Talk:Charlotte
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![]() | On 6 December 2023, it was proposed that this article be moved from Charlotte (disambiguation) to Charlotte. The result of the discussion was moved. |
Requested move 20 December 2014
[edit]- The following is a closed discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.
The result of the proposal was no consensus. --BDD (talk) 16:46, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
Charlotte (disambiguation) → Charlotte – Charlotte currently redirects to Charlotte, North Carolina. There has been a bit of a discussion in 2008 and 2013 at Talk:Charlotte. I agree with Infovarius, that the city is hardly known to most non Americans and the given name would be the most likely subject which these users would expect to find. As virtually all American cities already have the format City, State it seems logical to turn Charlotte into a disambiguation page. Inwind (talk) 17:24, 20 December 2014 (UTC)
- Suport per nom, first thing I think of is the female name, second is Charlotte Motor Speedway, which isn't in Charlotte NC, it's in Concord. -- 67.70.35.44 (talk) 07:14, 21 December 2014 (UTC)
- Support – I see no good primarytopic claim here. Dicklyon (talk) 17:37, 21 December 2014 (UTC)
- Strong oppose per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC and related discussions (Talk:Raleigh (disambiguation), Talk:Bellingham (disambiguation), etc.). There is no factual basis to the assertions in the nomination--sure, most U.S. cities are at the "City, State" title, but in many, many cases, the base name "City" redirects there (Little Rock, Memphis, Missoula, Austin...). "First thing I think of" is actually not a criterion for determining primary topic on Wikipedia; page views and long-term significance are. This major U.S. metropolitan area got 163089 pageviews over the last 90 days. The given name? 7033. And no case has been made that any of these other topics even comes close to challenging the largest city in the Carolinas for educational significance. Red Slash 18:59, 21 December 2014 (UTC)
- May be the city got more pageviews because the redirect leads there? Infovarius (talk) 07:30, 22 December 2014 (UTC)
- Almost certainly, and that is a good point; the redirect doubtlessly gives a couple of mistaken pageviews a week at least. But of the 14298 times in the last 90 days that Charlotte itself has seen a hit, most of them come from the over 500 links in articlespace to Charlotte, (virtually?) all of which expected to get the North Carolina city. Just like people link UK rather than [[United Kingdom|UK]], people do the same for Charlotte. Red Slash 21:51, 22 December 2014 (UTC)
- Page views for a redirect are counted separately from that of the target in the statistics. older ≠ wiser 12:14, 23 December 2014 (UTC)
- Almost certainly, and that is a good point; the redirect doubtlessly gives a couple of mistaken pageviews a week at least. But of the 14298 times in the last 90 days that Charlotte itself has seen a hit, most of them come from the over 500 links in articlespace to Charlotte, (virtually?) all of which expected to get the North Carolina city. Just like people link UK rather than [[United Kingdom|UK]], people do the same for Charlotte. Red Slash 21:51, 22 December 2014 (UTC)
- May be the city got more pageviews because the redirect leads there? Infovarius (talk) 07:30, 22 December 2014 (UTC)
- Strong Oppose As there are no other entities approaching the page views of Charlotte, then the page should stay as is. I note that if you look at Charlotte (given name) it is more or less a disambiguation page anyways, noting different people using the feminine version of Chuck. In response to Charlotte Motor Speedway not being in Charlotte, Baltimore-Washington International Airport is neither in Baltimore nor Washington, to which page should we disambiguate to clear this up? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 143.65.196.20 (talk) 12:13, 22 December 2014 (UTC)
- Baltimore-Washington contains the airport, so is not like Charlotte at all. Further, the Charlotte Motor Speedway is highly prominent. -- 67.70.35.44 (talk) 00:03, 24 December 2014 (UTC)
- By the same logic, Charlotte also contains the speedway. older ≠ wiser 00:43, 24 December 2014 (UTC)
