Talk:Meek's Cutoff

Untitled
Thanks for your notification, and I appreciate your putting some thought into this proposed change. However, in this instance a DAB is the right way to go. Per Disambiguation there is no primary topic here. To a film buff, the film is clearly more interesting; to a historian, there is no question that the emigration route is more interesting. If we wanted to evaluate that disagreement (which we don't need to do if there's a DAB page), the emigration route would be the clear winner; its infamy has lasted centuries, long enough to...well...inspire the creation of a feature film, among other things.

As for the precise name, the emigration route shares the precise name "Meek's Cutoff" among the several variants on that term (including "Stephen Meek's cutoff", "Meek cut-off"...) But here is a search that establishes that this variant is frequently used: https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?search=%22meek%27s+cut-off%22&title=Special:Search&go=Go&ns0=1&ns100=1&ns106=1&ns114=1

All that is rather policy-based, but let me sum up with a more practical scenario. If we assume that a user searching for "Meek's Cutoff" is interested in one or the other of these articles:
 * User A, a historian interested in the emigrant route, has no trouble finding the right article, and learns that there was also a film made about it.
 * User B, interested in the film, has ho trouble finding the right article, and learns that the film was named after a famous historic emigration.

But if we were to delete the disambiguation page, User A might be surprised to find, upon searching for a famous emigration that took place nearly 200 years ago, to see an article about a film. Yes, they could explore and find the hatnote, and would probably find what they want, but along the way they would have had to contend with the idea (very strange to a historian) that Wikipedia considers a feature film to ave similar importance to an event that has been covered, over nearly two centuries, in numerous academic and non-academic sources. I think this is undesirable, and easily avoided by retaining the DAB page. -Pete Forsyth (talk) 22:30, 10 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Fair enough – I still think it's redundant but my feelings are not that strong and I'm not inclined to bother with AfD for something that does no harm. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 23:27, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Meek's Cutoff (film) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 23:21, 4 March 2024 (UTC)