Talk:S.T.S. (band)

Requested move 13 April 2024

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) Toadette^Edit! 11:55, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

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• S.T.S. → S.T.S. (band)
• M.A.S.K. → M.A.S.K. (franchise)
• K.O.D. → K.O.D. (Tech N9ne album)
• O.D.T. → O.D.T. (video game)
• A.T.O.M. → A.T.O.M. (TV series)

– Whether an abbreviation is spelled with a terminal period or not is a triviality. In all of these cases the title without the terminal period redirects somewhere else, so the title with the period should do the same. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 21:50, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

• Support per nom. If there's no primary topic for "ODT", then there's no primary topic for "O.D.T.", etc. Paintspot Infez (talk) 05:54, 14 April 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose, this is a shaky rationale. No evidence shown to justify primary/no primary for any of these. The existence of a redirect is not a justification. 162 etc. (talk) 16:25, 14 April 2024 (UTC)
• Support all This is too minor for SMALLDETAILS to apply and none of these seem obviously primary. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 20:34, 14 April 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose. I agree that the terminal period alone is too trivial even for WP:SMALLDETAILS – but we need to also consider periods vs. no-periods in a broader sense. In my experience, it's relatively rare to see period-separated initialisms in contemporary day-to-day usage. There are some specific initialisms where the periods remain in widespread usage (such as Q.E.D. or N.B.), but outside of these narrow cases I think we shouldn't expect that readers would proactively insert period separation into acronyms they're searching for. No one sticks periods into, say, PBS. The reason I bring this up is because, since readers are unlikely to use period-separated disambiguators where they're not already conventional, I don't think we should assume that (for instance) any given entry at STS is a title match for S.T.S.
  Following on this premise, a review of the relevant DAB pages suggests that there are virtually no other articles contesting the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC status for each period-separated initialism. (There exists M.A.S.K. (TV series), but it seems sensible for the franchise to hold the primary title above a series within it; Atom (disambiguation) also mentions an album called A.T.O.M, but that album doesn't have its own article, making it a nonissue.) Therefore, I believe the best approach is to leave the articles at their current titles, and to retarget the no-terminal-period redirects to point to these topics. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 14:42, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

  The use of periods to separate acronyms might have become somewhat dated and "old hat", probably due to companies forever in search of a more "streamlined" name, but I refuse to believe that no one would ever use dots in acronyms anymore unless they're searching for a specific band. At most, there's no way to know what they're looking for and we shouldn't presume to know. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 19:30, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

  My thinking on this one is that periods vs. no-periods is a textbook SMALLDETAILS case: if a reader goes to the trouble of entering a title in a less common, more work-intensive style, I feel it's fairly safe to assume that they have a specific reason for doing so. It's analogous to how we assume that a reader searching Ice Cube has capitalized the C on purpose, and so we don't redirect that title to ice cube. I don't believe that literally nobody would use dots simply to indicate the acronym in general, but I believe it's rare enough that a hatnote will be the best overall solution here. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 19:23, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

• Support per nom. Cfls (talk) 21:14, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
• Support per nom. None of these are primary topic for these abbreviations. -- Necrothesp (talk) 12:25, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
• Support per nom. Any abbreviation of STS, MASK, KOD, ODT, or ATOM could be written with periods, which is the nature of abbreviations. BD2412 T 03:48, 21 April 2024 (UTC)
• Support grammatical pedantry would insist on the periods. Further, S.T.S. is the Space Shuttle, as much documentation has full-stops -- 65.92.247.66 (talk) 11:34, 24 April 2024 (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.