Talk:MBE

Primary topic?
I think the links to this page want the Order of the British Empire page- replace with redirect?


 * Nah, it's a disambiguation page like any other. Those links should be disambiguated instead. --Shallot 20:56, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Following a discussion on another page, I have made CBE, DBE, MBE and OBE all into redirect pages to Order of the British Empire, and moved the four "TLA" pages to "TLA (disambiguation)". - Fayenatic london 22:45, 10 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Hey, is the decision to link "MBE" directly to "Order of the British Empire" based on anything like "statistics have shown that most people click this link on the disambiguation page"? i guess not. until today i've never heard of this 'order' and dont think it's what the majority of people expects to find when typing MBE into wikipedia. i propose: link MBE directly to the disambiguation page. if you dont like this idea, then rather link it to 'Molecular-beam epitaxy' or 'Mail Boxes Etc.' than to where it's linked to now.--MarsmanRom (talk) 10:00, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Incoming links
Almost all incoming links for MBE are for Member of the Order of the British Empire, so MBE should redirect to that page. A hatnote there links to MBE (disambiguation).- Fayenatic (talk) 07:20, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I'd say that's rather Anglo-centric. I assumed it was going to disambig so I could get the US Multistate Bar Examination taken as a part of the bar exam for all American lawyers. --208.54.4.38 (talk) 22:24, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * No, it's Wiki-centric. Have a look yourself at what links here. - Fayenatic (talk) 00:11, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Requested move 15 April 2020

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 

The result of the move request was: moved per information given below that the current does not meet the PT criterion for traffic, and no arguments presented for singular long-term significance. --  JHunterJ (talk) 11:44, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

MBE (disambiguation) → MBE – MBE is currently a redirect to Order of the British Empire and it'a an abbreviation of one of the five orders described in that article. However, this is clearly not the primary topic – a web search for the abbreviation returns a wide variety of topics, while on google books the chivalric order is almost completely absent, with most results dominated by the Multistate Bar Examination and Molecular-beam epitaxy. A similar picture emerges out of a comparison of |MBE the pageviews, which indicate that out of the 56,000 (or fewer) readers who searched for "MBE" last year, as many as 46,000, or 84%, clicked through to the dab page.

