Talk:Boyle

Requested move 5 January 2024

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.

---

• Boyle (disambiguation) → Boyle
• Boyle → Boyle (surname)

– No clear primary topic, the surname has 346 views but the County Roscommon one has 1,734, the Alberta one has 183, the Mississippi one has 85, the Kansas one has 13 and the crater has 8[[1]]. Crouch, Swale (talk) 22:13, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

Note: WikiProject Disambiguation has been notified of this discussion. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 23:40, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

• Support – if there is a primary topic (PT) then it's either Boyle, County Roscommon or Robert Boyle. I regularly fix links to Boyle intended for the former. That's not enough to make it a PT, but it's more than enough to prevent anything else such as the surname being a PT for the term. Certes (talk) 23:52, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

  BTW the fact that you have to do those fixes is an indicator of editor behavior, not reader behavior. It's similar to the Bay, Somalia story - the people writing about a topic are thinking about it in a "in universe" manner and don't think much about general ambiguity. Also, imagine if it was a place in the US - there the conventional way of referencing toponyms would be e.g. "Boyle, State name" or "Boyle, XY" (state code); but nobody defaults to Boyle, Ireland or Boyle, IE (country code) in case of this kind of a location. The fact that a relatively tiny group of Wikipedia editors aren't diligent enough to ponder all aspects of every link they create can't be determinative for organizing navigation of a relatively overwhelmingly larger group of readers. --Joy (talk) 13:58, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

  But is the surname the primary topic? Yes if we take into account the usage of the surname in the context of people looking for the people with the name and its connection it may sway that way but when views show the town gets more views I don't think we can delare the surname as being primary, the best option is to have the DAB at the base name so that readers can choose the town or surname or one of the other uses. People are unlikely to expect to be taken straight to an individual by typing the surname alone so offering them the surname on the DAB seems the best choice. Crouch, Swale (talk) 17:13, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

  The issue is that if you move the current list out of the way, the disambiguation guidelines as they are now don't support adding people to the main list, which means some of these like Robert would no longer be 1 click away but 2. --Joy (talk) 08:27, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

  The disambiguation guidelines at WP:NAMELIST seems correct. People aren't likely to expect to get to Robert by typing just "Boyle" into the search box, unless people like Abraham Lincoln are commonly known by their surname alone they should only be included on the surname article which is what readers and editors would expect. People searching for "Boyle" would be 1 click away from the town in Ireland and the surname article, yes people looking for Robert would need 2 clicks but as I noted people wouldn't expect to get straight to Robert unless they type his full name. Crouch, Swale (talk) 17:14, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

  Actually, yes, yes they are, because people are habitually referred to by their names ambiguously. Also, if this wasn't the case, there would also have been no reason for Boyle's law to be listed at the other disambiguation. --Joy (talk) 16:12, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

  People are sometimes like Raleigh but most aren't which is why it redirects to the NC city. Perhaps per WP:NAMELIST we should put Robert on the DAB page as well as the surname? That way Robert would also be 1 click away. Would you be prepared to change to support (or at least not oppose) if this is done? Crouch, Swale (talk) 17:04, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

  No, because, like I said already in no uncertain terms, the entire traffic for the rest is already overshadowed by the traffic for the people, and making some sort of a rotten compromise would not actually be beneficial for our readers. --Joy (talk) 14:19, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

  BTW the status of the Raleigh redirect isn't quite as serene as you might believe, it has been a topic of discussions at Talk:Raleigh (disambiguation) and Talk:Raleigh, North Carolina twice already. --Joy (talk) 14:32, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

