Talk:Mother Jones Prison

Requested move 31 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: moved (closed by non-admin page mover) DannyS712 (talk) 03:45, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

---

Mother Jones' Prison → Mother Jones Prison – As a relatively minor side issue to the concurrent nomination at Talk:Mary Harris Jones#Requested move 31 January 2020, the apostrophe, although logical, is not generally applied in reference to this structure, as confirmed at National Historic Landmarks and at Restoring Women's History Through Historic Preservation. Wherever an apostrophe does happen to be used, it appears to be copied from or influenced by the main title header of this Wikipedia article. Roman Spinner (talk • contribs) 22:22, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

• Support per nom. This reverts an undiscussed move from 2012. Station1 (talk) 23:45, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
• Support per nom and per WP:CONCISE, and because it's actually not logical (i.e. it causes a WP:RECOGNIZABLE and WP:PRECISE issue) with the possessive form. It is not a prison belonging to or founded by Mother Jones, but named after her retrospectively; it is the same kind of name as Edith Cavell Memorial and Washington Monument and Gerald R. Ford Freeway, none of which would use a possessive. It's actually hard to find cases that do. The only one I've turned up so far is Wagoners' Memorial, but it is not linguistically parallel, and practically begs for a possessive. There's a real-world linguistic conflict going on (which WP can observe but avoid taking active part in) when it comes to plural constructions of this sort. It's most often seen in organization names, where confusion about whether to use singular possessive or plural possessive often leads to avoiding both, with every single possibility making someone unhappy about it: X Player's Association, Y Players' Association, Z Players Association. WP will just go with whatever the organization's own spelling is, if it's consistently used by them and not defied by a majority of reliable source. For a monument, which is not a trademark, we should just go with the general MoS principle to not apply an optional stylization unless RS do so for that case with near-uniformity. So, use Mother Jones Prison. PS: This buys us a bonus, of avoiding anypotential feuding between "Jones'" and "Jones's"; if we stick with using a possessive in this case, it needs to move to Mother Jones's Prison for MOS:POSSESSIVE reasons. It is not possible to satisfy everyone with Jones' or Jones's, no matter what, so we would just follow the guideline. But it would cost us another character of CONCISE for no actual gain. Summary: We get more CONCISE, at no cost (yet possible improvement) in RECOGNIZABLE and PRECISE, plus we avoid POSSESSIVE squabbling, all by just dropping the unnecessary and potentially confusing apostrophe.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:37, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

---

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.