Fort Towson

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was moved. --BDD (talk) 16:16, 14 March 2013 (UTC) (non-admin closure)[reply]

Harrison-Crawford State Forest → Harrison–Crawford State Forest – In WP, we format connections of distinct names with en dash, per MOS:DASH. This forest is named for the two distinct counties that it is overlaps, so it fits this pattern. I didn't think this was controversial when I moved it before. Apparently Nyttend didn't think it controversial to use admin powers to delete the properly tagged redirect, move it back citing WP:ENGVAR and formatting on a web page here, and again tagged the redirect so that I can't simply revert his bold move. Is there any reason not to fix this to follow MOS? I see no possible relevance of ENGVAR here. Dicklyon (talk) 03:03, 3 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• (1) MOS is fickle and frequently changing; we can't depend on it. (2) US usage consistently uses hyphens, so if you want to depend on MOS, WP:TIES says that we should follow local usage and use the hyphen. (3) See WP:COMMONNAME. I'm finding no sources that use your preferred title, while official sources such as [1] and [2] and unofficial reliable sources such as [3] and [4] consistently use the current title, and the ones I've found that don't use "Harrison-Crawford State Forest" are unofficial (and typically unreliable) ones using something like "Harrison-crawford State Forest" (robot-generated?), "Harrison Crawford State Forest", and "Harrison / Crawford state forest". If we change to your preferred title, we're telling the state of Indiana and the USGS that they've made a mistake in their name for the forest; do we really know better than they do? Nyttend (talk) 03:28, 3 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Perhaps it would help if I responded to everything you said. A simple common-sense move like this one doesn't need discussion; it's not as if the page had been moved after some long discussion with lots of input or as if it had been the subject of contention over the whole name, unlike pages with descriptive yet contentious titles, e.g. "2010 Pakistani aggression against India" versus "2010 Indian aggression against Pakistan". Nyttend (talk) 03:37, 3 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have to disagree with pretty much everything you just wrote. (1) The MOS section on dashes in not fickle or unstable. It was updated in the summer of 2011 after a long powwow in which 60 editors came to a consensus, and have been stable since. It specifies the en dash as the styling for this kind of construction. (2) There's is nothing about US or other English varieties that's coupled to the choice of dash typography. The stylings in sources are very mixed, as you found, with many sources choosing to avoid the hyphen, which suggests a closer coupling than the intended meaning would want; that's exactly the kind of thing that the en dash was invented for, though some prefer to use space or slash. And, your use of admin powers to undo a change that you didn't like is inexcusable. And finally, nobody is telling anyone that a different styling of the name in a different context is a mistake; in WP, it would be a mistake to not follow the style suggested by the MOS, but others use different styles. Dicklyon (talk) 21:30, 3 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Support move. There is no such thing as 'Harrison-Crawford' county. It's not the first time I've seen Nyttend's 'heads I win, tails you lose' type of argumentation around here, and I suspect it won't be the last time. WP:TIES is all about spelling variants between different codes of English, and WP:STRONGNAT is about date formatting. Yes, I've seen WP:COMMONNAME, combined with sources-based approach, advocated for article titles, but the consensus doesn't favour such a punctuation override of WP:MOSDASH. This is the first time I've seen the above arguments invoked for a hyphen vs dash. I don't mind so much if 'space' was the separator here (ie there was no dash nor hyphen), but hyphen is clearly ignorant usage. -- Ohconfucius ^{ping / poke} 02:37, 13 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per Dicklyon and Ohconfucius. Clear case of MOS:DASH. The sources are all over the shop so we should go with our own house style. Jenks24 (talk) 05:58, 14 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.