- Baltimore-Washington is not Baltimore or Washington, D.C. though, so unlike Charlotte, it is the conurbatino of two centers -- 67.70.35.44 (talk) 05:35, 24 December 2014 (UTC)
- That's not really relevant though. Baltimore-Washington is a metropolitan area just as the Charlotte metro area. older ≠ wiser 14:07, 24 December 2014 (UTC)
- Baltimore-Washington is not Baltimore or Washington, D.C. though, so unlike Charlotte, it is the conurbatino of two centers -- 67.70.35.44 (talk) 05:35, 24 December 2014 (UTC)
- By the same logic, Charlotte also contains the speedway. older ≠ wiser 00:43, 24 December 2014 (UTC)
- Baltimore-Washington contains the airport, so is not like Charlotte at all. Further, the Charlotte Motor Speedway is highly prominent. -- 67.70.35.44 (talk) 00:03, 24 December 2014 (UTC)
- Oppose. It's clear which Charlotte is the primary topic, and it's the North Carolina city. -- Calidum 02:43, 23 December 2014 (UTC)
- Oppose. I see no evidence that challenges this good sized city as WP:PRIMARYTOPIC of the title "Charlotte".--Cúchullain t/c 14:03, 23 December 2014 (UTC)
- Comment. I believe that the page view counter is not a good indicator for this article and WP:PRIMARYTOPIC is not based solely on page views but on the result of a discussion. The page view counter is useful for articles with names primarily used for places or surnames. Articles relating to widely used terms often have the disambiguation page as the primary topic. I have not done the page view count on Buffalo, but I guess there is a good chance that Buffalo, New York would be a strong contender. Inwind (talk) 10:56, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
- Support. The city is definitely not the primary topic. -- Necrothesp (talk) 01:53, 29 December 2014 (UTC)
- I'm sorry, can you explain why? Red Slash 08:01, 29 December 2014 (UTC)
- With the number of queens and princesses called Charlotte you think a city which is not terribly well-known outside America should be primary? Clearly not. Obvious US-centricity. -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:44, 2 January 2015 (UTC)
- I'm sorry, can you explain why? Red Slash 08:01, 29 December 2014 (UTC)
- It appears that the city meets primary topic pageview thresholds. Following are pageview stats for one arbitrary month for entities called simply "Charlotte" with over 1000 views:
- Charlotte, North Carolina: 59118
- Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (the eponym of the city): 13882
- Princess Charlotte of Wales: 6856
- Princess Charlotte, Duchess of Valentinois: 5507
- Charlotte (cake): 4708
- Charlotte, Grand Duchess of Luxembourg: 3596
- Charlotte (given name): 2410
- Charlotte, Princess Royal: 2069
- Charlotte Stuart, Duchess of Albany: 1703
- Support, because apparently the city doesn't come close to surpass the rest of the eponymous topics with regard to long-term significance - I did a Google Books search for "Charlotte" [1] and I only found a city-related book at the very bottom of the third page. I didn't expect it to be that lopsided, but on the other hand, the given name does appear to be rather old and popular. A Britannica search for "Charlotte" [2] shows what is effectively a disambiguation page, listing the city first, and then all the other meanings, which is what we can do, too. I'm not particularly swayed by the raw hit count argument, because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not an index of popular things on the Internet. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 12:43, 2 January 2015 (UTC)
- Comment in light of the recent decision with regards to Worcester it appears that obviously the city should be the primary topic, unless there is something else that is VASTLY more important. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 143.65.196.20 (talk) 18:13, 2 January 2015 (UTC)
- Comment this issue has previously been discussed at Talk:Charlotte where there are comments about it from 2008, 2011, 2012 and 2013. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 12:44, 4 January 2015 (UTC)
- Oppose per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. Softlavender (talk) 09:29, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
- The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.
