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Talk:Myron (given name)

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Requested move 23 December 2024

[edit]

– The given name is the primary topic. How many people know about the ancient Greek sculptor? Clarityfiend (talk) 05:25, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Per WP:DPT, the reader interest can be gauged with some stats:
The sculptor's article gets 75/day, so it's already surpassed by 467/day for Myron Rolle, 144/day for Myron Scholes, 124/day for Myron Floren, 122/day for Myron Boadu, 108/day for Myron Mixon, 100/day for Myron Ebell, 87/day for Myron Healey. I for one have no idea who these people are, but it seems fairly clear that the average reader will recognize this as a name of many notable people, not a mononymous reference to a single person, even if significant. Trying to force readers to read this and then click twice to get to the rest is just bad navigation.
There's also chrism saying myron is a synonym, so some of the 185/day there may also be relevant (sadly the topical redirects weren't in use here until now).
WikiNav for November shows 104 identified clicks to the hatnote at #2, and 220 filtered clickstreams, so that's a tad suspect as well. WikiNav at the disambiguation list happens not to show anything other than further 58 clicks to the given name list, and 20 filtered clickstreams.
Looking at the all-time monthly page views for the top items - with logarithmic scale - it's apparent that the one big spike in hatnote traffic corresponded with interest in Rolle's article.
(Support) --Joy (talk) 08:43, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. There are two main ways of determining the primary topic for a title: long-term significance, and page views. By long-term significance, Myron the sculptor is clearly primary; for comparison I note that Homer the epic poet is also primary, despite the many places and persons named Homer, including Winslow Homer and Homer Simpson; and as with Myron, anyone who does not know or cannot remember the surname of a specific Homer would be led first to a disambiguation page for all uses, and from there to a list of other persons named Homer; so in other instances, expecting people who do not know the correct title of an article to make "two clicks" is acceptable.
By page views, the sculptor would also seem to be primary. His article receives more than four times the daily page views as the name list, and all of the subjects on the list contain natural disambiguation by virtue of their surnames. None are likely to be searched for mononymously. We know that people searching for "Myron" are not generally looking for other topics, because the disambiguation page linked in the hatnote at Myron receives hardly any traffic at all; if people who do not know the title of the article they are looking for cannot be bothered to click once, then it seems pointless to fret about them having to click twice—but the number of clicks could still be reduced to one, simply by adding the name list to the hatnote: Homer has three disambiguation pages in his hatnote. I also think that we can dismiss any concern about people searching for "myron (chrism)" since that redirect has received precisely three page views since it was created last April. P Aculeius (talk) 13:25, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The claim that the sculptor is clearly primary by long-term significance should be accompanied with some sort of an analysis beyond an assertion, because it's a complex comparison between one biography and dozens of them.
The comparison with Homer may or may not be relevant, because the topics are of distinctly different scale. For example if we look at a comparison of reader interest in Myron, Homer and Rodin, all mononymously known people, the difference is about 30 : 1 and about 10 : 1. Not everything that applies to Homer or Rodin necessarily applies to Myron when we're talking about differences of an order of magnitude.
You can't make these sorts of far-reaching claims on user interest with people searching for Myron, because our statistics do not distinguish people who land at Myron with distinct purposes. If you have a look at WikiNav first graph, it nicely illustrates how most of our traffic is at the Myron article comes either from external search engines, or from internal links inside the topic area (Discobulos, Polykleitos, etc), or from other-internal meaning other Wikimedia projects.
The largest of these categories, external search, is opaque to us, as the search engines don't tell us how they decided to guide that traffic to us. We can't know that all these readers came here with the expectation of reading about a primary topic for the term "Myron" or just came here because any number of characteristics of their search led them there. We can try to glean some insight from Google Trends here, for example with a search like this, where likewise there's little apparent correlation between general traffic for the search term "Myron" and the traffic they identified was for the sculptor topic, and big spikes of interest seem to correspond to some other people with the name. And at the same time they warn against comparing search terms and topics, so who knows how reliable this is, too.
At the same time, all three of these categories of incoming traffic are at least mutable by us - in the sense that if we change the title of the article where the sculptor is described, all of this traffic will soon switch over to wherever that is, because the search engines will learn that, and we'll update the internal links to disambiguate them.
Beyond those three, there's a small uncertain category of other-empty (where the user browsers don't tell us where they come from), and a small uncertain category of filtered (clickstreams that are anonymized). To figure out what these kinds of users want, our system has no better tool than to present them with a simple list where we can try to measure further.
Bad navigation patterns prejudice user navigation - it's not that users cannot be bothered to click once - we're actively dissuading them from doing that by presenting a layout that effectively tries to convince them that all other meanings are way less relevant. Again, we just can't make far-reaching claims about readers when we already decided what to show them first.
The number of clicks on the redirect myron (chrism) is likewise not indicative of much because it wasn't even linked from myron (disambiguation) until yesterday. Just because a redirect exists, that doesn't mean anyone will use it, especially not such a relatively contrived one. --Joy (talk) 17:26, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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