Talk:Vaughan

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. 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.

The result of the proposal was move. Mindmatrix 15:32, 3 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

• Rename: Vaughan → Vaughan (disambiguation)
• Rename: Vaughan, Ontario → Vaughan

This page should be renamed per the criteria at WP:CANSTYLE. It appears to be the primary use of the term Vaughan, and an internet search for the term, excluding the term "Ontario" to find occurrences not related to this city, yields numerous hits, all about people whose name contains Vaughan - they are not singularly known as Vaughan though. Vaughan, Mississippi is a small, unincorporated community, so should not prevent this page move. Other Wikipedia pages about Vaughan are either about subjects in the city itself (an electoral district, a mall etc.) or subjects whose name contains the word Vaughan. The dab page should be sufficient to handle these, and a hatnote to that dab page will be necessary Mindmatrix 14:08, 25 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

• Support as nominator. Mindmatrix 14:08, 25 July 2008 (UTC)Reply
• Support, as per nomination. This city is quite evidently the primary use of the term. And it is clear Wikipedia practice (as demonstrated by articles ranging from Barrie to London) that we do not dismabiguate settlement articles due to the fact that certain persons might have a surname that is the same as the settlement name. Skeezix1000 (talk) 14:20, 25 July 2008 (UTC)Reply
• Support. The presence of a Vaughan, Mississippi gave me some pause for thought but as it is an unincorporated community, I dare say that Vaughan, Ontario is by far a primary use for the title. DoubleBlue (Talk) 22:41, 28 July 2008 (UTC)Reply
• Support per nom. DigitalC (talk) 01:18, 3 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. 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.

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.

The result of the move request was: Not moved. Participants in the discussion emphasized that this city is the most important place to be called Vaughan, and thus "Vaughan" was found to be the preferable title per WP:CANSTYLE. Some users argued that the surname "Vaughan" was the true primary topic, but pageview analysis did not support that argument. (non-admin closure) ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 15:21, 5 January 2022 (UTC)Reply

Vaughan → Vaughan, Ontario – First, to make a place entry consistent with all other "Vaughan" place entries; "Vaughan", Ontario, is not of the same status as Paris, Moscow, or London. Second, to free up "Vaughan" page for redirect to Vaughan (disambiguation) so that the (overwhelming majority of) users who come to Wikipedia seeking something with the name Vaughan in it other than Vaughan, Ontario, may be spared having to spelunk around the Vaughan, Ontario, page for a redirect to find what they are after. Wikiuser100 (talk) 14:45, 24 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

This is a contested technical request (permalink). Crouch, Swale (talk) 12:04, 25 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

• Vaughan, Ontario was moved to Vaughan after a 2008 RM, so a discussion would be required to move it back. 162 etc. (talk) 14:53, 24 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

• @Wikiuser100 and 162 etc.:. Crouch, Swale (talk) 12:04, 25 December 2021 (UTC)Reply
• Oppose, per WP:CANSTYLE#Article_names. Vaughan is by far the largest place by the name - the others are a small village or unincorporated town names. Per CANSTYLE, "Cities that either have unique names or are unquestionably the most significant place sharing their name can have undisambiguated titles," which fits this situation. PKT(alk) 13:36, 25 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

BTW, the hatnote that states, "For other uses, see Vaughan (disambiguation)" should be enough for users to avoid "spelunk"ing for other options. PKT(alk) 20:13, 25 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

• Oppose. In addition to the comment by PKT, of the individuals listed at Vaughan (given name) and Vaughan (surname), none appear to be known by a mononymous name (that is, simply as 'Vaughan'). This city appears to be the primary topic for entries known specifically as 'Vaughan'. Mindmatrix 14:55, 25 December 2021 (UTC)Reply
• Oppose per PKT and Mindmatrix. Hwy43 (talk) 23:10, 25 December 2021 (UTC)Reply
• Oppose If the town wasn't teh wp:Primarytopic most of the traffic to it would make use of the hat not to get to the dab page, this isn't the case [2]—blindlynx 16:00, 27 December 2021 (UTC)Reply
• Support. Clearly not the primary topic, given the existence of Vaughan (surname). -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:50, 29 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

Pageviews for the last-name are consistently about a sixth of those for the town [3]—blindlynx 03:12, 30 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

• Weak support Google shows the surname article before the city article and from England that's the only result for the city, Images also results as many or more results for people than the city but the individuals are probably PTMS, Books also appears to mainly return people. Crouch, Swale (talk) 18:12, 1 January 2022 (UTC)Reply

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.