Requested move 31 August 2018
[edit]- The following is a closed 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: not moved per primary topic criteria. -- JHunterJ (talk) 13:51, 7 September 2018 (UTC)
Charlotte (disambiguation) → Charlotte – While this is a large city, it isn't primary by either criteria [[3]] [[4]] [[5]]. If you take into account these others the views would be even lower. As has been pointed out before the city's name comes from the given name and people globally would probably expect to find that at the base name, in addition to the fact that it was 11th most popular girl name in 2013 in the United States. See also Talk:Isle of Lewis. Crouch, Swale (talk) 12:23, 31 August 2018 (UTC)
- Support Page views aside, there are so many well known things called Charlotte that I don't think anything can lay claim to primary topic.ZXCVBNM (TALK) 15:16, 31 August 2018 (UTC)
- Support this move 2601:541:4500:1760:E861:9904:9861:4E33 (talk) 20:02, 3 September 2018 (UTC)
- Oppose. The nom's own links show that the North Carolina city gets around 2/3rds of pageviews overall, which more than qualifies it for primarytopic by usage. Of the other topics called "Charlotte", the North Carolina city also is a clear winner for long-term encyclopedic significance. Nothing's broke here to fix. Dohn joe (talk) 18:18, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
- If you take into account some of the topics that are also sometimes "Charlotte" (as noted by AjaxSmack) [[6]] and the fact that it has been argued that the common name of US cities is "Placename, Statename" then you could end up with a negative number. While I agree its a clear winner of long-term significance over the anime, that's less clear with the name, especially given the city derives from the name. Crouch, Swale (talk) 06:50, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
- Support. There is no way that the city is the primary topic for this common name. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:17, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
- Oppose no valid argument has been put forward for a move, which is required under policy. Moving the dab page to primary is a huge disservice to our readers when a hatnote works just as fine. TonyBallioni (talk) 04:49, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
- No valid argument? I have provided my arguments showing that this isn't significantly more likely to be sought with "Charlotte" and other evidence of PT#2. The move would slightly inconvenience those looking for the city but make it significantly easier to find the large number of other uses. Crouch, Swale (talk) 12:39, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
- No, you actually haven’t presented a single policy based reason for a move. You’ve presented IDONTLIBKEIT combined with hand waving at the primary topic criteria. That doesn’t come close to establishing that we should remove a major financial centre from its stable title, and even if your arguments came close to presenting a reason to move (they don’t, so this shouldn’t be moved regardless) others have presented sound arguments that this wins on both primary topic criteria. All you say in response is that you are unsure on that above. Basically, you don’t like this title like it is and think we should make 2/3 of our readers take an extra click to get to the page they want. That’s just senseless if there isn’t a good reason, which there isn’t here. TonyBallioni (talk) 12:48, 7 September 2018 (UTC)
- I have presented page views which is usually the most common way to establish a PT, the first criteria "much more likely than any other single topic", and "more likely than all the other topics combined". Charlotte (anime) gets more than 1/3 of the views of Charlotte, North Carolina and the 2nd half of the 1st criteria might not be true if some of the other pages are also searched for with "Charlotte". I haven't presented IDONTLIKEIT arguments, my point is that the current set up is surprising to anyone who doesn't live in North America. See my arguments at Talk:Yelling (disambiguation) where the village is obviously an interest to me but I think its highly unfriendly to send the rest of the world to it who type "Yelling". The redirect Charlotte has been far from stable, see its edit history. Crouch, Swale (talk) 13:25, 7 September 2018 (UTC)
- No, you actually haven’t presented a single policy based reason for a move. You’ve presented IDONTLIBKEIT combined with hand waving at the primary topic criteria. That doesn’t come close to establishing that we should remove a major financial centre from its stable title, and even if your arguments came close to presenting a reason to move (they don’t, so this shouldn’t be moved regardless) others have presented sound arguments that this wins on both primary topic criteria. All you say in response is that you are unsure on that above. Basically, you don’t like this title like it is and think we should make 2/3 of our readers take an extra click to get to the page they want. That’s just senseless if there isn’t a good reason, which there isn’t here. TonyBallioni (talk) 12:48, 7 September 2018 (UTC)
- No valid argument? I have provided my arguments showing that this isn't significantly more likely to be sought with "Charlotte" and other evidence of PT#2. The move would slightly inconvenience those looking for the city but make it significantly easier to find the large number of other uses. Crouch, Swale (talk) 12:39, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
- Oppose per Dohn joe. The stats show that the city is the primary topic, and the current disambiguation hat note isn't causing any confusion to readers. Bradv 04:56, 6 September 2018 (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.
