User:JoelleJay/sandbox

This proposal was to move "Pākehā settlers" to "European settlers of New Zealand" (or an equivalent term). There were 15 support versus 9 oppose. This was closed as "no consensus", despite the closer stating that the support rationales were stronger: See below strong, policy- and guideline-based arguments for moving to the proposed title along with fair rebuttals and almost equally strong rationales that are opposed to this page move. The closer did not actually state what any of the arguments were, how they were weighted, or why a 15-9 support supermajority was not considered relevant or strong enough to counter the admittedly weaker oppose arguments. Followup on the closer's talk did not clarify any of the above, although they did repeatedly mention that the topic is "contentious" (in the real world). In my opinion, the close and followup read as if the closer simply assessed how many !voters linked a policy or guideline, took them at their word that they were actually addressing what those P&Gs say, decided it was a simple COMMONALITY vs TIES disagreement, and concluded that since it's not clear in the guidelines whether either one overrides the other, there can't be a consensus, regardless of the number of !votes.

The fact that the closer stated the support arguments were stronger and yet didn't consider 15-9 to be a clear consensus ought to be reason enough to investigate this close. Other troubling aspects include their inability/refusal to elaborate on what they deemed "strong arguments", and their vague reference to the topic being "contentious" as if that was a policy-based reason to prefer one title. However I wouldn't be bringing this here if I didn't also believe an analysis of the argument substance should have found overwhelming favor for support even without the lopsided !voter counts. Details are collapsed below.

Arguments

Oppose arguments (that were based on P&Gs) rested almost entirely on the claim that WP:TIES meant the New Zealand-only term "pākehā" was preferred over "European" and that this overrode WP:COMMONALITY. Two early oppose !voters attempted to justify this with evidence of which term was more common in NZ, by pointing to the sources already cited in the article, by claiming quantitative evaluation of term usage was inherently invalid because the terms are descriptive rather than proper names, and by showing that a quantitative Google Scholar search for "pākehā" yields more results than for "New Zealand European|European New Zealander|NZ European". These justifications for TIES occurred in the first two-ish days. Support !voters immediately pointed out that there is no indication that TIES overrides COMMONALITY, especially given COMMONALITY provides guidance specifically on when to use a national variety of English and which national variety to use when there are multiple. WP:COMMONALITY states vocabulary common to all varieties of English is preferable, Use universally accepted terms rather than those less widely distributed, especially in titles, and When more than one variant spelling exists within a national variety of English, the most commonly used current variant should usually be preferred. "European" is universally understood in English, "pākehā" is only understood in New Zealand. Supporters reiterated that the page also obviously has strong ties to the origins of the European settlers, as they are the topic of the article. Supporters also noted that TIES says An article on a topic that has strong ties to a particular English-speaking nation should use the (formal, not colloquial) English of that nation., which more or less obligates editors to determine, quantitatively, what term is the "formal English of that nation". They countered that the GS search query by the opposers was not specific to the topic, which is the settlers of NZ, and further that the query runs into the same problem complained about above re: descriptive terms versus proper words. In support of "European settlers" satisfying both COMMONALITY and TIES, support !voters presented the following (and more) evidence demonstrating "European settlers" in the context of NZ is by far the preferred term in recent New Zealand sources: a) a search of scholarly sources since 2021 (pākehā: 191, European: 3310); b) .nz-limited Google News hits from the last year (p: 47, E: 239); c) .nz-limited scholarly sources since 2020 where any "European settlers" hits were discounted if the same page had the word "pakeha" on it (p: 256, E: 1560; the disparity is higher when hits containing "pakeha" aren't removed from "European" results, while there were only 3 pages that exclusively used "pākehā settlers" over "European settlers"); d) The NZ government uses "New Zealand European" for the census, suggesting there must not be universal familiarity with or agreement on definition for "pākehā" among English-speaking citizens of NZ; e) Google Trends from the last 5 years in NZ show zero hits for "pākehā settlers" as opposed to 7 hits/day for "European settlers New Zealand". There were no rebuttals (or direct references to prior rebuttals) to the above quantitative findings beyond the initial two opposers, who only contested the general approach represented by the first two items and did not address evidence c–e. In fact, only two oppose !voters addressed real-world usage of the term at all, whether to challenge the specific numbers or to argue that the numbers were irrelevant/unrepresentative. Meanwhile, 4-5 editors did explicitly endorse the quantitative evidence, especially that from c-e. Considering that TIES specifically asks for "the formal national variety of English", demonstrating what that is should be the priority for anyone citing TIES in their argument. The closer should have recognized the stark lack of evidence presented for "pākehā" as being the TIES term was a significant weakness of oppose !votes. Finally, support !voters showed that "European" complied better with WP:CONSISTENT, as the other pages that concern European colonization are of the general form "[European] colonization of X" or otherwise use general, global terms. European New Zealanders are also not referred to as pākehā in running prose elsewhere on Wikipedia, apart from the page pākehā. Neither of these points was refuted.

