Talk:Trebizond

Requested move 17 January 2025

Trebizond → Trebizond (disambiguation) – Trebizond should redirect to Trabzon. The city is primary, like Rome and Byzantium. Srnec (talk) 01:20, 17 January 2025 (UTC) — Relisting. Reading Beans, Duke of Rivia 03:44, 24 January 2025 (UTC) — Relisting. TiggerJay (talk) 05:06, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

Per WP:DPT, let's have a look at some stats. WikiNav shows a split between readers we could identify clicking on the city and the empire, 161 : 144. At the same time, another 155 clicks were anonymized. There's three more items in the list, which could be noticable among the anonymized clicks. This is already typical of a fairly clear lack of a primary topic by usage.

All-time mass views for all these items show a similar split as well: on average 560/day for the empire, 492 for the city, 29 for eyalet, 18 for the novel, and 3 for vilayet.

It's fairly plausible that the filtered clickstreams don't substantially deviate from these patterns. So if we make this move, it seems more likely than not that half the readers looking up Trebizond would have to click a hatnote, which would be bad for navigation. We need a much more coherent long-term significance argument to override this. (Oppose) --Joy (talk) 11:45, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

The dab page gets a tiny fraction of total views (12/day), so how bad could it be for navigation? Better not to give those 12 people the mistaken impression that Trebizond is like "New York" and can refer to two things when in reality it is more like "Rome" and can refer to the empire by metonymy. Srnec (talk) 01:52, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

@Srnec the part that is not obvious is that search engines are implicitly handling most of our incoming navigation, so the 12/day we're seeing is traffic that hasn't been pre-split by them towards the individual topics. At the same time, the pattern is consistent - both the more current article and the more historical article get similar levels of interest at either place.

I don't know if the comparison with Rome is determinative, because the interest in Rome and its empire is orders of magnitude higher than here, and the circumstances are different - that city is still of global importance as the capital of a major country, and there's a single term in English use instead of two, neither of which is the case here. --Joy (talk) 11:04, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

I know that most people get here by external search, but are you saying that turning this page into a redirect will degrade the Google experience? Srnec (talk) 21:12, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

We don't know that, their algorithm is opaque to us. It would be an interesting experiment, the results of which we could try to assess in a few months. --Joy (talk) 21:23, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

Relisting comment: Relisting and notifying a few projects related to the two PTOPIC contenders to receive more attention. TiggerJay (talk) 05:06, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

Note: WikiProject Disambiguation has been notified of this discussion. TiggerJay (talk) 05:06, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

• Support Trabzon has a coherent summary of the history (probably more than enough for the great majority of readers), & the more detailed articles of course are linked. Johnbod (talk) 05:26, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

  Would you redirect Trebizond to Trabzon#Empire of Trebizond then? --Joy (talk) 11:05, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

The name Trebizond is not specific to the period discussed in that section. It seems to have been the usual English name for the city up until the 20th century: see e.g. this article in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Zacwill (talk) 14:12, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

That's right, so no. Johnbod (talk) 21:18, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

It's not clear from readership that the use of the term Trebizond for the later history of the city is of comparable significance, but we could still try it and see how it goes. It's good that a search for the empire in the Trabzon article isn't long, as it's already mentioned to the lead section; adding the empire to the hatnote would still be necessary, and we could set up statistical redirects to try to measure where they're clicking. --Joy (talk) 21:29, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

• Support per nom. Zacwill (talk) 14:07, 31 January 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose per Joy. Someone looking for Trabzon will most likely type Trabzon, not the historical name. TheJoyfulTentmaker (talk) 22:03, 31 January 2025 (UTC)
  • And they will get to it. That is not the issue here! Only a redirect is proposed. Johnbod (talk) 22:37, 31 January 2025 (UTC)
    • I mean, if they typed Trebizond, they are probably looking for something different from the present day city, so the disambiguation page is more appropriate than a redirect to Trabzon. I am okay with the page move if Trebizond will redirect to "Trebizond (disambiguation)" instead of Trabzon. But the nomination says otherwise, that's why I opposed. TheJoyfulTentmaker (talk) 23:58, 31 January 2025 (UTC)
      • Trebizond cannot redirect to Trebizond (disambiguation): it would be WP:MALPLACED. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 17:21, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

      @TheJoyfulTentmaker I'd say let's continue with the change as an experiment. We can set up measurements to see if readers typing in Trebizond are excessively reaching for navigational aids. It's easy enough to reconsider this with more data in a few months time. --Joy (talk) 13:39, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

      Thanks. If we can measure it and we can reconsider later, I have no strong objection to the change as proposed. TheJoyfulTentmaker (talk) 16:16, 10 February 2025 (UTC)