Requested move 6 December 2023
[edit]- The following is a closed 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 after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
The result of the move request was: moved. Per consensus, not primary topic. (closed by non-admin page mover) – robertsky (talk) 01:07, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
Charlotte (disambiguation) → Charlotte – There is no way that Charlotte unambiguously refers to Charlotte, NC. What about the multiple queens and princesses with that name? The other people with that name? Boats that have feminine pronouns for some reason? Other cities with that name? I don't want to sound like a dumb anti-American, but this screams Americentrism to me. LilianaUwU (talk / contributions) 20:42, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
- Support the term "Charlotte" clearly doesn't normally refer to the city. Just by full matches[[7]] the others get around a 5th of views 58,991 for the NC city, 5,196 for the cake, 3,678 for the 2021 film, 2,776 for the given name, 947 for the singer and 754[[8]] for the Michigan one. Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz has 126,661 views and Charlotte Flair has 90,562[[9]]. By long-term significance the given name clearly has long-term significance so its safest to disambiguate. Crouch, Swale (talk) 20:58, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
- Support move. We lacked consensus for the last few tries, but the city doesn't appear to be the primary topic. O.N.R. (talk) 22:05, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
- Oppose per last time. Again, the evidence doesn't back up the move. The nom misstates the policy - it's not whether a topic is unambiguous, it's whether a reader/editor is more likely than not to intend a certain topic, and more than the others combined, and whether that topic has long-term significance. Here, even the first response notes that the city article has around 80 percent of pageviews for solo "Charlotte" articles. And as noted before, this is a major banking/finance center and certainly has long-term/significance which many of the other topics don't. And WP:PARTIALTITLEMATCHes like Charlotte Flair don't count for WP:PRIMARYTOPIC purposes. Dohn joe (talk) 03:26, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
- A reader is not likely to intend a city in North Carolina when searching a fairly common first name. Again, this screams of Americentrism. LilianaUwU (talk / contributions) 04:23, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
- The city article only gets 80% of pageviews of articles linked directly from the disambiguation page. The seemingly very unfortunate WP:NAMELIST guideline causes a lot of biographies that are of significant reader interest to be effectively hidden from view by our navigation, by requiring readers to do yet another click to get to them, and then in turn they have to scroll through yet another long list. (I've discussed this before in Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation/Archive 55#effects of WP:NAMELIST on navigation outcomes for anthroponymy entries.)
Looking at it now, we probably already have an issue of not having the terms 'Queen Charlotte' and 'Princess Charlotte' in the first disambiguation list.
In general, the idea that only solo articles – presumably that means those where disambiguation is done by editors, with a comma or parentheses in the titles – qualify for the examination of primary topics is not correct IMO, because it is prejudiced against the natural disambiguation of human names that exists in reality; we should not be going out of our way to make finding people by name as difficult as it sometimes seems to be.
In fact, a lot of our American readers who do want to refer to the city still naturally disambiguate just "Charlotte" into "Charlotte, North Carolina" even in the vernacular, so this argument is quite odd. If we know that our readers are by and large already aware of the ambiguity of a term, why are we going out of our way to try to set that ambiguity to the side? --Joy (talk) 12:23, 7 December 2023 (UTC) - When you factor in the other uses like the queens or the likes of say Charlotte's Web that are at least sometimes called "Charlotte" you could easily get a negative number especially given people normally expect US cities to be at "Placename, Statename". The city is indeed a large and important city but the given name is also very common and many of the people with this name as well as the name its self have lots of long-term significance. In addition like Lewis I'd expect most people in the world to associate it with given it was 31st most popular girl name in 2013 which means its likely even in America its not likely the city would be the first think that would come to mind. It was the most popular girl's name in Australia in 2013 and the 21st most popular in England and Wales in 2015. Crouch, Swale (talk) 18:14, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
- Statistics [10] indicate that there's a huge amount of interest in the topic of the American city, at 85k incoming and 27k outgoing views per month. If the article was already at Charlotte, it would not have been possible to even start to properly analyze the ratio of readers who had the intent of looking up the city strictly as Charlotte compared to those who would be fine reading about it at Charlotte, North Carolina; the hatnote was #10 at 581 identified outgoing clickstreams (~0.7%) but we don't really know if that's good enough or bad enough.
