Talk:University of California, San Francisco Medical Center

Requested move 7 December 2024

• University of California, San Francisco Medical Center → UCSF Medical Center
• University of California, Santa Barbara College of Letters and Science → UCSB College of Letters and Science
• University of California, Riverside School of Business → UCR School of Business
• University of California, Santa Barbara Physics Department → UCSB Physics Department
• University of California, Santa Barbara College of Engineering → UCSB College of Engineering
• University of California, San Diego School of Medicine → UC San Diego School of Medicine
• University of California, San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy → UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy

– This is to follow up on reverting numerous sudden undiscussed page moves from common name titles to official name titles by User:Cfls in January 2024, claiming that WP:TITLECON overrides WP:COMMONNAME. No, it does not. WP:TITLECON is an essay. WP:COMMONNAME is part of a policy. Policies and guidelines represent community consensus, essays do not. See the full explanation at procedural policy WP:POLICIES. User:Robertsky previously reverted most of those bad page moves on 26 January 2024 at my request, but not all of them. This request is to fix a few more. Coolcaesar (talk) 14:36, 7 December 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. Reading Beans, Duke of Rivia 23:10, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

I am amending this to add two more I just caught. --Coolcaesar (talk) 22:47, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

WP:GOODFAITH. Accusing "bad page moves" in the article Talk page and accusing "disruptive page moves" on my Talk page are not constructive or assuming good faith in any sense. Violating WP:GOODFAITH is a serious issue. I noticed that on your talk page, User:Alanscottwalker also raised a concern earlier this year that one of your edit summaries is performing "abusive practice" against them. Rather than throwing accusations on other editors, please stay WP:GOODFAITH and discuss the topics.

That's back to discussing the topic in question itself. If "UCSB" and "UCR" were the WP:COMMONNAME for both of the schools, I suppose we did not see that our Wikipedia main articles for those schools were UCSB and UCR instead. It is also the same case for other University of California schools. I fully understand the WP:COMMONNAME policy, as well as all other polities, guidelines, and other community documents. From my point of view, I assume the university's main pages are practicing the WP:COMMONNAME policy and thus, their respective article title names are their WP:COMMONNAMEs. In this sense, I do not believe there were any problems of using the established consensus of institutional common names in their affiliate entities' articles.

At the same time, I am open for discussion and looking forward to reading your opinions, as long as your responses are practicing WP:GOODFAITH. We are having some different opinions on what would be the best titles for certain articles, in according to established community agreements and for the community's and the public interests. We are not accusing or defending any behavioral issues. Let us focus on the topic, shall we?

You may cite "revert undiscussed move" to revert my changes. WP:BOLD encourages everyone to perform changes at their discretion under good faith, while others can also revert changes under good faith.

We the Wikipedia editors are constructing Wikipedia articles together for public interest. Let us not throw accusations on each other, can we? Cfls (talk) 16:55, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

This is a situation where the common names for the UC campuses' component units have not used the full names of the campuses for many decades because the units' official names are too long and as a result are completely impractical for use in everyday American English. So UC people virtually always use an abbreviation or acronym for the campus name in the units' common names.

An attorney might say they went to "UCLA Law" or "UCLA School of Law" for law school, and then if they are speaking with a listener outside of the United States who looks puzzled, they might add, "UCLA is the University of California, Los Angeles." Or they might say in a speech to a foreign audience, "I graduated from the law school of the University of California, Los Angeles." But they would hardly ever say out loud, "I went to the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law." That would sound like unnatural legalese. It's like saying, "I went to a fast food franchisee of McDonald's Corporation to buy lunch." No one says that, not even lawyers (I'm a lawyer). They say, "I went to McDonald's for lunch."

But in contrast, it is common to use both the abbreviated and expanded official campus names when referring to UC campuses as a whole. For example, people often refer in oral and written American English to both "UC Berkeley" and "the University of California, Berkeley". So I can see where your confusion is coming from.

This is common knowledge among college graduates as a whole, because of how UC is so prominent worldwide. Five of the twelve Nobel laureates this year were UC alumni or former faculty. Many Americans pick this up in high school, usually because they are thinking about applying to one or more UC campuses. They pay attention to how UC people talk and imitate them. Or they look at UC web sites and notice how most units are consistently abbreviating campus names and the only place where the full campus name appears (if at all) is in Web page footers or some "About" Web pages. (For example, when I initiate page moves, I always check Web sites, Google Books, Google Ngram Viewer, and other sources to make sure I have a clear understanding of what terms are in common use for the subject of a Wikipedia article.)

