: as far as I can tell, Blueboar was just reporting what is the case, not what they decided. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:13, 6 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
Peter, thanks for your Ngram result. This one might shine further light on the matter—revealing significant lowercase usage. en.WP's MOSCAPS says that items consistently capitalised in sources are capped in WP. Sources do not consistently cap "lord mayor", and when it is used in the plural there's no logic in classifying it as a proper name. Compare: "Until then, President Jackson thought single-payer health insurance was pure evil"; and "Three presidents were born in the 1910s". Tony (talk) 05:33, 7 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Tony1: as I said, the ngram isn't an argument for capitalizing here, just an explanation of why it looks odd to me and others. I would point out that your ngram looks very different if you use only British books (almost all the data disappears), so it must be based on non-British sources. "Lord Mayor" isn't a title used in the US, so how it's capitalized there isn't immediately relevant to an article which should clearly be in British English.
My concern is different: picking off individual cases, like "Lord Mayors", isn't helpful. The best approach would be an RfC to agree to lower-case all plural job titles, including cases like List of Presidents of the United States. Proposing to lower-case British "Lord Mayors" but not US "Presidents" when the evidence is that British sources capitalize doesn't seem reasonable or acceptable to me.
It's possible to make a case that "mayors" and "Lord Mayors" are not the same. Some job titles that can be used to prefix a name are also, or by usage have become, descriptive of what the job involves. A "Lord Mayor" is just a mayor; it's just a title, not a job description. If I tell you that Jones is the Lord Mayor of Utopia, this tells you no more about what they do that if I told you they were the Mayor of Utopia. Thus it makes slightly more sense to treat "Lord Mayor" as always being a title. It's not an argument I would strongly support, but capitalization in modern English is not a simple issue, with clear answers, and the de facto compromise of capitalizing "Lord Mayors" but not "mayors" is not utterly senseless, and may be the best compromise pending the RfC I favour. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:54, 7 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
  • Oppose - why is this being brought up again so soon after the previous request? "Lord Mayor of Birmingham" is a proper name, usually capitalised in sources, and the correct plural of that is therefore (also in title case), "Lord Mayors of Birmingham". So yes, the others are at "List of mayors of Finsbury", but that's not a reason to change this one. We already don't have consistency, thanks to examples like List of Presidents of the United States. I don't think consistency applies here, because the cases are different. Thanks  — Amakuru (talk) 11:01, 7 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
  • Support. I salute you, BarrelProof, for standing up for what's right in the face of these overwhelming odds. Here I quote from the Chicago Manual of Style: "In formal academic prose, however, civil titles are capitalized only when used as part of the name" (Section 8.21). This rule is illustrated by various examples, the most relevant of which is this one: "the mayor; Richard M. Daley, mayor of Chicago; Mayor Daley." AP style is the same: "In general, confine capitalization to formal titles used directly before an individual’s name." Here is Oxford Style Manual: "Words for titles and ranks are generally lower case unless they are used before a name, as a name, or in forms or address." Burchfield's New Fowler's Modern English Usage (1996) gives "lord mayors" (yes, lower cased) as an example in the its entry on "titles." Great scott (talk) 12:16, 7 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
    Well that's all well and good, except that we don't use the Chicago manual of style. We use our own manual of style. And that is crystal clear (from MOS:JOBTITLES) that When the correct formal title is treated as a proper name (e.g., King of France; it is correct to write Louis XVI was King of France but Louis XVI was the French king). This title is a clear "Louis XVI was King of France" case, with the only difference being that it is in the plural form.  — Amakuru (talk) 12:54, 7 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
    The rule given in the guideline is, "Offices, titles, and positions such as president, king, emperor, pope, bishop, abbot, and executive director are common nouns and therefore should be in lower case when used generically." That's essentially the same rule as the one given in the various published guides I quote above. All the guides I quote are recommended in WP:MOS. Your interpretation uses the "King of France" example to reverse a rule stated both in our guideline and in the sources it is based on. Why is "King of France" a "correct formal title" but "French king" is not? This is nonsense. Great scott (talk) 13:44, 7 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
    CMOS gives the example "King Abdullah; the king of Jordan." So the "King of France" example is clearly wrong. CMOS also says to capitalize a title when it is a "substitute for a name." Whoever wrote the "King of France" example may have been aware of this rule and misunderstood it. Great scott (talk) 23:04, 7 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
    Well fine, that may be the case, but that is the way the rule is written, and it's pretty clear it should apply here. If you want it changed, go change it at the MOS, don't try to go against what it says in local examples. And then bear in mind that the change will have knock on effects for all articles conerning "King of France", "President of the United States" and so on. If these lord mayor articles are downcased, because of a change to the MOS, then so should all those others.  — Amakuru (talk) 10:22, 8 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
