Talk:Outaouais

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Untitled[edit]

I deleted the sentence saying that the Outaouais is Quebec's 3rd largest region in population. This is not possible, since Montreal, Laval, Montérégie, and Capitale-Nationale (and maybe others) are more populated. Emile 15:53, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

You're right. Actually, Chaudière-Appalaches, Lanaudière, and Laurentides also beat it, making it eighth. Eighth out of seventeen puts it right in the middle. However, on a different point, this article lacks a map, like the other ones have. Backspace 17:25, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Requested move[edit]

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. 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 move request was: both moved. The search results provided by Skeezix1000 seem to carry the day. Favonian (talk) 14:09, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

– This is one of the 17 administrative regions of Quebec, and is the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC.relisted--Mike Cline (talk) 13:12, 11 March 2012 (UTC) P.T. Aufrette (talk) 17:57, 2 March 2012 (UTC)


P.T. Aufrette (talk · contribs) is proposing:

The request for deletion of Outaouais (disambiguation) remained unactioned for nearly two days which suggests that admins are dubious about this move. Certainly there are lots of special:whatlinkshere/Outaouais (region) links and very few special:whatlinkshere/Outaouais links. I have move-protected Outaouais until there is a clear consensus here for a move. — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 12:56, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Take a look at the contents of the current Outaouais disambiguation page. Apart from a couple of notes about how, eg, the Ottawa River is called the "Outaouais" river in French, etc (which is not really a disambiguation conflict at all in English), and a note about "Outaouais HVDC back-to-back station" which is not even a redlink, the only actual potential "Outaouais" bluelink is with something called "Outaouais Herald Emeritus". But that would always be known by its full name, never just as "Outaouais", just like Canada Cup, for instance, contains the word "Canada" but would never be known as just "Canada".
On the other hand, Outaouais is one of the 17 administrative regions of Quebec (or see here), and that is its name in both English and French. I can't think of any other rival for primary topic; if there was, it should have been added already to the disambiguation listing.
P.S. There are fewer incoming links to Outaouais because I myself mechanically disambiguated some of them to Outaouais (region), until I stopped to think for a moment and realized it made much more sense to just make it the primary topic. -- P.T. Aufrette (talk) 17:29, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Oppose the river is also found in English (especially in Montreal) using the French name, and there's also the tribe to consider, since Quebec administrative regions don't mean that much in general. Between the MRC/municipality level and provincial level, there's not much there. 70.24.251.71 (talk) 05:21, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
    It's not just an administrative region invented purely for some formal governmental purpose, it's also an "actual" region. To clarify, Beauce is not the name of an administrative region, yet it is still a traditional region with high name recognition within all of Quebec, and Outaouais likewise is equally well-known even to those unfamiliar with the precise administrative region structures. Regarding the river, although Google counts aren't "proof" of anything, "Ottawa River" gets 200 times more hits than "Outaouais River". And in any case, the existence of "Ottawa River" doesn't cause "Ottawa" itself to be a disambiguation page, nor does the "Mississippi River" make a disambiguation page out of "Mississippi" even though the river is arguably more prominent than the state. -- P.T. Aufrette (talk) 20:56, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
    This is an administrative region article. The "actual region" you refer to is covered under Ottawa Valley. 70.24.251.71 (talk) 05:30, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
    The "actual region" might not have precisely-demarcated boundaries, but only the edge (albeit well-populated) of its territory borders on the Ottawa River. Since the river marks the border between Quebec and Ontario, half the Ottawa Valley is within Ontario — but none of the Outaouais is in Ontario (I'm pointing out the obvious for the benefit of readers from other places: a Google search for "the Outaouais region of Ontario" turns up exactly one hit in the entire Internet; "the Outaouais region of Quebec" turns up about 200,000 hits). Ottawa itself is within the Ottawa Valley, but it's not in the Outaouais. Anyway, this is just clouding the issue: what other article in Wikipedia has a valid claim to be the primary topic for "Outaouais"? Articles that don't even contain the word "Outaouais" in their title don't exactly fit the bill. -- P.T. Aufrette (talk) 07:48, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
    The region existed before Quebec was split into Upper and Lower Canadas, and the history of the region is in the Ottawa Valley article. True, half of the Ottawa Valley is within what was split into Upper Canada, which divided the existing region in twain politically. The influx of settlers from further west diluted the Franco-Ontarian population there, but it is still the heart of Franco-Ontario. 70.24.251.71 (talk) 10:07, 5 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Support per the evidence of the DAB page. In English only the region is likely to be meant (unless perhaps one is using English as a second language). Srnec (talk) 02:42, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Support per Srnec. Steam5 (talk) 00:29, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Oppose. I would have considered the river to be a more prominent usage; these administrative regions aren't that prominent in practice. Because of the French name usage that has seeped into English throughout history for the tribe and the river, I think having Outaouais as a disambiguation page is wise. Good Ol'factory (talk) 23:32, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Support We don't disambiguate for the purpose of distinguishing between subjects that have similar names (or, in this case, a subject that has a similar name to another subject's French name), but rather to resolve conflicts between articles that qualify for the same artcle title. Therefore, unless there is a realistic potential move of the Ottawa River article to the plan Outaouais title (highly highly unlikely), then it is just overkill to maintain Outaouais as a DAB page simply due to the river (and the river can be nicely and better handled through a hatnote). The term Outaouais is, I strongly suspect, overwhelmingly used in English to refer to the region (since in English the river is almost always referred to as the Ottawa River), and therefore the region is the primary use. Skeezix1000 (talk) 23:34, 13 March 2012 (UTC)
    • My search of English-language google books and scholar reveals just as many usages of "Outaouais" referring to the native tribe or to the river than to the region. But there is no single primary usage that stands out from the others. I don't think we can say that if someone encountered the word "Outaouais" and wanted to look it up that we would know with any degree of certainty which meaning they were looking for even a majority of the time. Good Ol'factory (talk) 23:51, 13 March 2012 (UTC)
I found the exact opposite. The results of a Google search overwhelmingly referred to the region - in the first ten pages of results, I only found 3 results that referred to the river (1, 2, 3), all of which were only hits because they were bilingual sites which included both English and French versions of the river name (and we are concerned solely with English language usage). Exact same thing with a Google Books search - almost entirely references to the region, with one book from 1763 referring to the tribe (An universal history: from the earliest accounts to the present time, Volume 40), one federal publication from 1966 containing both Englsh and French language references to the river (Water resources paper Issues 142-144) and one volume that could anybody's guess (Outaouais Québec:Fisherman's paradise). Skeezix1000 (talk) 15:12, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
Wow, I think using google.ca must have resulted in different results, because that's sure not very similar what I got. Or—I don't think I have different access to academic materials on google (since I did my search from an computer linked into the major online academic article databases), but it is possible that that's the case. I will need to look in to how my computer's academic database access might reflect in my garden variety google searches. (I did some draft attempting to link to my specific results, but clicking on them results in "access denied" messages, so something is going on.) Good Ol'factory (talk) 22:07, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
I am in San Francisco at the moment, and just got as far as I can tell the same result using Google.com. I am not as familiar with Google Books, but suspect you are correct that access to the databases may have given you different results. --Skeezix1000 (talk) 23:21, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Support. Googling Outaouais -wikipedia yields mainly results about the region, as Skeezix1000 has already documented. Kauffner (talk) 18:32, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
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. No further edits should be made to this section.

