Talk:List of presidents of Austria

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Remove numbering?[edit]

Should were remove the numbering of the presidents, based on this argument? GoodDay (talk) 15:22, 2 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 12 May 2019[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. There is a narrow consensus to move the page, it should be noted that consensus can change and while prior consensus is a precedent, it does not override present consensus. Participants are encouraged to formulate MOS guidelines on this particular issue, possibly via a wider community RfC. (closed by non-admin page mover) qedk (t 桜 c) 20:20, 19 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

– Per MOS:JOBTITLES: "Offices, titles, and positions such as president, king, emperor, grand duke, lord mayor, pope, bishop, abbot, chief financial officer, and executive director are common nouns and therefore should be in lower case when used generically. They are capitalized... when a formal title for a specific entity... is not plural." Major style guides such as AP Stylebook and The Chicago Manual of Style explicitly state that "presidents" (plural) should always be lower case and that "president" (singular) should be upper case only when preceding a president's name. Surtsicna (talk) 12:41, 12 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • Opposed. We have had this debate many many times, ... community consensus is against this interpretation of MOS:JOBTITLES. Consensus is that since the title "President of Italy" (etc) is a proper noun and thus capitalized, it should also be capitalized when written in the plural. Context is important in applying MOS:JOBITLES properly. The words "president", "king", "mayor" etc are normally generic (and thus not a proper name) so they are not normally capitalized (in either the singular or the plural). However, when "of X" is added, these do indeed become proper names (they are the name of specific offices) and thus should be capitalized (in both the singular and the plural). It is "King of England", in the singular and "Kings of England" in the plural. To illustrate why it is capitalized in the plural... let me give a parallel example: when referring to the barbecue held by the family of a man named Fred Smith, one writes "On Friday, the Fred Smiths held a barbecue" - you do not shift to lower case simply because the proper name "Fred Smith" is written in the plural. Blueboar (talk) 15:00, 12 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • No such consensus was reached anywhere on Wikipedia. That "presidents of Italy" should somehow be capitalized is not grounded in any style guide nor indeed in basic English-language orthography. It directly contradicts Wikipedia's own style guide as well as the world's leading style guides. AP Stylebook says the word "president" should be capitalized "only as a formal title before one or more names" and "lowercase in all other uses". The Chicago Manual of Style says that "in formal academic prose", "civil titles are capitalized only when used as part of the name". We have had this debate many times, most recently over at Talk:List of governors of New York, which ended in the consensus that Wikipedia should follow its own style guide and established rules of orthography. There is no need to flip over backwards by coming up with irrelevant analogies when reputable publications and Wikipedia's own style guide say that this specific word in this context should not be capitalized. Surtsicna (talk) 15:20, 12 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Consensus is not necessarily formed in one single location. Any single RM closure can be swayed by who shows up with limited participation. If we examine multiple RM discussions, on the other hand, we can get a better indication of broad consensus... the aggregate does a better job at indicating what the actual community consensus is. Multiple RM discussions have repeatedly closed in favor of keeping the capitalization. Blueboar (talk) 15:37, 12 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
And consensus should not be determined by who shows up (only three people showed up at the recent Talk:List of chancellors of Germany discussion). Arguments should matter. We need a good reason to ignore the world's most reputable style guides, our own manual of style, and basic orthography. I cannot see how they could be overridden by personal interpretations of orthography, which would be called original research or POV if it were article content. Surtsicna (talk) 15:53, 12 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Look beyond the RM header... The second half of the Presidents of Germany RM contained an extensive discussion explicitly on the capitalization issue. Blueboar (talk) 21:59, 12 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
At least four RMs have tilted against the outcome for List of Presidents of Germany since its last discussion (please see below for a list of them). Also, we also have an inconsistency with List of German presidents by longevity. —BarrelProof (talk) 19:09, 13 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
There is also inconsistency between the incorrect List of Presidents of the United States and the correct List of presidents of the United States by age. Please see this RM from a year ago as well as this RM also from a year ago. Paine Ellsworth, ed.  put'r there  11:49, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.
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