Jump to content

Talk:McGill

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rename to "McGill (disambiguation)"

[edit]

If you search for Harvard, Yale, Cornell, etc... you do not go to disambiguos pages, but for McGill you do.. even though there are very few links. If noone opposes then I will make this into a redirect to McGill University and create a seperate disambigious page with the current content.—Preceding unsigned comment added by DFRussia (talk • contribs) 23:36, September 30, 2007 UTC

There is certainly a pretty good case for the university to be the primary topic. But I'd suggest proposing the move on WP:RM, as there is an edit history on both pages, indicating there have been difference of opinion in the past. older ≠ wiser 01:49, 1 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Hey, I think you reverted my changes to this page. I was wondering what the justification for it was? I understand that whether this page should be called McGill disambig or McGill should be put up for discussion, but what was wrong with my content edits? I modeled it after Harvard disambig and many other disambigs for the content, by breaking things down into groups and linking to the largest article at the top --DFRussia 03:26, 1 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
See WP:MOSDAB. There is a separate page listing people with the surname, so there is no point repeating any individual ones here. For a page that does not have many entries, it is not that helpful to break the list down with subheadings. What you call the "largest article" is in disambiguation lingo, the "primary topic". For a page like Harvard (disambiguation), where Harvard is a redirect to Harvard University, the school is considered the primary topic for the simple term "Harvard". So long as the simple term "McGill" is a disambiguation page, there is no primary topic. older ≠ wiser 11:57, 1 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Hmmm, if it is just the two of us that are concerned with this, can we just decide here without doing formalities like going to MOSDAD? Some of my reasons? Other than it is the largest and most edited page listen in the disambig... also when you search for "McGill". You get McGill University with 100% relevance, then the McGill Daily with 40-some% and then this page with 30-some%. I can't even see McGill,Nevada. If McGill University is 100% relevancy and nothing else on the disambig is not even close in relevance... then why not redirect directly to McGill University when you search for McGill? --DFRussia 01:19, 4 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The Wikipedia search engine is notoriously bad -- can't really use it as the basis for making a determination. Some sort of Search engine test using Google or Yahoo can sometimes give better indications, but even there it is very easy to misinterpret results. Which is why it is often useful to ask for wider input--sometimes something that seems completely obvious from one perspective is merely overlooking other perspectives. Finally, there is an edit history at McGill (disambiguation), so you'd need an administrator to move the page--which is precisely one of the primary reasons for WP:RM. older ≠ wiser 01:39, 4 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
How is McGill not the primary topic of those listed? The only other candidate would be the surname page, but the other entries on the page are either incredibly obscure, or actually derived from McGill University (viz., the streets and metro station). Penn is an abbreviation for "Pennsylvania" and by extension the University of Pennsylvania. McGill is a family name, as well as the name of a more famous university, just as are Harvard, Yale, and Cornell. I don't see how you can possibly justify treating it any differently. --194.98.58.121 (talk) 07:58, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
You can't possibly compare McGill Univ. to internationally famous universities like Harvard, Yale or even Cornell. It is also a very common surname of Scottish/Irish origin and appears in many contexts that have nothing to do with the university. If anything, McGill (surname) would be the primary topic here, as even the university itself is derived from this surname. Redirecting this to the university page is like pointing Smith to Smith College or Brown to Brown University; it allows academic boosterism and personal biases to trump good judgment. A more comparable example here is Vanderbilt, a less common surname than McGill that is actually associated with a famous university. That page is a disambiguation page with the surname article listed first. Jphillips23 (talk) 16:56, 24 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
McGill is pretty unambiguously better known worldwide than Cornell (though certainly not Harvard or Yale), but you don't have to take my word for it. The Vanderbilt example is an apt one, though. But, for the record, I think it is also a pretty hard to read disambigulation page. I guess the larger problem is WP's disambigulation page norms, which are very poorly thought out. There can be one primary topic and everything else is equal? This makes it very difficult to find the one or two articles that the reader is almost certainly looking for in a host of very minor stubs. But that's not a discussion for this page. --194.98.58.121 (talk) 11:27, 15 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Happily, the auto-suggest feature in the search now makes these petty arguments about McGill's 'primary topic' status moot--now the "McGill University" page outranks "McGill" alone, making this extremely ambiguous "disambigulation" page harder to find than the actual, obvious primary page. (Which, not having primary status, doesn't even link to this page!) Anyway, happy to see that technology has trumped the objections of those here who have never heard of one of the world's great universities. --163.1.150.29 (talk) 01:04, 27 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:McGill&oldid=1252219271"