Talk:Falaise pocket

message: The pocket was lowercase for many years, and was capitalized (but only in the lead) in this 2009 copyedit on the leadup to FA; the article title followed about 6 years later.  The text is still not case-consistent.  You can see the effect of the over-capitalization in recent sources.  It's still not close to the threshold suggested by MOS:CAPS though.  We should fix this.  To lowercase. Dicklyon (talk) 05:30, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I might be a bit slow, but can you clarify which 'threshold' you're referring to specifically?  Isn't this the 'accepted name of a battle' which is 'usually capitalized in sources'?  It's a fascinating ngram though -- the Title Case uptick really kicks in rather dramatically in the very early 1990s.  This article and Wikipedia as a whole have a pretty good alibi for being to blame for that.  I think one can perhaps overdo consistency on this:  'battle' and 'pocket' are still perfectly serviceable common nouns one might have cause to use in an article like this -- juxtaposed with 'Falaise' or otherwise.  But that doesn't mean that the Battle of Falaise Pocket -- battle of the Falaise Pocket!? -- Battle of the Falaise pocket?! -- isn't viable as a proper noun phrase.  If anything I think there might be a case (as it were) for retitling as tBotFP, but using Fp internally when referring to the geographical envelopment, rather than the engagement as a whole.  109.255.211.6 (talk) 06:22, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: From the MOS:CAPS lead: "Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are  are capitalized in Wikipedia."  In my experience, "Battle of" is most often capped in sources, while many other terms are not.  So "Battle of Falais Pocket" would possibly make more sense as a proper name (though sources seem to more often say "battle of the Falais pocket", so maybe not), but "Falais pocket" is clearly not used that way in sources.  Dicklyon (talk) 17:16, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

text: There was indeed a big blip up of caps in the mid 1990s, but after that settled back, the next prominent steps up seem to be synchronized to our 2009 lead capitalization and 2015 title capitalization.  See here.  Dicklyon (talk) 17:46, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Ah, the eternal fuzziness of terms like 'accepted', 'substantial', 'consistent', 'usually' -- just throw in 'reasonable' and you have the full suite of lawyer's delights!  (But their joy might be contingent on their fee for navigating them, it must be said.)  I'm not sure if we consistently applied 'consistent', we'd ever capitalise anything ever again, but I'll grant you that this isn't one of the...  consistenter ones.  (Battle of the) Falaise Gap seems similarly mixed, leaning capsed.  Yes, there's certainly another large uptick in 2016-8, but at that point it's merely 'running up the score' of an existing lead, by that graph.  The change in 2009 is much less dramatic.  As I say, I think it's somewhat inherent to the nature of the phrase, as it's doing double duty as a proper name, and a descriptive composition of common nouns.  It's a gap (and was a pocket) near Falaise and there was a battle there, so no law against juxtaposing those attributively and possessively on that basis!  109.255.211.6 (talk) 18:44, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: That runup in 2016–18 is exactly what I mean by the reaction to the 2015 title capitalization.  Wikipedia is unreasonably effective at influencing such things.  And yes "consistently" is not a consistently interpreted threshold, but it as least means a sustained substantial super-majority.  If you correct the n-gram counts for the frequent appearance of capped terms in titles, references to titles, headings, captions, and such things that many styles cap a lot, you'll find that it's not close. Dicklyon (talk) 19:08, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

text: OK, fixed.  If someone finds a consistently capped accepted name for this event, we can consider it. Dicklyon (talk) 20:01, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: 'ce' is the edit summary of last resort, I think.  Covers anything from actual copy-editing -- a broad church at the best of times! -- to 'messing around with the format of infoboxes for no transparent reason'.  Not really insightful as to either 'what my edit did' much less 'why it did it'.  109.255.211.6 (talk) 22:48, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

text: Though on the subject of edit summaries:  I think there very much is a 'suggestion of a source-based or guideline-based reason to cap these words here.'  I thought I'd already explicitly cited WP:MILTERMS, but apparently I only alluded to it.  "Accepted names of wars, battles, revolts, revolutions, rebellions, mutinies, skirmishes, fronts, raids, actions, operations and so forth are capitalized if they are usually capitalized in sources."  This is I think a (couple of different) accepted name(s) of a battle which is indeed usually capitalized in sources.  109.255.211.6 (talk) 23:42, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I read "if they are usually capitalized in sources" as meaning usually, which is a lot more than we're seeing in sources, which I'd call "sometimes". Dicklyon (talk) 00:02, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why the capitals? 

message: It's not typical for articles to have both a lead section and a subsection called "overview". The lead is only 1 paragraph, so I believe the "overview" section should be trimmed and incorporated into the lead. As it is, the article does not meet the FA criteria because of this weird organization and because every non-lead paragraph is required to have an inline citation. (t · c) buidhe 09:24, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sourcing + article organization