Category talk:BP

BP -> British Petroleum
I think we should not have categories of acronym like BP. It is too short and is too ambigious. Should we rather move this category to British Petroleum? •–• 16:27, 15 October 2020 (UTC)
 * According to en.wp (which I have no particular reason to doubt, on this point), some years ago they officially changed the name of the company; they aren't British Petroleum plc anymore, they're BP plc. --Pi zero (talk) 16:38, 15 October 2020 (UTC)
 * So the cat should be BP plc. (Though B in that is for British and P is for Petroleum). •–•  16:41, 15 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I have no objection in principle. --Pi zero (talk) 16:45, 15 October 2020 (UTC)
 * What do you say? Another aye, and I will run the pywikibot to handle this. •–•  16:48, 15 October 2020 (UTC)
 * To be honest, I have always known this company as BP. Some of my earliest memories are of going down to the local BP petrol station to buy crisps and sweets. However, I have no objection to changing the category to the full name and in fact it probably does sound better that way. - Green Giant (talk) 19:23, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

BP is not a well known acronym. There is Bharat Petroleum (referred as BP, unofficially; BPCL per enwp). Just for clarification, Green Giant, when you said "I have no objection to changing the category to the full name", did you mean it should be British Petroleum, British Petroleum plc, or BP plc? •–• 04:43, 16 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I meant it should be Category:British Petroleum but that BP should point to that category until we have a Category:Bharat:Petroleum. -- Green Giant (talk) 16:06, 17 October 2020 (UTC)
 * My objection to that is that it's not British Petroleum. It was at one time, but we have archived articles that have corrections on them because they called it British Petroleum and that's wrong, it officially changed its name to BP. --Pi zero (talk) 17:43, 17 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Now this poses an interesting problem, . What does "BP" in "BP plc" stand for?  A parallel problem -- it is "Republic of India", not "India", and so is true for many other countries, and we don't use the official name.  (Even on Wikipedia, the official names are redirected to the smaller well-known names).  So how do we handle it?  For example, we know "HP" in "HP inc" is "Hewlett Packard", even if they prefer to call themselves "HP inc". •–•  05:18, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
 * To be decided on a case-by-case basis. "IBM" and "NASA" are so much more widely recognized than the full expansions of their names that they can be used without expansion.  (If, hypothetically, their categories had been given the expanded names, it would have been workable and wouldn't have to be changed, but I don't think it would make sense to go through the trouble of changing the existing short category names.)  "HP", although an often-used abbreviation, does not completely eclipse "Hewlett-Packard", and in fact it's expanded in the actual name of the company ("Hewlett-Packard Company").  But "British Petroleum" is actually wrong, correction-worthy; the company, apparently, legally changed its name and there now is no company with the longer name.  The "plc" we would not ordinarily add to the end of the company &mdash;though most businesses have some such ending on their full names, as Hewlett-Packard Company, International Business Machines Corporation, etc.&mdash; unless in some particular case the ending were usually included when people name the company, but in this case it would have the benefit of providing some further distinction for what I think we all agree would otherwise be a rather confusing short name. As an alternative, though perhaps less tidy in this case than a suffix " plc", one could use a disambiguating parenthesized suffix, perhaps " (United Kingdom)" (compare  Category:Daily Telegraph (United Kingdom)). --Pi zero (talk) 13:00, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

FWIW Hewlett-Packard Company broke in two: HP inc and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. •–• 13:04, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
 * so what do we do now? •–• 18:46, 21 October 2020 (UTC)

The company has been named BP since 2001. "British Petroleum" has not been part of the name since 1998. We should do nothing. --SVTCobra 14:38, 10 January 2024 (UTC)