Wikipedia:Move review/Log/2019 May

2019 May

Chairman

Chairman (talk|edit|history|logs|links|archive|watch) (RM) (Discussion with closer)

The closing rationale hinges on the line from WP:COMMONNAME that reads When there are multiple names for a subject, all of which are fairly common, and the most common has problems, it is perfectly reasonable to choose one of the others. In discussion with this Cuchullain, he stated his view that "Something that gets millions of returns in searches of the sources can be described as "fairly common", even if it's not the most common. During the RM, several participants provided evidence that "chairperson" is significantly less-common than "chairman" or "chair" when describing this topic. Specifically, User:Yair rand reported, without challenge, that the NOW Corpus shows "chairman" with 646,437 uses and "chairperson" with 76,080, for text since 2017. This confirms long-term Google Ngram evidence I provided, again unchallenged, that chairperson is provably not common.

Would Cuchullain claim a term is "fairly common" if there were only a hundred-thousand results? Ten-thousand? Twelve? I believe this move should be overturned based on Cuchullain's incorrect estimation of what "fairly common" constitutes, because that meaning in general language and the spirit of that line in that policy means to consider proportionate commonality, not an arbitrary quantity. Netoholic @ 16:36, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

• Relist to determine which gender-neutral term is the appropriate article title. Even taking everything the closer stated as fact, he chose to move the article to a gender-neutral term that is much less common than an alternative gender-neutral term, which would seem to violate at least the spirit of WP:COMMONNAME. There needs to be another discussion about which gender-neutral term to use. Even the closer said so, but says he prefers to wait. Well, I see no reason to wait, as this is something that should be discussed now while the issue is still fresh and involved editors are still engaged in the process. Rreagan007 (talk) 17:35, 16 May 2019 (UTC)
• Endorse as someone uninvolved in the original discussion (or any of the preceding ones). As was stated in the close discussion by the closing sysop I think if anything is clear here, it's that a decisive majority of participants disfavor the former title of "chairman" and there are solid grounds for that based, based on both Wikipedia practice and real world experience[1]. This seems an entirely accurate reading of the consensus of the editors who participated in the discussion. The closing statement addressed what elements of COMMONNAME did and didn't appear to hold true in this case and is a reasonable application of that policy. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:10, 16 May 2019 (UTC)
• Endorse as closer. First off, it's clear from the discussion that most participants favored the move. Several who opposed preferred a different gender-neutral title (something recommended by MOS:GNL). In other words, a wide majority of participants found the "chairman" title problematic. I believe that a term that's in demonstrable use in millions of sources, not to mention regular parlance, is "fairly common" in the sense that COMMONNAME intends. Given that, I saw no reason not to uphold the consensus in the discussion, which was in favor of the proposed name (and widely in favor of deprecating the former name). I believe this is a reasonable decision based on applicable policy and the WP:RMCI.--Cúchullain ^t/c 18:20, 16 May 2019 (UTC)
• Endorse close and Speedy close. As one who prefers a disambiguated Chair (e.g., Chair (role)) variant over Chairperson, but nevertheless recognized I'm in the minority about that since the ranked multi-choice survey of the March 22 RM demonstrated no consensus for a disambiguated Chair variant, and did reveal consensus for Chairperson over Chairman, I proposed this particular move to Chairperson accordingly which confirmed the same 60/40 consensus favoring Chairperson over Chairman that I recognized in the March 22 RM ranked survey. I don't see any grounds on which the closer could have chosen an alternative gender-neutral term as Rreagan007 suggests, especially since the explicit move to a disambiguated Chair was recently rejected by the community. As to the claim made in this MRV nom, consensus in the discussion clearly disagrees about the significance of that argument, and the closer read that correctly. Expecting a closer to go against such a strong consensus is not within any closer's bounds of decision-making. --В²C ☎ 18:29, 16 May 2019 (UTC)
• Endorse close as participant The claim that this terms is not "fairly common" is utterly ridiculous. The first two images in the article are of chairs of international committees whose placards say "chairperson". A recent section on the talk page shows an additional three images of chairs of international deliberative bodies with placards showing them as "chairperson". The ANC refers to its highest positions almost exclusively by "chairperson" (this is well reflected in contemporary corpora). The discussion pointed out why Google hits and Ngrams are not reliable for determining commonality because, given historical and contemporary gender dynamics, positions of power have been predominantly occupied by men. Because of this, of course "chairman" will be more common historically because for most of history women were not even allowed to hold such positions of power. The use of corpora has also been amateurish. Because there are more chairmen than chairwomen we would expect a higher frequency of chairman because it represents both a generic and specific usage whereas chairperson is most commonly a generic.

So what we care about is not raw frequency but rather in what contexts is one used more often than expected given this difference in lexical scope. The NOW corpus gives us this functionality in the comparison tab. "Chairman" is significantly more likely than "chairperson" to appear when used around "John", "Mr", "Executive", "CEO", "Chief", and "Senate" all of which show a heavy statistical bias towards men. "Chairman" is significantly less likely than "chairperson" to be used around the word "commission". Using the NOW corpus's random sample function, I took a random sample of 100 contexts for "chairman" and "chairperson". 6% of uses of "chairperson" were unambiguously references to the position proper rather than a particular individual, and 8% were identified in the same sentence by a masculine pronoun. In the sample of "chairman" contexts, 0% were unambiguously in reference to the position (thought there was one that was unclear, so at least 99% referred to a specific individual) and 0% identified an individual using a feminine pronoun in the same sentence. As "chairperson" has a greater than expected distribution with "commission" and random samples of it in context show "chairman" is rarely if ever used as a generic, the corpus shows no support for the argument that "chairman" is a common generic term, let alone a gender neutral one.

It's absurd that someone can look at a corpus with thousands of hits in international news sources for "chairperson", be confronted with numerous chairs of international committees referred to as "chairperson" both generically and specifically, and then with a straight face contend that it's not a common term. The reason such an absurd argument is being clung to is because once we accept "chairperson" is not an obsure neologism, the COMMONNAME opposes lose all weight since, as I said in my support rationale, that policy does not require us to choose the name with the highest line on Ngrams. The supporters in the discussion recognized this, the closer noted that consensus, and correctly closed the discussion. Wugapodes [t^hɑk] [ˈkan.ˌʧɹɪbz] 21:08, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Boxing Day shooting

Boxing Day shooting (talk|edit|history|logs|links|archive|watch) (RM) (Discussion with closer)

Discussion was relisted ONCE instead of twice, with only two comments following the first relist Jax 0677 (talk) 15:42, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

• Endorse<uninvolved>. Per Wikipedia:Requested moves#Relisting, In general, discussions should not be relisted more than once before properly closing. The page also notes Despite this, discussions are occasionally relisted up to three times. However, due to the lack of further !votes after the first relist, a no consensus closure was entirely appropriate here. I'd advise waiting a couple of weeks and renominating at requested moves, but the closure was entirely appropriate, so this is the wrong process. SITH (talk) 16:40, 14 May 2019 (UTC)
• Endorse. The closing was entirely appropriate. Rreagan007 (talk) 01:32, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
• Endorse. <uninvolved> Relisting is irrelevant, or a waste of time. The discussion was going nowhere. Assuming hypothetically that a move *is* a good idea, the best way forward is to (1) acknowledge the failure of that nomination to gain the support of others; (2) wait ~ two months, to refresh your perspective and no annoy everyone else; (3) make a fresh RM nomination with a better rationale that addresses the underlying reasons for the opposition in the previous RM. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:30, 15 May 2019 (UTC)