Talk:Alabama's congressional districts

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Added table with current house representatives

Added TableDreammaker182 (talk) 07:30, 9 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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Requested move 3 January 2020

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: Not moved. There is consensus to not move just this one article by itself. No prejudice against anyone proposing a multi-move request at any time. Station1 (talk) 09:30, 10 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Alabama's congressional districts → Congressional districts of Alabama – There is an apostrophe in the title. I'm not sure if it's proper to have it in the title. If this request passes, I would like similar articles such as California's congressional districts to be moved to Congressional districts of California as well. Interstellarity (talk) 00:50, 3 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Weakly oppose. There is nothing wrong in having an apostrophe in the title. Per WP:NCCS, we should "do what English does", and the possessive case is common enough in English.

But my opposition s based mostly on ease of search. If the state name is moved to the end of the title, effectively as a disambiguator, then we have 50 or more titles all starting "Congressional districts of", which is hard on people using incremental search: are they not more likely to type "Alabama congress"...?

That being said, we have a pattern with e.g.United States congressional delegations from Alabama so there may be a precedent there that we should follow. 94.21.10.204 (talk) 05:18, 3 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose as proposed since from the random states I've checked at Category:United States congressional districts by state use that style. This should be proposed as a group change so not to create inconsistencies. I will say that the category Category:Congressional districts of Alabama and the article don't match for the complete set, which is not good. --Gonnym (talk) 11:17, 3 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose as proposed per Gonnym. I did the same check (while Gonnym was writing that!) and found also that all of these congressional district and related articles are using "State's whatever" article title format. It's an informal-looking and questionably encyclopedic style. I would support a mass-RM that moved all of them at once, but we can't (per WP:CONSISTENT) just move this one. That same policy is, however, a reason to move them en masse, because this small tree of "State's whatever" articles is at odds with a much larger set of trees of "Whatever of/from/in State" articles (like the aforementioned United States congressional delegations from Alabama), in turn consistent with innumerable "Whatever of/from/in/at Jurisdiction/Place/Entity" articles more generally. The possessive form is an aberration, and usually only appears on WP in titles of works and other proper names. Also, 94.21.10.204 is mis-citing WP:NCCS: it says nothing about apostrophes/possessives at all, meanwhile "X of Y" is also "what English does". More the to point, it's what formal English does, and we have a long history of moving articles away from possessive constructions. I also don't buy the anon's incremental-search argument; since a redirect will exist from the possessive title, there will be no negative effect at all on incremental searches. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:57, 3 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

You're right about the redirects of course. Personally I think the "X of Y" format is too formal, but anyway we could just use the noun as modifier and write "Georgia congressional districts" perfectly grammatically. It's "New York City Subway", not "Subway of the City of New York", for example.

You're also right that WP:AT is entirely silent on the subject of apostrophes in titles, beyond WP:TSC), but "we've a long history of doing it that way" means no more or less than being WP:CONSISTENT. 94.21.10.204 (talk) 12:28, 3 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

(struck previous !vote) Mass move to "Congressional districts of [state]". The "United States" in, say, "United States congressional delegations from Georgia" seems an entirely redundant disambiguator, per WP:PRECISION. It is not as if Georgia (country) has congressional districts, and Washington, D.C. appears not to either. So I would not support a proposal to have "United States" as part of the article title.94.21.10.204 (talk) 12:28, 3 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@94.21.10.204, Gonnym, and SMcCandlish: (edit conflict) I didn't do a mass move because I would have to propose 50 different moves for all of the states. That's a lot of work for me. When I proposed this originally, I wanted to do a mass move on all the 50 states' congressional districts. Interstellarity (talk) 12:36, 3 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry about the edit conflict. I think you made that clear enough. Technically your move request is WP:MALFORMED, though. It doesn't bother me. By the way, IP editors don't receive pings. 94.21.10.204 (talk) 12:54, 3 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry about that. I didn't know that. Interstellarity (talk) 13:16, 3 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Interstellarity: See Template:Requested move/doc. The way to do a mass-move is {{subst:Requested move|current1=...|new1=...|current2=...|new2=...|...|reason=...}} The easiest way to do it is to copy-paste the list of articles from the category and clean it up in a text editor, then just add the numbered parameter names; then copy the list, change the names in the copy to the intended versions, and change |currentX= to |newX= in the second list. A vertical template layout works well for this, obviously. These named parameters do not have to be in order (just make sure that, say, |current12= and |new12= refer to the same article), so you can do {{subst:Requested move|current1=...|current2=...|...|new1=...|new2=...|...|reason=...}}. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:43, 6 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@SMcCandlish: I knew how to do it, I just didn't have the patience to do it. Interstellarity (talk) 00:48, 6 January 2020 (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.