However, as we have a case of a primary redirect here, the stats can be compared at least to an extent. So, based on page view statistics [11] in October there were 2,440 views of the redirect "Charlotte", and then that gets thrown together with the organic traffic for the city (we don't have clickstreams for that particular traffic). And then at that point we know that there were 581 clickstreams out to the disambiguation page (presumably via the hatnote). That's already huge - it could mean that our current navigation caused up to 24% of these readers to have to reach for the hatnote. The total views of the disambiguation list were 1,579,[12] so there's quite a bit more to it than the hatnote even. I went into the clickstream archive[13] to check the months before and the ratio was 449 vs. 2,161 (~21%) in September (total dis. traffic 1,273) and 537 vs 2,573 (~21%) in August (total dis. traffic 1,402), so it's not a fluke. This is not good enough for a primary topic by usage, we should aim for these kinds of numbers to be less than e.g. 10%, otherwise any claim that the city is more likely to be the topic of interest than all other homonymous topics combined is less than tenable.
Combined with the mass views clearly showing there are other Charlotte topics that garner comparable or larger organic interest than the city, it's much easier to say that the primary redirect should be replaced with a disambiguation page. MOS:DABCOMMON will help the vast majority of average readers even if we make a mistake. (Support)
Note also that we could try to read the leaves from comparisons. For example, Denver the city is currently a primary topic with [14] 88k incoming and 28k outgoing views in the same month, but there the hatnote doesn't come up in the top 20 list of identified clickstreams, as the raw clickstream data indicates it was at 219 and 206 the last couple of months, though there exists John Denver at 146k views. We don't know if the same number ratios would hold if we moved it to "Denver, Colorado" and had a primary redirect, like here. We have Jersey the island as a primary topic with [15] 89k incoming and 26k outgoing, and its hatnote had 604 clickstreams and came at #10 that month (538 the previous month), though there's jersey (clothing) with 12k views and New Jersey with 139k. There's probably much more analysis necessary to try to find some vaguely consistent patterns.
One thing we are learning over time is that search engines will usually move the vast majority of any organic traffic based on context to the right article within months, regardless of how Wikipedia navigation is set up, so I would lean towards more experimentation as opposed to less. --Joy (talk) 12:29, 7 December 2023 (UTC)- Joy - first off, thank you for the deep dive here. But I don't understand - the redirect Charlotte is linked to by thousands of pages intending the city article. So usage of that link is almost exclusively readers who were searching for the city article. So the 581 clicks to the dab page are not really connected to the redirect - it's just of all the people who went to the city page, or 581/88k total views, which is only 0.6%, which is acceptable. Dohn joe (talk) 19:52, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
- Special:WhatLinksHere/Charlotte indeed says there's 1023 links to it[16] This in and of itself seems wrong to me, because in such a mass of links who knows how many may be wrong? I don't think we ever audit these. But in any event, the use of the redirect isn't just through links, it's through search as well - whoever types in "charlotte" in the search box goes there. Sadly we don't have WikiNav for redirects to be able to see which amount of these comes from which source. --Joy (talk) 20:22, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
- Note also that the fact that a lot of the "Charlotte" traffic could be from links natually skews our impression of what the intent of the average reader is; it's modified by the intents of the editors. Whereas if we disambiguate all those links, then we'll be able to know such traffic only comes from some sort of search. The redirect is currently tagged with {{R from less specific geographic name}}, but could be tagged {{R from ambiguous term}} instead. --Joy (talk) 20:30, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
- Joy - first off, thank you for the deep dive here. But I don't understand - the redirect Charlotte is linked to by thousands of pages intending the city article. So usage of that link is almost exclusively readers who were searching for the city article. So the 581 clicks to the dab page are not really connected to the redirect - it's just of all the people who went to the city page, or 581/88k total views, which is only 0.6%, which is acceptable. Dohn joe (talk) 19:52, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
- Support - Charlotte, NC is not the primary topic. 120.28.224.32 (talk) 18:36, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
- Support I think readers would be best served by a dab in that case. Joy's analysis is convincing. (t · c) buidhe 18:45, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
- Support: per nom. YorkshireExpat (talk) 20:05, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
