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 after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Moved all but West Virigina articles, for which there was No consensus. (closed by non-admin page mover) Bensci54 (talk) 17:24, 23 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Connecticut Panhandle → Connecticut panhandle
• Idaho Panhandle → Idaho panhandle
• Nebraska Panhandle → Nebraska panhandle
• Oklahoma Panhandle → Oklahoma panhandle
• Texas Panhandle → Texas panhandle
• Northern Panhandle of West Virginia → Northern panhandle of West Virginia
• Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia → Eastern panhandle of West Virginia

– Not consistently capitalized in sources; also should be consistent with Florida panhandle, which was recently moved (permalink). Elli (talk | contribs) 19:56, 7 January 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. Bensci54 (talk) 17:16, 15 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging @Cinderella157, PK-WIKI, Amakuru, The Grid, Randy Kryn, Dicklyon, and Tony1: who participated in the Florida discussion. Elli (talk | contribs) 19:58, 7 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Support – Some of these have seen majority capitalization, but not the "consistently capitalized" that MOS:CAPS calls for. And unlike a lot of terms, their capitalization has been declining in recent decades, not increasing. So it's fair to say that sources are not treating these as proper names. Dicklyon (talk) 20:37, 7 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per nom and Dick.  — Amakuru (talk) 22:58, 7 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Out of the US panhandle articles, there are perhaps two that might be argued about because they have historically been capitalised. However, as noted by PK-WIKI in the previous discussion, we should be considering the most recent usage. On this basis none of the names reach the threshold of being "consistently capitalised" that would lead us to capitalise per MOS:CAPS. Furthermore, if the capitalisation is to be consistent across these articles (an argument I did not make previously), then a clear majority of cases would dictate that all should be lowercase. Cinderella157 (talk) 01:48, 8 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Note: WikiProject Connecticut has been notified of this discussion. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 11:51, 8 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose on two, I live very close to the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia and I have never seen "Panhandle" in lower case on either the Eastern or Northern. While I can't speak for the rest, these two are definitely always capitalized. - Neutralhomer • Talk • 14:17, 8 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Further: A search of the newspaper of record for Martinsburg, West Virginia for "Eastern Panhandle" shows it is always capitalized. Further searches from WUSA-TV and WRC-TV in Washington, DC show the same. WDVM-TV in Hagerstown, Maryland and West Virginia MetroNews also show "Eastern" and "Panhandle" is always capitalized. On the flipside, The Wheeling Intelligencer and News-Register capitalizes "Northern" and "Panhandle". As does WTRF-TV in Wheeling, WTOV-TV in Steubenville, OH, and WPXI-TV in Pittsburgh. West Virginia MetroNews also capitalizes "Northern" and "Panhandle". - Neutralhomer • Talk • 04:44, 9 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  Comment Even if you have never seen the term lowercase in your own experience, Wikipedia has different guidelines when it comes to capitalization and using sentence case. I just came from the Florida panhandle discussion. (Almost stated Florida peninsula which could also be correct as a region is lowercase but if it's a proper town or place then uppercase is valid.) – The Grid (talk) 16:32, 9 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  @The Grid: Please check the references provided by myself (above) and by P Aculeius below. "Florida panhandle" is correct, but "Eastern panhandle" is not. Just because Wikipedia has "different guidelines when it comes to capitalization and us[e] in sentence case" does not change fact. The fact of the matter is, "Northern Panhandle" and "Eastern Panhandle", when discussing specifically West Virginia and only West Virginia, is not only grammatically correct and referenced as consistently capitalized by the State of West Virginia and media sites, dating back at least 50 years. - Neutralhomer • Talk • 17:48, 9 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  I have requested the MOS folks have a say on this portion of the discussion. - Neutralhomer • Talk • 18:01, 9 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose with respect to the West Virginia panhandles; neutral on the others.: regarding West Virginia's panhandles, The West Virginia Encyclopedia treats both as proper names in their respective articles.^[1] They are treated as proper names in Otis K. Rice's West Virginia: A History, probably the best-known history of the state,^[2] and in West Virginia, A Bicentennial History.^[3] A quick search of articles for "panhandle" in the state's two largest newspapers, the Charleston Gazette-Mail and The Herald-Dispatch, shows that both panhandles are consistently capitalized as proper names.