  Talk:Raleigh (disambiguation) (2014) resulted in "not moved" even though it was controversial. Talk:Raleigh, North Carolina#Requested move 26 August 2022 resulted in unanimous opposition to move the city to "Raleigh" but that was mainly due to WP:USPLACE requiring the state even if primary though a number of people indicated the DAB should be moved to the base name. My point is that while people with the surname should be considered for primary topic they rarely are so. That said the DAB RM was nearly 10 years ago and like Talk:Ford#Requested move 26 August 2018 (not moved) and Talk:Ford#Requested move 25 August 2021 (moved) there could easily be a change of consensus for Raleigh. Crouch, Swale (talk) 17:05, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

• Support per nomination and Certes. There are 15 entries listed upon the Boyle (disambiguation) page [plus two entries under the Boyle River dab page], with no indication that the list of people surnamed "Boyle" is primary over the combined notability of all the remaining entries. —Roman Spinner (talk • contribs) 04:19, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

  Just in case it needs to be said explicitly, there is plenty of indication that the combined notability of the people is larger than the combined notability of all the remaining entries, but the alphabetically-sorted lists aren't being very helpful about demonstrating that quickly. You actually have to do the work to figure it out, which is a problem in itself. --Joy (talk) 09:13, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

• https://wikinav.toolforge.org/?language=en&title=Boyle tells us that in the month of October '23, there were 654 incoming views of Boyle, and we could identify 25 outgoing clicks to Robert Boyle, 25 to the proposed swap target, 15 to Robert Boyle (disambiguation), 14 to Danny, 11 to Charles. Because the anonymization threshold is 10, we don't know about the rest. 25 compared to 654 is <4%; if we proceed with this move, what reason do we have to believe that this will not deteriorate the state of navigation for the remaining >96% of readers?

The move would also lead to a removal of direct links to Robert, Danny, Charles and whatever other targets that we already know attract larger or comparable interest from readers compared to the entire non-anthroponymy group, because the disambiguation guideline doesn't allow for that at this time. This would definitely impede navigation in this thankfully measurable way. (Oppose)

Likewise, if we look at the page view statistics for all items as opposed to just the hatnote'd group, and we look at all-time statistics and not just the latest 20 days, we get this list and this list and this list. In the former list we can see:

• Susan Boyle 2,856 / day
• Lara Flynn Boyle 2,548 / day
• Danny Boyle 2,108 / day
• Peter Boyle 2,018 / day
• Frankie Boyle 826 / day
• Robert Boyle 610 / day
• Zoe Boyle 316 / day

...and so forth. In the latter two lists we can see:

• Boyle's law 1,423 / day
• Boyle Heights, Los Angeles 209 / day
• Boyle, County Roscommon 84 / day
• Boyle River (Ireland) 3 / day
• Boyle River (New Zealand) 3 / day

The article on Boyle's law does not refer mononymously to the law, as just "Boyle", though it does refer mononymously to its eponym, Robert Boyle. The article on Boyle Heights doesn't seem to refer to the place mononymously as Boyle, though it does refer mononymously to its eponym, Andrew Boyle. There are vague mononymous references in the names of North Boyle Avenue and South Boyle Avenue, though those could also be references to Andrew Boyle, too.

So, we're left with the idea that we're not navigating well enough to a town in Ireland with a population of 3k, which is plausible, but with the ratios of 30 : 1 and similar just between individual items, let alone the overall statistics, it's actually borderline ridiculous. What we're actually not navigating well enough are probably some of these biographies, and there's a possibility that the reader is already not given a good enough impression of what "Boyle" typically means even now.

This is yet another in a long line of cases where we would allow this WP:NAMELIST-inspired apparent nonsense to make navigation worse. I feel like these discussions are becoming repetitive, and we really need to fix the guidelines to try to curb further waste of volunteer time. --Joy (talk) 09:31, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

The reason I rail about the name list guideline is because our boundaries between anthroponymy articles and various anthroponymy navigation aids are rather blurry, cf. recent discussion at Wikipedia talk:Content assessment#Request for comment. In this case it's pretty obvious that Boyle is an Irish name, so that concept as a primary topic would be pretty obvious, as that's the obvious pattern for the people, the town, the river, etc. But the way we organize articles right now means that we have to split things up by type, which then creates this artificial dilemma about what to put where. This is indicative of a suboptimally designed system. --Joy (talk) 14:06, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

