Talk:Negev desert road ambush

Requested move 19 March 2024

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: No consensus to rename * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 20:43, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

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Negev desert road ambush → Negev Desert road ambush – Should Negev Desert not be capitalized? I see it appears twice capitalized and once lowercase in the Negev article. If we're referring to the Negev region and not the desert then maybe 'desert-road' should be hyphenated to make it clear that we're talking about a desert road in the Negev region and not a road in the Negev Desert? Dennis C. Abrams (talk) 21:06, 19 March 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 17:23, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

I’m not a native speaker, but based on some spelling in the sources, shouldn’t it be “Negev Desert Road Ambush”? FortunateSons (talk) 20:02, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

No. See WP:LOWERCASE. Dennis C. Abrams (talk) 22:56, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

• Support per nomination. A glance at Category:Deserts by continent confirms that when "Desert" is rendered in main title headers such as Arabian Desert, Chihuahuan Desert, Djurab Desert, Gobi Desert or Moçâmedes Desert, the "D" is uppercase. —Roman Spinner (talk • contribs) 03:43, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

  I also found Lompoul desert, Nafud desert, Nara desert (part of the Thar Desert), and "ecoregions" such as Arabian Peninsula coastal fog desert, Arctic desert, Atlantic coastal desert, Baja California desert, Caspian lowland desert, Central Asian northern desert, Central Asian southern desert, Eritrean coastal desert, Great Sandy–Tanami desert, Mesopotamian shrub desert, North Tibetan Plateau–Kunlun Mountains alpine desert, Red Sea coastal desert, Registan–North Pakistan sandy desert, Sahara desert (ecoregion), and Tirari–Sturt stony desert. That's not an exhaustive list. It seems you're right that most of the named specific deserts use a capital "D" if the word "desert" is part of the article title. We don't seem to use caps for places called a "semi-desert". —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 16:32, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose since plenty of sources refer to the desert as the "Negev desert". Dicklyon (talk) 08:42, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

  But the search you've linked shows that Negev Desert is the more common capitalization. Dennis C. Abrams (talk) 13:22, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

  Yes, somewhat more common, but perhaps not, per MOS:CAPS, "consistently". It looks like about 60%, whereas "consistently" could be a higher threshold of 80–90%. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 16:22, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose Desert is a descriptive term preceeded by a proper noun. Whether or not desert is capitalised when referring to a particular desert varies from case to case. How we capitalise each case depends on whether it is consistently capitalised in sources (per MOS:CAPS and WP:NCCAPS) - see above. In this particular case, while the ngram evidence does indicate it is capitalised more often than not, it is not consistently capitalised in sources to an extent that would lead us to capitalise this here. Note that ngrams do not distinguish capitalisation in references, captions and headings which normally use titlecase as opposed to sentence case and an allowance of 10% is often cited for this overreporting of capitalisation by ngrams. This JSTOR search would further indicate that it is not consistantly capitalised. In the JSTOR results that there are many e cases of allcaps in titles and capitalisation for the titles of works using title case. As our article, Negev, indicates (see also this ngram) Negev is commonly used without the descriptor, desert. A google search gives only 34 hits for Negev desert road ambush as an exact term and one would be hard pressed to rub two reliable sources together out of these, while a broader searh, not using the exact trem does turn up reliable sources that don't use this name. The article title, Negev desert road ambush, would appear to be a Wiki constructed descriptive name rather than a WP:COMMONNAME. Because desert is not commonly used with Negev, it might well be appropriate to use Negev road ambush as the article title, since it is more concise and does not suffer WP:OVERPRECISION that is unnecessary. Cinderella157 (talk) 03:37, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

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.