Talk:Mbombela

Name Change

I don't know if anyone has noticed but the name of Nelspruit is now Mbombela. The name only changed recently. As with the article on Pietersburg (changed to Polokwane) shouldn't the article on Nelspruit also change to Mbombela? --Setzor (talk) 19:33, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

I agree that it should be changed. The article on Witbank as well (new roadsigns, as far away as Johannesburg are now calling Witbank eMalahleni).

Already e-tv weather maps show Nelspruit as MBO (Mbombela), although interestingly, not the SABC. I recall something about the name being phased in over five years or something, when it was announced.

Unfortunately, because of the limited participation of South Africans on Wikipedia, marginal viewpoints are given undue WP:Undue prominence regarding these name changes (see Talk:Bela-Bela and Talk:Polokwane), so expect that any move to Mbombela will be reverted, and another rearguard action will be fought to preserve the existing article name.

Park3r (talk) 13:30, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

What do you mean by "marginal viewpoints"? The official name is Mbombela, not Nelspruit (anymore), so what's wrong with moving the page to Mbombela? I can justify the name change by citing hundreds of articles, so why can't we enforce a name change? —Preceding unsigned comment added by XJ3N0V4x (talk • contribs) 09:31, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

I would really love some articles where people use the name. Bangalore hasn't yet moved to Bengaluru because the name change process isn't quite finished yet. Although not exactly the same, but there is a similarity in that it's now a waiting game. I would really love to see some articles with the name Mbombela, and especially the "Mbombela Municipality" actually use the name. Bezuidenhout (talk) 09:38, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

It's 2018. What's the actual name of the place? Park3r (talk) 13:57, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

Officially it’s Mbombela, in practice it’s Nelspruit. Michael (talk) 11:46, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Requested move 15 January 2022

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: no consensus. (closed by non-admin page mover) Vpab15 (talk) 17:39, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

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Mbombela → Nelspruit – The WP:COMMONNAME appears to still be Nelspruit despite the 2009 renaming, per ngrams which shows that Nelspruit is used three times more than Mbombela, and per Google Scholar, which shows twice as many uses for Nelspruit since 2021 than it does for Mbombela. Note that many of the results for Mbombela are in reference to Mbombela Local Municipality, rather than the city. BilledMammal (talk) 05:26, 15 January 2022 (UTC)— Relisting. — Coffee // have a ☕️ // beans // 03:52, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

• Support per WP:COMMONNAME based on the Google Ngrams. Rreagan007 (talk) 00:54, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
• Support per nom. Clear common name. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:14, 19 January 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose. If you put smoothing to 0 on the Ngrams link there is much less of a gap. The direction of travel is very clear that Mbombela will overtake Nelspruit shortly, if it hasn't already done so (Ngrams only runs to 2019). I think it would need much stronger evidence to overturn the previous renaming. YorkshireExpat (talk) 09:11, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

@YorkshireExpat: what impact does smoothing have on the results? Greenman (talk) 14:33, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

@Greenman: I don't know what the implementation is, but it will be some sort of moving average where the smoothing factor alters the coefficients. The point is that one of the main arguments presented uses ngrams to say that Nelspruit is three times as popular, but ngrams can also be used to show the difference is only 1.25 times. YorkshireExpat (talk) 14:49, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Note that the smoothing of three is default, as it allows us to see the pattern, rather than outliers. BilledMammal (talk) 14:58, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

The trend shows Nelspruit down, Mbombela up! It is also three years out of date. YorkshireExpat (talk) 15:21, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose. The same as mentioned on Talk:Makhanda, Eastern Cape applies here. ngrams only goes until 2019, so is not particularly relevant to common usage today. Common usage in the media is skewed towards Mbombela. Looking at News24 there are 17 pages vs 23 pages on News24. There's similarly a lot of noise in these results, such as "Nelspruit Flying Squad", or "Nelspruit Commercial Crimes Court". The Google Scholar results are also filled with historical usage. On the first page of my results, "We were living on a farm just outside Nelspruit " referring to 1957, and "At age 9, she used her favourite place—a farm in Nelspruit Mpumalanga—as her first muse to begin writing poetry." Greenman (talk) 14:15, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

  Note that on the first page of Mbombela, we find three inappropriate results (referring to the local municipality, not the city), compared to the two inappropriate results on the first page for Nelspruit. Extrapolating this out suggests that the numbers are even more favourable for Nelspruit than I initially stated. Regarding the ngrams, you would have a point if the name was recently changed, but it was changed over a decade ago.

As for the news results, a few issues - first, a single agency is not representative. Second, because of how news24 uses tags, many articles, such as this one, returned results for "Mbombela" that did not actually mention the city except in a "see also" section, and so a lot of noise is introduced, on top of the noise introduced by the references to the local municipality rather than the city. BilledMammal (talk) 14:44, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

The main part of WP:COMMONNAME which would be relevant here is WP:NAMECHANGES, and so one 'independent, reliable English-language sources' that we should be giving extra weight to is the SABC news. YorkshireExpat (talk) 15:04, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

(ec) The city isn't an independent source for the name of the city. BilledMammal (talk) 15:07, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Your edit doesn't make much more sense; why would we give extra weight to a single news source? We would give it equal weight to other reliable news sources, and less weight than reliable scholarly sources. BilledMammal (talk) 15:08, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm suggesting a way forwards and pointing out another bit of WP policy that is relevant. I realise my first post was a bit dim. YorkshireExpat (talk) 15:11, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose Mbombela has been the official name for 13 years--RicardoNixon97 (talk) 11:31, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
  • Irrelevant. See WP:OFFICIALNAME. -- Necrothesp (talk) 16:31, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Why KaNyamazane twice?

In the "Suburbs and Townships" sections, KaNyamazane is listed twice. I assume this is an error. Joe Forster/STA (talk) 09:26, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

Population size

The article claims that Mbombela is the (capital and) "largest city in Mpumalanga" (population 58 672 in 2011). Both Emalahleni (Witbank, 108 673) and Middelburg (87 348) are larger, so I'm removing the part about it being the largest city. --Leviel (talk) 19:43, 17 April 2024 (UTC)