The only benefit of the status quo, and apparently the reason the dab page got moved away from the primary title back in 2007, is editor convenience. Wikipedia has a large number of biographies of recipients of the MBE order, these biographies by convention make an abbreviated mention of the fact somewhere prominently, and editors have found it most expedient to format this abbreviated mention as MBE. If the dab page is moved, then these links, likely over a thousand, will need to be fixed. That won't be a bad thing at all – currently if a reader encounters the link and they want to find out what it means they have to click through to the target article and then scroll down to the section that defines the term; if the link is instead something like MBE then the reader will only need to hover over it to find out what it stands for. – Uanfala (talk) 14:31, 15 April 2020 (UTC) —Relisting. buidhe 15:49, 22 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Support - I have an exceptionally high bar for any specific TLA being primary over others, and this one falls quite short. We should discourage lazylinking through TLA's where possible. The hatnote at the top of Order of the British Empire lists many other candidates for moves such as this. -- Netoholic @ 19:48, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Support Solid arguments. -- King of &hearts;   &diams;   &clubs;  &spades; 21:18, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose a quick check on Google news shows clearly that MBE is still the main meaning of MBE by a long margin. In ictu oculi (talk) 11:52, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
 * By a long margin, yes: a full 100% of the uses of "MBE" are for "MBE" :) Otherwise, if you're referring to the award, it sure is prominent if you're searching on google.co.uk, or from a UK IP addess. You'll get very different results if you don't – see for example this search on duckduckgo – I could only find two related pages out of the first 30 results. And if your intention is to limit results specifically to google news, I'm not sure why you would be doing that, but a higher proportion of hits for the order is only expected – people are more likely to get in the news when they're promoted into the knighthood than when they pass the multistate bar examination. – Uanfala (talk) 12:20, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Support per nom.--Ortizesp (talk) 14:44, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose. Thousands of people hold and use these post-nominal letters, and the overwhelming use in Enwiki for "MBE" relates to the award, as a Search for articles that contain "MBE" shows. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 12:21, 18 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Comment. Whenever three-letter abbreviations are involved, there is always the question of how likely the three-letter abbreviation is to refer to the subject, as opposed to merely how significant the subject is. For example, in Talk:MSG (disambiguation) we saw that Monosodium glutamate was overwhelmingly likely to be the referent of MSG despite only marginally edging out Madison Square Garden in pageviews. If we look at the 2019 pageviews on MBE (disambiguation) we see that MBE (currently a redirect to Order of the British Empire) holds a plurality but is only ~23% of the total. The caveat, of course, is that MBE holds the advantage of being the base page but the disadvantage of being a redirect rather than an article (thus losing out on link traffic). We cannot guess which effect is greater. So one thing we can do is run an experiment, similar to what I did over at MSG: 1) Move MBE (disambiguation) to MBE on a provisional basis. This is necessary to give each of the entries a fair chance. 2) Create special-purpose redirects for each of the top contenders (I went down the pageview list and kept going until there was a massive falloff): Order of the British Empire (MBE), Molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE), Management by exception (MBE), Mail Boxes Etc. (MBE), Multibeam echosounder (MBE), and Minority business enterprise (MBE). Redirect them to the respective articles, and replace the links to the main articles in the disambiguation page with these. 3) Wait a month, come back, and check the traffic stats for these redirects. The key here is that they serve no purpose other than to funnel people from the disambiguation page to the proper articles, so it represents a reasonably accurate sampling of where people tend to go after they search for "MBE". -- King of &hearts;   &diams;   &clubs;  &spades; 02:26, 19 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose. Clear primary redirect. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:25, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Support per Netoholic's high bar for TLA primaries. Fix the many links and then do what King of Hearts says if you still want to make a case that users typing MBE really want that article overwhelmingly. Dicklyon (talk) 01:12, 23 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Support For one, lazylinking per Netoholic. This is a problem for all ambiguous terms, but TLAs are especially problematic. A few days ago, I disambiguated 120+ articles linking to Churu. It turned out that about half of them pointed to the wrong article.
 * Furthermore, what King of Hearts said. Whenever an article gets primary privileges, the pageviews lose much of their meaning. The Google results are irrelevant. Google searches an entirely different space, and adresses a very different audience. I daresay that on Wikipedia, users are more likely to look for molecular beam epitaxy than out in the wild, relative to Britishisms.
 * But most importantly, even with the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC advantage, MBE is not . Paradoctor (talk) 11:32, 24 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Comment Uanfala surmised that there are 1k+ links to MBE. The actual number is 1542. Not a problem, I volunteer. It means that I will ascend from MPT to TotE that much sooner. ;) Paradoctor (talk) 11:39, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
 * There you go, all bright and shiny: MBE (Order of the British Empire) Paradoctor (talk) 11:49, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Ok! Whenever you feel like it, just remove a chunk to chew on from User:Paradoctor/sandbox. Before you start editing, please. Paradoctor (talk) 12:06, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
 * It might be a good idea to decide on the best replacement for the link. Should it be MBE, MBE, or something different? – Uanfala (talk) 12:40, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Does it matter? I'm piping everything, so nothing changes for the reader. FWIW, I'm using }} where possible, and MBE for the rest. Paradoctor (talk) 13:20, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Well, if 1,500 links are going to be changed, then it won't hurt to pause for a bit and decide on the best way to do it. Yes, the target is not visible in the text, but it becomes visible for anyone who hovers over the link or clicks on it. I didn't know about post-nominals, but using it seems like a good choice. Currently, it seems to format MBE links as  MBE (which appears to contradict its documentation, which has it as MBE). – Uanfala (talk) 13:38, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
 * That's the nice things about using templates: one edit corrects the problem.
 * "it becomes visible for anyone who hovers over the link" Huh? On hover, you get a preview of the target article, and on click you get the full monty. You probably mean the link target display of the browser. That is something we have no control over, and depends on the manufacturer, and may not even be present. On mouseless devices you can't even hover.
 * You made me think, though. Dabing is a manual task, no way around that. But there's nothing preventing me from using a basic link template to replace the (soon-to-be) ambiguous links. This can be pointed anywhere you like. As soon as I'm finished, and once debate has stopped raging, a final edit to the template and calling in air support, should settle the matter with the least amount of hassle. Give me a sec. Paradoctor (talk) 14:22, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
 * There you go: MBE Paradoctor (talk) 14:40, 24 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Why not just use the post-nominals template? This would save the extra step of substitution (will be easy on the editors watchlisting the articles concerned). Sorry for being inaccurate about the "hover" bit – yes, that would depend on what device you use and what wikpedia gadgets you've activated, among other thing. And yes, some (most?) browsers will display the link target in the lower-left corner of the screen, and if clicked, the article that loads will have it in the "Redirected from.." bit at the top as well. That was my point – the redirect used in a piped link is not invisible. – Uanfala (talk) 15:36, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
 * "Why not just use the post-nominals template?" The template is intended for use directly after a name, and applies some formatting. There are quite a few links not attached to a name where the template would be inappropriate.
 * "redirect used in a piped link is not invisible" To most users, it is, because most users use mobile devices. And for the minority who get that bit, most of them are not even aware of it, almost all of the time. The question that really bugs me, though, is what kind of horror do you expect when the "wrong" redirect is chosen? What is the actual issue? At the moment, this looks a little like you're looking for a problem for your solution, TBBH. Paradoctor (talk) 16:03, 24 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Support Like Netoholic I think that ambiguous TLAs should usually be disambiguated. I'm not convinced of PRIMARY in this case. buidhe 19:26, 29 April 2020 (UTC)


 * The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.