Talk:Social justice warrior

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: Not moved. The consensus is that this should be sentence case, per WP:NCCAPS, MOS:CAPS, and common usage in reliable sources. (non-admin closure)  — Amakuru (talk) 11:39, 14 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Social justice warrior → Social Justice Warrior – There has recently been dispute over how the phrase should be capitalized. Per WP:UCRN, the most common name should be used. A search for "social justice warrior" on DuckDuckGo shows that of the first 2 pages of results, 55 use "Social Justice Warrior" and only 12 use "Social justice warrior" or "social justice warrior". We should follow the capitalization that is more prevalent in usage. SSTflyer 01:16, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

WP:TITLEFORMAT says to use sentence case, and WP:UCN doesn't say anything about how things are capitalized. I'm leaning towards weakly opposing the move request, although if the capitalization is used consistently in the sources for the article maybe it would make sense to follow that. — Strongjam (talk) 01:42, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose I've scanned thru the online available sources to the article. The majority use sentence case, the only ones that seem to not use sentence case are MTV (inconsistently uses both), Boing Boing (consistently upper cases first letters), HuffPo (one use, capitals) Mary Sue (one use, in capitals). There are a couple that use it as a proper noun when talking about a video game. All of the rest (15 or so, didn't keep a running count) seem to prefer sentence case. Including the OED. — Strongjam (talk) 01:58, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Per WP:POTENTIAL, we do not only judge based on sources currently in the article. SSTflyer 05:46, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose – no basis for capitalization per WP:NCCAPS or MOS:CAPS, so leave it lowercase. Dicklyon (talk) 01:48, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. Oxford University Press uses: "social justice warrior" = lowercase. — Cirt (talk) 02:23, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Wikipedia does not follow what a single source uses. SSTflyer 05:46, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    • Agreed, but it's quite a strong single source. Just wanted to bring attention to that particular one. In reality, the majority of secondary sources do indeed use the lowercase term, as mentioned by other respondents above and below. — Cirt (talk) 12:09, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose - Don't see a compelling reason to capitalise all letters. It may be frequently shortened to 'SJW', but that doesn't mean it's a proper noun. PeterTheFourth (talk) 03:39, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. The article shows that there are many people called social justice warriors, not merely one grand Social Justice Warrior working alone like Batman or Superman. Here we merely have "importance capitalization" or "respect capitalization", not proper-name capitalization. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 05:39, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Social Justice Warriors" (in this form of capitalization) is frequently used, similar to for example Asian Americans. SSTflyer 05:46, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    • "Asia" and "America" are proper-names, and in English (but not in French) by customary usage their derivative ethnic adjectives keep the capital. The words "social" and "justice" and "warrior" are each not proper-names. In German, and formerly in Danish, this "importance capitalization" went to its apotheosis and capitalizing all nouns. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 05:52, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
      • Another example would be Apple Watch. Is "Watch" a proper name? SSTflyer 11:09, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
        • Yes, the product name is "Apple Watch" so it's a proper name, hence both words are capitalized. Similarly "tiger" is not a proper noun, but "Detroit Tigers" is a proper name. — Strongjam (talk) 12:22, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
          • It's closer to Jewish-American Princess where a stereotyped pejorative is capitalized. It's a pejorative identity being applied to an individual and the identity is capitalized to separate it from non-pejorative uses. --DHeyward (talk) 03:12, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose - The hits for "social justice warrior" on DuckDuckGo linked in the OP don't support this proposal. The vast majority use sentencing casing within the article. The search results are only displaying titles. PermStrump(talk) 06:15, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose - WP:NCCAPS. These are not proper nouns. Also Permstrumps point is strong. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 06:19, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose, per WP:MOSCAPS. From what I gather from the article, it's a (pejorative) term to describe someone, not a movement or occupation. soetermans. ^{↑↑↓↓←→←→ B A TALK} 09:24, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Support as it is reported as a proper name stereotyping pejorative. They are not split up, as in '"social justice" warrior' but used as a group identifier. Not using caps is the same as saying "liberal Democrat" vs. "Liberal Democrat." "Liberal" is capitalized when it's the basis of a title for a group like the political party in the EU, but not capitalized when used to describe a viewpoint. "Social Justice Warrior" is a group label, not a description of viewpoints. Jewish-American Princess is capitalized as another stereotyping pejorative proper name. Our article gives no other definition of "Social Justice Warrior" than as a pejorative stereotyped group identity. No one confuses "he's a warrior for social justice" with "he's a Social Justice Warrior." The first is not clear whether the meaning would be a pejorative, but the second, through the use of capitalization, is very clearly intended to denote the pejorative use as a proper name for a group. Not using capitals implies that "social justice warrior" is not always a pejorative proper name label for stereotyping individuals and that it somehow reflects their individual viewpoints. Proper names are capitalized per WP:MOSPN and do not use sentence case even if the proper name includes common nouns (i.e. South Africa, not south Africa). --DHeyward (talk) 03:08, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. Not a proper name. No reason to capitalise. -- Necrothesp (talk) 12:34, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose – No need. The majority of RSes seem to favor lowercase, and plenty of pejorative and slang terminology is uncapitalized. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 16:13, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Support because I agree that it does function as a Proper Noun as it functions as a title, ergo, should use title case. Zombiedude347 (talk) 16:16, 10 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • How does it function as a title? It's a term to describe someone, not a movement or a name. Just like "proper noun" (and not "Proper Noun"), it isn't capitalised. soetermans. ^{↑↑↓↓←→←→ B A TALK} 06:26, 13 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• It's a proper name, not noun. If it weren't, the common nouns in it could be rearranged without change of meaning. "warrior for social justice" is never used as a replacement for "Social Justice Warrior." It always defines a group or we ned to rewrite the article so that it's not a pejorative stereotype. --DHeyward (talk) 10:11, 14 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose No evidence that use as a proper name outweighs sentence-case usage. clpo13_(talk) 16:24, 10 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• It's not a pejorative stereotype like "Jewish-American Princess?" --DHeyward (talk) 10:11, 14 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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.