Talk:St. Paul's Cathedral (San Diego)

New article

Thanks for the new article - very well done! It may need a little trimming, as a little too boosterish, but you have supplied more than enough references to prove its notability. I do wonder about the title. Wikipedia standards for such an article would suggest a title of either St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral (San Diego, California) (not abbreviating the state name) or St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral (San Diego) (since San Diego is one of the American cities that does not need the state added to its name). Give the title some thought. As for deleting the older redirect page, I would prefer a redirect to this page - waiting until the actual name of this page is settled. --MelanieN (talk) 19:07, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Actually I went ahead and removed the PROD from the other article and redirected it here. We can always modify the redirect if this article name gets changed. --MelanieN (talk) 19:11, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

To User:Slforsberg, I hope you aren't too unhappy with the changes I have made to the article. A lot of the details about services and specific programs had to go, as did the promotional language. I also put the references into Wikipedia style and added categories. --MelanieN (talk) 23:31, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Hi User:MelanieN, thank you for your help. Naturally I thought it was perfect the way it was (joke ;-) but I have no objection to making it conform to Wiki standards. I would be happy to change the title as you suggest, what is the best way to do that? Also if people would like to link this to Project Christianity or Project San Diego, that's fine, again I do not know the best way to establish those links. Thanks. Slforsburg (talk) 01:02, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

The links to the projects are already established, via the templates above. Somebody from those projects may come around and do the "evaluation", I didn't do that. As for the name, I know somebody who is very much into Wikipedia policy regarding titles; I think I will ask him what he thinks the name should be. --MelanieN (talk) 03:16, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

K thx. I will monitor and see what you all suggest and how to do it. Slforsburg (talk) 04:57, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

I boldly went ahead and changed it to what I thought it should be... St. Paul's Cathedral (San Diego). Based on the cathedral's website, the most common name is obviously St. Paul's Cathedral, but it needs to be disambiguated, and the natural disambiguator is the city it is in. I also fixed the entry on the St. Paul's Cathedral (disambiguation) dab page. If anyone thinks it should be something else, we probably should go through a WP:RM request. --Born2cycle (talk) 06:47, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, B2C. I should have known you would leave out "Episcopal" too! I definitely asked the right person. --MelanieN (talk) 13:27, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

The name Episcopal

Hi Folks, I do NOT agree with leaving out the denomination "Episcopal" for the following reasons. First, this is used extensively by sister Cathedrals. If you just search for Episcopal Cathedral on Wikipedia you get of slew of them including numerous Trinity Episcopal Cathedrals, as well as specific examples such as St Mark's Episcopal Cathedral, Seattle, St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral in Memphis, St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh (Episcopal) --you get the idea. This is also used for Episcopal parish churches. Use of this term distinguishes them from Roman Catholic. Someone searching for the Episcopal Cathedral in San Diego might ignore St Paul's, assuming it is Roman Catholic. OTOH, if you insist this should be Episcopal-less, it should be applied consistently , and the term Episcopal removed from ALL the sister Cathedra and the Episcopal parish churches. Thanks. Slforsburg (talk) 17:23, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Welcome to the inconsistent world of Wikipedia titles. You're correct that there are several Trinity Episcopal Cathedrals. But we also have

• Trinity Cathedral (Phoenix, Arizona)
• Trinity Cathedral (Omaha, Nebraska)
• Trinity Cathedral (Cleveland, Ohio)

Why the inconsistency? Perhaps because some Episcopal cathedrals actually use "Episcopal" in their names while others don't. Or perhaps no one has noticed until now, or taken the time to do anything about it. In this case, I think it's okay to leave "Episcopal" out. As for the rest, it would be a good and useful project to go through each of the Episcopal cathedral articles, and see whether they comply with our naming conventions - I might even take on a few myself. Dohn joe (talk) 18:26, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps because some Episcopal cathedrals actually use "Episcopal" in their names while others don't. Exactly! I was just teasing B2C a little with my comment above, because he and I have sometimes clashed over names - he likes to keep them as simple as possible. But in the present case, there is a very straightforward reason for leaving out the word "Episcopal" - the church itself does not use it as part of their name, as you can see from the church website. The name of an institution is the name the institution itself uses, and this institution calls itself "St. Paul's Cathedral". (Also note the period after St., and the apostrophe.) So the current name is exactly correct. As for the other cathedrals, we would have to look at each case and see what they call themselves - and that should be the name of their Wikipedia article. --MelanieN (talk) 18:36, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

P.S. In any case, Slforsburg, your original name St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral (San Diego, CA) still exists here as a redirect to this article, so no one is going to miss seeing this article for lack of the word "Episcopal". --MelanieN (talk) 18:40, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

I didn't review all of them, but if you go to the website of the first one in your list, St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral, Seattle, you'll see they use St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral as their full name in the title of their homepage.

That that article title is disambiguated with a comma instead of parentheses is unfortunate.

In general, we try to reflect the actual name of the topic, as used in reliable sources, in the title of the article. For a given institution, their own website is about as reliable a source as you can get for what its name is. --Born2cycle (talk) 19:56, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

You will find that this is true for many, many of the Episcopal churches I have pointed out in Wikipedia, not jut the Cathedrals: that is, the word Episcopal is in their wikipedia name, but not on their website. Isn't the goal to be unambiguous? As a user, I'd rather not waste my time clicking through to a church only to find out it is the wrong denomination. And since this rule is not consistently applied, I'd rather go for the clarity than the letter of the law. (Man, you folks are a hard crowd! ;-) Slforsburg (talk) 20:01, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Slforsburg, is it really "clarity" to add "Episcopal"? Is it even accurate? I note that the cathedral self-indentifies using both words "Episcopal" and "Anglican". Who are we to decide which term to add to its title? (LOL about a hard crowd! Welcome to Wikipedia! ;-) Everything here happens by consensus, and sometimes consensus doesn't go our way! But you will learn to accept it, and to "give as good as you get" - because the result of the consensus process is a better encyclopedia.) --MelanieN (talk) 20:43, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Yes, the goal is to be unambiguous - so that no two topics with articles in WP have the same title. By disambiguating with "(San Diego)", we achieve that goal. In other words:

• Unambiguous  Done.

If there are other articles that have Episcopal in the title, but the topic is not commonly referred to that way in reliable sources (including its own website), then those titles should be fixed. It's certainly no excuse to perpetuate the error here. --Born2cycle (talk) 20:59, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

BTW I took a look at the articles titled "St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral something-or-other". I discovered that St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral and St Paul's Episcopal Cathedral were both set up as redirects to a particular cathedral, even though there are others equally likely as targets. So I changed both of them to redirect to St. Paul's Cathedral (disambiguation) instead. --MelanieN (talk) 21:09, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

I'll leave you guys to it, then, and see how many Episcopals remain when you are done....! ;-) Slforsburg (talk) 21:20, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Turned out one of those redirect target articles wasn't even an Episcopal church - it's an Anglican church in Scotland! In any case I made sure that the original targets ARE listed at the disambiguation page St. Paul's Cathedral (disambiguation), so they should be findable. And your original title with the word Episcopal in it is still here, redirecting to the current page, so it should be findable as well. --MelanieN (talk) 22:56, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

So as long as the moved page with the rejected title remains in place, we're good. Somehow that's not a very satisfactory solution even if the purists prefer it. ;-) Slforsburg (talk) 23:41, 19 June 2012 (UTC)