- John Conway (disambiguation) (talk|edit|history|logs|links|archive|watch) (RM) (Discussion with closer)
The rough vote count is 2 support vs. 3 oppose. The Closer's rationale seems to be his own evaluation of "application of both criteria of WP:PRIMARYTOPIC" rather than an accurate summary of the discussion, which may indicate a WP:SUPERVOTE. -- Netoholic @ 18:08, 22 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- Please see WP:NOTVOTE (and if trying to lobby for a simple vote, remember to count the OP in with the supports). And please re-read WP:SUPERVOTE, which these were not. The supports had the backing of policy and guidelines, as mentioned in the closes. Investigating the claims made and describing how reality bore them out is not introducing new arguments. -- JHunterJ (talk) 18:59, 22 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- It is not always true that the OP is automatically a support, and since the burden is on those proposing a change, the status quo can be seen as a counter to OP. I cited the rough vote count, and even including OP, this is a draw. Likewise, the burden is on you as closer in this discussion to explain how and why you weighted the votes in the way you did to reach your conclusion. -- Netoholic @ 20:21, 22 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- Question: @Netoholic: I wanted to hear more about your views so that I could refine my argument to address your specific points of contention. I was honestly quite surprised that you didn't consider the second president to be the primary topic of John Adams, so I made a further inquiry at 20:26, 15 April 2020, for you to clarify your views, but I never heard back from you. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 20:53, 22 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- Endorse (ec) as the Supporters made clear WP:PRIMARYTOPIC arguments for both prongs (I !voted Support per the well-reasoned nom), and while the Opposers claimed to argue against long term significance, they either weren't well supported or were actually arguments against having primary topics at all (something not supported by the wider Wikipedia readership). Even if you found those arguments somewhat persuasive, there's enough discretion given to RM closes here to make Endorsing the only reasonable outcome here. Iffy★Chat -- 21:00, 22 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- Endorse (uninvolved). Closer's read of the discussion is reasonable, and the mathematician is frequently referred to as just "John Conway" without his middle name. Netoholic's point in the RM that "long-term significance holds weight" is a potentially reasonable counter-argument, but that's never followed up on - so who are these more important John Conways other than The John Conway, then? Why are they long-term important? Just because there are a lot of names on the disambiguation page doesn't mean that any of them in particular are "important", so I think there needed to be a more specific case here for that argument to hold weight if we're discarding page views. (Disclaimer: I personally am in the target audience for "knows who John Conway is," so selling me on his importance is already done.) SnowFire (talk) 15:59, 23 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- Indeed, I am more sympathetic to subjective arguments about long-term significance when things are in different categories, like Apple vs. Apple Inc. When all the contenders are of the same category, such as pop culture items (songs, albums, films, TV shows) more than 2-3 years old (to avoid WP:RECENTISM bias), or celebrities, or academics (as is the case here for the three biggest John Conways), we should fall back on cold, hard numbers. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 16:41, 23 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- Having multiple "contenders are of the same category" is exactly why they should ALL be disambiguated and that there be WP:NOPRIMARY because popular primary names (especially among similar topics) tend to accumulate bad incoming links. We should want everyone linking to John Conway to be exceptionally careful that they are linking to the right person from among so many possibilities. When a DAB page is at that primary, we have bots to notify when people link to it (rather than a specific, disambiguated topic) and we can also use the WhatLinksHere to cleanup any incoming links that haven't been addressed. For this case, its far better that a reader clicking a link to John Conway directly see the DAB page than potentially being delivered to the wrong academic and not be aware that there is any problem (WP:ASTONISH). -- Netoholic @ 18:49, 23 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- But you agree that the numbers matter, at some point, I'm sure? What if there's a historian called Stephen Hawking (historian) who barely scrapes by WP:NPROF? Do we really need to disambiguate Stephen Hawking, who would probably receive more than 100x the number of views of the historian? Assuming you agree, then it's a matter of setting a threshold. I believe that 85% of all pageviews, while not as overwhelming as my hypothetical Stephen Hawking example, is sufficient. This means that he outpolls by 5-6x not just his nearest competitor, but every other John Conway combined. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 19:35, 23 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- Using your massviews link and taking out irrelevances, I get a number of 79% pageviews, not 85%. I also see him as 1 out of 16 possibilities on that list, and specifically 1 out of 4 academicians, and 1 of 2 mathematicians (and the other mathematician is 3rd on the list by pageviews). So sure, numbers matter... but you're looking at only one scope of numbers (raw pageviews in aggregate). This move just has SO LITTLE benefit... because we know that the vast majority of views come here via search engines which work via keywords and context and deliver views directly to the article (not any redirect). Had your RM been about whether to move the article itself to primary, the overall pageviews would matter more. But as it is, we must consider that this redirect impacts editors FAR more than readers, and that we will accumulate bad wikilinks as long as the DAB is not at primary. -- Netoholic @ 21:48, 23 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- My intention is to move John Horton Conway to John Conway. However, there are people who might object on the basis of whether he is primary, and also people who might believe he is primary but should remain under his full name. Instead of conflating the two issues, it is better to do it step by step, especially since the second proposal is moot if the first one fails. The number of possibilities doesn't matter; John Adams (disambiguation) has over 50. And you can go on believing John Adams shouldn't be primary all you want, but almost no one will agree with you. (By the way, I didn't count Jon Conway because that's a misspelling of his name, that's probably the cause of our discrepancy.) -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 22:25, 23 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- Endorse neither the existence of other individuals with the same name nor a WP:VAGUEWAVE to "long-term significance" is enough to overcome the reasoned arguments made in support of the move. Calidum 15:16, 24 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- @Calidum: - All 3 opposes made multi-sentence justifications. It is the 2 supports that made 1-sentence WAVEs to WP:PRIMARYTOPIC with little backing evidence. I am shocked you can fairly look at those and come to the conclusion you did. -- Netoholic @ 09:15, 26 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- Endorse - perfectly reasonable reading of the linked discussion. Opposers failed to show that the British mathematician failed to meet either primary topic criterion. By the way, with all due respect, we do not count votes at Wikipedia; even if we did, please remember that the nominator counts as a "support" voter. Red Slash 17:37, 18 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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