Talk:Mount St. Helens

Naming

There has been some discussion (see Talk:United States National Parks for one example) of how to name national park articles, specifically whether the "National Park/Monument/Etc" should be considered the most common name. Mount St. Helens seems like a corner case, but I moved the article because without the "National Volcanic Monument" in the name it isn't as clear that the article refers to anything more than just the volcano, and also because using the full name is consistent with the naming of other national park areas. -- (WT-en) Wrh2 16:53, 19 Jul 2005 (EDT)

I would think that the old name was better as being 'most common'. Travellers who have never heard of "Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument" have heard of "Mt. St. Helens", and are much more likely to type the latter into the search box than the former. In my opinion the real page should go where people are likely to look (or named for what they are likely to search for), and any clunky longwinded official name made up by some beaurocrat but which nobody would think of without having already been there should be a redirect. That is if we use the longwinded version at all. -- (WT-en) Mark 20:44, 19 Jul 2005 (EDT)

Agree with Mark on this. The current name is just a little too longwinded. (WT-en) Jpatokal 21:24, 19 Jul 2005 (EDT)

No problem then, I'll revert the move, although it would be good if we could get an official policy on the discussion that started as to park names (see Talk:United States National Parks#USA National Parks). At least in the US, there are almost no park names that use "National Park/Monument" in the most common name, but there are a lot of good reasons to use that name in an article title. In terms of Mount St. Helens, no one says they "want to visit Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument", but that is the park's official name, and it is clear from the full park name that the article is about the entire park area (including Spirit Lake, nearby peaks, valleys, etc) and not just about the volcano. -- (WT-en) Ryan 21:37, 19 Jul 2005 (EDT)

OK, thanks. I really want to make it clear here that I'm not keen on giving any deference to official names for any destination. Official names tend to be verbose to the point of being silly, and we've had a long tradition of resisting them here (see Talk:Bombay).

Of course we want the congressonal staffers who make up these national park names to be able to use Wikivoyage too, but mostly I think travellers are better served by the common name for a place.

Also I really see this as being a Project:Slippery slope. If you have official names for one kind of destination then why not for all of them? Then someday a copy editor type will go around and start moving things, and we'll have The City and County of San Francisco and La Ville de Paris, and of course the ever popular Walt Disney World Resort -- (WT-en) Mark 22:03, 19 Jul 2005 (EDT)

I read through the Talk:Bombay discussion a while back while trying to figure out what happened to User:(WT-en) Dhum Dhum, and from that discussion it's clear that the "official name" issue gets some people's blood boiling. Since I'm still nursing scars from my last experience discussing changes to long-standing policy, and (more importantly) because it seems more important to write decent park articles rather than worrying about the naming, I'll hold my tongue for now 8-) -- (WT-en) Ryan 22:25, 19 Jul 2005 (EDT)