Talk:Plaza de California

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This article needs citations to reliable sources before 2023 ASAP or it needs to be deleted

Latest comment: 12 days ago4 comments2 people in discussion

I am thoroughly familiar with the history of California and the history of Sacramento in particular. I've never heard of the plaza in front of the Capitol referred to as the Plaza de California. And yes, I am familiar with that plaza, since I shot photos of two buildings near that plaza for Wikipedia (the Unruh Building and the Mosk Building).

All the sources cited in this article before 2020 do not actually use the term Plaza de California. They just refer to the plaza or the fountain on Capitol Mall in front of the Capitol.

Every reliable source on Google Books that refers to Plaza de California before 2023 is specifically referring to a plaza at the 1915 Panama–California Exposition in San Diego.

My guess is that someone may have applied the term to the plaza in front of the Capitol at some point in 2022 or 2023, either in error, or as an accident, joke, or deliberate misinformation, and then it spread from there.

If someone doesn't cite some reliable sources ASAP from before 2023, I am going to nominate this article for deletion. Coolcaesar (talk) 08:13, 12 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

No idea when the term began usage, but it is used in multiple prominent publications and even in a caption from an academic source - which is all good enough for me on the article's existence. I'll start looking to see if I find earlier sources, but either way I will fight you on this one. Cristiano Tomás (talk) 13:43, 12 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Let's see. As of today's date, June 12, 2024, the only two citations to books in the article which use the term Plaza de California are to a 2023 horror novel published by OtherLove Publishing, a small indie publisher whose address is a P.O. Box in Organ, New Mexico, population 323, and a 2024 nonfiction book about a "wedding march" in opposition to Governor Gavin Newsom's COVID-19 restrictions published by Histria Books, a small indie publisher whose address is a mail drop in a strip mall in North Las Vegas. Those are not exactly reliable sources in the sense of books about the history of Sacramento or the Capitol Mall.

Yes, some of the sources cited in the article are reliable sources, but I don't see any of them using that term in body text. The only place where it's appearing in those sources is in captions of photographs taken at Governor Gavin Newsom's second inauguration in January 2023. Which supports a reasonable inference that someone at the inauguration (probably a PR flack trying to articulate ground rules for the news media) incorrectly referred to the plaza on Capitol Mall as such, and then the photographers blindly adopted that term when they submitted photo captions to their news services or newswires. (I briefly worked in journalism when I was young, for outlets owned by two major media conglomerates.)

The SDSU Web page about a Sacramento postcard dates from 2024 and the term is used only in the SDSU metadata for the postcard as expressly displayed on the web page. Which implies the archivist could have picked it up from the 2023 news coverage of Newsom's second inauguration. The postcard itself does not use the term.

It's also interesting that the cited sources which are actually about the Capitol Mall or the plaza itself do not use the term.

If you can point me in the direction of a reliable source actually focused on the history of Sacramento or the Capitol Mall from before 2023 which clearly uses the term Plaza de California to refer to the plaza on Capitol Mall, then I will gladly stand corrected. But I already checked on Google Books. It looks like what you're more likely to find is something like this, a 1987 travel guide to Sacramento which only refers to the "fountain plaza" on Capitol Mall. (The current address of the publisher of this book corresponds to an office building in a New Orleans suburb.) --Coolcaesar (talk) 14:55, 12 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Very interesting. Please allow me some time to do my own research into the term and its history. I appreciate your insight. Cristiano Tomás (talk) 18:54, 12 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

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