Talk:The Wife (Seinfeld)

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BetacommandBot (talk) 05:48, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

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.

Moved as proposed. As noted in the discussion, the primacy of the TV episode is diminished by the propensity of readers to add "the" before other uses of "wife". bd2412 T 15:44, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

The Wife → The Wife (Seinfeld) – The Wife (film) Sundance festival would be the first reason per WP:NCF. Note Wife (disambiguation) leads to content on A Wife/The Wife, poem by Sir Thomas Overbury 1614 ("it continued to be one of the most widely popular books of the 17th century"), but we do not yet provide content for readers on The Wife, essay by Washington Irving 1819, The Wife, poem by Emily Dickinson or The Wife, novel by Meg Wolitzer. In ictu oculi (talk) 08:45, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose - As of now there are only two topics from which one could look for to conceivably end up on this page --this article and the film. According to page views, this is evidently the primary topic. If we ever make articles on the other topics I'd have no issue reassessing this move. However, as of now, it doesn't particularly help anyone.--Yaksar (let's chat) 09:27, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

• Side question: Is "The Wife" a real Le Guin story, or was it just a mixup with The Wife's Story?--Yaksar (let's chat) 09:27, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Yes it is a shorthand description of The Wife's Story I have changed on Wife (disambiguation). Thanks. In ictu oculi (talk) 09:36, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Our content provision is weighted to entertainment/trivia/WP:RECENT so it is natural that page views will be a reflection of content we choose to provide - as in this case ignoring more weighty subjects and pointing to a US sitcom episode from 1994. In other words Page views are a circular argument of Wikipedia defining what is notable in reality. On the other hand our readers may not share the same view of content as our contributors and may feel that a US sitcom episode from 1994 is not more notable than all other uses of "The Wife" combined. They may in fact be looking for the Overbury poem, the Irving essay or the Sundance film (which we do provide). In Google Books which is more notable? In ictu oculi (talk) 16:58, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

The issue is that we can get a sense of whether "our readers may not share the same view of content as our contributors" by looking at the page view stats, which I believe are influenced almost entirely by readers rather than editors (except for pages that get only a couple views a day, I guess). I will agree that at a first glance the notion that "a sitcom episode from over 20 years ago is more notable than other topics" might seem absurd, but we should acknowledge that an episode of an award winning show getting thousands of hits in a month even 20 years after its date may provide some indication of our reader interest.

The other pages for which we do not have an article are a different story. Disambiguation pages are primarily a navigational aid for readers. Having points on a disambiguation page for works that we don't have pages about often does little other than tell the reader that "this is a thing that exists". That's not a completely unimportant thing to do, as it also serves an eductational purpose to know, for example, that a name is also a work by a poet, but it does very little in terms of helping our readers navigate, and the slim slim minority who is simply looking for confirmation that a topic exists should not be enough to displace the majority of readers indicating an interest in an actual article. But that's why I said, if anyone creates some of these articles, I'd certainly be more than happy a few months down the line to look at page view stats and other factors and reassess my thoughts.

Note: What I'm absolutely not saying, and I don't want to be misinterpreted as such, is that if a topic does not have an article at an exact name but still serves as a redirect to a subject that is basically its equivalent that the above argument applies. Basically, I don't want anyone to say "well since we don't have an actual article named just JFK why should the JFK (film) have a disambiguation?"--Yaksar (let's chat) 17:45, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

I take the view that we waste peoples time by having trivial entertainment subjects sitting in generic title slots. But in this case the issue isn't just that (though that is the major issue), but first as per nom WP:NCF: If the 1991 Seinfeld episode had been shown in a cinema or at Sundance we would be obliged by the guideline to title it recognisably even though The Wife (film) did not win a prize (as the same director did the year before) but simply because we have two bits of footage with articles of the same title. The intention of WP:NCF is evidently to help readers find film articles, yet currently a few TV episodes are getting in the way of film articles. Compare this to imdb's titling : The Wife (1995), vs "Seinfeld" The Wife (TV Episode 1994) - evidently a far more user friendly reader/user navigation than our approach. Not even the most ardent Seinfeld fan (I have nothing against the series) wouldn't search "The Wife", they'd search "Seinfeld" + whatever they could remember from the episode. Adding (Seinfeld) when almost every episode already has (Seinfeld) attached and there are other subjects is a win-win edit, it helps everyone. In ictu oculi (talk) 18:37, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

• Support "The Wife" should point to the disambiguation page. The form of address "the Wife" meaning the female spouse of the person in question, is frequently used by many spouses to refer to their wives, so the term "the Wife" would probably have wife as its primary topic. -- 67.70.35.44 (talk) 06:46, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

  "The wife" as a term of address is not an encyclopedia topic, however. Dekimasuよ! 20:19, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose. Page views are pretty clear. This article has been viewed 3,700 times in the last 90 days. Meanwhile, the film has only one-third those views. -- Calidum 16:29, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
• Support: A 3:1 ratio is insufficient to establish a primary topic, and there are other works with this title in addition to that one. —BarrelProof (talk) 00:02, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

  Comment. Normally, that would be sufficient to establish the topic as primary, per "much more likely than any other topic, and more likely than all the other topics combined." Dekimasuよ! 20:17, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

  That was not relative to "all the other topics combined"; it was only relative to one topic. And the ratio I was previously given as a benchmark (although I don't remember in which discussion that was) was 10:1. —BarrelProof (talk) 22:07, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

• support Red Slash 02:07, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
• Support. Certainly not the first thing you'd think of when you heard the phrase. -- Necrothesp (talk) 16:07, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
  • Might not be the first thing you'd think of when you heard the phrase, but it is the topic most likely to be sought by anyone searching for the term "the wife", and that's what matters. --В²C ☎ 19:33, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
• Oppose per Calidum. The topic of this article is primary for this title. --В²C ☎ 19:33, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
• Support. No PrimaryTopic. The Wife (film) is actually a better article. This is a WP:NOTPLOT violation. "The Wife" is an idiom easily misrecognized. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:33, 15 November 2014 (UTC)
• Support. If there is a primary topic it is not this episode, which satisfies the notability guidelines but only barely. Andrewa (talk) 16:41, 15 November 2014 (UTC)
• Oppose per Calidum. This is the clear primary topic in a WP:TWODABS situation.--Cúchullain ^t/c 15:59, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

• WP:TWODABS? Wife (disambiguation) lists more than two notable "The Wife"s (five, I count). Solving this as a TWODABS makes it very hard to find the third an onwards. Also, the perfectly reasonable but not universally intuitive WP:THE convention means that many readers would be hindered by unexpected separate disambiguation routes; The Wife (film) and Wife (film) should both have an easy route to each other. No, The Wife should redirect to Wife (disambiguation). --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:32, 18 November 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. No further edits should be made to this section.