Talk:Waipaparoa / Howick Beach

Requested move 10 December 2023

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) Vanderwaalforces (talk) 10:28, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

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Waipaparoa / Howick Beach → Howick Beach – Per WP:COMMONNAME, WP:CONCISE, and MOS:SLASH.

Google News shows just nine results for any form of the dual name - and of those, two are discussing the name rather than calling the place by it, and another two use the dual name and proposed name interchangeably. In comparison, Google News shows 34 results for the proposed name - and a partial review suggests at least 90% are relevant and using the proposed name exclusively to refer to this location.

Google Scholar presents similar results, with one result, that discusses the name change rather than referring to the location, using the dual name, and several using the proposed title. BilledMammal (talk) 03:41, 10 December 2023 (UTC) — Relisting. Arbitrarily0 ^(talk) 14:49, 17 December 2023 (UTC) — Relisting. Queen of Hearts ❤️ (she/they 🎄 🏳️‍⚧️) 17:08, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

Oppose per WP:PRECISION, WP:RECOGNISABLE, and funnily enough, WP:COMMONNAME. I'm not sure how closely you looked at the sources you're citing, but you're clearly confused and demonstrating that the proposed title is nowhere near precise enough. Looking specifically at sources since 2018 (the year of the name change), we find that of the 19 English results for Howard Beach, 1 in 5 are actually talking about a beach in the UK and several others are talking about the suburb around the beach rather than the beach itself. As an aside, 13 of the 20 sources are from the same website, which appears to be little more than a community newsletter and doesn't really feel like a clear indication of widespread usage. Focusing on 2018-onwards does limit some of the sources for the dual name as well on the result, but there are still 6 (all from that same website, incidentally) which use the dual name. Meanwhile, there are only three scholar results since 2018 for Howick Beach - one of which, incidentally, proves that government agencies do not always use official names (but that's another discussion). One of these three is a club newsletter and another is a postgrad dissertation, neither of which are overly reliable.

Looking further afield then, and we find a wide range of sources such as tourism websites, more news, community groups, maps from multiple sources, gazetteers, and several more sources all using the dual name. Given your apparent confusion with a beach on the other side of the world, and that the dual name is far less likely to cause others to suffer the same fate, while also being an extremely common name, it's the obvious choice for the article title. Turnagra (talk) 09:26, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

First, there was no confusion with the beach in the UK; if you read my proposal, you will see that I recognize that a small number of the 34 results are not relevant.

Second, as for the suburb around the beach, I'm not seeing any sources that use "Howick Beach" in reference to it - they refer to it as "Howick" or "Howick Town".

Third, per WP:NAMECHANGES we don't give no weight to sources from before the official name change.

Fourth, your list of sources has has issues with independence (such as TopoMap, which is a direct mirror of LINZ), reliability, and more generally cherry picking. For example, you present Howick175 as evidence for the dual name, but a systematic review of their site by searching Google for all mentions of "Howick Beach" on their website finds 17 results. Of these 17 results:

• 13 use "Howick Beach"
• 3 use "Waipaparoa / Howick Beach"
• 1 uses both

My systematic review of news and scholarly sources demonstrates that Howick Beach is the common name; cherry picking exceptions does not disprove this. BilledMammal (talk) 09:48, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

1 in 5 of the results is not small, and as for the suburb there are a few of the recent ones which talk about variations of "flooding in Howard Beach", which makes no sense if talking about the beach itself as "at" or "on" would be used instead.

As for the so-called independence issues, yelling that they're not independent doesn't automatically make it so. Those sources meet all of the criteria at WP:IS and can't just be excluded with the wave of a hand. They clearly demonstrate strong and widespread usage of the dual name. Turnagra (talk) 17:35, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

as for the suburb there are a few of the recent ones which talk about variations of "flooding in Howard Beach" Can you link the sources that talk about flooding? My search finds only a single article, but I don't think that is one of the sources you are referring to as it is from before the official name change.

Those sources meet all of the criteria at WP:IS While some of the sources do I don't agree that all do - but I'm particularly surprised to hear you say that about TopoMap, as it is a direct mirror of LINZ?. However, that wasn't the main point I was making; my main point was that cherry picking sources doesn't tell us anything about the common name, as evidenced by the fact that when I did a systematic investigation into one of the sources you provided I found that it overwhelming supported "Howick Beach", not "Waipaparoa / Howick Beach". BilledMammal (talk) 17:50, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

Merge into Howick, New Zealand instead. Most of the text in this page is in the "History" section, and it seems to be copy-pasted from almost identical text in the Howick, New Zealand page (and likely other pages). (As an aside, we seem to have a big problem with one editor who likes to copy identical "History" text into multiple New Zealand towns' pages.) I don't see any need to have a separate page for the beach - as well as the suburb. We don't have separate 'beach' pages for the nearby suburbs/beaches "Cockle Bay", "Mellons Bay", or "Eastern Beach". PatricKiwi (talk) 15:02, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

• Support merge per Patric. --Spekkios (talk) 01:13, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Oppose, as per @Turnagra

This is in effect a slow edit war attempting to reverse old decisions Somej (talk) 09:01, 21 December 2023 (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.