Talk:Waka

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Closing as not moved. bd2412 T 16:12, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

– WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. Of all the articles linked to on the current disambig page Waka, the only one that even comes close to Waka (poetry) in importance is Waka (canoe). Waka (canoe) currently has about 25% more incoming wikilinks, but the vast majority of them are on loosely-related pages because of this article being included in the broad templates Culture of Oceania, Canoeing and kayaking and Māori. If these pages are discounted, then Waka (poetry) has over twice the number of incoming wikilinks; if Waka (poetry) were added to Template:Culture of Japan or any one similar template the result would likely be the same. Additionally, both GBooks and GScholar seem to back me up on the Japanese poetry being more widely discussed in reliable sources: 92,000>21,100; 79,400>43,800; 4,690>2,270; 8,510>3,710+4,670. elvenscout742 (talk) 02:42, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Waka → Waka (disambiguation)
 * Waka (poetry) → Waka


 * Support. For the last 90 days, I get 11,760 page views for the poetry genre, 8,406 for the canoe, 961 for the music, and 369 for the town. Update: I did the math, and the poetry article is getting 55 percent of relevant traffic. Kauffner (talk) 02:18, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Amazing what you can do with selective statistics. Worth noting that for the last 90 days, you get 11,760 page views for the poetry genre, 8,406 for the canoe, 7,024 for the radio station, 9,912 page views for the Zappa album, 5,273 page views for the Quechua term,... and nearly half a million page views for the rapper! Grutness...wha?  05:38, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * The radio station is "WAKA" and the Quechua word is "huaca" or "waqa." So neither one requires the lemma "waka." Kauffner (talk) 09:36, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Waka is an accepted alternative spelling for huaca, and WAKA, despite the capitalisation, would still be linked from the same disambiguation page, so both are relevant. Grutness...wha?  07:03, 19 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Oppose per usage stats of Kauffner, clearly the poetry topic is not the primary topic. per the google stats from elvenscout, the dominance is not that large. -- 65.92.180.137 (talk) 11:41, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * What do you mean? The Google stats are between 2:1 and 4:1, and the usage stats indicate that the poetry is more prominent than all the others combined -- how dominant does it need to be? elvenscout742 (talk) 11:52, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * 2:1 is not very dominant at all. 4:1 is better, but you still have the 2:1 results to contend with, which is not that dominant. A magnitude of difference between this usage and all other usages would be definitive. (10:1 poetry to everything else) -- 65.92.180.137 (talk) 22:16, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * You are just pulling numbers out of the air. WP:PRIMARYTOPIC says that a topic is primary if it is, "more likely than all the other topics combined." The idea should be to get as many articles as possible titled under the actual name of the their subject. Kauffner (talk) 04:32, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * No, I am not, and you should know better, since you've participated in many discussions where many editors have pointed to the magnitude in difference as determining priamrity. -- 65.92.180.137 (talk) 04:47, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Even when the difference is an order of magnitude, you still oppose primary topic status. You just like to mess stuff up? Kauffner (talk) 08:57, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Maybe that's true, and maybe it isn't. Come back with a dab page where there is an order of magnitude difference to find out. This one hasn't. Grutness...wha?  07:03, 19 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Oppose all of the options are regional ones, there doesn't seem to be a clear Primary Topic - depending on where you live the primary will be different, therefore disambiguation, the status quo, is the best option. Mattlore (talk) 11:55, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Commodore Matthew Perry is the primary topic in Japan, but Matthew Perry isn't a disambig page because the numbers all put the Canadian actor on top. The numbers put the Japanese poetry on top in this case, so... elvenscout742 (talk) 12:01, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * WP:PRIMARYTOPIC states "A topic is primary for a term, with respect to usage, if it is highly likely—much more likely than any other topic, and more likely than all the other topics combined—to be the topic sought when a reader searches for that term." I certainty don't think the poetry is more likely than all the other topics combined to be the topic sought. Personally, I had never heard of this type of poetry before this discussion, and I see I'm not the only one in this discussion to be in that er...boat. Mattlore (talk) 20:22, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Perhaps more readers are looking for the rapper, the Shakira song, and even the kickball league, but those are partial title matches. I interpret the phrase "all the other topic combined" as "all other topics covered by Wikipedia that are named 'waka', or could reasonably be named 'waka'." Britannica has a full-length article on the poetry genre, but no mention of the canoe. Kauffner (talk) 04:23, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * And the Oxford Dictionary defines it as "a traditional Maori canoe" with no mention of the poetry. Mattlore (talk) 21:36, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Which proves yet again that an encyclopedia is not the same as a dictionary. Kauffner (talk) 09:34, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Which is irrelevant, since WINAD is about the nature and objective of creating articles, not what the subject of an article is. Grutness...wha?  07:03, 19 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Oppose - in this kind of situation, where there's clearly two main uses, I personally prefer not