- Support per nom. Clear absence of a primary topic. I would put Charlotte (given name) ahead of any city. BD2412 T 22:06, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
- Support. The city is most certainly not the primary topic per long-term significance. -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:09, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
post-move
[edit]To be able to go through Special:WhatLinksHere/Charlotte ordered by the readership of the originating page, I used a insource:/\[\[Charlotte[\||\]]/ search at PagePile to generate a list that could be fed into mass views. It's restricted to 500 and the actual list is twice as long, but later a new pagepile can be generated, and the long tail probably isn't as interesting to order. Having gone through the top 50, I found an ambiguous link, then a link that seems factually dubious that I removed, and among the rest a big portion of them were actually entirely unambiguous in text, while many were obvious in context. I also found one that referenced just "Charlotte" but in context meant a specific tennis tournament, so that was a bit of an improvement as well. --Joy (talk) 08:58, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Joy: what a complete waste of time. The NC city is clearly the primary topic, and I imagine we'll be back in a few months anyway when the new nav data is in... But hey ho I guess — Amakuru (talk) 10:54, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Amakuru: Where were you for the RM discussion? :P Dohn joe (talk) 18:58, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Dohn joe: Well this primary topic has been disputed for ages with many people surprised and confused by it. Yes in an encyclopedia the city may be more important than the given name but looking at the views of everything its not clear the city is primary by either criteria and in terms of what people expect I'd expect most people would expect the given name so isn't the DAB page the best compromise? Many of the other projects like fr:Charlotte and de:Charlotte (even though they don't have a requirement to have the state in the title) have the DAB or name at the base name though I guess the city may be less important in other languages but in most English speaking countries the given name would probably be expected. See for example Lewis that even me as someone in the UK was bemused to find at the base name. Crouch, Swale (talk) 19:06, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
- It's disputed because people think they know better than the actual criteria on which we assess primary topics. My instinct is like yours, to assume that Charlotte is a clearly ambiguous term. I know several Charlottes, there have been queens of that name, a princess who's third in line to the throne now. But none of that matters, because those articles would never be titled Charlotte on its own. It's unlikely a reader would even type such a term into the search box, expecting to see their chosen Charlotte pop up in front of their nose. The city is far and away the primary topic for plain vanilla Charlotte, and this is yet another case of supposed ambiguity trumping reader convenience. I really despair at times. — Amakuru (talk) 01:20, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
- I don't think we should make assumptions on what is likely for the reader to type into the search box, for reasons stated many times over, so let me now introduce a weird recent example - once we recently disambiguated the term "MVP", largely because of another term, it turned out that both of those terms were just as equally as interesting to readers as an American wrestler's ring name, which is listed at the very bottom of the people section, in total only the #8 link in the list. I don't think that outcome was on many editors' radars. Rather than despair, just ponder what other interesting things we may learn in the future about how encyclopedia navigation should work :) --Joy (talk) 11:56, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Amakuru: Taking into account the primary topic criteria, the views indeed do show of just "Charlotte" articles the NC city gets around 75% of views but when you factor in all the other titles even assuming most readers use the full titles could easily get you closer to 50% especially when you factor that many readers will probably expect the title of the NC city to include the state anyway as most US cities include the state per common use and the name is a common given name meaning readers are likely to expect bare "Charlotte" to take them to the city which could easily mean you could have a negative number. This means while its likely the NC city is the single most likely intended target for plain "Charlotte" its not clear the city is much more likely than any other topic and more likely than all the others. By long-term significance its a major financial and large city but surely the given name also has significant long-term significance at least when you factor all the people with that name who while are likely to be PTMs the views for them does point towards the long-term significance of the name its self. The city's name is also comes from Mecklenburg-Strelitz and while name origin isn't everything it again points to the given name having long-term significance. The last thing we often take into account, the principal of least astonishment clearly isn't satisfied since to most people "Charlotte" is a given name. Again if I was basing only on this I'd suggest putting Charlotte (given name) at the base name which I don't think would be a good idea. I think its OK when a term may not be primary in most parts of the world like say Raleigh where in England the bike company and explorer may be more likely but are still the most likely topic for most of our readers. Crouch, Swale (talk) 20:37, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
