Talk:1919 Austrian Constituent Assembly election

Requested move 27 June 2018

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: move the page at this time, per the discussion below. Although it appears that both titles are in use, the proposed title garnered more support in the current discussion, and it was argued that this wording is also more common in reliable sources in English. Dekimasuよ! 02:08, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

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Austrian Constitutional Assembly election, 1919 → Austrian Constituent Assembly election, 1919 – Constituent and Constitutional may be used as synonyms as presented by the article Constituent assembly which allows both phrases, but leads with "Constituent". "Constituent" appears the common word as also presented in and List of constituent assemblies which has a comprehensive overview of this category. Unless those assemblies have specific names, such as Continental Congress, "Constituent" seems the majority name. The references provided in the article refer to a "constituent" assembly, as do this source, as well as this one. In the native German, the assembly was called "konstituierend", see de:Konstituierende Nationalversammlung. The online dictionary of the Technical University of Munich prefers "constituent" as translation (link). Therefore, as per WP:COMMONNAME I request to move the article name. This had been done by another user before as WP:BOLD good faith move and reverted by the article author. However I do believe that the user was right to move the name. I don't strictly think this forum would have been required, however as suggested by the author of the English language article who opposed the move, I submit this request to clarify. As the move has created a redirect, this is as much a request to clarify the editing of the article to reflect the wording. _pseudonym Jake Brockman ^talk 18:03, 27 June 2018 (UTC) --Relisting. bd2412 T 15:45, 12 July 2018 (UTC) --Relisting. Anarchyte (work | talk) 11:59, 22 July 2018 (UTC)

• Oppose Contrary to the above, not all the sources refer to this as a constituent assembly – the Nohlen source lists it as a constitutional assembly, as do numerous other sources, including this, this and Encyclopaedia Britannica. I would therefore contest the above claim of COMMONNAME. What the institution is called in German is not relevant to en.wiki; we rely on what English-language sources call it. This was an Assembly elected to write a constitution, so the phrase "Constitutional Assembly" is more WP:PRECISE than "Constituent Assembly", which can also refer simply to an Assembly elected as a stopgap measure, usually at the point of independence. Number 57 19:39, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

Comment The constituent assembly was an assembly elected as a stopgap measure at the point of independence. The German Austria of November 1918 was not an established sovereign state deciding to give itself a new constitution. It was an emerging coalition of seven provinces (five of them with yet-uncertain borders) that had no government (and especially no legislature) with any kind of authority and whose creation was a revolutionary act. From the vantage point of Cisleithanian law, the election, and in fact the convocation of the Provisional National Assembly that called it, was unconstitutional and treasonous. Damvile (talk) 22:54, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

• Support Number 57 is correct, not all sources refer to this as a constituent assembly. But references to "constituent assembly" do decisively outnumber references to "constitutional assembly". This is true both for publications written in English by Austrians and for publications written in English by native speakers. Damvile (talk) 22:50, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

• Support Per Jake Brockman, Damvile and the article's own references: link, link. Colonestarrice (talk) 03:39, 28 June 2018 (UTC)
  • As noted above, the references in the article also refer to it as a constitutional assembly; not sure why you're ignoring this. Number 57 05:35, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

Number 57 correctly states that some of the sources use "constitutional" therefore there is some ambiguity about an external common name. However, Wikipedia internally we overwhelmingly use "constituent" as I have outlined above. This does fall under consistency as part of WP:CRITERIA. As WP:TRANSLITERATE guides us, if there is ambiguity in English sources, the title should be translated from the native language. The clostest translation for the German "konstituierend" is "constituent", while "constitutional" has other double meanings which in itself would be confusing given comments made by Damvile. _pseudonym Jake Brockman ^talk 06:36, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

What double meaning does "constitutional assembly" have? I don't see this as being a consistency issue as there are numerous articles that have "Constitutional Assembly" in their title (many more than are listed on that page; I will check later when I have proper internet access, but I would guess that we actually have more articles at "Constitutional" than "Constituent"). What will be your view if this turns out to be the case? Number 57 08:50, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

So, I did a count, and there are 46 articles at "Constitutional Assembly election" and 39 at "constituent assembly election". There is therefore no consistency argument for moving this article. Number 57 20:21, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

No offense, but an article count is not a useful piece of evidence, and on top of that you're contradicting yourself:

1. Wikipedia is not a reliable source. We need to look at what books and peer-reviewed papers do. Google Scholar finds 43 results for "austrian constituent assembly" and only 6 results for "austrian constitutional assembly". Google Books finds 565 and 260. The ngram viewer doesn't find "austrian constitutional assembly" at all.
2. As you have correctly pointed out earlier, constitutional assembly and constituent assembly are not quite the same thing. Maybe Wikipedia lists more constitutional than constituent assemblies because historically there have been more constitutional than constituent assemblies. Maybe Wikipedia has more constitutional than constituent assemblies because the former have historically happened more often in countries that Wikipedia is better at covering. Maybe Wikipedia appears to have more constitutional than constituent assemblies because some of these other articles also have titles that are at variance with the language preferred by the literature. Impossible to be sure without an in-depth evaluation of how representative (and competent) our coverage is! Damvile (talk) 23:35, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

You've misunderstood the purpose of the article count. The claim was made by Jake Brockman that Wikipedia "overwhelmingly" preferred the term 'constituent' over 'constitutional' and that therefore this article should be moved to make it consistent with others. The above evidence was presented to demonstrate that this is clearly not the case. Number 57 06:21, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

You're right; I misread you. Sorry. My first point still stands, however: the literature prefers "constituent" to "constitutional" when talking about the Konstituierende Nationalversammlung. Jake's (and Colonestarrice's) original point also still stands: the fact that the literature prefers "constituent" to "constitutional" is unsurprising because the former is definitely a better translation. The difference between "constituent assembly" and "constitutional assembly" is almost perfectly equivalent to the difference between "konstituierende Versammlung" and "verfassungsgebende Versammlung". Damvile (talk) 23:35, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

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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.