Talk:First information report

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. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: moved as requested per the discussion below. Dekimasuよ! 16:47, 19 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

First Information Report → First information report – Per WP:NCCAPS and MOS:CAPS. This appears to be a common-noun phrase, a descriptive label for a whole class of reports used in multiple distinct national legal jurisdictions. I think this is a combination of a specialized-style fallacy (i.e. "governmentese overcapitalization" in this case) and the ignorant habit of Capitalizing Re-expanded Acronym Parts (CRAP >;-).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:17, 26 June 2018 (UTC) --Relisting. Mahveotm (talk) 08:24, 4 July 2018 (UTC) --Relisting. Andrewa (talk) 16:12, 12 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose, as the sources on the page, two in Further Reading and all in External links, use full capitalization, although the only reference can't be pulled up on my computer, so this may be an unreferenced page at this point. Then there's the n-gram combinations], the ones I chose show a wavering story but seem to indicate upper-case as the common name (at least during the time leading up to and in 2008). Randy Kryn (talk) 03:31, 26 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Kryn's Ngram isn't valid, since it's netting headings and titles (capitalized), not just mid-sentence use. There's an easy way to fix this, and shows that "first information report" is more common overall [1], especially when you consider the fact that a large number of occurrences of the phrase are going to be in governmentese works that over-capitalize. If you just search news sites [2] you find the usage wildly mixed, about 50/50. This means WP does not capitalize; the central rule of MOS:CAPS (and thus of WP:NCCAPS) is to not apply capital letters unless an overwhelming majority of RS do so consistently for the case in question, and this fails that test.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:46, 13 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support One might argue that WP:COMMONNAME is policy, and that if it extends to how the name is capitalized, then it would trump guidelines WP:NCCAPS and MOS:CAPS. But the purpose of COMMONNAME is to have a recognizable title, and it would be unconvincing to claim that "First information report" (30-50% of uses in RS) is significantly less recognizable than "First Information Report" (50-70% of uses in RS). Furthermore, COMMONNAME is part of WP:TITLE, the WP:LOWERCASE section of which says "Titles are written in sentence case ... [after the first word,] words are not capitalized unless they would be so in running text." The policy goes on to point to NCCAPS for more guidance, and NCCAPS and MOS:CAPSACRS instruct us to use "First information report". --Worldbruce (talk) 06:00, 26 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • The short version is that COMMONNAME doesn't apply to capitalization. It's the policy that tell us whether the name is "first information report" or "1st information report" or "fisticuffs imbecile reprimand" or "chicken pot pie", regardless of the capitalization scheme. It defers to NCCAPS (which defers to MOS:CAPS) for a reason; they work in concert, and there is no conflict between them. WP:P&G would not tolerate a conflict between them (other than a very short-lived one that the community would fix as a silly error). It's weird that so many people don't get it. I wrote WP:COMMONSTYLE to help them.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:43, 5 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support – It's hard to relate Randy's comments to our guidelines. This is clearly not a proper name, and his n-gram search makes it clear that sources don't treat it as such. Dicklyon (talk) 06:45, 5 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  Yeah, the capitalization we see is "Letters, Capital, Official Government Issue". Governmental agencies/ministries are addicted to capitalizing Everything Within Their Purview (and some news publishers will imitate this when writing about the Official Government Thing, because it just looks excitingly ministerial or something). Has jack to do with encyclopedic writing style.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:43, 5 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose The common name for this concept is FIR, pronounced by saying the letters. This term is ubiquitous in Hindi and English language news and society. More people know the term FIR than "First Information Report". The reason why this should be capitalized is because the commonname for the topic is actually a pronouncement of the letters including by people who do not speak English. Check the Hindi page at hi:प्राथमिकी and see out the Latin letters come through. It is difficult to demonstrate the use of these letters as a name because we cannot easily get Google hits for short words. Also the everyday use is different from the expositions of the concept that Wikipedia would like to cite. This concept comes up much more as the subject of conversation in India than the concept of "police report" does in English speaking countries. Indian English does not have the arguments about a proper use of letters or capitalization that is common in US or UK English, and these letters and this capitalization scheme are fine in Indian English. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:33, 5 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  That's completely contrary to the consensus style guidelines about how caps are used on Wikipedia. See MOS:CAPS#Expanded_forms_of_abbreviations, which explains that we don't cap words just because they are used in making acronyms. Dicklyon (talk) 15:43, 5 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  Yes, there are so many holes in that argument it's hard to pick where to start. How common a term is has nothing to do with whether to capitalize it. How something is pronounced as an acronym has nothing to do with anything. See, e.g., DNA, which we do not render as "DeoxyriboNucleic Acid". I think Blueraspberry is confusing the obvious idea that the FBI is the (capitalized) Federal Bureau of Investigation with the incorrect idea that everything that has an acronym is capitalized when spelled out. Federal Bureau of Investigation isn't capitalized because it's an expansion of FBI, but because it's a proper-noun phrase; a generic type of legal document is not (see, e.g., temporary restraining order). Furthermore, what is done in Hindi is irrelevant on this wiki. Whether FIR is more common in English than "first information report" is irrelevant for the purpose of this capitalization cleanup RM, though someone's free to make a case that the article should move per WP:COMMONNAME to something like "FIR (India)". That's not likely to fly, per WP:CONSISTENCY, since we are not treating any similar articles that way. It's very rare for us to have an article actually at the acronym title (e.g. HIV/AIDS, DNA, and SWAT). I can't think of a single example in a legal-documents context (not even TRO). If the everyday Indian English use of this term diverges from the strictly defined material in this article, then that's a content matter that can be resolved with reliable sources; has nothing to do with capital letters. The supposition about Indian English and capitalization is false; formal (i.e., encyclopedic) Indian English follows British style guides, as can be readily observed in the Indian English-language press; both the Oxford and Cambridge guides are printed and distributed in India as well as in the UK. There are no mainstream, public-facing style guides specifically for Indian English. Hardly any exist at all for any audience/context. There's a book of informal "Indlish" colloquialisms [3], which have nothing to do with encyclopedic writing, and a handful of house style sheets for internal use by particular entities for particular purposes like audit reports or sports writing [4], [5], [6]. They are indistinguishable from British English, other than some mention crore.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:37, 6 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I will back off some on my opposition. Indian English routinely capitalizes the words of terms which are routinely and better known by initialisms. Indian English uses initialisms more frequently than either British or American English. Indian English split from British English before American English did so I do not agree that the standard for Indian English is any British style guide, although I will agree that when India looks to style guides it uses a British one almost always in preference to any Indian one.

