Talk:French fleet at the siege of Toulon

Requested move 27 February 2021

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: Moved (non-admin closure) (t · c) buidhe 16:02, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

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French fleet at the Siege of Toulon → French fleet at the siege of Toulon – Lowercase siege – Sources seldom cap siege in the context of "the siege of X", and in particular do not cap it in "the siege of Toulon" in sentences. Per WP:NCCAPS, our naming convention is to use sentence case except for proper names, and per MOS:CAPS proper names are generally taken to be things that are consistently capped in sources. This is not that, so lowercase is what our guidelines suggest. Dicklyon (talk) 01:06, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

• Data:
  • Upper/lower usage stats in books shows overwhelming majority lowercase, even without excluding heading and titles and such.
  • Data on other sieges are similarly mostly lowercase by a wide margin (the exception the Siege of Chicago is from the book title Miami and the Siege of Chicago).

  Dicklyon (talk) 01:14, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

• Comment - For me, this boils down to whether Siege of Toulon is a proper noun or not. My view is that it is and should be capitalised accordingly. The ngrams provided by Dicklyon show that, in 2019, the difference in the use of caps was 0.0000002909%. That is next to no difference! But even if there was a big difference, this is about English usage and in that respect, history books are not a useful guide.--Ykraps (talk) 08:00, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

  That's funny. Since you are fixated on percentages, maybe you'll like this way better, where it shows the lowercase uses are 500% to 1500% of the capped uses. And this is from all English book, not just history books (though where else you'll find it mentioned, I'm not able to guess). Dicklyon (talk) 23:54, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

  I don't understand how that ngram shows what you say it does. Doesn't that merely show that fewer books have been written containing either variant?--Ykraps (talk) 07:30, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

  See Google Ngram Viewer. The absolute percentages are not that interesting. I think it saying that there about a 1 in 100 Million chance that a random 4-gram pulled from a book will be "the siege of Toulon". The second one is the ratio of the probabilities, or frequencies, which do change over time as a few more people cap it (likely partly in response to finding it capped in Wikipedia). Still, in most recent books it's 5X more lowercase siege than capped. Dicklyon (talk) 17:52, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

• Support per WP:NCCAPS, MOS:CAPS. Not even close to consistently capitalized this way in sources, so we don't do it on WP. "whether [it] is a proper noun or not. My view is that it is and should be capitalised accordingly" is just opinion grounded in nothing. If it were regarded as a proper noun phrase in English, then sources would near-consistently capitalize it, but they do not.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:08, 1 March 2021 (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.