Talk:John Barnard

Comments

The article for John Barnard said he "left" Benetton , but the article for Flavio said that he was "fired." Two different stories. - FunKeh, 20/3/06 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 222.153.140.42 (talk • contribs) 02:50, 20 March 2006‎ (UTC)

Two corrections

The followings are pointed out on the note of Japanese edition;

• Barnard moved to Ferrari at the end of 1986, not 1987.
• Benetton B192 was not his work, but Ross Brawn and Rory Byrne.--K.F. 09:05, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Requested move (2010)

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. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: No consensus to move. Jafeluv (talk) 13:22, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

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John Barnard → John Barnard (Formula One) — to make way for a disambiguation page. The number of incoming links (about 175) looks high, but the vast majority of them appear to be accounted for by Barnard's inclusion in a series of well-populated templates. The much-less-templated American Civil War General John G. Barnard, has about 75 incoming links, and has at least as good a claim to be the primary topic. Better to disambiguate both of them, and move the disambiguation page to the undisambiguated name. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:00, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

• Oppose. This John Barnard had five times the pageviews of John G. Barnard last month and almost double the pageviews of all 6 other John Barnards combined. No more than 6% of readers landing on this article clicked on the hatnote to the dab page, indicating most readers were where they wanted to be. Station1 (talk) 00:18, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
• Support, although I would suggest John Barnard (engineer) (or maybe John Barnard (motorsport)) as the new name for the article. As noted in the article, in addition to Formula One, Barnard has also worked in Indycar and motorcycle racing, and is currently involved in furniture design. (Although I concede that he is probably most noted for his Formula One activities). DH85868993 (talk) 02:12, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
  • Either John Barnard (engineer) or John Barnard (motorsport) are fine by me. "Formula One" seemed to be the most common dab when I checked the relevant categories, but if it's too narrow then DH85868993's suggestions give wider scope, and "motorsport" also seems to be a widely-used dab. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:21, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose, Station's statistics seem to confirm that this is indeed the primary topic, so no change is necessary.--Kotniski (talk) 11:28, 15 December 2010 (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. No further edits should be made to this section.

Requested move 05 December 2014

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: no consensus to move at this time. While page views show this may be the primary topic, Google Books appears inconclusive, so there is no persuasive arguments here that make move a viable close. (non-admin closure)--Mdann52talk to me! 16:03, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

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Propose and support John Barnard → John Barnard (motorsport) – With the intention of replacing the present John Barnard as a disambiguation page. I raise the issue once again since it appears the situation has changed since 2010 when the last discussion was held. There are now 11 John Barnards with articles in WP, and the other 10 receive between them about as many hits per day as this John Barnard - so the question of an overwhelming preponderance of hits, which was an issue last time round, no longer arises. As there seemed to be some consensus on John Barnard (motorsport) last time round I submit it herewith, as it meets with the 'precision' requirement of article title policy. Smerus (talk) 22:16, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

Survey

Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with *'''Support''' or *'''Oppose''', then sign your comment with ~~~~. Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's policy on article titles.

• Oppose, mainly because I tend toward maintaining the status quo when there is no overwhelming need for change. The fundamental stats are similar to the last discussion: there are still almost twice as many hits (61%) on this page as all the others combined; this page still gets more than five times as many hits as the next most popular; at most, only 3.5% (down from 6% last time) of people arriving at this page head on to the dab page. I see no fundamental problems being caused by the current structure, and increased inconvenience to our readers outweighs any benefit. Pyrope 04:57, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

• Support - evidently not primary to readers interested in the other fields, WP:PRIMARYTOPIC is meant for things that are overwhelming in books. The John Barnard (general) seems to be No.1 there, not that being No.1 is primary, primary means one man is 66+% of all John Barnard refs, which none of the 11 is. In ictu oculi (talk) 06:28, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

• Support. A case well made, which also shows the danger of relying on page stats as was done last time and is again the only argument against this time. While we don't speculate on these things, experience and commonsense both indicate that these stats are rather fickle, particularly with respect to celebrities such as recent F1 innovators, musicians currently topping charts, etc., and the guidelines already point this out. In the current RM, however, the page stats argument has been answered with like, so there is no contest. Andrewa (talk) 18:21, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose. The page view evidence still show this John Barnard to be more popular than all other ambiguous articles combined. And only 192 hits at the dab page suggests we're not getting a huge influx of people coming to the article intending another "John Barnard". Google Books looks inconclusive to me at best, especially accounting for Google's geography and the fact that the #2 article, John G. Barnard, is evidently rarely referred to without his middle initial or name. Overall, I don't see this move as making things easier for readers.--Cúchullain ^t/c 15:18, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose. The pageview stats provided by Pyrope suggest that this John Barnard meets the usage criterion. No case has been brought forward to suggest that a different John Barnard meets the long-term significance criterion. Those are the actual criteria listed under PRIMARYTOPIC, which does not state it was "meant for things that are overwhelming in books", and a good thing, too, considering that what comes up in Google Books searches isn't exactly the highest-quality scholarly literature anyway. Egsan Bacon (talk) 18:27, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

