1

It has recently come to my attention that quadrilaterals with two parallels sides are most often called trapeziums in British English, but trapezoids in American English as explained in  WolframMathWorld :

Now the question arises as to what we do with:

  1. How to  Calculate the Area of a Trapezoid
  2. How to Find the Area of a Trapezium
  3. Step 4 in Finding the Area of Regular Polygons Using Other Formulas  (even though a general trapezoid is not a regular polygon)
    I was thinking that maybe 1&2 could be redirected to "Calculate the Area of a Quadrilateral with Two Parallel Sides and the trapezium/trapezoid snafu being explained up front (in the introduction), but am open to other suggestions.

Also I was thinking that any reference to “a quadrilateral with two parallel sides” should be called: “a quadrilateral with two parallel sides (usually called a trapezium in British and a trapezoid in English, but not always)”. I know this is confusing, but the situation, itself, is confusing. Can anyone think of something better?

tagging: @Stephen-Han @Atheia @Chris-H @Isorhythmic

2

Wikipedia lists the article as trapezoid and gives the context for trapezium in the first sentence and the infobox. I think putting the word trapezoid in the title would be best, and for every introduction, the word trapezium is included for non US/Canada people (and only mentioned once).

For example, here is a sample first sentence of an article titled “Calculate the Area of a Trapezoid.”

>Calculating the area of a trapezoid (British English: trapezium) is very simple.

On an article called “Calculate the Area of a Trapezium,” it would be customary, at least for Wikipedia, to put:

>This article is about calculating the area of a quadrilateral with no parallel sides. For calculating the area of a quadrilateral with one pair of parallel sides, see Calculate the Area of a Trapezoid.

Or some note like that.

I don’t think anyone is going to search for an object called “quadrilateral with two parallel sides” directly in the search bar, and from my experience, the search isn’t really up to par (same articles listed on later pages, and I’m not sure how good it is with searching by text in articles). Maybe we could improve that in the process.

3

Atheia’s comments seem pretty right on to me. 

Looks like “trapezoid” is more frequently searched than “trapezium,” and the older “Calculate the Area of a Trapezoid” article is already reaching and helping a lot of people. I’d say right call in this case is to make that the merge target. The hybrid title Ron suggested doesn’t seem to have much search volume, and title guidelines favor the more concise and commonly searched title. I’ve added the alternate term, trapezium, to the intro of “Calcuate the Area of a Trapezoid”.

We don’t need to do anything with Step 4 in “Calculate the Area of a Polygon” – there’s no problem with a general article containing some overlapping content with a more specific article.

4

That is very good thinking, @Atheia . Thank you! 

5

@Chris-H - Should we just nfd “Find the Area of a Trapezium” to keep that title available for someone to write about calculating the area of a quadrilateral with no parallel sides?

6

What do you think about changing the method and tweaking the title to reflect “no parallel sides”? Then it wouldn’t be a dup.

7

That’s fine, @Chris-H . My initial concern was that the original author is new and I did not want to dishonor his work, native language, or learnings. I really didn’t have a good solution to the circumstance, which is why I came here. Perhaps he will be up for rewriting the article as you suggest!