    Isn't this covered under "Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization"? That's our primary capitalization rule, according to MOS:CAPS. If the published style guides recommend lower casing in a given situation, that would seem to me the epitome of "unnecessary." There was never any decision by Wikipedia editors to upper case titles against style guide recommendations. You are teasing out a principle from an obscure poorly drafted clause that others have overlooked. We are writing a reference work, not a business letter. Great scott (talk) 11:46, 8 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
    Re: "we don't use [RS style guides]. We use our own manual of style" – That's a confused argument. Our style guide is based on the very same style manuals Great_scott cited, and we definitely look to them, in RM discussions and in MoS discussions, when disputes arise about applicability or interpretation of our own (highly compressed and not always perfectly worded) style line-items. The one in question is under clarification discussion right now at WT:MOSCAPS, specifically because some people are badly misinterpreting it to mean "capitalize Lord Mayors". It does not mean that at all.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  16:56, 11 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
  • Support – Our style is to only cap proper names. Titles that are not attached to names are just job description. Just like mayor, lord mayor is lowercase when not part of a name. And even if "Lord Mayor of Birmingham" gets capped when referring to a specific individual, a list of lord mayors of Birmingham does not. Jobtitles are jobtitles. Dicklyon (talk) 14:14, 7 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
    It is a proper name. So our style is to cap it. I know you don't like title case, Dicklyon, and in many cases I agree with you, but this is a poor example because this job title is always capitalised, and is therefore a proper name.  — Amakuru (talk) 10:22, 8 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
    Why would you think it's a "proper name"? That it's a plural suggests that it is not a proper noun. This ngram suggests published sources use either upper or lower case. So we have the option to do it correctly. I don't see how anyone can justify doing mayors one way and lord mayors the other. Great scott (talk) 12:09, 8 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
    But if you do the ngram properly, restricting it to British books (since a list of Lord Mayors of Birmingham has a clear national tie), the ngram shows that capitalizing is about 7 times more common, so saying that published sources use either upper or lower case is disingenuous to say the least. Peter coxhead (talk) 12:20, 8 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
    Well, whatdoyouknow? Turns out "Lord Mayor" is upper cased in British English, according to Oxford Dictionaries. In American English, you can do it either way.[1][2] Great scott (talk) 16:39, 8 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
    Didn't you give examples of two other Oxford University Press publications recommending lower case (The Oxford Style Guide and Fowler's Modern English Usage), the latter explicitly for "lord mayors"? I think that style guides can sometimes be so intent on applying a principle consistently that they don't reflect actual usage. Ham II (talk) 05:33, 9 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
    OSG says "titles and ranks are generally lower case." But that rule wouldn't apply to a title that the dictionary, whichever one you use, gives upper case. New Fowler's lists "bishops and archbishops, lord mayors, lady mayoresses, the Chief Rabbi, the Pope, ambassadors." I had assumed that represented British style, but I guess things are more complicated than that. I checked Oxford English Dictionary. It gives "Lord Mayor" in upper case. OneLook shows results from nine different online dictionaries. Great scott (talk) 06:41, 9 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
    The dictionary's being misinterpreted. Its definition is for the office as such, not as a common-noun phrase. For the very same reason, WP would write "Donald Trump was elected to the office of President of the United States", but "According to Newsweek, Trump is our most controversial president in over a century", and "Trump has made more direct use of the Internet than all previous US presidents combined". (Yes, List of Presidents of the United States also needs to be moved. Let's do it next.) N-grams are unreliable on matters like this, because it's impossible to examine the context, the reputability of the publishers, a too-small sample size, and various other factors. Frankly, nothing is going to get around the fact that the two British style guides of note both converge on lower case for this, one even specifically using "lord mayor" as an illustrative example. There is no ENGVAR case to be made here; ENGVAR only applies to consistent matters of national style, and we have not only proof of inconsistency, but also the main style authorities for the dialect saying lower case.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  16:56, 11 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
  • Comment - I actually think it's dubious whether "lord mayor" is even a thing on its own at all. OED has it capitalised,[3] and explains that it is the formal title for various mayors (lower case) in certain British cities. Thus if you insist that the name "Lord Mayor of Birmingham" is not a proper name in its own right, (of which this is the list of said proper name entities), then you have to move it to List of mayors of Birmingham, as there is no such thing as a lord mayor in the absence of the title. Note that WP's article is also at Lord Mayor.  — Amakuru (talk) 21:55, 18 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
I agree. "Lord Mayor" is simply a title held by some mayors. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:49, 19 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
If that is the case, I would have no objection to the titling suggestion to move "List of Lord Mayors of X" to "List of mayors of X". —BarrelProof (talk) 17:22, 19 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
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