Discussion

Any additional comments:

Page view stats (last 90 days):

• John Barnard: 5526
• John G. Barnard: 1052
• John Barnard (musician): 855
• John Barnard (British politician): 357
• John Barnard (supporter of James II): 286
• John Barnard (biographer): 275
• John Barnard (clergyman): 260
• John Barnard (cyclist): 182
• John Barnard (musician and clergyman): 165
• John Barnard (cricketer): 132

Total = 9090

• John Barnard (disambiguation): 192

Just a quick skim to facilitate discussion, so that each editor doesn't have to go ferreting around for these each time! Pyrope 04:01, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

• Comment - since page views are minor and often self-fulfilling component of WP:PRIMARYTOPIC editors will still need to do a Google Book search for themselves before supporting/opposing in the section above. In ictu oculi (talk) 06:28, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

Some rather confusing (dabs) there; I've moved John Barnard (musician and clergyman) to John Barnard (music publisher) and John Barnard (musician) to John Barnard (composer) as primary notability in each case, and John Barnard (clergyman) to John Barnard (American clergyman) given that the music publisher was a canon at St Pauls. In ictu oculi (talk) 06:35, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

I disagree with your assumption that Google Books provides a better metric or that page views should be considered "minor". For topics such as these, that are not commonly in the public eye, all Google Books is telling you about is the preoccupation of a very small slice of society: those people who write scholarly works. As there are orders of magnitude more works on military history than any other topic, is it surprising that in this sample the military figure is the more common? Taking a look at what another slice of the general public are interested in, you could consider any number content repositories. Take YouTube, for instance. Here, a search for "John Barnard" gives two videos on the subject of this page in the first page of results, four on the organist or his works, three on an MMA fighter for whom we have no page, and three on a minor club racer who again has no page. I've skimmed down through a few pages of results and I see nothing on the general. Of course, YouTube is itself biased toward subjects popular amongst people with the ability to record and post digital video, so that sample isn't very illustrative of the wider general public either, but it shows what sort of bias you can induce if you assume things about the representative nature of any source. The only place that we have to record the interests of Wikipedia users – who are our target audience! – are the page view statistics on Wikipedia. Here, a comparison of numbers between the main topic page and a hatnoted dab page is the most useful measure of the degree to which our audience's interests are not being served. As mentioned above, currently this runs at 3.5%, and that is a worst-case measure as it makes the assumption both that all dab page views are coming from this page and that people viewing the dab page are not interested in the subject of this page, rather than curiously heading off after reading it to see what sort of other people have been called John Barnard. Pyrope 17:18, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

But WP:PRIMARYTOPIC is not so narrowly drawn as Pyrope seems to imply. This is what it says:

A topic is primary for a term, with respect to usage, if it is highly likely—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. A topic is primary for a term, with respect to long-term significance, if it has substantially greater enduring notability and educational value than any other topic associated with that term.

As regards the first of these, the 'primarity' of the John Barnard is marginal (<66%). As regards the second of these, its 'primarity' is highly debatable, to say the least. Pyrope opposes the proposal because ' I tend toward maintaining the status quo when there is no overwhelming need for change'. When there are 10 different John Barnards (not to mention a further four or five 'John Barnard XXXX's and 'XXXX John Barnard XXXX's) I tend to think the need for change is obvious. But then neither my, nor Pyrope's, tendencies are relevant arguments for the present purposes.--Smerus (talk) 11:02, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

I'm not sure which of my comments you took to be the "narrow" part. That I consider the users of Wikipedia today to be more important than what their great grandchildren might be searching for using implanted brain chips in 2050? Oh well, priorities vary I guess, and if our cyborg progeny decide that the subject of this article isn't the more interesting to them, then they will be perfectly capable of adjusting the page names at that point. If you are talking about a topic that has flared up in the last few months then I can see the advantage in taking the historical long view as they will probably fall from public favour in a few short weeks, but this page has been maintaining its page views for many years now. Getting nearly two thirds of all page views is not "marginal", and when you consider that the next most viewed gets only 11% it looks pretty obvious that the subject of this page is indeed "much more likely" to be the topic of a search than any other single John Barnard. Five times more likely than its nearest rival, in fact, and twenty times more likely than most. Marginal? Come on... Pyrope 17:14, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.