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A move request (renaming) of this article should he been made, for discussion, if the first line is not going to read Divide and conquer... etc. We use the most common form of any item as an article name. I will be moving this back to Divide and conquer unless it can be shown reliably that Divide and rule is the more frequently used term in English. It is not, I firmly believe. Rignt now, the first line of the article is a perfect example of a confusing disaster. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 18:32, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I rolled back 3 edits which were flagrantly non-Wiki. This should be moved to Divide and conquer which by far is the most common term. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 20:54, 1 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This was moved arbitrarily without that and should just be moved back. Maybe an administrator will see this and help with that. I dare not use a help tag 'cause I always get scolded when I do that.--SergeWoodzing (talk) 00:20, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Does anyone - anyone? - contest the fact that Divide and conquer by far is the most common term? How did the article ever get it s current name? --SergeWoodzing (talk) 01:16, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
A bot will list this discussion on the requested moves current discussions subpage within an hour of this tag being placed. The discussion may be closed 7 days after being opened, if consensus has been reached (see the closing instructions). Please base arguments on article title policy, and keep discussion succinct and civil.
Support. While I see that "divide and rule" is the literal translation, and has some historical use, "divide and conquer" seems to have been the more common phrasing in English for a long time. While both are correct, I was only familiar with the expression as "divide and conquer", and I imagine most of our readers will either expect to find this under that title, or be equally familiar with both. That favours the move, and the current title will still go there. It also probably explains why this move has been proposed twice in the past; I gather that one of those discussions ended because there was already a disambiguation page at the proposed title, which has since been moved, and at that time the editors were confused or intimidated by the process of swapping multiple pages, as well as the challenge of improving what they felt was a messy article. The other discussion doesn't seem to have gone very far. I see no real objection to moving it now. P Aculeius (talk) 14:58, 26 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose as unnecessary. According to the Ngram, there is no great difference in frequency between the two variants. Cambridge dictionary (UK) has an entry on Divide and rule and gives a variant Divide and conquer (mainly US), which suggests that this is an issue between different English variants (WP:TITLEVAR). 84.251.164.143 (talk) 07:42, 29 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
As a further observation, most of the sources currently in the article use "divide and rule". Pages linking here also do not show preference for conquer in redirects (What links here, where 10 article pages link to Divide and conquer) or piping (Source links, where only 1/5 of the links are piped from conquer to rule). I admit that the latter is a biased measure, as the article name influences the links, but in clear cases, there is typically a lot of piping. 84.251.164.143 (talk) 11:08, 29 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is misleading. The phrase is clearly not an Americanism; it was used rather famously by Samuel Johnson in 1751 ("Divide and conquer, is a principle equally just in science as in policy." [emphasis in original]), and we find it quoted in 19th century treatises, reports, and parliamentary debates from around the English-speaking world. Neither the original OED nor Webster's 3rd have an entry under either title, presumably as the sense is already covered under "divide". The ngram supplied above is faulty, in that limiting it to 1950 and after gives the impression that "divide and conquer" has only recently become more common; but if you begin the ngram at 1800, as would normally be done to take in the period for which most English-language works scanned by Google are available, you'll see that "divide and conquer" was predominant for the entire period prior to World War I, while "divide and rule" was slightly more common during the interwar years, before "divide and conquer" again became more common in works published from 1939 to 1954, and much more common beginning in 1987. I knew this to be the case because I checked before posting my "support" above. Since it's not a variant between different dialects of English, it should be at the predominant form. P Aculeius (talk) 12:16, 29 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
In the Ngram, one can select the corpus. In American English corpus, conquer is 1.1–3 times more common. In British English it is the other way round: rule is 1.5–9 times more common between 1950–2024. I set starting point to 1950 simply because we usually base the considerations on modern usage. Other editors can judge whether the above is enough of an difference so that WP:ENGVAR is applicable. I think this at least demonstrates that "divide and rule" is not some obscure variant, like the earlier !votes seemed to imply. 84.251.164.143 (talk) 13:25, 29 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