BTW, from the clickstream archive, sorted list of most common identified outgoing clickstreams:

• August '23: Boyle_(disambiguation) link 34, Robert_Boyle link 27, T._C._Boyle link 14, Robert_Boyle_(disambiguation) link 12, Danny_Boyle link 11
• September '23: Boyle_(disambiguation) link 22, Robert_Boyle link 19, Robert_Boyle_(disambiguation) link 13, Charles_Boyle link 12, Boyle,_County_Roscommon link 11, Clan_Boyle link 10
• November '23: Robert_Boyle link 19, Boyle_(disambiguation) link 15, Robert_Boyle_(disambiguation) link 12, Clan_Boyle link 12, Charles_Boyle link 12, Boyle's_law other 12, Danny_Boyle link 11, Boyle,_County_Roscommon link 11, O'Boyle link 10
• December '23: Boyle Boyle_(disambiguation) link 30, Robert_Boyle link 14, Charles_Boyle link 12

While we don't see the entries <10 because of the anonymization threshold, the pattern is still pretty consistent - there's very little reason to believe that we ought to do much more to help readers navigate to the place over the people. Moving the town link from See also to the hatnote might help its numbers move up a tad. --Joy (talk) 14:30, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose. The name is the clear primary topic by long-term significance. In fact, I might even say that Robert Boyle should be a primary redirect. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:29, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
• Leaning support. There are surnames that are clearly primarily surnames by their construction, like Anderson or Jameson (both dabs anyway) or O'Connor or Lubański, but this is not so clearly one of them. BD2412 T 15:08, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

  @BD2412 So... we're supposed to be prejudiced against some surnames because they don't look like a very typically constructed surname? :) --Joy (talk) 09:08, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

  @Joy: Well, let's extrapolate from this. Should we treat all atypically constructed surnames primarily as surnames? For example, Mercury is a surname; Bok is a surname; Caron is a surname; etc. BD2412 T 14:36, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

  Well, if it wasn't clear already, I don't think we should be inferring or extrapolating anything when we can simply analyze the information pertinent to this specific term. --Joy (talk) 16:11, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

• Support per nom. No primary topic here.  — Amakuru (talk) 13:07, 5 February 2024 (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.

post-move

After the recent move, we have two thirds of the month of February with new stats. The clickstreams for that month are now generated (also rendered at https://wikinav.toolforge.org/?language=en&title=Boyle), and we can see 416 incoming views, with the following identifiable outgoing clickstreams:

• clickstream-enwiki-2024-02.tsv:Boyle Boyle_(surname) link 65 (~15.6%)
• clickstream-enwiki-2024-02.tsv:Boyle Boyle's_law link 29 (~7%)
• clickstream-enwiki-2024-02.tsv:Boyle Boyle,_County_Roscommon link 15 (~3.6%)
• clickstream-enwiki-2024-02.tsv:Boyle Robert_Boyle other 12
• clickstream-enwiki-2024-02.tsv:Boyle Clan_Boyle link 11

So, we see a spike in traffic to Boyle's law (last time it was seen in clickstreams was November - 12 "other"), which is probably good. The couple more clickstreams to the Irish town aren't so pronounced (likewise last time in November it was 11 also via "link"). Everything else is still about people, and we clearly introduced an extra click, and having to type in Robert's name in the search box ("other"). Let's see what happens next month. So far it does sound like a fair bit of a regression. --Joy (talk) 13:39, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

These results raise a wider question. If no person is a primary topic, the surname itself is of little interest but the total views for people listed on the surname page outnumber the total for other topics, does that entitle the surname to the base name? My instinct is "no", but we might want to discuss the matter in a more general forum. Certes (talk) 14:47, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

