Talk:Line search

The following discussion is an archived 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 the page from "Linesearch" to Line search, per the discussion below. Dekimasuよ! 07:54, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Following the discussion above I have entered a formal request for moving the article back to Line search. As I wrote above, the main reason is that the spelling "line search" (800,000 Google hits) is much more common than "linesearch" (48,000 Google hits). --Zvika 18:37, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Oppose for now. Zvika's Google search is useless trivia unless he can show that a good portion of the hits in either case deal with the particular subject of this article, and unless it is even more overwhelming if it can be whittled down to those which do, I wouldn't find it convincing enough to move from a name getting 48,000 hits in any case; there may well be other factors which would affect our choice under Wikipedia naming conventions. Gene Nygaard 16:31, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

• Here is some hopefully more convincing evidence:
  1. A search for "line search" +optimization yielded 267,000 results, whereas a search for "linesearch" +optimization yielded only 25,000 results. A brief examination of the first 20 results showed they are all indeed about the line search method.
  2. A similar search in scholar resulted in 13,300 results for "line search" +optimization and only 1,120 for "linesearch" +optimization.
  3. As mentioned above, the lecture notes (also available as a printed textbook) of Nemirovski and Ben-Tal use the two-word term.

In summary, obviously the one-word term is also used, but it seems to me that it is much less common. --Zvika 11:39, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

If it's roughly 10:1 across the board, I'd probably support it; if it were more like 3:1 or less, I wouldn't see any compelling reason for a change, because the accuracy of determinations of he usage ratios aren't very precise in any case and redirects would suffice. But if there are distinctions on who is using it each way, that still might not be determinative. Are the differences time-sensitive? Maybe it is an evolution, a trend to change the terminology by the professionals in the field. Maybe something recommended by some professional organization in the field. Or is it location-sensitive? In that case we might have to worry about Wikipedia:Manual of Style#National varieties of English. I'm not strongly opposed to the move, but let's still wait and see if anybody else has any concerns for some reason or another. Gene Nygaard 13:02, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Along the national varieties of English line, your additional search term fell under that too. Google doesn't give quite the same results if you include "optimisation" rather than "optimization" in your search, but it's still about 10:1. A significant number of them do have hyphens, however, see below. It might be that it is often used as an adjective but with several different possibilities for the noun it is used with, but pretty much the same meaning with various nouns. In that case, its probably used as a stand-alone noun to keep it at just the one-word, two-word, or hyphenated version. Gene Nygaard 13:24, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

I would support a move to line search. FWIW, Numerical Recipes uses the term "line minimization". Jheald 16:05, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

New comment. In this article the term seems to be mostly used as an adjective. That raises two additional concerns:

• Should it include a noun under Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Redirect adjectives to nouns and the rest of those conventions? (And even if that isn't necessary, are there adjective-noun combinations which should redirect here?)
• Do we need to worry about hyphenated or not as well, including "line-search" in the discussion. In any case, that redlink should be fixed. Gene Nygaard 13:12, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Support move to "line search". Major books on optimization, research reports, and journal papers of my acquaintance use the two word form. For example, the classic text Practical Optimization by Gill, Murray, and Wright (ISBN 978-0-12-283952-8) can be searched at Amazon.com to confirm the phrase "line search". Or try Practical Methods of Optimization by Fletcher (ISBN 978-0-471-49463-8), and Linear and Nonlinear Programming, 2nd ed. by Luenberger (ISBN 978-1-4020-7593-3). --KSmrq^T 22:18, 19 October 2007 (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.