Talk:Chocolate bar

British usage?

Is it common in Britain to call things like Mars Bar, Twix, etc "chocolate bars"? In all my life, I've never thought of them as such, and don't think I've every heard them called that. To my mind, a "chocolate bar" is a solid bar of pure chocolate (like a Cadbury's Dairy Milk ), or at most, a solid bar with things mixed in with it (like a Cadbury's Fruit and Nut). Is this my mistake? A regionalism? Or an error in Wikipedia? Iapetus (talk) 14:35, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Yes, it is common. If the primary ingredient, or outer coating, is chocolate, it's a chocolate bar. See here, here or even here --Escape Orbit ^(Talk) 16:19, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

MOS:Chocolate

Product type	A bar of solid chocolate	A bar of chocolate combined with other ingredients, such as wafers or nougat	A confectionery bar containing no chocolate, including those which contain only compound chocolate and no true chocolate
Example	Cadbury Dairy Milk	Snickers	PayDay (confection)
Main Article	Chocolate bar	Chocolate bar	Candy bar
Category	Category:Chocolate bars	Category:Chocolate bars	Category:Candy bars
Disambiguator	(chocolate bar)	(chocolate bar)	(candy bar)
List article	List of chocolate bar brands	List of chocolate bar brands	List in Candy bar
In British English Articles	"chocolate bar"	"chocolate bar"	”confection”
In American English Articles	"chocolate bar"	"candy bar" (eg, "Oh Henry! is a [[chocolate bar|candy bar]] containing...")	"candy bar"
In Canadian English Articles	"chocolate bar"	"chocolate bar" Canadian English generally refers to these as "chocolate bars", though only bars of solid chocolate can be marketed as such.	none yet identified

I've been working on standardizing language and scope of chocolate bar-related articles and categories, including Candy bar, Chocolate bar, Category:Candy bars, and Category:Chocolate bars. The above chart is the approach I am taking to the standardization.

The articles and categories are a bit of a jumble due to regional language differences. My approach is to make those language differences more explicit, while implementing consistency across articles.

My first thought was to use candy bar as the generic term, but that didn't work out for several reasons:

• The Chocolate bar article is the original, with Candy bar being a 2014 fork. (Chocolate bar was originally at Candy bar, but was moved in 2011 as a result of the discussion above, which found chocolate bar to be the more common term.)
• Most of articles in Category:Chocolate bars use the broader meaning (ie, Snickers-style bars), so it will be less work to enforce that as the category scope.
• The list article is at List of chocolate bar brands
• Several articles for Snickers-style bars use "(chocolate bar) as their disambiguator.--Trystan (talk) 03:06, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

Chocolate or not?

@Trystan, thanks for doing this. I wonder whether the information about the history of the combination candy bar ought to move back to Candy bar, since they are both part "candy bar" and part "chocolate bar", and candy bar is the more general subject.

I don't think that the trends seen in past choices is the right way to approach this, because for years there wasn't any other option: you either linked to "chocolate bar" or to nothing. I'm also not sure that I'd include chocolate compound in the non-chocolate section. Most people don't know whether a mass-produced chocolate-flavored food is real chocolate, and the definitions vary. The EU had to invent a category they called family milk chocolate precisely because what the UK was calling "milk chocolate" is what much of the world calls chocolate compound. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:59, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

I think "combination candy bar" is a US term for something the rest of the world calls a chocolate bar (see the above RFC). It would make the most sense to me to redirect Combination candy bar to Chocolate bar, where such products are covered. It would be particularly difficult to extricate the discussion of combination bars from chocolate bars, because the US sources referring to combination bars don't really explain what they mean by combination bar. Some give the impression that they mean anything other than a bar of solid chocolate. But at the same time, they say the Goo Goo Cluster was the first combination bar in 1912, though Fry's Chocolate Cream was launched in 1866.

I don't have any objection to grouping compound chocolate bars with true chocolate bars. That was my initial approach, but another editor at Charleston Chew objected. I think that is the only compound chocolate bar in Category:Candy bars that would be affected.--Trystan (talk) 15:32, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

"Combination candy bar" is the technical term in the industry. It is not something that I would expect any consumer, anywhere in the world, to have encountered. This UK blog calls it a "combination chocolate bar". (I wonder whether Goo Goo Cluster should actually be described as the first name-brand American combination candy bar, rather than the first in the world. The Mirror says it's the world's first, but I'm doubtful that they carefully researched that point.)

"Chocolate bar" is a subtype of "candy bar". Everything that we can say about chocolate bars is also true and relevant for the broader subject. I don't think it makes sense to put nearly all the information about the broader inside the article about the narrower subject. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:11, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

I think it does make sense in this case, because chocolate bar is globally the much more notable topic. That the US instead uses a slightly broader term, candy bar, which is accompanied by a slightly broader conception of the category, doesn't require us to adopt US terminology for the primary article. I think the consensus of the RFC above is that the substantive content on chocolate bars be located at chocolate bar. Perhaps a fresh RFC would be helpful to get additional views.--Trystan (talk) 18:43, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

What do you mean "much more notable topic"? How can chocolate plus non-chocolate be bigger than chocolate alone?

The RFC that you reference is nine and a half years old. Wikipedia:Consensus can change and all that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:53, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

I think it is quite common for a more specific topic to be much more notable than a broader category to which it belongs. Bicycles are part of a larger category of single-track vehicles, but Bicycle as a topic is clearly more notable than Single-track vehicle. Additionally, the idea of a "candy bar" as a parent class of "chocolate bar" doesn't exist much outside the US, so the conceptual hierarchy is far from universal. If we were to combine Chocolate bar and Candy bar into a single article, I would support locating it at Chocolate bar, with a short section noting that the US uses a slightly broader terminology and conception for this product, in which it includes a handful of non-chocolate products. Though I think the current two-article structure works best.

Of course consensus can change. That's why I suggested a fresh RFC, to see if it has.--Trystan (talk) 19:27, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

The problem with merging the two articles isn't that the US tends to call a bar of pure chocolate a "candy bar". The problem is that nobody calls non-chocolate bars "chocolate bars", and if you stick information about non-chocolate bars in a page that says "chocolate bar" in the title, then we'll get perpetual complaints that chocolate-free Caramac bars and chocolate-free Zagnut bars and chocolate-free PayDay bars and chocolate-free Hershey's Gold bars and all of the other notable non-chocolate bars don't belong in the resulting article, because the title says 'chocolate bar' and editors will think that excludes non-chocolate bars. We don't have that problem at the more generic name.

If you want the resulting merged article to be at a name that describes the full scope but doesn't use American English, then maybe you'd use "confectionery bar" as the title, but I don't find evidence of that being a term used in Canadian English, and I do find that "candy bar" appears in Canadian newspapers. Canadian newspapers prefer "chocolate bar" approximately 4:1, and American newspapers prefer "candy bar" approximately 2:1. Both of these names are used in both countries. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:19, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

First

About the Goo Goo Cluster: The cited source says, opage 126, that the 1912 Goo Goo Cluster is "the first chocolate combination candy" [not "bar"], and that the Clark Bar (1917) was "the first combination candy bar".

I do wonder whether that statement ought to also have qualifiers of "name brand" and "in the US". WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:06, 10 January 2021 (UTC)