Talk:Catholic Memorial School

Requested move

Catholic Memorial School (West Roxbury, Massachusetts) → Catholic Memorial School – Unnecessary disambiguation. Powers ^T 01:01, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

• Support. Agree with the nom. Good luck convincing Noetica if he sees this :) Jenks24 (talk) 04:51, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
• Oppose. Of course. What about Catholic Memorial High School (Wisconsin), co-inhabitant with the present article at the DAB page Catholic Memorial High School? What about Judge Memorial Catholic High School? Vincent Memorial Catholic High School? J. E. Cosgriff Memorial Catholic School? What about the dozens of pages listed at this DAB page: Memorial High School? Are we sure none of those would be sought under the vanilla rubric "Catholic Memorial School"? The proposed change cannot benefit anyone and can lead thousands astray. But I expect that consideration to affect no one here.

I can be convinced by argument and evidence, as some RMs and other discussions show. I am debating whether to bother presenting evidence and arguments in RMs at all though, since very few participants have been observed changing their minds or their votes – or even answering the hard questions. Let's just cast a vote, get a coloured thumb, and move on to something productive.

If a vocal and active minority really wants, needlessly and heedlessly, to weaken the encyclopedia and make it manifestly less useful to millions of users all over the world, of course that tiny minority must have its way, with their narrow and distorted interpretations of policy and guidelines to call on.

Who am I to stand in the way of decline? Let the voting continue; and adjourn the mourning for good sense and genuine dialogue sine die. ♥

Noetica^Tea? 05:20, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Such cases are easily handled with hatnotes, which would be necessary whether this page is disambiguated or not, since Catholic Memorial School already redirects here. Powers ^T 19:00, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

A patently, woefully inadequate response to my detailed submission here, Powers. But that should not concern you; it's the norm. Ignore the world and its information needs. Such concerns are peripheral; none of Wikipedia's business. Ignore Bishop Paschang Catholic School ("Bishop Paschang Catholic School was formerly known as the 'Bishop Paschang Memorial School' "); ignore Reading Central Catholic High School ("more completely, Monsignor Bornemann Memorial Central Catholic High School of Reading, Pennsylvania"); ignore John F. Kennedy Catholic High School (Burien, Washington) ("formerly known as John F. Kennedy Memorial High School, but changed its name with the beginning of the 2009/2010 academic year in order to reflect its Roman Catholic roots"), since we must trim every title that can be trimmed down to its bare minimum length, on whatever pretext we can find. If the good alumni of Kennedy Catholic are months behind the cutting edge, that's their bad luck. "Primary topic" must be shoe-horned in as invincibly paramount.

Let the voting continue, and let the numbers be mechanically counted. We'll continue to talk past each other and ignore the big picture, and the usefulness of Wikipedia. Fair arrangement? Sure it is! ♥ Noetica^Tea? 01:36, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Your sarcasm makes it nearly impossible to hold a reasonable dialog. Powers ^T 18:02, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Powers, if from our past encounters I had any reason to expect responsive dialogue, I would certainly assume good faith and proceed in the hope that we might actually exchange ideas. Since your style has been to start a discussion, expressing your own point of view, and then not stay to answer questions that challenge your assumptions, rationality is to no avail. Do not be affronted if I resort to sarcasm when you are unable to define a proper noun, or unwilling to consider afresh the usefulness of Wikipedia to its readers. A hidebound adherence to rules, narrowly interpreted, is against the spirit of the Project. Go read about sphexishness: "This iteration can be repeated again and again, with the Sphex never seeming to notice what is going on, never able to escape from its programmed sequence of behaviors." (☻) Noetica^Tea? 01:43, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

• Support. There is no other article currently on WP that is or reasonably could be titled precisely "Catholic Memorial School". When article titles are not in confict (i.e., not identical), any disambiguation, if necessary, is better handled by hatnotes than by adding artificial parenthetical phrases to the topic's real name. In this case, a {{distinguish}} hatnote pointing to the Wisconsin high school might be reasonable, if not strictly necessary. It is unlikely any significant number of readers will be looking for any other school that currently has an article on WP by searching for or linking to that specific phrase. Station1 (talk) 04:44, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

With respect, Station1, we just don't know that. We don't know how readers will interrogate Wikipedia – through Google, as is often their way in, or in the search box at the top right of the Wikipedia display. Some have a half-remembered name or phrase in mind, or one that is superseded, and they will try variants until they get what they are after. The notions "Catholic", "memorial", and "school" are so generic, and apply to so many topics (with articles, or so far lacking an article), that we should not make brisk assumptions of the sort you do here. Indeed, of the sort normally made in RMs. We know Wikipedia so well that we forget how things are for naive searchers, who outnumber us by orders of magnitude. This has become a pervasive problem, and it needs to be tackled systematically in a broader forum than this. Admins closing these RMs would do well to think freshly also. Too mechanical; too heedless of readers' interests; too sphexish. Noetica^Tea? 03:35, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

It's true we don't know that. It's equally true we don't know the opposite. We can only use our judgment, based on evidence and experience, as to what is more likely or less likely to be the case. I think it's better to serve what I believe are the larger number of users who know what they're looking for, rather than the much smaller number who don't; the latter have internal and external search engine to find what they need. You may honestly disagree, but to accuse those who disagree with you of thinking mechanically and ignoring readers' interests is not only somewhat insulting but, in most cases, wrong. Station1 (talk) 05:27, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

• Oppose. Unnecessary deletion of useful disambiguation. The article needs a lot of work on sourcing more than it needs a move; I added a few tags and did some copyedits to bring it toward WP conformance. Dicklyon (talk) 02:46, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
• Oppose Per Dicklyon, which is all that needs to be said about the matter. Greg L (talk) 03:59, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
• Oppose—Ah, sorry to come in late; I haven't had time to check Noetica's contribs page for about a week. The matter of specificity is difficult for article titles, and most editors acknowledge that we need to do some serious thinking about it at WP:TITLE and elsewhere. At the very least, we need more detail to give editors a more nuanced feeling for what is too much and what is too little. Some of our current practices (based on interpretations of wording put into wp:title without sufficient discussion, IMO) are the easy way out and is producing problems where over-general article titles appear in a list (as opposed to the specific context of an inline wikilink/pipe). It's a particular problem in google search results and in category pages, where readers will be irritated by having to divert to the article itself to find they've gone down a rabbit hole. It's worsened by the frequent disregarding of our rules about avoiding unnecessary capitalisation: we haven't yet reached the stage where caps or downcasing each send a reliable signal. Even as proposed with caps, I find Catholic Memorial School dangerously general, even if it's a formal name (does the school really use just three words on its letterhead? There must be many such schools in the world with the same title or part-title. If editors are concerned with the length, I could personally live with the removal of the state. Tony (talk) 08:04, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

  PS Noetica, I scuttled to the article on Sphex but didn't get the wry point you probably intended. Maybe I'm too tired. Powers, let's be kinder to each other and be slow to accuse. Sometimes things come over on-wiki that weren't intended. Tony (talk) 08:09, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Fair enough, Tony. Because people are busy I had already given the summary from that link. See this, above: "This iteration can be repeated again and again, with the Sphex never seeming to notice what is going on, never able to escape from its programmed sequence of behaviors." The point, of course, is that we have to move beyond stereotyped and blinkered behaviour in these RMs and creatively consider the real issues. The wasp Sphex famously cannot do that; we should be better at it on Wikipedia (despite interesting analogies to ant nests, beehives, and other collectives).

Noetica^Tea? 11:06, 6 December 2011 (UTC)