Requested move 13 January 2020

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: not moved to the proposed titles at this time, per the discussion below. Dekimasuよ! 18:28, 20 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

– Please see above request. The same rationale applies to this request as well just more states to apply consistency. Interstellarity (talk) 18:06, 13 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Interstellarity: Why? Is the only reason for the requested move the apostrophe? Please elaborate. —GoldRingChip 18:22, 13 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@GoldRingChip: The reason why I am proposing these moves is so the tone of the title is more encyclopedic and It is more encyclopedic without the apostrophe. Interstellarity (talk) 18:35, 13 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support The current title seems somewhat too informal for an encyclopedia. I also think the new titles are more logical search terms. Number 5 7 12:12, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Regardless of what is done in the press, in formal English the possessive 's is not normally used for inanimate entities – cf. "John's leg", "the leg of the table". Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 17:40, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Question. @Interstellarity: Under the rationale of your proposal, would the article Utah's 1st congressional district become 1st congressional district of Utah? And Delaware's at-large congressional district become At-large congressional district of Delaware? --Woko Sapien (talk) 21:52, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Woko Sapien: Yes, that would apply as well. Interstellarity (talk) 23:27, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Interstellarity, my bot has flagged your request as malformed. Seven of the pages you've requested to move are redirects. Changes to the targets of redirects should be discussed at WP:Redirects for discussion. Unfortunately this was one of two requests the bot didn't handle gracefully until I patched the code, see related discussion HERE. – wbm1058 (talk) 02:15, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Wbm1058: OK, I didn't realize that some of the requests are redirects. What I meant to propose was to change the target articles the redirects are targeting to different titles. I'll create a separate proposal after this one is done that addresses those. Hope this helps. Interstellarity (talk) 11:45, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Strong oppose all - the proposed title is less WP:NATURAL, clearly less WP:CONCISE, equally recognizable, less common (though neither shows up in ngrams) and equally precise. That's all five naming criteria. The idea that using a possessive form of a proper noun is not "normal" is bizarre and unsupported - I found over 10,000 news results for the randomly selected "america's foreign policy". https://www.google.com/search?surl=1&q=%22america%27s+foreign+policy%22&safe=strict&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS832US832&tbm=nws&ei=pU8eXrGTFYTk-gSawICwDQ&start=120&sa=N&ved=0ahUKEwjx-bKWoITnAhUEsp4KHRogANY4HhDy0wMIeQ&biw=1396&bih=657&dpr=1.38 We try to use common names here in common English that the common people would use and understand; as a result I strongly oppose this request. Red Slash 23:34, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting proposal, but OPPOSE for 3 reasons:
1. I agree with User:Red Slash that it's less WP:NATURAL and WP:CONCISE.
2. Little is gained by this change: it's all cost and low benefit.
3. It has downstream effects on associated articles. Without falling into "slippery slope" fallacies, do we change all articles with the districts in the title? E.g., 1805 Delaware's at-large congressional district special election → 1805 At-large congressional district of Delaware special election… that's not an improvement at all. —GoldRingChip 13:28, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. The proposal has some merit, but it would require not just renaming all the state's congressional district articles, but all the individual congressional district articles (including obsolete ones), as well as retooling infoboxes to read "Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from the 4th district of New York", which sounds verbose for an already wordy infobox title. While states are inanimate objects and strictly speaking shouldn't possess anything, the naming system of State's nth congressional district seems like a well established custom. That said, I wouldn't be opposed to having the proposed titles all redirect to the existing ones (it looks like a handful of them already redirect anyway). --Woko Sapien (talk) 16:52, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose as per the three !votes above me – i.e. esp. as per WP:NATURAL and WP:CONCISE. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 17:18, 16 January 2020 (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.

Update the 2020 section.

I’m not really familiar with editing on Wikipedia but earlier today the Supreme Court upheld Alabama’s controversial 2021 map. 2601:940:C001:CA90:5DE5:6848:C44F:7CEC (talk) 04:22, 8 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]