Talk:Western Kentucky Hilltoppers and Lady Toppers

Use of WKU vs. Western Kentucky in article titles

WikiProject College football is currently having a discussion whether it is more appropriate to use "WKU" or "Western Kentucky" for the Hilltoppers sports teams in Wikipedia article titles. Please join the discussion and express your opinion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College football#Western Kentucky. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 08:09, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Page name

Don't mean to rip open an old wound here, but I think it's time for another discussion of the page name. The discussion a couple years ago had many people wanting to wait and see if major outlets adopted the school's rebranding as WKU. A quick search indicates they haven't: ESPN, Yahoo!, and USA Today all go with "Western Kentucky." CBS is the outlier, but it goes with "W. Kentucky," not "WKU." Overall, I think WP:COMMONNAME outweighs the consideration of what the athletic department decides sounds sexiest, especially when major media outlets don't go along with a re-branding. WKU isn't an unrecognizable abbreviation, but as I see it, it's much closer case to Eastern Kentucky or Northern Kentucky than the entrenched usage that, say, a UNLV or IPFW is. That said, I think it's something worth discussing. Thoughts? Kithira (talk) 22:05, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Support rename - I have long been beating the drum that these pages should be "Western Kentucky" as the majority of indepedent sources call them that vs. "WKU." I believe the reason is that the casual fan has to think really hard to figure out what "WKU" is (as opposed to LSU or USC or BYU). For basketball (WKU's main sport), the readership is global and may or may not get the abbreviation since to many college sports in general are a bit foreign. I'd be in favor of continuing to spell it out to avoid confusion until the abbreviation is used pretty much exclusively. Rikster2 (talk) 22:12, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

By the way, there has been a more recent discussion here on the naming, which should be considered a part of this discussion. Rikster2 (talk) 22:14, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Whoops, missed that, thanks. Searched the archives but forget to check the main WP CBSK talk page Kithira (talk) 22:38, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Requested move 22 November 2015

The following is a closed discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was move per request. The weight of past discussion favors the move. See:

 • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College football/Archive 12#Western Kentucky (2012);
 • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College Basketball/Archive 5#Western Kentucky Hilltoppers (2014); and
 • directly above.

In 2013 (without reference to any discussion), this was moved to the target title. However that was reverted in April 2014 based on lack of consensus to "move back", even though the original title was Western Kentucky... and that remained for four years before the first move to WKU... Search results from today, addressing the wait-and-see aspect of past discussion as to whether reliable sources would follow the university's re-branding when referring to the teams – indicate that has not occurred at all. That is, Kithira's comments above from 2014 remain true. From a wider view, news and books searches indicate the target title is about two orders of magnitude more common overall.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 21:08, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

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WKU Hilltoppers and Lady Toppers → Western Kentucky Hilltoppers and Lady Toppers – Teams are much more commonly referred to as "Western Kentucky" than "WKU" Joeykai (talk) 22:59, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.