A quick Google search suggested no other places commonly known as "northern" or "eastern" panhandles; this ngram appears to show that in all English-language publications, the phrase "Eastern Panhandle" is usually capitalized, and has been historically. The case is closer in this ngram for "northern panhandle" in all possible capitalizations, but historically it was treated as a proper name more often than not. Given that both are consistently treated as proper names in reliable sources about West Virginia, including histories and reference works, and in the main newspapers of record, I think these should be regarded as proper names.

Perhaps the fact that there are two of them, requiring separate names, distinguishes West Virginia's panhandles from those in states having only one, where "panhandle" may be regarded as a common noun. P Aculeius (talk) 15:34, 8 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The book stats suggest that your impression is wrong; lowercase is actually more common, and has been for decades. In any case, it's clear that these are not "consistently capitalized" in sources. Dicklyon (talk) 04:39, 19 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Tentative support. I had some misgivings about this, based on my own anecdotal notions (I long lived near the Texas and Oklahoma [p|P]anhandles and in my memory they were typically capitalized), but usage changes, with English moving more and more toward lowercasing that which doesn't seem to "demand" capitalization. I do wonder whether there are any direct correspondences between these regions and official boundaries, that may make one or more them proper-noun constructions instead of purely descriptive appellations. The most contentious ones above seem to be the WV cases. Ngram for the northern one [1] shows long-term dominance of the lower-case form, with a spike in capitalization after 2010, which may be WP influencing the results (and actually putting caps slightly in the lead all of sudden around 2018 or so). The eastern one also has lower-case consistently in the lead, though not by as much and without a capitalization spike (go figure) [2]. In both cases, the results are probably skewed slightly in favor of capitals, by not weeding out title-case headlines and such (I tried prepending "the" to fix that, but the results were too few to rate). Compared to the results that follow, this actually makes both of the WV cases the least supportable as capitalized, despite the comments above. "I can find a sources that prefers to capitalize them" really doesn't mean anything.

  The CT one doesn't show up in enough sources to ngram it. NE: capitalization once dominated but has declined so much the two forms have come out even [3]. OK: Same thing happening, a little slower [4]. (Ditto with FL, not under review here [5].) ID: ngrams actually show more capitalization [6], and same with TX [7]; they are quite commonly capitalized in news but not consistently; if some were to remain capitalized, it would probably be these, but if various news sources, usually actually from the regions in question, don't treat them as proper names, I'm inclined to go along with that.

  Capitalization of regional terms that don't correspond to jurisdictions of some sort has always been iffy. There are lots and lots of ill-defined ones like "Northern California", etc. Some that seem ill-defined actually correspond to an officially-defined thing like a Metropolitan Statistical Area or Combined Statistical Area of the US Census Bureau, which is a reasonable argument for proper-noun status. I'm not sure if any of our panhandles here can lay such a claim, but that might be worth consideration (and if so, possibly some !vote reconsideration – MOS:PROPERNAME overrides the lead of MOS:CAPS by definition; if it did not, then PROPERNAME would simply have to be deleted from CAPS as never-applicable noise). It's also important that WP:CONSISTENT only applies to things that are actually properly comparable; it can't be misused to force a demonstrable proper name to lower-case. But "proper name" doesn't mean "stuff I see capitalized pretty often". Some publishers just have a house-style to capitalize anything vaguely in the ball-park of "placename" no matter what kind it is; I live near San Francisco, and all the papers around here refer to it as "the City" or even "The City", but we all know that's silly.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:16, 9 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  I'm astonished that your ngrams only consider usage from 1980 onward, as though that were the only relevant period for this inquiry. Had had you chosen a different starting point—1900, for example—your conclusion that lowercase has "long-term dominance" would be impossible to justify. But ngrams don't tell the whole story, which was why I looked for sources that might have some quasi-official stance on the topic, such as standard reference works about the subject, and how they treat it. I find your reduction of looking for the most relevant sources to "I can find a sources that prefers to capitalize them" insulting, as well as ungrammatical. You're not going to find sources with more direct relevance than the encyclopedia and two histories I cited. They clearly distinguish "Northern Panhandle" and "Eastern Panhandle" as proper names, even while using "panhandle" by itself as a common noun.

  Newspaper usage seems like a good guide, but major newspapers aren't likely to have West Virginia in their style guides: I searched New York Times articles and was astonished to discover that "Panhandle" is frequently capitalized with respect to Texas, Florida, and Idaho, while references to West Virginia alternated between capitalized, partly-capitalized, and lowercase. But the major newspapers actually in West Virginia have more cause to refer to, and have a standard practice with respect to places that have little cause for standardization in national sources, and they too consistently apply capitalization.