The problem is the one we discussed in that RFC that died out - we compartmentalize navigation too much, which leads to these kinds of questions. Don't get me wrong, the question is completely logical in our current little cinematic universe :) but we shouldn't be forced to think of navigation like this. --Joy (talk) 15:41, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

In March, there were 391 incoming views[2], and

clickstream-enwiki-2024-03.tsv:

• Boyle Boyle_(surname) link 129 (~33% / ~64%)
• Boyle Boyle's_law link 35 (~9% / ~17%)
• Boyle Arthur_Conan_Doyle other 22 (~6% / ~11%)
• Boyle Boyle,_County_Roscommon link 16 (~4% / ~8%)
• total: 202

There was one more view to the Irish town, yet it was both close to the anonymization threshold, and behind the seemingly random traffic towards to a famous Doyle, which is another Irish name. --Joy (talk) 14:24, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

It will be interesting to see the clickstream data for Boyle (surname) when available. I suspect that most readers who reached that page, either via dab Boyle or otherwise, were looking for a particular person called Boyle rather than the surname itself. The January data for Boyle in WikiNav's Comparison Over Time → Outgoing Pageviews suggests that Robert Boyle may be popular enough to be worth listing more prominently with a direct link in Boyle. Certes (talk) 20:30, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

@Certes the threshold of doing another click and recursion into another list appears to be substantial for a whole lot of readers.

Since the January RM, we've lost most of that direct traffic to Robert, T.C., Charles, Danny, ... and even those previous numbers weren't necesarily great because that list is also sorted alphabetically and requires more reader effort to parse to get to the popular stuff.

In the meantime, we've had more examples of this phenomenon, most recently the one described at Talk:Luka, where we see readers navigating to a biography 5 times more after it was linked directly from the first list. --Joy (talk) 10:57, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

In April, with 333 incoming views, clickstream-enwiki-2024-04.tsv showed:

• Boyle Boyle_(surname) other 132 (~40% / ~70%)
• Boyle Boyle's_law other 34
• Boyle Arthur_Conan_Doyle other 13
• Boyle Boyle,_County_Roscommon other 11
• total: 190 to 4 identified destinations

In May, with 299 incoming views, clickstream-enwiki-2024-05.tsv showed:

• Boyle Boyle_(surname) link 105 (~35% / ~68%)
• Boyle Boyle's_law link 30
• Boyle Robert_Boyle other 10
• Boyle Boyle,_County_Roscommon link 10
• total: 155 to 4 identified destinations

The patterns are still similar. --Joy (talk) 10:47, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

Yes, Robert Boyle is now very buried and may deserve a more prominent link. Readers may have heard of Boyle's law or similar and be unsure of the given name. The name list eventually guides them to the right person, but the journey could be smoother. Certes (talk) 11:08, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

Since then the issue has persisted:

June 280 views, clickstream-enwiki-2024-06.tsv:

• Boyle Boyle_(surname) link 113 (~40% / ~80%)
• Boyle Boyle's_law link 15
• Boyle Boyle,_County_Roscommon link 12
• total: 140 to 3 identified destinations

July 301 views, clickstream-enwiki-2024-07.tsv:

• Boyle Boyle_(surname) link 120 (~40% / ~72%)
• Boyle Boyle's_law link 30
• Boyle Boyle,_County_Roscommon link 16
• total: 166 to 3 identified destinations

August 270 views, clickstream-enwiki-2024-08.tsv:

• Boyle Boyle_(surname) link 97 (~36% / ~65%)
• Boyle Boyle,_County_Roscommon link 21
• Boyle Boyle's_law link 20
• Boyle Clan_Boyle link 11
• total: 149 to 4 identified destinations

Note that this doesn't include filtered clickstreams, but August WikiNav shows as many as 85 or ~28%. (This is a matter I discussed recently at some length at WT:D#WikiNav considered harmful.) --Joy (talk) 07:09, 6 September 2024 (UTC)