- Also when I Google Charlotte while the WP article for the NC city comes up first only 2 other results (ignoring news results) comes up, the rest are for other things. Images mainly returns the city but Books doesn't seem to return the city at all, all results appear to be for the given name. Crouch, Swale (talk) 20:43, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
- I don't think we should make assumptions on what is likely for the reader to type into the search box, for reasons stated many times over, so let me now introduce a weird recent example - once we recently disambiguated the term "MVP", largely because of another term, it turned out that both of those terms were just as equally as interesting to readers as an American wrestler's ring name, which is listed at the very bottom of the people section, in total only the #8 link in the list. I don't think that outcome was on many editors' radars. Rather than despair, just ponder what other interesting things we may learn in the future about how encyclopedia navigation should work :) --Joy (talk) 11:56, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
- It's disputed because people think they know better than the actual criteria on which we assess primary topics. My instinct is like yours, to assume that Charlotte is a clearly ambiguous term. I know several Charlottes, there have been queens of that name, a princess who's third in line to the throne now. But none of that matters, because those articles would never be titled Charlotte on its own. It's unlikely a reader would even type such a term into the search box, expecting to see their chosen Charlotte pop up in front of their nose. The city is far and away the primary topic for plain vanilla Charlotte, and this is yet another case of supposed ambiguity trumping reader convenience. I really despair at times. — Amakuru (talk) 01:20, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Dohn joe: Well this primary topic has been disputed for ages with many people surprised and confused by it. Yes in an encyclopedia the city may be more important than the given name but looking at the views of everything its not clear the city is primary by either criteria and in terms of what people expect I'd expect most people would expect the given name so isn't the DAB page the best compromise? Many of the other projects like fr:Charlotte and de:Charlotte (even though they don't have a requirement to have the state in the title) have the DAB or name at the base name though I guess the city may be less important in other languages but in most English speaking countries the given name would probably be expected. See for example Lewis that even me as someone in the UK was bemused to find at the base name. Crouch, Swale (talk) 19:06, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Amakuru: Where were you for the RM discussion? :P Dohn joe (talk) 18:58, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Amakuru we don't know that, but at least in a few months it will be possible to make an argument based on a rationale as opposed to just assertions :) One thing I didn't mention is that most of the references to Charlotte the city that I found were cursory, like some event minor to the article happened there or some other city article is explaining its position in reference to that one and a small laundry list of others. It's not implausible that these casual 1k+ links significantly contributed to the monthly traffic of 1k+ to the ambiguous term in reference to the city, making things seem more primary than they actually may be; we'll be able to judge that once they are disambiguated. I seem to recall that there was once a time when we linked various dates, but MOS:UNLINKDATES mostly eliminated that; a lot of what we see in toponymy linking is not unlike that. --Joy (talk) 11:22, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
- To put things in perspective - in the top half of the list for all of November[17], the middle entry is 1993 ATP Tour with a total of 502 views, and that got fixed already[18] by the ever-diligent Onel5969, and the text was
Charlotte, NC, US
where NC was already pipe-linked to the state, as the location of a tournament that already has a blue link right above that, and the rest of the table is chock full of blue links to country flags and players. From such a context it's unclear how many people would ever actually click that. --Joy (talk) 12:15, 14 December 2023 (UTC) - And in the middle of the list I posted earlier (the default weekly stats snapshot), the middle entry is Dale F. Halton Arena with 16 views/day (so likewise ~500/month), also already fixed by the same editor,[19] and the ambiguous link was on the 11th mention of the word Charlotte in the article, way after the full name already linked explicitly unambiguously in the lead, so pretty much pointless anyway. --Joy (talk) 12:20, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
