brown Caucasian Cattle

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: consensus to move the pages, per the discussion below. Dekimasuよ! 06:38, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

---

• Brown Caucasian → Brown Caucasian cattle
• Brown Carpathian → Brown Carpathian cattle
• Brown Swiss → Brown Swiss cattle
• Red Maasai → Red Maasai sheep

– Per WP:PRECISION and WP:RECOGNIZABLE, and for WP:CONSISTENCY with all the prior RMs that resulted in Blue Grey cattle, British White cattle, Welsh Black cattle, Florida White rabbit, Anatolian Black cattle, Uzbek Black goat, Nicastrese goat, Korean Native pig, Argentine Criollo cattle, Algerian Arab sheep, Anglo-Nubian goat, Indo-Brazilian cattle, West African Dwarf goat, Flemish Giant rabbit, American Sable rabbit, Silver Marten rabbit, Belgian Fawn goat, White Park cattle, Australian Pit Game fowl, Coburg Lark pigeon, Asturian Mountain cattle, and so on, where the name without the species at the end was intolerably ambiguous.

Any of these presently nominated could be interpreted as descriptive of genuine human populations, and only readers with both a broad knowledge of ethnical terms and of animal breeds would intuit that they don't refer to people (or to other things – see below), so the existing names fail WP:PRECISION policy (and probably also WP:RECOGNIZABLE, since only experts in obscure breeds of particular kinds of livestock, not agricultural animals generally, will recognize them at all). We routinely (and WP:NATURALly not parenthetically) disambiguate animal breed names in any cases where confusion may result. See years of previous RMs, and the contents of Category:Cattle breeds, Category:Goat breeds, Category:Rabbit breeds, etc. These terms are not any more improbable as ethnic terms than Black Dutch and Black Irish. The core problem with these bare compound adjective names is that they just inspire questions like "Brown Swiss what?".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:04, 24 January 2018 (UTC)--Relisting. –Ammarpad (talk) 13:43, 31 January 2018 (UTC) In detail:

• "Brown Caucasian", for example, has been in use in anthropological literature since at least as far back as 1883 [1][2],and is possibly a viable article topic (or at least subsection somewhere).
• "Brown Carpathian" doesn't seem to be used in RS to refer to people, but occurs frequently in "brown Carpathian bear" [3] (I don't know if this is a subspecies or something), and also shows up in descriptions of Carpathian elm wood [4], as a color of Doctor Marten's boots [5], etc.
• "Brown Swiss" doesn't seem used as an ethnonym in RS, but is the name of multiple streets [6][7][8], a type of beer [9], [10] (viable article topic), a painting by Andrew Wyeth (with no cattle evident in it)[11], and occurs in other constructions like "brown Swiss lace" [12].
• "Red Maasai" is used as an actual ethnic (more tribal) term [13], and thus a viable section subject if not an article. There's also a Red Maasai goat breed [14], which is probably a viable article. "Red Maasai" is also overwhelmingly common in descriptions of Maasai goods [15] (they like red a lot, or at least the "Red" Maasai do, while the "Blue" Maasai go for ... a different color).

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:04, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

• Support all per above. Paintspot Infez (talk) 14:25, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
• Support all Rreagan007 (talk) 16:42, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
• Support all per nom. ToThAc (talk) 18:26, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
• Support all per detailed and strongly-referenced nomination. —Roman Spinner (talk)(contribs) 07:35, 25 January 2018 (UTC)
• Oppose. Sorry, but this is mostly just so much silly nonsense. We don't disambiguate things that don't need to be disambiguated. The Brown Swiss is one of the best-known and most successful cattle breeds in the world, unmistakably the WP:Primary topic for this title even if there were any other contender for it – which there isn't. The Brown Swiss does need to be carefully distinguished from the brown Swiss cattle that it derived from, but our page on those is at Braunvieh, so there's no conflict there (there's also a page on the few that remain uncontaminated with Brown Swiss genes at Original Braunvieh). There's no other rationally conceivable topic for either Brown Caucasian or Brown Carpathian, as McCandlish has successfully shown. Are we really going to have an article on the colour of a model of children's head-kicking boots? No, of course we aren't. I'm a little less certain about the Red Maasai, as the OP raises the possibility of a Red Maasai breed of goat. That is not listed in Mason, the definitive text on breeds world-wide, but then nor is this sheep (index, volume 2, page 125). The source he cites calls it a "red Maasai goat", or red-coloured goat of the Maasai people; if it were a breed you would expect to find "Red Maasai Goat", because breed names are normally capitalised. Anyway, until and unless someone creates that article, disambiguation isn't needed there either. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 22:34, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
• Support all. Improves Wikipedia reader experience. Brown Swiss is particularly confusing as Swiss Brown is a very common (and delicious) variety of mushroom (see Talk:Swiss Brown), and we should be consistent with other breeds. Perhaps we need a specific naming convention to reassure people that it's not silly nonsense. Andrewa (talk) 03:54, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

---

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.