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On 30 September 2020, it was proposed that this article be moved from Mississippi (disambiguation) to Mississippi. The result of the discussion was Not moved. |
People also use "mississippi" for counting, because it takes exactly a second for an average person to pronounce the word mississippi. It's common knowledge right? But i can't find a good reference. Or would this one be sufficcient to add it to the disambiguation?. PizzaMan ( ♨♨) 09:06, 18 December 2014 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: not moved per the arrangement of the titles The Mississippi and Mississippi River for the usual ways of referring to the river. Could set up a test redirect on the hatnote on the base article to gauge if that is not the case among the Wikipedia readership. -- JHunterJ ( talk) 18:43, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
– No clear primary topic. The river is a level 3 vital article while the state is only level 5. Google Images returns many results for the river to. By views the river gets nearly as many views[ [1]] and on the French Wikipedia it gets more views[ [2]]. Its possible that the state has many more incoming (and incorrect) links than the river which are inflating the views. In fact if you go back to 2015 the river actually gets slightly more (5,988,526) than the state (5,787,408)[ [3]]. There are also a number of other items on the DAB that have a qualifier. On a similar note Thames is a redirect to River Thames and it would be reasonable for someone who wasn't that familiar with names of rivers in the US to think that the river might not have the suffix since many such as Nile and Danube don't. As noted about the vital article which shows long-term significance in favour of the river even if the river is only sometimes called just "Mississippi". The river and mud pie are well known globally unlike the state and the state is named after the river. While its true that its more likely readers looking for the river will include "River" it doesn't seem clear that the state is primary and a DAB page seems like the best option like Georgia, Washington and New York. On Commons, Commons:Category:Mississippi is a DAB as a result of a CFD that I started in 2017. Crouch, Swale ( talk) 19:05, 30 September 2020 (UTC)
In Great Britain rivers are usually named "X River" even if its the primary or only topic...Actually, in the UK it's almost always "River X"! But "River" is not usually included in the names of major rivers in any case in everyday speech. -- Necrothesp ( talk) 11:53, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
Does it change anything that "Mississippi" alone means " Big river", see List of tautological place names#Rivers. @ Rreagan007: The only other US state appears to be Connecticut which means "Long tidal river". However since we're in modern English rather than Algonquian this probably doesn't make that much difference today even though as Necrothesp points out it is often known as plain "Mississippi". Crouch, Swale ( talk) 19:09, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
I happened to notice the discussion from 2020 above. I found it odd to see we disambiguate something as huge as New York, but not Mississippi, when the river is clearly a topic of comparable long-term significance to the state. I also found this completely incongruent with the recent discussion at Talk:John Kennedy (disambiguation)#Requested move 25 March 2024, where people weren't even willing to consider ambiguity of topics where there was a major, national-level topic, and kept the primary redirect there.
I think the argument about the usage was somewhat overly convoluted, and the arguments to the contrary weren't necessarily answered well enough.
First of all, the fact that we allow the redirect the Mississippi to point to the river, and nobody even found this the least bit controversial, already indicates that it's unlikely that the state is necessarily more commonly sought by readers looking for "Mississippi". We have the WP:THE convention saying avoid the articles in front of words unless necessary because it interferes with the quick search function, meaning we shouldn't expect readers to have to navigate like that; this is in line with a number of disambiguation guidelines about generally keeping plurals and singulars together, and uppercase and lowercase together, because it's known that some users will just not be precise enough in their search queries.
People said this is a topic with strong national ties, and Americans generally know to refer to the river with qualifiers, and the state without them.
However, this is not actually particularly relevant to how navigation is generally organized in the English Wikipedia. With regard to these two groups of readers:
The standard of determining if a
primary topic exists with regard to usage typically involves examining whether a topic is highly likely—much more likely than any other single topic, and more likely than all the other topics combined—to be the topic sought when a reader searches for that term
. If the sum of any of the contingents of readers looking for "Mississippi" that aren't well accustomed to the pertinent conventions is anywhere close to being statistically significant, this is already a case where there is unlikely to be no primary topic by usage. The standard really isn't "this works well for most people I know", it's about the average English Wikipedia readers in general, and it's understandably hard to fathom the breadth of our audience.
On related note, I tried to check our statistics to try to read the leaves for hints of ambiguity. I extracted from the clickstream archive the top 5 articles named Mississippi_something that readers navigate to from the current Mississippi article. This obviously can't tell us which of the links (if any) they followed, so for example we can't say if they clicked the hatnote or the geography section for the river.
So it seems that the topic most consistently commonly sought is the river, as well as its delta. The political bodies of the state are the next major group, yet they're usually at much lower volume compared to the river. To me this hints at there being legitimate ambiguity for the search query of "Mississippi".