I think I see the root of our disagreement. UC is dominant in many but not all academic fields. If you were in one of those areas where no UC campus currently plays any significant role (e.g., mining engineering), or where UC is merely one of many significant institutions but not a leading one, you might not have been exposed as much as others to this common usage (that UC campus names are commonly abbreviated when referring to UC campus units). So if that's the case, then I would be incorrect to take for granted that this is common knowledge across all academic fields. And in that scenario, I can see how you could have initiated such moves in good faith, if you were unaware of that common usage. --Coolcaesar (talk) 17:05, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

 Comment: I don’t see HSBC Holdings using its full name, and I doubt most people in the UK are even aware of it, despite it being the largest bank in the country. The bank is officially registered as HSBC without a full name. Similarly, if "UCSF Medical Center" never refers to itself as "University of California, San Francisco Medical Center," even in official documents, it seems reasonable not to use the full name. Otherwise, there would be no reliable sources to support the usage of the full name, and the "full name" would be just a conjecture. Free ori (talk) 08:56, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Comment Keep I think the full titles are fine and a redirect from the abbreviation will work for searches. Most people describe UCB as "Cal", but that would be a bad choice for an article title. So picking titles based on what people say over cocktails is not a good choice. Johnjbarton (talk) 23:56, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Please familiarize yourself with WP:COMMONNAME. We do not use full official names for article titles on Wikipedia, we use common names.

Again, we're not talking about the titles of the articles about the UC campuses themselves, which is not at issue here.

We're talking about the titles of UC campus units. The issue here is that the vast majority of them do not use their full formal names as their common names. They usually abbreviate the campus name in their common names, both in spoken and formal written English.

However, since User:Johnjbarton is correctly pointing out that oral usage is not a reliable guide for common usage, and since Wikipedia:Verifiability is a big deal on WP, there's an easy way to resolve this question by reference to written sources. But if we go that way, this again goes back to why User:Cfls's moves were so mystifying in the first place.

When I want to move an article title, I always check official web sites if they exist. I also check news coverage on Google News (if available). In this case, all ten UC campuses are often covered by the California news media, and all ten have student newspapers which are further evidence of common usage of the names of their campus units. I like to ensure compliance with WP:COMMONNAME up front so that I can readily defend the move later if necessary, by reference to the materials I consulted. What's not clear is why that did not occur here.

In this instance, simply glancing at the official web sites of those UC campus units before attempting to move their article titles would have revealed that most of them do not use their full formal name on their web sites. They rarely use them in footers or in contexts where one would expect formal written English, such as "about us", "legal notice" or "privacy policy" web pages. They usually use only their common names, in which the campus name is always abbreviated. And the local student newspapers and many news media publications follow the lead of the official web sites and rarely use the full official names. It's more common to see the UC campus units' full official names in out-of-state sources like The New York Times.

UCLA campus units are especially prone to always abbreviating UCLA, because the campus name is simply too long. UCSB and UCSF are both saddled with the longest UC campus names; both city names are 13 characters long. UCSB units are reluctant to mention the name of their own campus in prose. Notice how they include "UC Santa Barbara" only in page headers but the body text of their web pages refers only to the name of the unit itself, such as "L&S" or the "Gevirtz" school, although sometimes they will refer to "UCSB" in passing (not as part of the unit name). UCSF units consistently refer to themselves as "UCSF School of ..." or just the "School of ..." There are a few exceptions, such as the UC Irvine School of Law, which repeatedly and stubbornly uses its full formal name in several places on its web site, but they are quite rare. --Coolcaesar (talk) 22:47, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Please don't patronize ("please familiarize yourself"). Please don't speak with an authority you do not have ("we do not use full etc"). Just make your case like everyone else.

All you needed to say was

"We're talking about the titles of UC campus units. The issue here is that the vast majority of them do not use their full formal names as their common names."

That's enough for me. Johnjbarton (talk) 23:34, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Well said. The walls of text from the nom are not helpful. If I had the authority to do so (and I don't) I'd speedily dismiss this RM just on grounds of minimum waste of time so we could move on. It's turned into a distraction and we have better things to do. Andrewa (talk) 19:44, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

• Support per WP:SHORTFORM (CIA activities in Vietnam, FBI files on Elvis Presley) and WP:ACRODAB. Note that WP:SHORTFORM is actually part of WP:TITLECON! —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 15:55, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
• Partial support. I think that "University of California" should be shortened to "UC" in all of these names, as it is very common to refer to institutions in the University of California system as "UC" something. However, I do not believe that UCR, UCSB, or even UCSF are as well known (UCR in particular being an ambiguous term). BD2412 T 03:24, 22 December 2024 (UTC)
• Support:

• University of California, Santa Barbara College of Letters and Science → UCSB College of Letters and Science
• University of California, Santa Barbara Physics Department → UCSB Physics Department
• University of California, Santa Barbara College of Engineering → UCSB College of Engineering

As an alumnus of UCSB, I know that the acronym is part of their branding. No comment on the rest. Theparties (talk) 06:29, 22 December 2024 (UTC)