to have a dab page at the main name - it's better to give immediate satisfaction to say 45% of your audience rather than making everyone click through to somewhere else. However I'd argue that the canoe should be the here rather than the poetry, for the simple reason that it's part of the culture of an English speaking nation. Thus even if the clickthroughs were equal, it's more important to some readers on the English Wikipedia than the poetry. Conversely I'd expect the poetry to get top billing on the Japanese Wikipedia, and maybe have a dab page on the German Wikipedia. I guess some of the Google hits will be distorted by Japanese-language pages which aren't relevant to English Wikpedia, I suspect Maori pages are less of a problem. Le Deluge (talk) 12:10, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I see your point, but the Google results are not in Japanese: "waka" in Japanese is not written as "waka" but as "和歌", and the English classifiers "poetry" and "Japan" help. New Zealand may be an English-speaking country, but it's a small English-speaking country, and this is English-language Wikipedia, not New Zealand Wikipedia: the numbers point to the poetry being more prominently discussed in English-speaking countries in general than the canoes. elvenscout742 (talk) 13:11, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * (As an aside, the poetry article can't get top-billing on Japanese Wikipedia because the two words are written in completely different writing systems, being kanji and katakana, and Japanese Wiki doesn't even have an article on the canoes. In fact, only 6 Wikipedias have articles on the canoes, as opposed to 22 on the poetry: indicates that the poetry is more objectively noteworthy than the canoes. elvenscout742 (talk) 13:25, 15 February 2013 (UTC) )
 * I still think you can't just dismiss the fact that a segment of the en.wiki community has a much closer emotional connection to the canoe than any English speaker has to the poetry. It can't be conveniently described in numbers, but it's a real factor IMO. Plus the Kiwis are part of a wider culture - 23m Aussies would also recognise the canoe, and certainly as a fairly-well-educated Brit, I've heard of the canoe but not of the poetry. One came through the middle of London only last year as part of the Jubilee pageant, and seemed to be the iconic image in all the TV news packages to symbolise the involvement of all the Commonwealth countries - I don't recall any Japanese poetry achieving that kind of profile recently. It's always wise not to put too much weight on Google hits, particularly when comparing something academic (and written) with something with a wider cultural significance from a culture with an oral tradition. I'm not sure how reliable your searches are in disciminating the different subjects either - the canoe will mostly be talked about by NZ sources where they won't need to explain that it's a canoe, (see eg the Waikato Times ). If you look at Google News for your reliable sources, then "waka poetry" has 10 hits versus 224 hits for "waka boat". Of those 10 poetry references, only three are your Asian poetry, three are for a rapper called Waka Flocka Flame,  two are talking about Shakira and her song Waka Waka, one is an (English) poem about the canoe and one about a sci-fi character. Whereas most of the boat references do seem to be about the boat. You mention the problems of transliteration - is there an alternative transliteration/synonym of either term? That can provide an elegant way of disambiguating - qv Syrah is used for the grape and Shiraz for the city, even though Shiraz is more familiar than Syrah on wine labels.Le Deluge (talk) 17:19, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Waka (poetry) is a historical term, so it's not going to get much usage in news sources, in Japan or out (modern waka are referred to as tanka). I understand that a lot of people in the English-speaking world may have a stronger connection to the boats. However, this isn't "Wikipedia for people in English-speaking countries", it's "English-language Wikipedia". I'm a native English speaker from Ireland and the poetry means more to me because I am one of the one million or so foreigners in Japan -- and that doesn't include all the Japanese people and people of Japanese ancestry who use English Wikipedia. The fact is, therefore, that vague emotional attachments of certain terms to certain ethnic groups is irrelevant: what matters is the relative traffic these article get from readers of English-language Wikipedia. At present there is a link to the canoe article placed on several hundred pages to which it is only loosely related, as a result of the aforementioned templates, but in the past three months it has got noticeably less traffic than the poetry article. This despite the poetry article having only existed for three months, after it split off from Tanka. Also, I might point out that last time I was involved with a move request like this it was pointed out that "Tanka" is the name of an ethnic group in an English-speaking territory, Hong Kong, and so the article on Japanese poetry can't be the primary topic, but that argument didn't work. elvenscout742 (talk) 17:34, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * (EDIT CONFLICT) Also, "224" hits seems to be an exaggeration: I only saw 15. "tanka poetry" showed a similar problem, and although it is fewer none of these searches brought up more than 20 hits. elvenscout742 (talk) 17:40, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I consistently get 224 hits from the above link. Scholar versus News is a pretty good indicator of specialist interest versus general awareness in the population - and Wikipedia is intended for the general population. Going back to my Shiraz/Syrah thing, could the poetry be moved to Yamato uta?? Le Deluge (talk) 17:57, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Definitely not. No one calls waka "Yamato uta" today, and very few people have done so historically. I included that reference in the opening paragraph of the article because the most widely-known anthology of waka has "Yamato uta wa..." as the opening of its Japanese introduction. Anyway, just because Wikipedia is intended for a general audience it doesn't mean we should let "general awareness" determine our article titles: the Japanese poetry still receives more traffic than the canoe. elvenscout742 (talk) 03:24, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
