Talk:Danton (disambiguation)

No idea why Anne Alvaro is named as the second lead in the Wadja film; the second lead after Depardieu is more obviously Wojciech Pszoniak, the Polish actor who played Robespierre. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.170.241.160 (talk) 00:00, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Move. Compelling objections are noted, but we appear to have a rough consensus that Georges Danton is the primary topic of the term "Danton". The dab page will move to Danton (disambiguation) and the base name will redirect to Georges Danton. Cúchullain ^t/c 21:24, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

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• Danton → Danton (disambiguation)
• Danton (disambiguation) → Danton

– "Danton" should redirect to "Georges Danton", with the "Danton (disambiguation)" page handling the various related topics. Georges Danton is the primary topic, and most of the other dab entries are for items related to or named for him. SteveStrummer (talk) 16:21, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

• Is there any evidence of primacy in terms of pageviews or Google hits? bd2412 T 17:14, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Yes. Ninety-day pageview statistics show that the Georges Danton page has received over 35,000 views, far more than the combined total of the hockey player, the actor, the pseudonymous journalist and the two villages. Google shows an even greater disparity: appx. 135,000 in GoogleBooks vs. 1,500, 3,400, and under 100. SteveStrummer (talk) 23:00, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

In that case, support as the topic that is significantly more likely than all other topics combined to be the article sought. bd2412 T 02:21, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Support as case made S a g a C i t y (talk) 14:20, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose. In addition to the topics listed above in the nom's reply to BD2412, there are many more topics listed at Danton (disambiguation), including 5 films, a class of battleships, 2 dramatic works, and 2 places (both small, but the longevity of placenames gives them a long-term significance). Given this wide variety of uses of the term, I do not agree that the revolutionary is "much more likely than any other topic, and more likely than all the other topics combined—to be the topic sought when a reader searches for that term." --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:15, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Please reconsider: the battleship and its class are both namesakes of Georges Danton, and the films and dramatic works are all biographies of him. (The two villages are absolutely negligible in terms of page views, Google hits, and on-wiki links). — Preceding unsigned comment added by SteveStrummer (talk • contribs) 18:31, 4 March 2014

If named-after was a criterion, then the mighty metropolis of Baltimore, County Cork would displace the little upstart Baltimore in Maryland ... and the colossal conurbation of Boston, Lincolnshire would usurp primary topic from the wee village Boston in Massachusetts. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:25, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Boston, however, is not a disambiguation page - despite the fact that there are a very large number of things called "Boston", including other places, there is one topic that is primary for the term. A comparable case is Reagan, which redirects to Ronald Reagan, despite having many things named for him and many things that were called "Reagan" before Ronald Reagan was born. Based on usage alone, Georges Danton appears to be the primary topic of Danton, no matter how much other stuff exists, or whether all of these other things are named for him or not. If most people searching for this term are looking for the revolutionary, then they are stymied and disrupted by having a disambiguation page in their way. bd2412 T 23:02, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

You miss my point entirely. SteveStrummer was arguing that being the thing that others are named after is a factor in choosing a primary topic. It isn't, as my examples illustrate.

As to readers being "stymied and disrupted", they know how to search. If they are looking for Georges Danton, they will search for his name Georges Danton (possibly with a mis-spelling such as George Danton, which redirects to the Frenchman), or search for something like Danton France or Danton Revolution. If they choose to be lazy and search for the unqualified term Danton, they will find him conveniently listed at the top of a small, quickly downloaded and quickly-rendered dab page. No stimy, no disruption, just one click.

OTOH, a reader looking for the film or the ships who lands at the article on the revolutionary will find themselves facing a long article, with only a small hatnote offering a pointer to a dab page. That stymies them. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:34, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

This argument (immediately above) is essentially an argument against the use of any WP:PRIMARYTOPICS at all. We don't need to discuss that, since that issue is settled law. Let's go back to your original argument – that being "named after" someone doesn't matter. In response, I would say that understanding context is key to any good decision-making. All the other entries (except the two villages, presumably) are namesakes of Georges Danton, and most of their sources inevitably refer to him: should their page views and Google hits be deducted from his, or added? ...Even if we ignore that idea for a moment, and treat those entries as if they were named for some other Danton, the common yardstick still shows the primary topic: ninety-day page view statistics for the battleship are 1,153; the ship class, 1,763; the Büchner play, 3,800; the von Einem opera, 974; the 1921 film, 291; the 1931 film 259; the 1932 film, 153; the 1970 film, zero (because it was not even an article until I made a stub for it this week); the 1983 film 7,403; the North Dakota village, 234; and the English village, 202. As noted above, the Georges Danton article has been viewed over 35,000 times in the same time period. SteveStrummer (talk) 02:28, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

@User:BrownHairedGirl, our policy currently states that a topic is the primary topic if it is "much more likely than any other topic, and more likely than all the other topics combined—to be the topic sought when a reader searches for that term". Do you disagree with that policy? Would you prefer that we limit primary topics to titles that are unique? Boston is a good example. A reader looking for anything other than the city in Massachusetts who lands at the current article "will find themselves facing a long article, with only a small hatnote offering a pointer to a dab page". Shouldn't Boston be a disambiguation page, by that reasoning? Shouldn't Florida and Ronald Reagan and Earth? bd2412 T 03:09, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

By the way, I hope that doesn't come across as snarky. I am honestly concerned that a certain number of editors appear to have a philosophy of disambiguation that will lead to that result. My view on the subject is that we perceive disambiguation pages to be helpful because we are insiders, and that they are far more confusing to outsiders than we imagine. If there is a problem with the visibility of hatnotes, or hatnotes on long pages, then those seem to me to be issues that we can address without erecting a maze of disambiguation pages. Cheers! bd2412 T 03:22, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

No, I don't disagree with WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. However, I do disagree with the enthusiasm of some editors for declaring a primary topic if they possibly can, and I strongly disagree with the presumption that a disambiguation page is some sort of usability nightmare.

