Talk:Samuel Osgood House (North Andover, Massachusetts)

Requested move 29 August 2017

 * 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. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: Moved Samuel Osgood House to Samuel Osgood House (North Andover, Massachusetts) per NC and Samuel Osgood House (New York City) to Samuel Osgood House. Doncram's oppose for the latter noted, but the NYC one still seems to be the primary one in WP:TWODABS situation. I will sort out the incoming links to the Massachussets one, and any potential mis-links I encounter. No such user (talk) 08:27, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

– The New York building is the first U.S. presidential mansion, the historical predecessor to the current White House. The notability of the Massachusetts building, while not in doubt, rests pretty much on its being listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
 * Samuel Osgood House → Samuel Osgood House (Massachusetts)
 * Samuel Osgood House (New York City) → Samuel Osgood House

On pretty much every criterion, the NY building is the primary topic:
 * Incoming links. About 200 for the NY building; 2 for the MA building -- although the NY building's count is obviously raised by its presence in the navigation template George Washington;
 * Page visits. A Pageviews comparisonshows the NY house getting between 2500-4000 views in most months (it jumped to 5,000 and 6,000 around the times of Trump's election and inauguration, but those are presumably outliers); the MA house never goes over 100.


 * Search engine results. Searches for "Samuel Osgood House" overwhelmingly return results on the NY house: Google (web); Google Books; Google scholar. See the Advanced Search sidebar if you'd like to do further searches.
 * The articles themselves. The article on the NY house, while short, is several paragraphs of well-researched and well-illustrated material. The article on the MA house is a three-sentence stub.

The current naming appears to be an accident of history; the article on the MA house was created first, in 2008 and as the first article got the unqualified name; when the article on the NY house was created in 2010, it needed to be qualified because of the preexisting article. Nonetheless, the NY presidential mansion is clearly the primary topic, even if its article was second-created. TJRC (talk) 21:21, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Support per nom's thorough and convincing proposal. I will note, however, that the usual format for historic American houses would be Samuel Osgood House (North Andover, Massachusetts). If not made the title, that should be a redirect. Station1 (talk) 05:04, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Station1. I have no problem with it moving to Samuel Osgood House (North Andover, Massachusetts). I came up with Samuel Osgood House (Massachusetts) based on WP:CONCISE, but if there's a naming convention I missed, by all means we should follow it. Frankly, my main objective here is to move the presidential residence article to the unqualified name. TJRC (talk) 19:21, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I happen to agree with you re WP:CONCISE and would be happy to see the move as proposed. Unfortunately, I think we might be in the minority on that point. Station1 (talk) 02:41, 31 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Weak oppose solely based on the page view claim (which may also affect search engine results.) Several of the page views to Samuel Osgood House (New York City) are probably the result of a link to this page being present on the navbox template George Washington (The template is present on George Washington, a highly-trafficked article), whereas a direct link to Samuel Osgood House is present on no templates. More evidence to support the pageview/hits claim may be needed since the numbers could be skewed due to the navbox template. Steel1943  (talk) 19:54, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
 * I don't think the navbox template affects page views. It does affect incoming links, as I noted, but even controlling for that, I think the NY house tops the MA house. TJRC (talk) 20:10, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Actually, just to make that a little more quantitative, as I type this, there are 173 transclusions of the George Washington template and 188 incoming links to the NY house; so there are at least 15 incoming links that do not depend on the template. There's probably a handful more; I would bet that at least a small number of article both include the template and have the more usual link, but without checking all 173, that's hard to confirm. It's probably only 2 or 3, though, so I think it's fair to ignore them. In any event, even assuming only 15, that's 13 more -- or more than 7 times -- the number of incoming links for the MA house, so the NY house is still dominant on this factor. TJRC (talk) 20:07, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
 * The navbox template does not greatly affect pageviews. There are |Samuel_Osgood_House_(New_York_City)|Potomac_Company|George_Washington's_Gristmill other links on the template that get far fewer pageviews so there's no reason to suspect the number of views coming through the template for the NY house is more than for those other links. Of course, another way to look at it is that the mere fact that the NY house is linked from George Washington indicates it is the primary topic because it has far more "long-term significance" as the first presidential residence than the other house. Station1 (talk) 05:46, 12 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Right. Steel1943 said "page views to" but I think he or she meant "incoming links to," which is affected by the navbox. TJRC (talk) 21:15, 12 September 2017 (UTC)


 * Mixed:
 * Support move of Massachusetts one to Samuel Osgood House (North Andover, Massachusetts). We use (City, State) convention, consistent with article naming policy for wp:USPLACES.
 * Oppose move of NYC one to Samuel Osgood House, because there is no primary usage: like almost all NRHP-listed historic sites, these are obscure places that scarcely anyone knows about.  Sure it is possible some New Yorkers will think that the NYC is "the" major one, but Massachusettians will think the same for theirs;  no one would be surprised to see their one having parenthetic disambiguation.  And, in my opinion, you can have a two-item dab page at Samuel Osgood House. -- do  ncr  am  04:21, 8 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Move, since there's no way that an average historic house in Massachusetts is primary vis a vis the first official presidential residence, but use "North Andover, Massachusetts" (or some alternate form if it's in a separately named village in the town) to meet our naming conventions. WP:NRHP bows to other naming conventions when applicable, e.g. courthouses are simply (State) because there's only one courthouse per county (aside from oddball situations, e.g. Mississippi County Courthouse (Blytheville, Arkansas) because there's also a Mississippi County Courthouse (Osceola, Arkansas)), and train stations have their own conventions, but when it's a place like this that's an "ordinary" historic house, notable only because it's gotten coverage over the years and thus "merely" making WP:GNG, there's no other applicable convention to follow.  And I'd say move the New York house to this title; it's a major piece of American period architecture, due primarily to its prominent short-term resident, as opposed to this one, which is (again) covered simply because it's a good 1740s residence.  Nyttend (talk) 22:08, 12 September 2017 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.