Category talk:Health regions of British Columbia

title

Given the nature of the articles linked, either the "region' should be capitalized suggestive of "Fraser Health Region" as a title for Fraser Health, e.g., or the category should be Category:Regional health authorities in British Columbia or Category:Regional health boards in British Columbia....with the proviso that "health authority" and "health board" are usually capitalized, even when their identifier is not specified (but when the context is). e.g. "the director of the Fraser Health Authority went on to say" is equivalent to "the director of Fraser Health went on to say" vs "the director said the Health Authority was not prepared to act". As with Land Districts, Regional Districts, Provincial Parks, and eventually Forests Regions/Districts and others, I dno't think it appropriate that the Wikipedian obsession with making things lower case that normally aren't because of some spurious claim to the orthodoxy of "standard English", or arbitrary applications/interpretations of said "rules of standard English", is a valid policy. That's for now beside the point; my main point just now is that the articles in this category are the Regional Health Authorities/Boards, and not about their regions as such (though no doubt those regional boundaries are described in teh articles, or you'd hope so).Skookum1 (talk) 14:41, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

To put this another way, it needs to be stressed that "Health Region" is an institutional, specific reference, and not usage of "region" in the general sense which is what small-case-r "region" refers to; these are not articles about geographic regions, these are articles about particular insitutions and also, titles of articles and categories are not the same as in-line text usages. "The directors of the health regions is fine", but not capitalizing this category title as Category:Health Regions of British Columbia is akin to rendering its member articles as: Fraser health, Interior health, Northern health, Vancouver coastal health etc. "Health Region" is the formal title of a type of institution; it is not a general usage. Similarly, it would not be appropriate to have "Kamloops forest district" as a title or for that matter Fraser river or Coast mountains. A Health Board/Health Region is a type of entity; having lower-case r-region implies it is a geographic sense, rather than an institutional one. I'm sure somewhere in the rulebook of "standard English", wherever it is kept in some fusty cupboard in Oxford or maybe the U.ofT. there is a caveat about such usages and their eminent necessity....Skookum1 (talk) 15:12, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Standard English usage, also, generally requires full capitalization of titles, excepting prepositions, conjunctions and articles (if not occuring at the start of the title). This titling rule you'd think would apply in Wikipedia, but instead we see titles like Wah Mee massacre, Rock Springs massacre, Thetis Lake monster even though "most common usage" and in fact standard English styleguidelines for titles of articles would make those "Wah Mee Massacre", "Rock Springs Massacre" and "Thetis Lake Monster", which is in fact how they do occur in the literature/sources (vs {"the massacre at the Wah Mee Restaurant", "the massacre at Rock Springs, Wyoming", "the monster in Thetis Lake" etc). And when there is some distinction between the general use of a word like "region" (which is geographic) vs a specific institutional usage like "Health Region", this distinction is all the more important especially given that a category title IS a title. Similarly not capitlizing the 'd' in Category:Regional districts of British Columbia allows and even encourages the gross misconception that Regional Districts are "regions" or "districts" in the other senses those words are used in BC; it's bad enough RDs are mistakenly used as a geographic classifier (a practice which should end) but to encourage the use of their name as if it were simply meaning "region" or "district" is utterly mistaken and, in my opinion, probably not normal in the rules of standard English. Wikipedia seems to have made a lot of arbitrary and shallow assumptions, with awkward-looking results and often confusing ones, about such "rules" (as if English had "rules" like French does, i.e. an institution governing the use of the language) and they're oddly contrary to "most comon usage". Fine to write "the directors of the health boards met over dinner at the public expense", but it's not OK to write "the director of Fraser health met with staff".....and that's not even in titles, as is t he case with article/category names....Skookum1 (talk) 15:22, 23 June 2009 (UTC)