Discussion was marred by certain !voters seemingly having bigoted motivations behind their !votes, bludgeoning, veiled (and explicit) accusations of racism and colonialism, and whatever bad blood was left over from the prior RM (which I didn't look at). However, closers should be able to look past the behavior of !voters and whatever alleged "culture war" exists on this topic outside of WP and evaluate !votes on their application of relevant WP policies and guidelines.

JoelleJay (talk) 01:57, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

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This proposal was to move "Pākehā settlers" to "European settlers of New Zealand", with 15 supporting versus 9 opposing, and, according to the closer, the support rationales being somewhat stronger: See below strong, policy- and guideline-based arguments for moving to the proposed title along with fair rebuttals and almost equally strong rationales that are opposed to this page move.

Despite there being significantly more editors supporting than opposing and those editors having stronger arguments, the closer found no consensus to move.

In my opinion, the close and followup read as if the closer simply assessed how many !voters linked a policy or guideline, took them at their word that they were actually addressing what those P&Gs say, decided it was a simple COMMONALITY vs TIES disagreement, and concluded that since it's not clear in the guidelines whether either one overrides the other, there can't be a consensus, regardless of the number of !votes.

I also believe that the arguments for moving are considerably stronger than the closer assessment:

Arguments

Oppose arguments (that were based on P&Gs) rested almost entirely on the claim that WP:TIES meant the New Zealand-only term "pākehā" was preferred over "European" and that this overrode WP:COMMONALITY. Two early oppose !voters attempted to justify this with evidence of which term was more common in NZ, by pointing to the sources already cited in the article, by claiming quantitative evaluation of term usage was inherently invalid because the terms are descriptive rather than proper names, and by showing that a quantitative Google Scholar search for "pākehā" yields more results than for "New Zealand European|European New Zealander|NZ European". These justifications for TIES occurred in the first two-ish days. Support !voters immediately pointed out that there is no indication that TIES overrides COMMONALITY, especially given COMMONALITY provides guidance specifically on when to use a national variety of English and which national variety to use when there are multiple. WP:COMMONALITY states vocabulary common to all varieties of English is preferable, Use universally accepted terms rather than those less widely distributed, especially in titles, and When more than one variant spelling exists within a national variety of English, the most commonly used current variant should usually be preferred. "European" is universally understood in English, "pākehā" is only understood in New Zealand. Supporters reiterated that the page also obviously has strong ties to the origins of the European settlers, as they are the topic of the article. Supporters also noted that TIES says An article on a topic that has strong ties to a particular English-speaking nation should use the (formal, not colloquial) English of that nation., which more or less obligates editors to determine, quantitatively, what term is the "formal English of that nation". They countered that the GS search query by the opposers was not specific to the topic, which is the settlers of NZ, and further that the query runs into the same problem complained about above re: descriptive terms versus proper words. In support of "European settlers" satisfying both COMMONALITY and TIES, support !voters presented the following (and more) evidence demonstrating "European settlers" in the context of NZ is by far the preferred term in recent New Zealand sources: a) a search of scholarly sources since 2021 (pākehā: 191, European: 3310); b) .nz-limited Google News hits from the last year (p: 47, E: 239); c) .nz-limited scholarly sources since 2020 where any "European settlers" hits were discounted if the same page had the word "pakeha" on it (p: 256, E: 1560; the disparity is higher when hits containing "pakeha" aren't removed from "European" results, while there were only 3 pages that exclusively used "pākehā settlers" over "European settlers"); d) The NZ government uses "New Zealand European" for the census, suggesting there must not be universal familiarity with or agreement on definition for "pākehā" among English-speaking citizens of NZ; e) Google Trends from the last 5 years in NZ show zero hits for "pākehā settlers" as opposed to 7 hits/day for "European settlers New Zealand". There were no rebuttals (or direct references to prior rebuttals) to the above quantitative findings beyond the initial two opposers, who only contested the general approach represented by the first two items and did not address evidence c–e. In fact, only two oppose !voters addressed real-world usage of the term at all, whether to challenge the specific numbers or to argue that the numbers were irrelevant/unrepresentative. Meanwhile, 4-5 editors did explicitly endorse the quantitative evidence, especially that from c-e. Considering that TIES specifically asks for "the formal national variety of English", demonstrating what that is should be the priority for anyone citing TIES in their argument. The closer should have recognized the stark lack of evidence presented for "pākehā" as being the TIES term was a significant weakness of oppose !votes. Finally, support !voters showed that "European" complied better with WP:CONSISTENT, as the other pages that concern European colonization are of the general form "[European] colonization of X" or otherwise use general, global terms. European New Zealanders are also not referred to as pākehā in running prose elsewhere on Wikipedia, apart from the page pākehā. Neither of these points was refuted.