In this case, the presentation of the figures has been misleading. Adding up all the other topics, I get a total of 16,232 hits, so the Georges Danton page is viewed 2.19 times more often than all the others combined. I don't count a ratio of 2.2:1 as "much more likely"; my threshold would be about 5:1.

I haven't done the equivalent figures for Boston MA, but I'm pretty sure that if we checked the stats, then the majority for the city's 134,000 views would be much much higher than 2.2:1. If we added in all the topics which are subtopics of the city rather than merely related or named after it – such as Culture in Boston or History of Boston – then the figures point even more strongly to the primacy of the city. By contrast, I can identify no subtopics of Georges Danton.

For instances like this, where a topic is the most prominent but not by a big enough margin to be primary, I would like to see that near-primary topic as the first item on the dab page. That would be a bit like the way we handle a dab page where there is' a primary topic, except that the first item would be linked.

These discussions routinely overlook the very serious damage done to cross-linking by treating on page as a primary topic. When the unqualified title is a disambiguation page, the number of incoming links from article space should be zero, and it is very easy for maintainers to identify and fix any links which point there. However, when one page is selected as the primary topic, those misdirected links point to the same place as the much higher number of correctly targetted links for the primary topic. That makes it very difficult for editors to track the errors, because they have to wade through a huge number of false positives. This is not just an inconvenience for editors; it is an avoidable disruption to the reader of other articles with broken links. That's why I want to apply a high treshhold for the "much more likely" test in WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:25, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

I think that you have highlighted the core of the philosophical dispute - the policy refers to a topic being "more likely" than other topics combined, and "much more likely" than any other individual topic, but offers no guidance on how much more likely one topic must be to qualify as the primary topic. From a purely mathematical perspective, if there is one topic that is the target of 51% of searches, and a a dozen others that get ~4% each to add up to the remaining 49%, this is just past being "more likely" than all other topics combined, and is certainly much more likely than any other topic. However, we almost always disambiguate when there is a demonstrable 51/49% situation. Beyond that, there is a rather unsteady progression where we are more and more likely to have a primary topic, but we are internally inconsistent, with some discussions yielding a primary topic determination where one topic has, say, 60% of the views, while another results in disambiguation even where one topic has 80% of the views or more.

I do appreciate the issue of errant linking to primary topic pages (I regularly review now links to Mouse and Apple to fix those that are misdirected), but I think there needs to be some solution other than sending a majority - perhaps a fairly substantial majority - of readers to a disambiguation page, when we can determine the actual topic that most of them are looking for. I would also note, as a disambiguator, that the disambiguation project has hit a wall in terms of bringing down the number of disambiguation links. We were making consistent progress until July 4, 2013, when we hit an all-time low of 62,419 disambiguation pages with incoming links. Since then, despite some truly heroic efforts to fight the tide, the number of disambiguation pages with incoming links has steadily increased, and today stands at 65,340. In short, the number of disambiguation pages with incoming links is increasing faster than they can be fixed, meaning that new disambiguation links may never get fixed. We just don't have the manpower. bd2412 T 15:05, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

I would have a lot more sympathy for the inconveniencing readers argument if the term in question was the actual title of the subject. However, this discussion is not about "Georges Danton" or even the English-language equivalent "George Danton"; it is solely about his surname. So what we are discussing here is what to do for those readers who a) have not followed a link from one of the many pages which link to him; b) conduct an internal wiki-search (rather than using Google); c) use a partial search term.

Currently, those readers land on a uncluttered and quick-to-load list of topics related to Danton, with the revolutionary as the first link. That's good signposting: it imposes very little extra thinking requirement on those readers. It also serves well for readers who are looking for another topic named "Danton", who go directly to a list of alternatives, rather than being taken to the wrong place and having to find their way out again.

Consider a parallel of a motorway entering a major city. 20 miles out, most drivers can be assumed to be heading for the city, but a significant minority are bound for somewhere else. The signposts reflect this priority: the city's name in big bold print at the top of the sign, with secondary destinations in smaller type below. That's roughly what our current dab page does.

However, making "Danton" the primary topic is equivalent to funnelling all vehicles into the city, where they may then see a small and faint sign saying "other routes this way", which finally leads them to a meaningful signpost. Marginal gain for the majority, massive inconvenience for the others. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:53, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

We are in that fuzzy gray area of determining how big a majority we need to have to justify inconveniencing the minority instead of the majority. I don't know that the inconvenience is that massive, but we lack empirical data to say how hard it really is for the average reader to spot the hatnote. I don't disagree with the analogy, but the difference between this situation and the road to the city is that for an actual city, it is possible to put up multiple signposts along the route. Here, there can only be one topic per title (counting the disambiguation page itself as a "topic") so we have to choose between either putting the sign on the road, which will (momentarily) slow everyone who is actually travelling to the city, or put the sign in the city, which will not inconvenience anyone going into the city, but will slow those who are travelling to different destinations. How much they are really slowed, I don't know. Unlike certain more easily resolved situations, like Mouse, or like WP:TWODABS situations, there are many options, with no clear "second best" option to be put in the hatnote either, so it is all-or-nothing. The more I think about the issue, the more I think that the answer may be to restructure hatnotes themselves in cases like these. bd2412 T 15:04, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

• Support. The majority of the other topics are named for the French revolutionary Danton. The literature, art and battleship are all named after him. He is the primary topic. Binksternet (talk) 17:47, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.