Maybe overall my argument was just off the wall crazy. I admit that something about it is wrong but also I think that Indian English does use initialisms by some different ruleset than British or American English. Blue Rasberry (talk) 12:37, 6 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I can't find any evidence this is true in formal/academic written Indian publications. It's a habit of bureaucratese/governmentese, of marketing, and of some low-end journalism, but that's true across the entire anglosphere. So, WP would definitely not do it just because the topic is about India. MOS:CAPS and MOS:ABBR are not dialect-by-dialect guidelines. Furthermore, Indian English absolutely did not split from British before American did (not that such an argument has any relevance here); English wasn't even introduced to India in a programmatic way until the 1830s; American English had already diverged from British in the 18th century, and was codified in diverged form in 1828 in An American Dictionary of the English Language. Next, there's no evidence Indian English uses initialisms more than other dialects, and an assertion that it does so more than US English is extremely dubious. Even if it were true, it would have no bearing on how to write something like "first information report", a generic common-noun phrase. "I think that Indian English does use initialisms by some different ruleset than British or American English." Cite the "ruleset, then"; WP doesn't work on "belief". And "First information report" is not an initialism; FIR is, and it isn't being treated any differently that similar initialisms in English, like TRO, which is also sometimes over-capitalized when expanded [7]. There is nothing special about this case.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:15, 8 July 2018 (UTC); revised 00:46, 13 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I am wrong, mistaken, and corrected! I am pleased to get such a thorough response and am happily better informed. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:46, 18 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Relisting comment: Very interesting discussion, well argued and considered and flame-free. I think it's worth another week to see whether we can achieve something more like consensus. (I note with some relief that this does not undo any previous move from the target.) Andrewa (talk) 16:12, 12 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • This really isn't necessary, since the support comments have defensible rationales and the opposes do not; other related articles have been speedily moved to lower case without any conflict; and the article text itself has been lower-cased without any conflict. All we have here is someone whose main pastime seems to be opposing MoS being applied to titles in RM after RM after RM, here misusing Google's Ngram viewer; and another editor making unsourced (and in some cases already disproved) claims about Indian English, which are not relevant anyway (WP does not apply different capitalization based on dialect). Closers are supposed to evaluate the WP:P&G and WP:RS strengths of the arguments provide, not just "count heads". WP is not a vote.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:51, 13 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • Your opinion noted, but IMO it is out of process, as you're involved in the discussion. An uninvolved closer will assess your arguments and those of others, just as I as an uninvolved admin have done and decided (for whatever reason) to relist the discussion (and any other uninvolved editor could have done this too). And I think you should just respect that. Andrewa (talk) 01:33, 14 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, while admitting I have nothing novel to add to the discussion. The P&G arguments for moving this generic document are sound and have not been countered in kind. Primergrey (talk) 12:54, 17 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support writing common names without capitals as recommended by Wikipedia's guidelines. Thank you. 83.228.160.33 (talk) 20:06, 17 July 2018 (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.