Commons:Categories for discussion/2020/04/College athletics programs

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College athletics programs

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I'd like to propose that all categories for collegiate athletics programs be changed from the naming style "University of Cincinnati athletics" to the naming style "Cincinnati Bearcats". Here are some of my reasons:

  • The new naming scheme reflects common use. This is the naming scheme that is used on most/all Wikipedias, and it's also probably the most common one used outside of Wikimedia projects.
  • The term "athletics" is confusing. On Commons, Category:Athletics refers to the sport also known as track and field. However, these categories are not about each college's track and field program, but instead, about ALL sports programs at the college. This can create confusion; for example, as I type this, Category:College athletic programs is incorrectly placed inside Category:Athletics.
  • The current scheme doesn't properly describe the scope. The phrase "University of Cincinnati athletics" sounds as though it might include ALL sports-related activities at the university, including intramurals or club sports. However, in practice, these categories are only used for the university-sponsored sports teams. If we did want to broaden the scope of these categories, that would also be a problem, as they are typically linked to ikidata items which have the narrower scope.
  • The full names of universities may be unfamiliar to users. For example, someone looking for Virginia Tech Hokies might not recognize the full name, the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Similar issues exist with the UMBC Retrievers (University of Maryland, Baltimore County), California Golden Bears (University of California, Berkeley), LSU Tigers (Louisiana State University), and many others.
  • The current names are inconsistent with subcategories. In the "University of Cincinnati athletics" category, for example, there are subcategories Cincinnati Bearcats men's basketball, Cincinnati Bearcats football, and Cincinnati Bearcats men's soccer. It seems weird and counter-intuitive that the name of the parent category doesn't match its subcategories.
  • The new names are shorter/neater. The current title scheme is needlessly wordy; the shorter names convey the exact same meaning in a more straightforward way.

Here is the enormous list of moves I'm proposing:

Full list of proposed moves

That's almost every school from Category:College athletic programs, excluding 17 which already used my naming scheme, and one or two odd ones that seemed like they might need individual discussion. If there's any other moves which anyone thinks needs special discussion, feel free to single them out as needing a separate discussion. IagoQnsi (talk) 01:30, 24 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  •  Comment for me there's no problem as long as there's consistency. BTW is "Soccer" part of the name of the team, or is only descriptive of the sports discipline played by the team? Because I agree that the full name of the university might be unfamiliar to some users, but at the same "football" means different sports according to the place you live in. For us Europeans, for example, football is what you call soccer whereas for you Americans is the American football, that's why we prefer to call it association football when we are talking to an American (in turn, football is Australian rules football in Australia, and so on). -- SERGIO (aka the Blackcat) 08:12, 24 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Oppose Literally anyone can correctly guess the category Category:Case Western Reserve University athletics. Only someone who knows the school is going to guess at Category:Case Western Reserve Spartans. Also, to many people the latter primarily refers to the football team, and it necessarily excludes any intramural athletics at that University. - Jmabel ! talk 15:36, 24 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Jmabel: Actually, I would say the opposite is true in most cases. I'm not sure if you're U.S.-based or not, but typically in American sports media, the long name of a university is almost never used. American college sports teams are treated almost as if they're independent from their university. For many of these schools, I bet most American sports fans would struggle to remember whether any given school is "University of X", "College of X", "X College", "X University", or something else.
Regardless, we would have redirects from the old names to the new names, so it doesn't really matter what the user types in. What matters is that the name we use be the most widely-recognizable name for the entity. I think that someone who is familiar with, say, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte from an academic perspective would be able to recognize the Charlotte 49ers as the university's sports teams, but a sports fan looking for the Charlotte 49ers may not have ever seen the full name of the university before. I suspect many sports fans wouldn't know what the letters of LSU, SMU, USC, UMBC, BYU, and so on stand for, and wouldn't recognize the full names of the universities (to give a personal anecdote, I never knew what LSU stood for for the longest time, and when I first saw the name "Louisiana State University", I assumed it must be some other obscure little school). –IagoQnsi (talk) 01:52, 25 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • In the case of UConn, there's an argument to be made that that might be appropriate, as that's the primary name used even by the team itself. In most cases though, the media uses the initialism and a longer name interchangeably, and in those cases I selected the longer name in my proposed moves list (e.g. Virginia not UVa, South Florida not USF, Washington not UW). I think the initialisms should only be used in cases where it's so dominant that some people may not know what the acronym stands for, e.g. LSU, UNLV, BYU, and TCU. These teams' branding is on par with, say, NBC or BBC in terms of preferring the initialism over the long name. –IagoQnsi (talk) 19:06, 25 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Weak oppose I don't hate this idea, but I still prefer the current category naming scheme, which is especially useful for those who are unfamiliar with team nicknames. Also, not everyone knows that "Louisiana" in college athletics refers to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. I also agree with Kzirkel's point about the current categories being consistent with other categories about universities, like "campus" and "buildings" categories. Michael Barera (talk) 16:28, 24 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Michael Barera: Actually, I think schools like Louisiana are exactly why we should make the move. Someone who's familiar with UL Lafayette or UNC Chapel Hill or UT Knoxville from an academic perspective is reasonably likely to know that those are the flagship schools in their respective university systems, and that the city is commonly dropped from their names. But someone who is only familiar with the sports teams "Louisiana", "North Carolina", and "Tennessee" may have no idea which town those universities are based in, and wouldn't be able to pick out which category is the one they're looking for. –IagoQnsi (talk) 02:06, 25 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • @IagoQnsi: I respectfully disagree. While the 20-25 largest college athletics programs are arguably of comparable stature and name recognition as their parent universities, the vast majority of them are not. Take my home state for an example. While this rename may make sense for the University of Michigan and its intercollegiate athletics teams (the Michigan Wolverines), it doesn't make sense for Albion College, Central Michigan University, the University of Detroit-Mercy, Eastern Michigan University, Ferris State University, Grand Valley State University, Kalamazoo College, Lake Superior State University, Northern Michigan University, Oakland University, or Western Michigan University. Unless you're a fan of the Mid-American Conference or college hockey (and most American sports fans, let alone the general public, are not), probably the only two schools in the state that would be comparably recognizable after renaming their athletics categories to their nicknames would be Michigan (Wolverines) and Michigan State (Spartans). Michael Barera (talk) 22:59, 25 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • @IagoQnsi: I think Virginia Tech is a case where the other subcategories should probably change to "Virginia Tech", since that's the COMMONNAME. If you asked 10 Virginians the name of an engineering-heavy state university in Blacksburg, you'd likely get zero person say "Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University", and its most newsworthy event is called the Virginia Tech Massacre, not the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Massacre. But that's obviously a different discussion from this one. Ytoyoda (talk) 01:46, 26 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Support Here's a link to the 2011 discussion about the same thing, which ended without consensus. Nine years later, I still generally think the more accurate category names would include the team name. You noted this in your second bullet, but yes, I've always thought "Athletics" has a small potential to be misleading in that it traditionally refers to track and field events, and it could lead to semantic discussion over whether the members of a school's golf team or archery team are "athletes."-- Patrick, oѺ∞ 17:49, 24 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Weak oppose I like the intent of the proposal and I'm not completely against it, but I find myself agreeing with talk:Kzirkel and Michael Barera that it helps to have a parrarel with other university subcategories. Also, when I hear "North Carolina Tar Heels", I'm thinking about the teams or the athletes, but not the athletic department. When we talk about campus sports facilities or the Athletic Director, we talk about them as being part of the university, not the Michigan State Spartans, for example.
And I wouldn't be too concerned about the confusion with the non-American definition of "athletics", since American collegiate athletics are pretty unique in their scope and notability. If anything, I think it'd be more helpful to discuss editing Category:Athletics to match the en-wiki article titles, en:Athletics (physical culture) and en:Sport of athletics. Ytoyoda (talk) 19:48, 24 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I don't see the confusion with athletics. They're referred to athletic departments at most American universities.
  •  Oppose I'm all for changing the names to match the names used on Wikipedia. My only concern is making sure all the data is transferred over. I've seen many times on Wikipedia that the main category is changed, but the secondary categories are not and data is misplaced. If there is no guarantee of transferring all the data/categories, then I would change my vote to oppose.Spatms (talk) 21:28, 24 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I've decided to change my vote from weak support to oppose. I actually agree the names should be changed to match Wikipedia and don't prefer using the full college name and then athletics on the end. My issue is that hundreds of schools data will be lost, so the benefits do not outweigh the costs for me. During this discussion, no one has mentioned they will go through every category and link to the new names. Since no one will take on such a huge undertaking and do it correctly, I sadly can't support the change.Spatms (talk) 18:27, 28 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Spatms: Everything should transfer over without issue – Wikidata relinking happens automatically when you move a category, and there are bots that take care of fixing redirect issues. I think this will actually cause less data issues, as we will now match Wikipedia's naming. There are bots that create Wikidata items for Commons categories, and they've created many duplicate items for college sports programs because they didn't recognize the Wikipedia name. If all else fails, I'll be making sure everything moves over correctly. –IagoQnsi (talk) 21:11, 14 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Weak support Of the reasons already mentioned, I believe the most compelling one for the change is to reflect common usage and against is the loss of parallelism with other university subcategory names. All comments considered, I'd say it would still be an improvement. Waz8 (talk) 01:32, 27 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Intermural sports & Club sports vs Intercollegiate athletics