English pronunciation?[edit]

This article currently gives only the French pronunciation of Outaouais. The English pronunciation should be given as well. In fact, the English pronunciation is more important than the French is in this article, not because English is a more important language but because:

  1. This is the English Wikipedia, so the vast majority of its readers speak English, and only a minority of them also speak French. As editors of the English Wikipedia, we must assume that English is the only language our readers know;
  2. French speakers will already know (or be able to guess with considerable accuracy) how pronounce the word, so they don't need to be told;
  3. It is impossible just looking at the word for an English-only speaker even to guess how to pronounce Outaouais (unlike "Quebec", for example. I know I don't pronounce Quebec the way a French speaker would, but at least I can get close enough that a French Canadian would understand what I was trying to say if he wanted to). If I were forced to say "Outaouais", I can hardly begin to imagine what I'd say, except to pronounce "Out-" either like the English word "out" or like "oot" (as in "boot"). But how I'd pronounce that string of five vowels is almost impossible even to guess, since such formations don't occur in English words. I can think of two ways I might try: to ignore a vowel or two and the s and say something like "oo-too-way", or to try pronouncing each vowel separately and end up with six or seven syllables, which cannot be right;
  4. The Quebec article identifies Outaouais as one of the areas in the province with a significant English-speaking population (which is how I got here), so it's almost certain that there is an English pronunciation.

If the intention in giving only the French pronunciation is to try to encourage English speakers to use the French pronunciation, that is presumptuous, inappropriate and certain to fail. It's not our place to try to manipulate how readers pronounce foreign-language place names. We can tell them how the French pronounce "Paris", and if they want to try to pronounce it the same way they can; but our primary responsibility is to tell them how it's pronounced in English, the language they actually speak:

Paris (English: /ˈpærɪs/, /ˈpɛrɪs/ (About this soundlisten); French: [paʁi] (About this soundlisten)) is the capital and largest city of France.

This article should follow that article's excellent example.

If, on the other hand, the English speakers in Outaouais use an entirely different name for the region, instead of pronouncing the French name using English phonemic norms, then there may be no English pronunciation of Outaouais. If that is the case, then the name which English Canadians use when they speak of the region should be given in this article as a synonym for Outaouais.

--Jim10701 (talk) 14:03, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

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