 * It's a little bit different, but WP:COMMONNAME insists on general awareness for article titles.Le Deluge (talk) 13:36, 19 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Oppose As the above stats show, there isn't a primary topic.  Schwede 66  17:35, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * The above stats show a trend between slightly and overwhelmingly favouring the poetry article as the primary topic. Which stats are you talking about? elvenscout742 (talk) 17:40, 15 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Oppose per usage stats of Kauffner and the fact that there are quite a number of uses for the word. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 21:54, 15 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Oppose. "Of all the articles linked to on the current disambig page Waka, the only one that even comes close to Waka (poetry) in importance is Waka (canoe)." It's not that long ago since I tidied a load of articles which were pointed to the redirect page, so the number referring to any specific subject is largely irrelevant. FWIW, a google search setting US as the country of origin (as the likely major country of web search that is neither predominantly Japanese of Kiwi) turns up (in the top ten articles) four relating to the canoe and two relating to poetry, two for the TV station and one each for the music and a company name. From that viewpoint the canoe has prominence over the poetry. However, the canoe and poetry are close enough in prominence for each to lead the other in different ways of testing which is the main subject - surely reason enough to suggest that there is no overall predominance. As such, the dab page should stay at Waka. Grutness...wha?  04:38, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * When I google, I get mostly Waka Flocka Flame and Shakira. One hit refers to a movie called Tokyo Waka, and this is indirectly a reference to the poetry topic. I don't see anything about boats. Kauffner (talk) 06:16, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * My bad - I forgot the "-wikipedia"... but even so, it doesn't look like there's any way the poetry could be claimed as primary topic from your results. Grutness...wha?  10:51, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I clicked on the google link you supplied and, of the first fifty results, the sixth, eighth, thirteenth, twenty-ninth, thirty-fourth and thirty-ninth referred to the canoe; the fifteenth, twenty-second and thirty-second were metaphors based on the canoe meaning, and the forty-third was to a place name based on the canoe meaning. In comparison, the lone Japanese result among that lot was apparently to a restaurant. Daveosaurus (talk) 06:40, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * To quote Le Deluge above, "[i]t's always wise not to put too much weight on Google hits". Why would a genre of classical Japanese poetry appear high on the results of a general Google search? NONE of the encyclopedic topics are broadly represented by the above Google link. elvenscout742 (talk) 02:07, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
 * It's a good thing that ghits are only one of the reasons why a move seems less than ideal, then. Grutness...wha?  05:27, 18 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Oppose. Statistics as per Grutness, and in addition 'waka' is a loan-word in New Zealand English and is practically universally understood to describe large Polynesian canoes, or replicas of such; which should probably actually make it the primary topic on English Wikipedia, as per Le Deluge. Daveosaurus (talk) 06:40, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * It's not about the most common use, in New Zealand or anywhere else. It's about what people are most likely to be searching for. WP:Wikipedia is not a dictionary. Kauffner (talk) 08:57, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Per the stats I provided, it doesn't seem any single topic wins out in terms of popular search. No topic of those disambiguated generates more than 30% of the hits for "waka"-related pages. In any case, it's be reasonable to argue that "most common use" is a likely strong indicator of "most common search". I can't think of that many counter-examples where a minor definition of a term would be the most likely definition for a search. Grutness...wha?  10:51, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Oppose per Grutness. That graph says it all really. Regardless what is the most common search, link, or use - none are anywhere near an absolute majority - let along the overwhelming majority that would necessitate a consensus to support this proposal. I'd ask someone to consider closing this discussion even though it has not yet run a week. Can't see a support consensus being reached per WP:SNOW - Shudde  talk 06:55, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree. I have no more interest in arguing this issue. i do believe a number of the early oppose !votes had rather flawed arguments and may have personal/cultural biases, but I can't see this passing now. Even though to the best of my recollection it's the first time Kauffner and I have ever agreed on anything. :P Close elvenscout742 (talk) 08:00, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't think it's fair to suggest the oppose votes were due to a cultural or personal bias - no one suggested you had a personal bias regarding this proposal. I think the data that Grutness posted in response to Kauffner's data killed any chance of a consensus of support votes. Things are not at all harmful the way they are, and to change them needs a pretty strong argument. - Shudde  talk 08:31, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I'd like to note that I deliberately tried to avoid New Zealand and Japanese sources in those stats, so as to remove the likelihood of cultural bias. It is true that I live in New Zealand, but I hope that didn't affect my views in any way - they would be the same in any case where the statistics make it clear that describing any topic as primary is questionable. Grutness...wha?  07:03, 19 February 2013 (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. No further edits should be made to this section.