Category talk:Bureau of the Census, United States

Proposed move United States Census Bureau

EurekaLott (talk · contribs) edit Category:Bureau of the Census, United States on 2012-01-16 proposes to rename Category:Bureau of the Census, United States to Category:United States Census Bureau. --Closeapple (talk) 07:56, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

•  Oppose Most countries have a Census bureau, so it should follow the current Commons standard naming. Moreover, the official name is Bureau of the Census. --Foroa (talk) 06:14, 16 January 2012 (UTC)
•  Support: Most common name in use is "United States Census Bureau". http://www.census.gov/ appears to use "United States Census Bureau" and "Census Bureau" consistently in its main public communication; before this year, it used "U.S. Census Bureau" instead. English and 9 other Wikipedias use "United States Census Bureau", in English, as the article title, and there is also nds:US-Zensusbüro. (Norwegian uses no:Bureau of the Census with no country name. There are also translated versions of "Bureau of the Census" in various combinations with "United States" for some Wikipedias, but none that say "Bureau of the Census, United States" in English.) To be fair: Doing a search of the bureau's own site shows 22,800 matches for "Bureau of the Census" and 5770 for "Census Bureau". I think that "Bureau of the Census" is used primarily in legislation and the official seal, and occasionally in some indexing. It appears that there are no other categories named "Category:Bureau of the Census," with a country name, and I'm not sure how "Bureau of the Census, United States" would match any Commons standard. --Closeapple (talk) 07:56, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
  • As stated in the En:United States Census Bureau The United States Census Bureau (officially the Bureau of the Census, as defined in en:Title 13 of the United States Code is the government agency that is responsible for the United States Census. This can be seen in the official seal File:Census Bureau seal.svg. Most countries have a Census bureau (or Arabic, Chinese, Russian, ... names for it). The Commons naming rules try precisely to avoid the thousands of categories that start with American, United States, Chinese, Russian, ... --Foroa (talk) 08:35, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
    • Around 1300 categories start with "United States ...", 800 with "U.S. ...", (only roughly one fourth as on en:wiki) . What will it help if we promote such a mixing naming system for all countries? --Foroa (talk) 11:15, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
      • The naming system is to use the most common name in English. I'm not sure why we would want to avoid using the name that users are most likely to try first. Also, I can't discern any Commons system that "Bureau of the Census, United States" matches. I agree that a primary category name certainly shouldn't be, for example, "American Census Bureau", if "American" is only an adjective and not the name in common use. But "United States Census Bureau" is, indeed, the most common name for this subject. I can also understand why "U.S." would be a bad idea for a primary category title: We shouldn't use abbreviations like that in the primary title when the full words are also in common use. (Making category redirects for commonly used synonyms is useful though: If someone adds "Category:U.S. Census Bureau" or "Category:U.S. Navy" to a file, we certainly want the bots to know which real categories those are for.) I could understand 2100 category names starting with "United States": Federal agencies in the U.S. regularly use "United States" or "U.S." on the front of their names, because there are 50 states that often have a similarly named office. By the way: Those "United States" and "U.S." categories probably include category redirects, which are supposed to exist. (Commons:Rename a category#Should the old category be deleted?) --Closeapple (talk) 22:33, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

•  Support It's called the "United States Census Bureau" in basically everything. If you want to get overly official, it's called the "Bureau of the Census" as a unit of the Department of Commerce, which is not in the title either. It's in the agency's seal, but basically nowhere else; everybody including the agency itself just calls it the United States Census Bureau (look at its logo) and the current category name is very awkward. It's also the name that en-wiki uses, which is also something Commons tries to keep consistent. Avoiding categories starting with "United States" may make sense if it's purely used as an adjective, but not when it's the common name. Carl Lindberg (talk) 15:27, 25 June 2012 (UTC)