User:Seattle Skier/Cascade Volcanoes
What is the correct term for the Cascade volcanoes? What title should the article have?
The name of this article has recently been changed from "Cascade Volcanoes" to "Cascade Volcanic Belt", and the latter term has begun spreading to numerous other pages on Wikipedia. However, this term is not widely accepted and it may not be an appropriate title, especially when the phrase is capitalized as a proper noun (as it is now).
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (geographic names) states "The title: When a widely accepted English name, in a modern context, exists for a place, we should use it."
Wikipedia:Naming conventions states "Generally, article naming should prefer to what the majority of English speakers would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature. This is justified by the following principle: Names of Wikipedia articles should be optimized for readers over editors; and for a general audience over specialists."
Therefore we should use the title which has the widest acceptance in the volcanological community, as shown by publications in scientific journals and conferences, while at the same time the article should be easy to find for readers and to link to for editors. So I checked several search phrases on GeoRef, the main research database in the field, to find out how widely used they are (these are not full-text searches, only titles and abstracts are available to be searched):
| Search Phrase | Published Works | Peer-Reviewed Journals | Phrase is Capitalized? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cascade Arc | 98 | 35 | yes, sometimes |
| Cascades Arc | 36 | 8 | yes, sometimes |
| Cascade Volcanoes | 44 | 9 | none found |
| Cascades Volcanoes | 11 | 2 | none found |
| Cascade Volcanic Arc | 37 | 11 | yes, sometimes |
| Cascades Volcanic Arc | 15 | 4 | none found |
| Cascade Magmatic Arc | 7 | 0 | none found |
| Cascades Magmatic Arc | 1 | 1 | none found |
| Cascade Volcanic Belt | 4 | 3 | none found |
| Cascades Volcanic Belt | 0 | 0 | - |
| Cascade Volcanos | 3 | 0 | none found |
| Cascades Volcanos | 0 | 0 | - |
NOTE: GeoRef searches are case-insensitive, so I manually looked in the abstracts to see if the phrase was ever capitalized.
Some conclusions seem evident from these results:
- "Volcanoes" should be spelled with an "e".
- In each of the pairs of phrases, the singular ("Cascade") is much preferred to the plural ("Cascades"), so we should use the singular version.
- The current name, "Cascade Volcanic Belt", is not widely accepted and so is inappropriate for this article. We need to change it.
- The top 3 contenders are "Cascade Arc", "Cascade volcanoes", and "Cascade Volcanic Arc". We should use one of these terms as the title.
- Using either "Cascade Arc" or "Cascade Volcanic Arc" as a proper noun (capitalizing all words) is OK, since at least some publications do that, but not really so for "Cascade volcanoes".
Out of these three, "Cascade Arc" is not specific enough for the title of this article, which needs to contain some reference to volcanism. So "Cascade volcanoes" and "Cascade Volcanic Arc" appear to be the only reasonable choices of title. We should choose one of these two names by consensus and then modify any linked templates and individual volcano pages to reflect that consensus choice. Personally, I would vote for this article to be named "Cascade volcanoes" since it best meets the official policy, but I do like "Cascade Volcanic Arc" since it offers a more formal name as a proper noun.
Within the text of articles, if a proper noun is needed, then "Cascade Volcanic Arc" is a much better choice than "Cascade Volcanic Belt". It is favored by scientists because it is more accurate and apt for describing a 1200-km long example of arc volcanism like that in Cascadia, while "volcanic belt" usually refers to geographically smaller regions. All references to "Cascade Volcanic Belt" in Wikipedia articles should probably be changed to Arc instead, for example in phrases such as "Mount Cayley is a volcano in the northern part of the Cascade Volcanic Arc." I've already created a redirect page named Cascade Volcanic Arc in order to ease linking to the final choice of article title.
By the way, I've been researching the Cascade volcanoes extensively for the past 8 years, and I've read or skimmed most significant books and scientific papers written about them since 1900. I have over 500 photocopied or PDF papers about Cascade volcanoes in my files, along with at least 50+ books or guidebooks related to them. So I do have an extensive background in this area.
I welcome your comments about which name we should choose. Thanks.