- ... and the main space links have already all been disambiguated. That was pretty quick. Thanks to all who contributed :) --Joy (talk) 14:19, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
@Clarityfiend: why did you remove the MOS:DABCOMMON setup that listed the previous presumed primary topic at the top? --Joy (talk) 21:37, 27 December 2023 (UTC)
- Ditto for Queen and Princess, which I've explained above. --Joy (talk) 21:38, 27 December 2023 (UTC)
- After reconsideration, I agree that the other way is better. Not sure what you mean about Queen and Princess, and I'm not going to wade through the discussion to try to figure it out. Clarityfiend (talk) 00:29, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
- The Queen and Princess forms are essentially mononymous, and were noted by multiple editors as very significant to the topic, so they should qualify for inclusion in the common section. Indeed we actually have a specific person's article titled Queen Charlotte as a primary topic, indicating this sort of a usage is quite prevalent. --Joy (talk) 21:33, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
- After reconsideration, I agree that the other way is better. Not sure what you mean about Queen and Princess, and I'm not going to wade through the discussion to try to figure it out. Clarityfiend (talk) 00:29, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
We don't have a good statistical sample there yet because not enough time has passed, but a look at of daily views in this period already indicates we did not substantially alter viewer traffic patterns, which is a good sign. --Joy (talk) 05:12, 6 February 2024 (UTC)
Clickstreams/WikiNav were updated, so we now see in https://wikinav.toolforge.org/?language=en&title=Charlotte that in January, the 2119 incoming views led to the following identifiable outgoing clickstreams:
- 441 to the city (~21%)
- 410 to the given name (~19%)
- 160 to the TV series (~7.5%)
- 63 to the cake (~3%)
- 52 to the queen list (~2.5%)
- 48 to the princess list (~2%)
- 25 to the Texas town (~1%)
- etc
This seems to confirm the basic contention from the RM, that the city doesn't attract the amount of reader interest that overshadows everything else. Interestingly, once we changed the navigation, we also noticed interesting differences in what was assumed to be the long tail, so for example we see the TV series jumped ahead. --Joy (talk) 10:08, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
In February '24, there were 1952 incoming views, and these clickstreams:
- clickstream-enwiki-2024-02.tsv:Charlotte Charlotte,_North_Carolina link 460 (~23.5%)
- clickstream-enwiki-2024-02.tsv:Charlotte Charlotte_(given_name) link 348 (~17.8%)
- clickstream-enwiki-2024-02.tsv:Charlotte Charlotte_(TV_series) link 112 (~5.7%)
- clickstream-enwiki-2024-02.tsv:Charlotte Charlotte_(cake) link 58 (~3%)
- clickstream-enwiki-2024-02.tsv:Charlotte Queen_Charlotte_(disambiguation) link 46
- clickstream-enwiki-2024-02.tsv:Charlotte Princess_Charlotte link 44
- clickstream-enwiki-2024-02.tsv:Charlotte Charlotte_(2021_film) link 26
- +10 more down to the threshold, very obvious long tail
--Joy (talk) 21:11, 6 March 2024 (UTC)
In March, there were a total of 2215 incoming views[20], and
- clickstream-enwiki-2024-03.tsv:
- Charlotte Charlotte,_North_Carolina link 467 (~21.1%)
- Charlotte Charlotte_(given_name) link 446 (~20.2%)
- Charlotte Charlotte_(TV_series) link 106 (~4.8%)
- Charlotte Princess_Charlotte link 63 (~2.9%)
- Charlotte Charlotte_(cake) link 56
- Charlotte Queen_Charlotte_(disambiguation) link 48
- Charlotte Charlotte_(2021_film) link 25
- Charlotte HMS_Charlotte link 22
- +8 more down to the threshold, very obvious long tail
- total: 1334
--Joy (talk) 15:29, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
In April, with 2196 views, clickstream-enwiki-2024-04.tsv had:
- Charlotte Charlotte,_North_Carolina other 503 (~22.9% / ~35.6%)
- Charlotte Charlotte_(given_name) other 401 (~18.3% / ~28.4%)
- Charlotte Charlotte_(TV_series) other 130 (~5.9% / ~9.2%)
- Charlotte Charlotte_(cake) other 61
- Charlotte Princess_Charlotte other 57
- Charlotte Queen_Charlotte_(disambiguation) other 38
- Charlotte Hyperacusis other 27
- ...
- total: 1413 to 22 identified destinations
--Joy (talk) 16:36, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
In May, with 2287 views, clickstream-enwiki-2024-05.tsv showed:
- Charlotte Charlotte,_North_Carolina link 477 (~20.9% / ~31.7%)
- Charlotte Charlotte_(given_name) link 403 (~17.6% / ~26.8%)
- Charlotte Charlotte_(TV_series) link 146 (~6.3% / ~9.7%)
- Charlotte Hyperacusis other 108 (~4.7% / ~7.2%)
- Charlotte Charlotte_(cake) link 91
- Charlotte Queen_Charlotte_(disambiguation) link 69
- Charlotte Princess_Charlotte link 67
- Charlotte Charlotte_(2021_film) link 22
- ...
- total: 1504 to 17 identified destinations
Not sure what's going on with hyperacusis, but there's something there that we're missing. --Joy (talk) 22:20, 15 June 2024 (UTC)