Talk:Scranton general strike

Categories

@Namiba:, @Anmccaff:

I have to say that I do agree with Anmccaff on this one. This is a stand alone article for length reasons, but if this were a different format, it and other similar articles would be chapters in a larger work on the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 generally, which is remarkable more for the civil unrest portion than as a labor dispute, which, as such, accomplished little to nothing and overall comprised a small portion of the disruption, even though it started as the rationale for the events. TimothyJosephWood 16:43, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Captions

@Anmccaff: See WP:CAPFRAG. Captions are written in sentence case with the first word and only proper nouns capitalized. TJW^talk 14:13, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Yep, that the general guideline. I don't like it, but that's neither here nor there. Grammar and style within quotations, which is at issue here, is a different matter, and there are good reasons to preserve this as a quote...or to change it radically in new words, but wikifying it slightly is a bad compromise. Anmccaff (talk) 14:24, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

This isn't a quotation. TJW^talk 14:41, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

If you wrote it, obviously, it's yours to change, but I'd have sworn there was something very like it on one of PA retrospectives, and I thought it came from there. Searching shows it is straight out of Logan, but he doesn't use the extra capitalization (and isn't using it as a direct caption, where I'm sure he might have.) I'm reverting back to your version. Anmccaff (talk) 15:12, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Renaming

I've tried to start a follow up discussion about this once before, but I'm going to drop another note here before I do anything. I think it probably makes a lot more sense to rename this article now than it did two years ago. We now have:

• Great Railroad Strike of 1877
• Pittsburgh railroad strike of 1877
• Chicago railroad strike of 1877
• Baltimore railroad strike of 1877

Given we still have 1877 St. Louis general strike, 1877 Shamokin uprising and Reading Railroad massacre that don't follow this pattern, but I do think it makes sense to take steps to make them more in line with one another where we can, even if that's just one article at a time. If this doesn't generate any substantive discussion, I'll probably just boldly move the article some time in the next few weeks. GMG^talk 15:33, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

Rename it to what, exactly? Anmccaff (talk) 16:56, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

X railroad strike of 1877 seems like the obvious choice, given that it's the clearly source based name for the parent article, of which these would all be a chapter were this a book rather than an encyclopedia. GMG^talk 17:18, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

I think that'd be, if anything, worse than the existing. It's not used contemporaneously, it's not used in the best sources, and its not inline with the events, The rail strike helped spark it, but there was plenty of tinder.

How about "Lackawana Avenue Riot"? Anmccaff (talk) 17:31, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

Meh. Personally if we're not going for consistency, then it doesn't really matter all that much to me. To my mind we have a clear proper name for the parent article, and it makes intuitive sense to use similar descriptive titles for each subsidiary one, when were it not for length requirements, they would all be one article anyway. GMG^talk 18:17, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

The thing is, it's only the "parent article" because of Wikipedia itself; the parent article could as easily be "Labor violence in Scranton/the Wyoming Valley/the Anthracite Industry", and so forth. As you saw in the making of it, there are plenty of good sources to support any of these approaches. Anmccaff (talk) 18:23, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

Certainly there are multiple names that we could have used for the main, just poking around "The Strike Wave of 1877" "The Great Labor Uprising of 1877". But there are also multiple sources supporting "Great Railroad Strike of 1877". Although had we gone with The Strike Wave of 1877 it would have been equally beneficial to readers, who probably wouldn't notice the difference either way. What I do think is more likely confusing to readers is the inconsistency, which is hard to miss, and may suggest that there was something qualitatively different about Scranton compared with the other cities, when there really isn't, we just went with a different naming convention because Wikipedia. GMG^talk 18:30, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

There were several things qualitatively different about Scranton; the '77 violence was seen as a continuation of the '71 violence, and a precursor to later problems. Anmccaff (talk) 18:37, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

Meh. I'll not waste any more time on it then. GMG^talk 18:41, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

We'll have to agree to disagree, then. I think the current name takes a fairly good, fairly scholarly, and fairly accurate article and singlehandedly transforms it into a POV-pushing POS. Anmccaff (talk) 19:00, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

• Oppose The sources cited do not merit a name change. The article is fine where it is. Chris Troutman (talk) 18:40, 2 February 2018 (UTC)