Talk:Washington Medical College

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Name (and some rewriting of the lede to reflect this, maybe)[edit]

It's been suggested that this article to be moved to "Washington University of Baltimore"..

One confusing thing about all this is that, despite usually being named "University", it was always a medical school (maybe this was common back then, dunno).

It existed as "Washington University" 1827-1833 (7 years), it was then named as "Washington Medical College" 1933-1938 (6 years), then as "Washington University of Baltimore" 1838-1851 (13 years), but during a decline-to-oblivion phase. Then after a hiatus as just "Washington University" 1867-1878 (11 years).

Thus

Washington University, 7 years
Washington Medical College, 6 years
Washington University of Baltimore, 13 years
Washington University, 11 years

Quite a dog's breakfast. The only question is which name is mostly likely to be familiar to the plurality of readers such that on seeing just the title they are like "Oh, I get what this article is about". There's just no way to know I think. We also have to control for those readers who aren't familiar with the entity under any name before reading this article. Google Ngrams can't help as there are many Washington Universities.

Since there's absolutely no way to know, we are thrown back on Wikipedia:Article Titles and the 5 virtues of titles: Recognizability, Naturalness, Precision, Concision and Consistency. "Washington University of Baltimore" fails Precision because it doesn't explain what the entity is (a medical school). "Washington Medical College" is slightly shorter than "Washington University (medical school)" or "Washington University of Baltimore" if that matters for conciseness. As to consistency, I think we avoid disambiguation parens all things being equal. The other two Virtues, I have no idea which title meets that best, if any.

FWIW, "Washington University of Baltimore" was only the name when the entity was taking it's swan dive to oblivion. My preference is "Washington Medical College" because that is a unique name, was indeed one of the names of the entity, and shows very clearly at first glance what the entity is -- in other words, has Recognizability, altho the current title does this also, but a tiny bit less easily IMO.

On the other hand, it was named "Washington University" for a plurality of its years. This to me means nothing and is bean-counting, and has zero to do with serving the reader. If someone wants to do an survey of sources that might tell us more, but as long as the proper redirects are in place I'm not willing to do that. Herostratus (talk) 02:37, 6 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 30 August 2022[edit]

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. (closed by non-admin page mover) Extraordinary Writ (talk) 03:55, 6 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Washington University (medical school) → Washington Medical College – Per above section, which hasn't gotten any feedback so this is almost a technical move. The current name uses parenthetical disambiguation when we don't need to, and also could be confused with Washington University Medical School. The proposed title tells what the entity is (a medical school); another possible title, Washington University of Baltimore, doesn't do this, and is longer. Herostratus (talk) 00:29, 30 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Support per nom. -- Necrothesp (talk) 10:28, 31 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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.