Talk:Suit of wands

Merge from

I am proposing to merge all of the wands suit into a single article Tetron76 (talk) 12:06, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Capitalization

I would like to change the capitalization to Suit of Wands. This matches the usage within the article, in the namesake category, and seems to be common usage on the web. Chapters of books and songs in an album are both capitalized as formal nouns and I think this section of the deck of cards is equivalent. There is already some verbiage at that redirect so I'll need a WP:RM to make this change. Any concerns before I do that? RevelationDirect (talk) 08:34, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Merger proposal

I propose a merger of this page with Batons (suit). These articles both cover the same playing card suit. One is simply focusing more on the esoteric use of tarot cards that bear this suit. Tarot cards are actual playing cards, regardless of their subsequent use in cartomancy. — ★Parsa ☞ talk 19:55, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

Strongly oppose. The suits don't even have the same name. The playing card suit is never called "wands" - that's clearly a cartomancy term. In any case, most cartomancy packs are tailor-made for fortune telling, the designs are not the same and their usage is completely different. Furthermore cartomancers give a whole raft of meanings to the cards that have nothing to do with gaming and are meaningless to card players. Furthermore many playing card packs with a suit of batons (aka clubs) are not even tarot packs - they are ordinary 40 or 48-card Spanish or Italian playing card packs used solely for playing card games. What this article needs is expanding, not conflating with an article on fortune telling which will simply generate confusion. Bermicourt (talk) 21:05, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

BTW You currently have the proposal in 2 places which will cause confusion. Please delete one of them and link both pages to the same discussion. Bermicourt (talk) 21:10, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

Suit of Wands

Per the ngrams this looks to be uppercased in the tarot proper name. Dicklyon, where would the ngrams be incorrect? Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 05:16, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

And look at Suit of Cups. That seems to be uppercased as well. Randy Kryn (talk) 05:22, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

There are lots of ways the n-gram stats can be interpreted and misinterpreted, and I'm sure you've seen some. For one thing, a majority capitalization is not enough to imply "consistently capitalized". For another, caps are usually over-represented due to the capture of stats from headings and titles, including running heads in books, and such. If you turn off smoothing in your search you'll see a whole bunch of those capped Wands were from 2003 – possibly from one book, though that's hard to track down. Dicklyon (talk) 05:24, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

Your example also shows uppercased wands prevalent when considering both "suit of Wands" and "Suit of Wands". And look at this one for Suit of Swords, suit of swords, etc., uppercasing seems the common form. Randy Kryn (talk) 05:27, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

As for the fourth suit, 'Suit of coins' lowercased seems correct, but the uppercasing of the tarot term Suit of Pentacles seems obvious. Randy Kryn (talk) 05:41, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes, Pentacles. 2003 was a big year for tarot books with capped suits. Dicklyon (talk) 05:49, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

And yes the other problem with the n-gram counts is that there's often not enough context. Tarot vs playing cards in this case. But as you see when they have different names (coins/pentacles) that can help the interpretation. Dicklyon (talk) 05:51, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

You can also see that before the tarot craze of the 21st century, things were less leaning toward capitalization. Dicklyon (talk) 05:52, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

I was not very aware of all this when I saw the "Suit of x" articles with lowercase x and so much inconsistent uppercase elsewhere. Someone had apparently decided that lowercase was best even for tarot. Or maybe that lowercase decision was made before Bermicourt split the playing card suits out to separate articles. Anyway, it's a mess, and I'm not happy that tarot should get to have all that special capitalization of stuff that's not proper names, but I have more important things to worry about. I'm surprsised to see you repeating clear falsehoods like that NFL Draft is the common style, the same day you seem to be taking n-gram data seriously. Dicklyon (talk) 05:56, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

See Talk:Batons (suit) for where an editor wanted to re-merge the batons and wands, and Bermicourt strongly objected. I similarly and more recently proposed deleting/merging his spinoffs, but that didn't go at all well. Part of the trouble is that the "Suit of x" articles still talk about the playing cards a bit; they should be made more clear that they're about tarot. I still wouldn't cap them, but that's me. Dicklyon (talk) 06:13, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

And is every card in a tarot deck really independently notable? Seems nutty. Dicklyon (talk) 06:14, 7 January 2024 (UTC)