Talk:Slab-grave culture

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References

Please provide references ASAP. Unreferenced text may be deleted at any time. See Wikipedia policies, WP:V, WP:RS, WP:CITE. - Altenmann >talk 14:07, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

Requested move 28 December 2024

Slab-grave culture → Slab Grave culture – correcting title to be in line with accepted scientific naming conventions for archaeological cultures and for the dominant term in relevant literature Laerodar (talk) 23:31, 26 December 2024 (UTC) This is a contested technical request (permalink). Laerodar (talk) 23:26, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

Does anyone seriously contest this move? The proposal made is in line with relevant (especially anglophone scholarship) literature published on this topic. In addition, one can compare the name to other archaeological cultures that are characterized by similar descriptive names based on found material assemblages (rather than location or other aspects of discovery), which are named accordingly. Laerodar (talk) 23:26, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

Oppose as proposed. If "grave" is uppercase then "culture" also should be. Certainly "slab grave" alone is descriptive and only when paired with "culture" is it the name of something. No? Primergrey (talk) 01:28, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

• Laerodar, could you please provide some sources or other evidence (e.g. Ngrams, Google Scholar, Jstor searches) to back up your claim that "Slab Grave culture" is the WP:COMMONNAME here? Dicklyon, since you moved this page to the current title based on what you found in the sources, could you please share your evidence too? Toadspike [Talk] 10:50, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

  Three aspects play a role in this discussion. The first aspect is hyphenated vs. unhyphenated, the second is capitalized "Grave" vs uncapitalized "grave", the third being "Culture" vs "culture". Looking at Google Scholar overview, the unhyphenated name appears to be more common than a hyphenated spelling, see here. This is also true for Jstor search. Describing cultures by assemblages are also mentioned briefly in the BIAD Standards, with the example being "Linear Pottery Culture" The description of the assemblage is capitalized in both elements, as is also true for "Slab Grave". Note also the absence of a hyphen in the BIAD example. Analogous archaeological cultures adhere to the same conventions on wikipedia, and are even described that way. Thus, the unhyphenated and capitalized variant as "Slab Grave culture" appears more frequently than the hyphenated variant. The discussion should focus more on the question, whether an a all-capitalized "Slab Grave Culture" should be favoured over "Slab Grave culture" as both spellings occur to comparable degrees in literatur. The latter seems preferable due to it being congruent with and analogous to other cultures' names on wikipedia. Laerodar (talk) 13:59, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

  Thanks for the sources. I support this move as nominated. There are sources that use a hyphen, but on Google Scholar and Jstor (linked by Laerodar) they are a very small minority, and on Google Books (linked by Dicklyon) it's closer even but still leans toward no hyphen. The capitalization in sources is messy and varies, but the version proposed, "Slab Grave culture", is consistent with our other similar articles: Brushed Pottery culture, Netted Ware culture, Encrusted Pottery culture, House Urns culture, Bell Beaker culture, Battle Axe culture, Corded Ware culture, Linear Pottery culture, and Pitted Ware culture are examples from Category:Archaeological cultures of Europe; I see no entries using the current hyphenation or capitalization of this page. Toadspike [Talk] 16:15, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose after a quick look at book sources. Dicklyon (talk) 11:15, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

Correct. Both variants, whether "Slab Grave culture" or "Slab Grave Culture" are comparably common in literature searches. The descriptive element of the name is generally capitalized. The "culture" word element is variable, but wikipedia seems to favour the lower case variant in these names, e.g. see the alphabetically sorted list of archaeological cultures in Europe. Laerodar (talk) 14:49, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

Answer above meant for @Primergrey's opposition as proposed. Laerodar (talk) 14:51, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

You've made it clear that capitalization in sources is inconsistent. Per MOS:CAPS then we should use lowercase. And the hyphen helps the reader parse the compound, and is not unusual in sources, so there's no good reason to omit it. Dicklyon (talk) 21:22, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

