In creating the article from the French Rafle du billet vert, I considered various options for the title: "Green card roundup", "Green ticket roundup", keeping the original French title and italicizing it: La rafle du billet vert, even a hybrid French-English "Billet vert roundup"; also some English descriptive titles based on date or location or a combination, such as "June 9 1941 roundup in France", "Paris region roundup of Jews in 1941", and others. I ended up choosing "Green ticket roundup", not my favorite, but I feel it's the best choice based on policy and usage.
Among all of the options considered, about the only constants in every use of the term in reliable sources, are the words green. and roundup, so I was sure that the title would end up having those two in it. And in the case of roundup, there is actually a great irony there, because there was no actual roundup in the Green ticket roundup. The reason it is universally called a roundup is explained in the article. So, the choice came down to mostly: "English title, or French one", and, "ticket" or "card".
First stop in settling on a title was to check to see whether there is a WP:COMMONNAME in English, and it turns out, there isn't. First, there aren't that many altogether. There are reliable sources in English that treat it in some of the ways noted above, but they tended to be one of the first two listed above, leaving the choice pretty much between "Green ticket..." and "Green card...". (By the way, the capitalization of the first word is only due to Wikipedia style requirements for article titles; when occurring in running text in English sources, it was mostly lower-case. So in the article, it needn't be capitalized when not sentence-initial.) As near as I could see from sources, there were about as many that use ticket as card. Even the books that habitually referred to one of the English titles included the French expression in the text somewhere, usually that was by way of explanation of its origin, rather than one of usage.
So it seemed to be a tie, between "Green ticket roundup" and "Green card roundup". A simple dictionary lookup of "billet" gives "ticket" as its primary meaning; but in the sense of something mailed to someone, it's really more of a "card", "notice", "notification", and so on. It's not a "ticket" in the sense of something valid for transportation; recipients had to make their own way to the assembly point. Some of the sources describe it as a "green paper". Given the apparent deadlock, I was going to let Marrus & Paxton decide the toss, because their "Vichy France and the Jews" is a seminal 1981 book that blew the lid off Vichy historiography in France, so has a great deal of weight. As it turns out, they have it both ways in the text! So, no help there. I assigned one "negative point" to the "green card roundup", due to a possible point of confusion with a green card in the United States, which is a highly sought-after immigrant status in the United States; mixed with fears of roundups and arrests on the part of undocumented immigrants in the current political climate, the term "Green card roundup" sounds like some odd mashup of immigration-related topics, or a conspiracy theory. Given how close it was, I went with "Green ticket roundup". I hope more scholarship can be located on this topic, so the tendency in reliable sources, if there is one, can become clearer and give us more confidence in choice of title. Mathglot (talk) 04:59, 26 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
- With respect to "green", all sources are in agreement about that, labeling it variously as being a "green paper" (Marrus & Paxton), a "green ticket" (several), a "green card" (several), a "green form", or a "green postcard" (Yad Vashem). Mathglot (talk) 20:34, 29 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
