Talk:Snowflakes (disambiguation)

Requested move

 * 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: page moved. &mdash;innotata 23:35, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Snowflakes → Snowflakes (disambiguation) – Per WP:PLURALPT, by far the most important historical usage of this term is the singular meaning, Snowflake; since it is extremely rare for snowflakes to actually occur in the singular, it would best serve readers for this title to take then directly to the article for which they are likely to be searching. bd2412 T 16:20, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Support WP:PRIMARYTOPIC of snowflakes are snowflakes. In ictu oculi (talk) 22:07, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Support per the nominator's rationale. ╠╣uw [ talk ] 12:19, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Support this one. Apparently, almost no one is looking for "snowflakes" - it gets about 6 views per day, as opposed to snowflake, which gets about 300 views per day. For the nom and others, this should be evidence that WP:PLURALPT gets it right - "readers and editors are used to seeing titles at the singular form, and can be expected to search for them/link to them in the singular form." It doesn't matter that snowflakes rarely occur by themselves - they get searched for and linked to in the singular on WP. In this case, though, there's only one title at the Snowflakes dab page, so the dab page is not even really necessary. Dohn joe (talk) 23:20, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't think the expectation that readers will search for things in the singular is true at all. Look at Grapefruits - a redirect to Grapefruit - that has had nearly 450 views in the last 90 days despite the fact that there is no other meaning of the word "grapefruits" (no album, no film, no surname), and the fact that there is no such plural even! The common plural of grapefruit is grapefruit, so people have to be going out of their way to search for plural usages of common nouns to be typing "grapefruits" at all, much less to be doing it several times a day. Another example is Logarithms, with no meaning other than the plural of Logarithm, and which has been viewed 2700 times in the last 90 days. Clearly people are looking for the common name subject by searching for the plural. bd2412  T 00:11, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Of course people search for plurals - just in tiny relative numbers. Using your examples:
 * Grapefruits: 450 views, or 5 per day
 * Grapefruit: 76,000 views, or 845 per day
 * Logarithms: 2,700 views, or 30 per day
 * Logarithm: 244,000 views, or 2,700 per day


 * So people can be expected to search for or link to the singular - around 90-95% of the time. That makes it much easier for other non-plural topics to overtake a plural for WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. That's the point of WP:PLURALPT. Dohn joe (talk) 14:44, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Throughout these discussions, your analysis has excluded the relative importance of the topics. We should not subsume important topics like Mirror or Postcard merely because some pop culture topic has imposed a fleeting vogue on the plural title. bd2412  T 16:14, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
 * My analysis actually does a pretty good job of assessing the relative importance that our readers and editors put on the singular versus plural versions of these topics. Generally speaking, the singular outdoes the plural by about 10:1 to 20:1. That means that a topic with a plural title is not competing against the importance of the full-strength singular topic. It's going up against a 1/20th-sized version of the singular topic, which makes it much more likely that a plural title can establish a separate primarytopic, or at least send all the topics to a dab page. That's the flaw I see in your argument. It's not "Mirrors (disambiguation)" versus "MIRROR" ; it's "Mirrors (disambiguation)" versus "mirrors" . Your argument does not take that usage disparity into account. Dohn joe (talk) 19:42, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
 * WP:PRIMARYTOPIC vary clearly states: "A topic is primary for a term, with respect to long-term significance, if it has substantially greater enduring notability and educational value than any other topic associated with that term". That is the guidance that makes the debate " Mirrors (disambiguation) " versus " MIRROR ", and also tends to make this a reputable encyclopedia rather than the Internet's pop culture toilet. We have already had our share of mockery for having more detailed articles on Pokemon than on classical poets and basic scientific principles. Let's not compound that by acting like we can't tell that basic concepts in science, philosophy, and culture are vastly more important than the title someone chooses for a pop culture media product. bd2412  T 20:20, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm not trying to be tricky here. The two main criteria at WP:PRIMARYTOPIC are 1) usage and 2) long-term significance, right? When you look at "mirror" and "mirrors", I think we can agree that they have equal long-term significance. But when you look at usage, "mirror" gets about 20x the usage of "mirrors". This is true of most plurals. This means that usage is a much more important factor for other uses of plurals than it is for singulars. That's all. Dohn joe (talk) 21:06, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Given the relative historical importance of the mirror, we would need to see some pop culture use of "Mirrors" outweigh the number of views received by mirror to a pretty massive degree to balance out the historical primacy of the basic topic. bd2412  T 21:31, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
 * But that's not right. We treat plurals on their own merit, separate from the singular. WP:PLURALPT says: "A plural form is treated like any other topic." The relevant usage is of the plural, not the singular. If we treated them identically, then we wouldn't even need WP:PLURALPT. Dohn joe (talk) 23:18, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
 * We would still need WP:PLURALPT for cases like "Orange", which is ambiguous, and "Oranges", which has been determined to apply primarily to the fruit. That seems to speak to the possibility of a plural term being more likely to apply to a singular, not less. bd2412  T 23:49, 13 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Support per nom. Obvious. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:39, 15 October 2014 (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.