We should try to make some sort of a change to be able to measure this better. If we were to switch to a primary redirect, which would cause the least amount of change, this would already allow us to compare statistics in a much more nuanced manner. Of course, it would require temporarily vacating WP:MALPLACED to even do that, so that's a bit of an issue. -- Joy ( talk) 23:43, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
Disambiguation | ||||
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On 30 September 2020, it was proposed that this article be moved from Mississippi (disambiguation) to Mississippi. The result of the discussion was Not moved. |
People also use "mississippi" for counting, because it takes exactly a second for an average person to pronounce the word mississippi. It's common knowledge right? But i can't find a good reference. Or would this one be sufficcient to add it to the disambiguation?. PizzaMan ( ♨♨) 09:06, 18 December 2014 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: not moved per the arrangement of the titles The Mississippi and Mississippi River for the usual ways of referring to the river. Could set up a test redirect on the hatnote on the base article to gauge if that is not the case among the Wikipedia readership. -- JHunterJ ( talk) 18:43, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
– No clear primary topic. The river is a level 3 vital article while the state is only level 5. Google Images returns many results for the river to. By views the river gets nearly as many views[ [1]] and on the French Wikipedia it gets more views[ [2]]. Its possible that the state has many more incoming (and incorrect) links than the river which are inflating the views. In fact if you go back to 2015 the river actually gets slightly more (5,988,526) than the state (5,787,408)[ [3]]. There are also a number of other items on the DAB that have a qualifier. On a similar note Thames is a redirect to River Thames and it would be reasonable for someone who wasn't that familiar with names of rivers in the US to think that the river might not have the suffix since many such as Nile and Danube don't. As noted about the vital article which shows long-term significance in favour of the river even if the river is only sometimes called just "Mississippi". The river and mud pie are well known globally unlike the state and the state is named after the river. While its true that its more likely readers looking for the river will include "River" it doesn't seem clear that the state is primary and a DAB page seems like the best option like Georgia, Washington and New York. On Commons, Commons:Category:Mississippi is a DAB as a result of a CFD that I started in 2017. Crouch, Swale ( talk) 19:05, 30 September 2020 (UTC)
In Great Britain rivers are usually named "X River" even if its the primary or only topic...Actually, in the UK it's almost always "River X"! But "River" is not usually included in the names of major rivers in any case in everyday speech. -- Necrothesp ( talk) 11:53, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
Does it change anything that "Mississippi" alone means " Big river", see List of tautological place names#Rivers. @ Rreagan007: The only other US state appears to be Connecticut which means "Long tidal river". However since we're in modern English rather than Algonquian this probably doesn't make that much difference today even though as Necrothesp points out it is often known as plain "Mississippi". Crouch, Swale ( talk) 19:09, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
I happened to notice the discussion from 2020 above. I found it odd to see we disambiguate something as huge as New York, but not Mississippi, when the river is clearly a topic of comparable long-term significance to the state. I also found this completely incongruent with the recent discussion at Talk:John Kennedy (disambiguation)#Requested move 25 March 2024, where people weren't even willing to consider ambiguity of topics where there was a major, national-level topic, and kept the primary redirect there.
I think the argument about the usage was somewhat overly convoluted, and the arguments to the contrary weren't necessarily answered well enough.
First of all, the fact that we allow the redirect the Mississippi to point to the river, and nobody even found this the least bit controversial, already indicates that it's unlikely that the state is necessarily more commonly sought by readers looking for "Mississippi". We have the WP:THE convention saying avoid the articles in front of words unless necessary because it interferes with the quick search function, meaning we shouldn't expect readers to have to navigate like that; this is in line with a number of disambiguation guidelines about generally keeping plurals and singulars together, and uppercase and lowercase together, because it's known that some users will just not be precise enough in their search queries.
People said this is a topic with strong national ties, and Americans generally know to refer to the river with qualifiers, and the state without them.
However, this is not actually particularly relevant to how navigation is generally organized in the English Wikipedia. With regard to these two groups of readers:
The standard of determining if a
primary topic exists with regard to usage typically involves examining whether a topic is highly likely—much more likely than any other single topic, and more likely than all the other topics combined—to be the topic sought when a reader searches for that term
. If the sum of any of the contingents of readers looking for "Mississippi" that aren't well accustomed to the pertinent conventions is anywhere close to being statistically significant, this is already a case where there is unlikely to be no primary topic by usage. The standard really isn't "this works well for most people I know", it's about the average English Wikipedia readers in general, and it's understandably hard to fathom the breadth of our audience.
On related note, I tried to check our statistics to try to read the leaves for hints of ambiguity. I extracted from the clickstream archive the top 5 articles named Mississippi_something that readers navigate to from the current Mississippi article. This obviously can't tell us which of the links (if any) they followed, so for example we can't say if they clicked the hatnote or the geography section for the river.
So it seems that the topic most consistently commonly sought is the river, as well as its delta. The political bodies of the state are the next major group, yet they're usually at much lower volume compared to the river. To me this hints at there being legitimate ambiguity for the search query of "Mississippi".
We should try to make some sort of a change to be able to measure this better. If we were to switch to a primary redirect, which would cause the least amount of change, this would already allow us to compare statistics in a much more nuanced manner. Of course, it would require temporarily vacating WP:MALPLACED to even do that, so that's a bit of an issue. -- Joy ( talk) 23:43, 6 April 2024 (UTC)