  I'll repeat and emphasize my earlier supposition: no other state—at least no other in this list—is burdened with two regions consistently referred to as "panhandles", allowing them to be referred to simply as "the panhandle", and why even appending the name of the state to which they belong doesn't suffice to distinguish them. This result doesn't demand that "Northern Panhandle" and "Eastern Panhandle" be treated as proper names, but it does account for why they are treated as such across published sources about and in West Virginia, which are surely the most relevant, when the state and its features are hardly known and seldom referred to elsewhere. P Aculeius (talk) 23:13, 9 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  While there was a lot more capping of the WVA Panhandles back during WWII, there was never a time when they were "consistently" capped. See stats back to 1950 (to clip off the big WWII spike, which is an outlier). The caps are not a critical part of describing those salients of your state. Dicklyon (talk) 05:11, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  I think looking into the actual results gives a better picture [8]. USGS has a couple entries. In prose, the lowercase is used as it's describing the physical region. If it's within a table, the region names are capitalized. However, I still see uppercase used in the prose. At least that's with sampling the first few pages of the content. I get SMcCandlish's mention of CSA names but I have seen cases where the articles can be minimized to Central city metropolitan area for brevity as the naming of the CSA or MSA uses the top three cities. A personal example is the Sarasota metropolitan area page. – The Grid (talk) 19:08, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  "why they [WV panhandles] are treated as such [capitalized] across published sources": They're not; they ended up being the weakest of the bunch in this regard. They do get capitalized a lot in local/regional sources, but that is true of all of the panhandles in all of their areas, and it's not really "consistent" even in those source pools, just higher. I do really think this is an edge case, but the results so far aren't that promising for capitalizing them.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:50, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  That anyone would be "astonished" that we look at modern English-language sources to answer style questions about usage in modern English is ... astonishing. We have no encyclopedic interest at all in what was typically capitalized generations ago; it's simply not relevant in any way to WP:AT or MOS:CAPS or WP:NCCAPS questions. (Well, it might be of interest in a general-trends sense at a "History" section, which we lack, at Capitalization in English.) Repeat: being able to find some sources that prefer to capitalize it doesn't tell us anything; we already knew there were some that did, or this discussion would never have existed. WP doesn't follow some other publisher's in-house style. Being the most relevant/reliable sources for facts about a topic does not magically transmutate a source into being a reliable sources on how to write 2024 encyclopedic English about that topic. Reliability for facts is not reliabilty for English-writing style about facts. This is the same ol' tedious specialized-style fallacy as usual.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:50, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What was "astonishing" is that your searches were tailored to exclude historical usage, in a case where ngrams showing historical usage and drawing a contrary conclusion from them were already posted in this discussion, as though hiding the rest behind a curtain made it go away. And that's quite relevant when the numbers in general usage are otherwise very similar. Nobody claims that "some other publisher's in-house style" dictates the result for Wikipedia, but ignoring what that style is or what published sources with some authority and expertise on the subject do when the evidence is otherwise ambiguous is simply hiding your head in the sand. So is "the same ol' citing smarmy essays as though they were Wikipedia policy fallacy". You keep beating the drum about "finding sources that support your point proves nothing", as if a general lack of sources with any authority for the contrary position were proof positive.

But I didn't go to those sources to bolster my opinion: I consulted them to see what they do, since those are somewhat authoritative sources that actually have something to say about the subject. USGS topographical maps don't usually name features like this; the GNIS doesn't include them, and is open to regular attacks claiming that it's not a reliable source anyway. Your argument seems to be that we should ignore what sources that discuss the subject because it's included in their scope of reference have to say because some other sources are inconsistent; that as long as some of the evidence is inconclusive, you can ignore all of the evidence that opposes your position; that how local sources treat the geographic names in their area is irrelevant if someone on high can't make up their mind. What is the point in having a discussion when you're going to dismiss any sources that don't support your conclusion? P Aculeius (talk) 22:26, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Support GabrielPenn4223 (talk) 10:20, 14 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Neutral for WV ones GabrielPenn4223 (talk) 04:05, 23 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Support for Connecticut, Idaho, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas. Neutral on the West Virginia ones.--Woko Sapien (talk) 16:56, 22 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisting comment: Need consensus on WV articles. Bensci54 (talk) 17:16, 15 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]