• Support exactly as proposed, based on User:Toadspike's analysis. The capitalization is indeed messy, and in such cases we can safely go by WP:CONSISTENT. –Austronesier (talk) 20:59, 29 December 2024 (UTC)
• Support, yes, Toadspike's analysis covers the standard way uppercasing is used. The opposition to continuing uppercasing as a common name once again minimizes the obvious. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:24, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose Those supporting the move ostensibly do so on the basis of Toadspike's analysis and an argument of WP:CONSISTENT. As Toadspike observes: The capitalization in sources is messy and varies. A perusal of google scholar confirms this. WP:LOWERCASE (at WP:AT) says: Titles are written in sentence case. The initial letter of a title is almost always capitalized by default; otherwise, words are not capitalized unless they would be so in running text. It invokes WP:NCCAPS and MOS:CAPS) as guidance to determine what should be capitalised in prose. Accordingly, because the term is inconsistently capped, it should not be capped here. CONSISTANT refers to documented WP naming conventions of which WP:NCCAPS is one. It generally refers to word patterns. CONSISTENT and the associated P&G does not refer to consistency of capitalisation between similar articles. It does not create an exception to LOWERCASE. To use CONSISTENT to argue against LOWERCASE is contrary to the spirit and intent of policy (WP:AT). In the absence of any document naming convention CONSISTENT effectively becomes an argument of WP:OTHERCONTENT, which is not of itself a strong argument. While Toadspike has listed other articles that use descriptive names to identify different cultures, where the descriptive names are capitalised but there are also articles where this is not done: Deer stones culture, Liaoning bronze dagger culture, Philippine jade culture, Square-mouthed vases culture, Multi-cordoned ware culture and Stroke-ornamented ware culture. The capitalisation of similar articles is not consistent. Even without considering the legitimacy of CONSISTENT for capitalisation, the consistency argument fails. Because these terms are descriptive, they are not true proper names but more terms of art where capitalisation is being used to denote a connection as a particular phrase. This is confirmed where sources use the term with quote marks (eg here and here). Per MOS:SIGNIFCAPS, we don't use caps for this purpose. Hyphenation also denotes a combination of word as we see in other examples. The use of hyphenation in the existing title is technically correct and more correct in terms of WP style than using caps for much the same purpose. Ultimately though, my objection is less about the hyphen and more about the use of caps. Cinderella157 (talk) 03:01, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

  "CONSISTENT and the associated P&G does not refer to consistency of capitalisation between similar articles." WP:CONSISTENT begins with To the extent that it is practical, titles should be consistent among articles covering similar topics. (emphasis mine)

  I appreciate your discovery of other articles which use different formats than the ones I listed above.

  Looking at specific examples, the issue might be that those articles are not at their common names either. Stroke-ornamented ware culture, for instance, cites two sources, a dead link to some news website(?!) and a scholarly source that calls the subject "the Stroke Ornamented Ware culture". Philippine jade culture looks like a POV-pushing mess and has a move history (9 moves, 0 RMs) to match. I cannot find a single reliable source on Google or GScholar that uses the term "Philippine jade culture" (any caps). I'm not going to argue for a multimove here, but none of the pages you listed have been through an RM and maybe some ought to.

  I believe reliable scholarly sources are using the term as a proper noun, though your argument that the capitalized names are terms of art is reasonable and I won't tally all the sources to convince you otherwise

  On the hyphen, Square-mouthed vases culture, Multi-cordoned ware culture, and Stroke-ornamented ware culture grammatically require a hyphen (compound modifiers of "vases" or "ware"; e.g. "mouthed" isn't a standalone noun), whereas "slab grave culture" and the other examples I linked are not wrong without one.

  Anyhow, thank you for your well-reasoned thoughts and sorry for all my yapping. Toadspike [Talk] 10:32, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

  The point I am making regarding CONSISTENT is that the statement needs to be read in the fuller context of that section, the fuller context of WP:AT (including WP:LOWERCASE) and the context provided by supporting P&G linked from that section that give fuller detail as to what the section means and how it is applied. Taking this as a whole, CONSISTENT applies to patterns of words used in titles but at no point does it refer to the capitalisation of those words as an exception to LOWERCASE. One can also see that CONSISTENT quite specifically does not apply to variations in spelling such as color v colour. Cinderella157 (talk) 12:03, 2 January 2025 (UTC)