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: moved. Comments by Randy were refuted by Dicklyon, amongst others. I see consensus to move. (closed by non-admin page mover) Reading Beans 09:21, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Zimmermann Telegram → Zimmermann telegram
• Riegner Telegram → Riegner telegram
• Göring Telegram → Göring telegram
• Höfle Telegram → Höfle telegram
• Bassett Letter → Bassett letter
• Lansdowne Letter → Lansdowne letter
• Ems Dispatch → Ems dispatch

– Per WT:AT, WP:NCCAPS and MOS:CAPS, these terms are not consistently capped in sources. Cinderella157 (talk) 02:23, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Evidence

See ngrams for Zimmermann Telegram, Riegner Telegram, Bassett Letter, Lansdowne Letter, which are quite conclusive. The ngram for Ems dispatch is not definative because of the acronym for Emergency medical services but this search of Google books clearly evidences mixed usage in book sources. Höfle Telegram returns no ngram hits but Google book and Google scholar searches indicate mixed usage in sources. Göring Telegram also returns no ngram hits but the Google books search indiactes it is commonly refered to as Göring's telegram (uncapitalised) - ie the article title is not the actual common name but a Wiki construct.

Here's a better n-gram for the Ems dispatch, constrained to sentence context by "of the". Dicklyon (talk) 16:45, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose change to Zimmerman Telegram per the n-grams, which seem pretty conclusive that uppercase is now the common form, probably through the "Wikipedia effect" but still the most common form in English. Support the rest. Randy Kryn (talk) 03:02, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  While uppercase is more common most recently, more common is not the criterion to be applied per MOS:CAPS, but a substantial majority. Most recently, it is capped 61% of the time and, as you know, ngrams tend to over-represent capitalisation because they also report title case usage (headings etc) not just usage in sentences. It will capture citations of Barbara Tuchman's book The Zimmermann Telegram, which incidentally, uses the lowercase form in prose. Cinderella157 (talk) 03:34, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Substantial majority? 61% to 39%, in any election, would be called a landslide. Randy Kryn (talk) 04:14, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

But capitalisation in prose (what we must look at) will be somewhat less than that. Cinderella157 (talk) 04:48, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Much less, if you just put "the" in front, which could still hit on some titles. See modified n-grams linked in my response to Yaksar just below. Dicklyon (talk) 16:32, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Dicklyon, do you mean like this use of 'the'? Randy Kryn (talk) 23:01, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, like that. In the telegram case, it shows lowercase totally dominating. In the school case, it shows capping never was consistent. I know you'd like to just have sources vote, but MOS:CAPS specifies that we look for "consistently capitalized" in sources before we cap it. Dicklyon (talk) 23:16, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose change for Zimmerman per User:Randy Kryn and what appears to reflect clear common usage in reliable sources. Neutral on the others at the moment.--Yaksar (let's chat) 13:29, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  Randy's logic is faulty there. If you do the n-gram search with some context to focus it in sentences instead of titles, and smooth it to not pay so much attention to the years after Wikipedia started capitalizing it (from 2004), you can see that lowercase is much more common. Dicklyon (talk) 16:29, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  Perhaps off-topic to an extent, but this chart is a good example of why we shouldn't always rely on Google Ngrams to give us an accurate picture of common usage in reliable sources. The chart shows a significant number of hits from before the telegram existed. Dekimasuよ! 03:30, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  I had the smoothing cranked up to 30 years on that one, to get an average view without all the wiggles, which means a moving average from 30 years before to 30 years after each year point. If you reduce the smoothing to 0, you see the first occurrence was in 1917, which might be correct (or might be a misinterpretation of some document that talked about the 1917 telegram, but was published later). Errors do happen. Dicklyon (talk) 06:49, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong support all per guidelines, usage evidence, and detailed careful nom. Dicklyon (talk) 16:29, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Support: ngrams do not show "consistently capitalized in a substantial majority" of sources. More importantly, the title of the article is not a proper name of anything. In this case, it's clearly descriptive. SchreiberBike | ⌨  22:09, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Support: The argument for capitalization seems weak. The term isn't a formal name, it's just a descriptive phrase. Waqar💬 15:28, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose changing the Zimmerman title, as 61 percent is a substantial majority by any sane measure. Neutral on the others, which should be considered on their own merits. ~~ Jessintime (talk) 15:29, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  That 61 is Randy's red herring. If you do anything to restrict the number of title hits in the stats, e.g. put "the" in front, it's majority lowercase telegram. Recall that WP:NCCAPS says to "leave the second and subsequent words in lowercase unless the title phrase is a proper name that would always occur capitalized, even mid-sentence." (my bold) Dicklyon (talk) 17:47, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Support all per nom and Dicklyon. The use of uppercase is not consistent. Ngrams find strings in title-case headlines as well as in body text (and 61% doesn't seem consistent enough anyway). The second word is just an identifier of the medium, like Zapruder film (which had a unanimously opposed RM eight years ago). —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 20:30, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per MOS:CAPS, WP:NCCAPS, MOS:TITLES, WP:CONSISTENT. These are not titles of works, they're short descriptive labels, and we do not capitalize those except in the unusual case that one gets reinterpreted by the vast majority of the writing public as a proper name to capitalize (e.g. the Rosetta Stone, the Pentagon Papers). MOS:CAPS: only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia (emphasis in original). Sore abuse of n-grams to confuse mid-sentence usage with title-case headings and to dwell on the citogensis of WP's own over-capitalization inspiring some off-site writers to imitate us after the fact, doesn't change the truth: these terms have generally not been capitalized in RS material, certainly not to a "consistent" level (like 90%+). The Zimmermann, Lansdowne, and Ems cases all clearly demonstrate the predominance of lower-case https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=the+Zimmermann+Telegram+*%2Cthe+Zimmermann+telegram+*&year_start=1900&year_end=2003&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=30][1][2] (even when we allow a date range that "poisons the well" with citogenesis: [3][4][5]). The rest are such disused phrases (they are WP:NDESC descriptions) that they're not n-grammable at all (i.e., it is not possible for them to have been used with such frequency and consistency that they could have evolved in the public mind from descriptive labels into habitual proper names).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:58, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Support all—"telegram" is not part of a proper name. Tony (talk) 03:33, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]