I appreciate you bringing this up. I agree that the current naming is tedious.

However, after doing some research, it is not always strictly correct to lump intermural sports in with intercollegiate athletics. At least in the case of Bowling Green State University, intercollegiate athletics are always called the Falcons, but intermural sports are rarely if ever called Falcons by university publications and local media, though the players for the teams are often called Falcons coloquially. Since this is a discinction that even English Wikipedia doesn't seem to bother with (Intermural sports are lumped in the Bowling Green Falcons page), it's mostly splitting hairs.

Overall, I support this rename. --Mbrickn (talk) 05:59, 24 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  •  Oppose basically because I agree with Jmabel's argument. These categories are systematic and (aside from your second bullet) unambiguous, and it's very easy to find one institution's category once you know the naming convention. I can easily find Category:Centre College athletics if I need it, without looking, while Category:Centre Colonels will take some searching. This is particularly important here at Commons, since users unfamiliar with English need to have things made easy. Imagine if you only speak German: you'll have learnt that "Ohio University athletics" represents the Ohio University athletic department, what you'd call "Ohio University Sportabteilung", so if you're looking at the Centre College category, you know where to find the athletics, but "Ohio University Bobcats" doesn't help you navigate to the Centre Colonels category; the anglophone user who goes to Category:Centre College will look at the subcategories and see that Colonels is the only one that really makes sense for sports, but because you only speak German, you won't know that, and you'll have a hard time finding the sports teams. Moreover, various institutions have abandoned their historic mascots in order to be politically correct, and the proposed name would cause the new categories to become restricted in their chronological scope: someone who played on a Miami University Redskins team is not a member of the "RedHawks", for example. Finally, I agree with your point about athletics being ambiguous (e.g. en:Athletics at the Summer Olympics), but that's a very different matter, and renaming to the team nicknames is only one way to avoid that problem. Let's close this as "keep" and prepare for another nomination that strictly addresses that issue. Nyttend (talk) 09:06, 28 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Weak oppose Sometimes, and perhaps often, the nickname of a university is used to more broadly to define affiliated components or aspects of the institution beyond just athletics. For instance, an "Aggie" from Texas A&M could refer to any alumni, the Corps of Cadets, the band, etc.
As far as the point about the term "athletics" being confused with the classic term (and IOC used term) for the sport of Track and Field, I would point out that nearly every single U.S. collegiate institution sponsoring sports generally uses the term "Department of Athletics" or "Athletics Department", which clearly is understood within the context of U.S. sports to be broader than only the sport of Track and Field. While this might be more confusing or an international reader, who would likely be confused by university athletics in the US in general because of its relative uniqueness, "athletics" is the ubiquitous term utilized in the U.S. to describe the full panorama and administrative structure supporting institutionally-supported sports offerings in education (and in general U.S. parlance, it is almost never used in a way that limits it to Track & Field). As a corollary, all collegiate soccer team articles use the term "[Short university name] [Nickname] soccer" and all college football articles are titled "[Short university name] [nickname] football", so I don't know if avoiding the use of the term "athletics" for categories involving U.S. collegiate sports entities is any more warranted. Crazypaco (talk) 20:47, 29 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Oppose A user unfamiliar with the school would have to figure out that the name of the mascot meant the athletics department. If I'm unfamiliar with the name "Stanford Cardinal", that could conceivably refer to a building on campus, a priest (if they were a Catholic university), or possibly some other school program, whereas "Stanford University athletics" is unambiguous. Not only that, but it's not uncommon to use the mascot name to refer to students or alumni. For example, UCLA students are generally called "Bruins" (source: personal experience), so if I found a category with that name I might expect to see Category:UCLA students underneath it. —howcheng {chat} 18:45, 27 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

 Not done: per discussion. --ƏXPLICIT 12:22, 28 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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