Talk:Mississippi (disambiguation)

Use in counting
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)
 * Wikipedia disambiguation pages do not disambiguate the Internet nor are they dictionaries or guides to slang usage. References and external links are not permitted on disambiguation pages. An entry on a disambiguation page must have an existing article on Wikipedia that supports the claimed usage.older ≠ wiser 16:03, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * wp:mosdef has an explicit section about linking to wiktionary and you could have had the decency to discuss here before reverting, especially since i politely asked that in the edit. Are you trying to improve Wikipedia or to chase off editors? PizzaMan (♨♨) 23:30, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, and it says the template can be placed at the top of the page as the first line, not embedded as separate entry. older ≠ wiser 00:06, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

Requested move 30 September 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: 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[] and on the French Wikipedia it gets more views[|Mississippi_(fleuve)]. 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)[|Mississippi_River]. 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)
 * Mississippi (disambiguation) → Mississippi
 * Mississippi → Mississippi (state)
 * Support per nominator, the river and the state are equally notable. J I P  &#124; Talk 23:15, 30 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose per WP:AINTBROKE. People searching for the river will likely search for "Mississippi River" or even "The Mississippi." Plain old "Mississippi" just refers to the state. -- Calidum  23:50, 30 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose. The state is the primary topic for "Mississippi". The river is either known as "Mississippi River" or "The Mississippi". The hatnote at Mississippi already includes a direct link to Mississippi River (and to the DAB page). There is no reason to point people directly to the DAB page. There are 15 U.S. states named after rivers. Should we move all of them? Rreagan007 (talk) 00:17, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * No we would only move the few that the river is also well known, Missouri and Colorado are likely the only others to be considered.  Crouch, Swale  ( talk ) 18:08, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose. April's fools is in 6 months. (CC) Tb hotch ™ 02:41, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * That's not a rationalization.  Crouch, Swale  ( talk ) 12:50, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Simply because the proposal is not rational. It's like if I ask to move Indianapolis because Indianapolis Colts has more views. (CC) Tb hotch ™ 22:04, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Indianapolis Colts is a sub topic of the city, see WP:DABCONCEPT while the river isn't.  Crouch, Swale  ( talk ) 08:37, 2 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Oppose. Seems like a MOS:TIES issue. The Thames, Nile and Danube examples might be appropriate based on the varieties of English used in Europe. But it seems to me that in common American English, "Mississippi" primarily just refers to the state and the full "Mississippi River" is required to refer to the river. This is treated differently from the usage of "Washington" and "New York" in common American English. And the difference with "Georgia" is that there is a topic outside the United States. Furthermore, the multi-language Wikimedia projects such as Commons should not be the basis of what we do here on the English Wikipedia, since editors from the French Wikipedia and other projects may also participate in those Commons discussions so there is a compromise between all the various Wikipedias on how to manage that central repository of files. Zzyzx11 (talk) 03:46, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * In Great Britain rivers are usually named "X River" "River X" even if its the primary or only topic, see WP:PLACEDAB and Severn. I'm not saying the river should be the primary topic, just that there isn't one.  Crouch, Swale  ( talk ) 12:50, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * WP:PLACEDAB does say "If specific disambiguation conventions apply to places of a particular type or in a particular country, then it is important to follow these". That was my thinking in also referencing MOS:TIES. We are comparing two geographic names in the United States, so we should defer to the common long-term local usage in that country. And the common long-term usage appears to be that "Mississippi" without any disambiguation primarily just refers to the state and the full "Mississippi River" is required to refer to the river. For proof, if I took a survey of all the editors that have commented here, I would expect almost all who oppose live in the United States and/or edit American topics. Zzyzx11 (talk) 07:44, 2 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes I would be interested to see what people outside the US think.  Crouch, Swale  ( talk ) 08:37, 2 October 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)
 * Necrothesp oops, sorry I meant "River X" like River Thames and River Yare. There are a few (like East Okement River) that have it as a suffix but mostly its a prefix. Certainly people say "the X" like "the Thames" or "the Eden" locally or when the river is well known or the shorter name is unambiguous. I don't think I've ever heard "the Severn probably because its ambiguous in that its pronounced the same as the number.  Crouch, Swale  ( talk ) 17:07, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose Most people type in "Mississippi River" if they're looking for the river.ZXCVBNM (TALK) 15:16, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Support per nom.--Ortizesp (talk) 16:20, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose. While it's true that "River" regularly goes unused, the river still is better known as "the Mississippi", which indeed points to the river article. Indeed, Google Books seems to agree, as I mostly receive results about the state with "Mississippi" and results about the river with "The Mississippi". The current setup seems ok. Nohomersryan (talk) 16:42, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose. Mississippi is the state. The river is "the Mississippi", not "Mississippi". —BarrelProof (talk) 19:09, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose Mississippi on its own is a clear reference to the state.Lsw2472 (talk) 20:55, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose Most people type "Mississippi River" to find the river, so there is no need for a rename.BlueShirtz (talk) 23:51, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose The State of Mississippi is much more notable than the river. Beaneater00 (talk) 21:29, 2 October 2020 (UTC)
 * How? when the river is a level 3 vital article while the state is only level 5.  Crouch, Swale  ( talk ) 21:48, 2 October 2020 (UTC)
 * There's nothing that special about a vital article ranking. They're very subjective with no real criteria. Nohomersryan (talk) 05:33, 5 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Well before the long-term significance criteria was added (and primary topic was determined only by usage) it was listed as an exception. Even if they don't follow a specific criteria it is likely that the river is more significant than the state.  Crouch, Swale  ( talk ) 12:24, 5 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Strong oppose with this. Google statistics have 278 million with the state and likely to remain as the primary topic. ApprenticeFan   work  09:02, 5 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Support. Very obvious to me. Claiming that the state is more important than the river is just laughable. Neither are primary. Claiming that most people looking for the river will type "the Mississippi" or "Mississippi River" is also laughable. Who types "the" into a search box? And while it is formally called the Mississippi River, simple Mississippi is how it's usually known. Just like most other major rivers in the world. -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:50, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose I have never heard someone just say simply 'Mississippi' in reference to the river-- it's always 'Mississippi River' or 'the Mississippi'. Though there's no way to quantify this, google agrees. on a practical note, it's more convenient to have 'Mississippi' point somewhere and a reader can click on the 'river' article clearly listed in the hat if they're looking for it. There is no Thames state, and the situations of Washington, New York, and Georgia are not comparable because people use the same phrase to identify two different things. That is not the case here. Eddie891 Talk Work 12:40, 7 October 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.

Big river river
Does it change anything that "Mississippi" alone means "Big river", see List of tautological place names. 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)

about the previous move attempt
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), 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:
 * While our American readers may well be aware of these conventions of how the Mississippis are referred to, that doesn't have to mean that we should force them to navigate like that, it's still a bit of an onerous requirement, and it's also possible that there is a non-trivial contingent of American readers who aren't fully aware of this and/or who would prefer not to be burdened by this.
 * Our non-American readers do not necessarily know these American conventions. Showing them a simpler list would probably help them navigate to the entire body of knowledge on topics named this way better than the hatnote does.

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)