The result of the move request was: NOT MOVED. No consensus. Hadal (talk) 17:42, 19 March 2023 (UTC)Reply

• Vaughan → Vaughan, Ontario
• Vaughan (disambiguation) → Vaughan

– The city in Canada is certainly a popular encyclopedic topic, but it does not rise to the standard described at WP:PTOPIC - it does not have a long-term significance or usage that is larger than all the other topics known as Vaughan. This is primarily because the human names are actually way more commonly known and associated with the term compared to the city.
The previous discussions about this were flawed IMHO because folks seemed to make a lot of unsupported assumptions about average reader behavior. Assertions were made that only well-documented mononymous usage is relevant, but I do not believe this is so - it is very common for surnames and given names to be used mononymously, even if they are naturally disambiguated in real life. Likewise, raw statistics were analyzed, but nobody seems to have gone into the overall body of statistics, which shows a substantially different picture.
For example, WikiNav for Vaughan shows the hatnote gets only 105 clicks out of a total incoming traffic of 8.8k (~1%), and the set indexes for the surname and the given name likewise don't get a lot of traffic. However, it is still in the top 10 list of outgoing traffic, and I would contend that this mainly demonstrates how we and the search engines navigate readers, as opposed to how they would naturally navigate. We effectively hid the anthroponymy behind a hatnote and listed it in the fifth subsection there, after various smaller places etc. So mass views for that page will show what it shows, with the city's 338 views a day looking dominant. But when you look at mass views for the surname and the mass views for the given name it's apparent that Vince at 5,764 / day, Stevie Ray at 3,234 / day, Robert at 2,122 / day, Matthew at 1,635 / day, ... and numerous others, including Vaughan Williams at 626 / day, all the way down to Frankie at 177 / day, and in turn the long tail after that, are all as a whole commanding a huge amount of reader attention. This amount is so large that it casts a substantial amount of doubt in any claim that when an average reader looks up "Vaughan" they by default mean the city.
Now, it's possible to claim that when the average reader thinks about what they would expect in an encyclopedia for "Vaughan", they might expect the city. However, I can't find other examples in support of that - a search for "Vaughan" in britannica.com does not short-circuit to the city (the dropdown shows people, while full results show an assortment of results, a fair few of which are about Canada too, yet it didn't show the city as such near the top). Likewise, the searches at encyclopedia.com and Columbia Encyclopedia (infoplease.com) mostly show people. Ditto for Google Books with pws=0.
So, I'm proposing that we disambiguate this at the base name and void the assumption of primary topic for the city. Worst case, in a couple of months time WikiNav will tell us that e.g. people are actually clicking the city's entry so much that it dwarfs all the other uses, and it'll be easy enough to revert or place a primary redirect based on that.
TIA. --Joy (talk) 09:24, 19 February 2023 (UTC) — Relisting. Steel1943 (talk) 06:35, 1 March 2023 (UTC)Reply

• Comment - Please could other editors looking at this proposal see the sister proposal for Markham, Ontario - Talk:Markham, Ontario#Requested move 16 February 2023 --- Tbf69 P • T 10:23, 19 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

• Comment - I've changed this requested move to move to Vaughan, Ontario, as WP:CANPLACE says the following "A Canadian city's article, however, should never be titled simply City, Canada (e.g. Halifax, Canada), although it is permissible to create a title of this type as a redirect to the properly titled article." --- Tbf69 P • T 10:23, 19 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

• Oppose - WP:PRITOP is somewhat of a subjective metric, but I suggest that an average reader looking, for example, for Vince Vaughan, would type his exact name in the search bar (same as the others with the surname "Vaughan"). However, those looking for the city will be most likely type Vaughan in the search bar, hence I believe that Vaughan (the city) is WP:PRITOP. --- Tbf69 P • T 10:23, 19 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

  With so many notable people named Vaughan and so much traffic, why would we assume that readers always remember the exact (spelling of the) given name of the person they want to look up? Think about a person trying to get to e.g. Terri Vaughn, but types in Terry Vaughn. It's very natural to try to navigate via "Vaughn" in any such case, and seeing the city there is violating the principle of least astonishment. Likewise, if we have these intricate rules in WP:CANPLACE you're invoking, it also stands to reason that readers that want to look up the Canadian places are actually accustomed to seeing those in titles, as opposed to relying on primary topic navigation. --Joy (talk) 11:12, 19 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

  Vaughn is a separate article to Vaughan (disambiguation).

  WP:CANPLACE also allows for simply the name of a city, in the case of WP:PRITOP.

  Anyway WP:PLA is an essay, so I wouldn't cite it as policy (WP:DCE). --- Tbf69 P • T 11:25, 19 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

  Like I just said, this difference is not really relevant for the purposes of navigating the average reader. It wasn't my intent to cite an essay as policy, I merely provided the pipe link for clarification for people who are not aware of this general principle. If you insist on a policy link, the relevant one can be the article title criteria because it works in the same vein. --Joy (talk) 12:39, 19 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

• Support. Having the city as PT doesn't seem optimal in this case, per the nominator's data and given the many other notable topics reasonably associated with the term. The proposed alternative is a simple and sensible improvement, and (as Joy notes) less astonishing. ╠╣uw [talk] 12:09, 19 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

Also per WP:TITLECON it's best to try to keep title patterns reasonably consistent whenever we can, and the current RM at Markham, Ontario is a good one to consider in this same context. ╠╣uw [talk] 12:32, 19 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

• Support or at least primary direct. In ictu oculi (talk) 15:08, 19 February 2023 (UTC)Reply
• Support. A numbers game is not informative here. Lots of people live in Ontario, so most of those hits are probably just local residents looking it up. It is not sufficiently notable outside of Ontario to be the primary topic, over all other Vaughans. Walrasiad (talk) 15:17, 19 February 2023 (UTC)Reply
• Weak support per previous discussion. Crouch, Swale (talk) 17:13, 19 February 2023 (UTC)Reply
• Support Oppose per last time—blindlynx 20:01, 19 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

  @Blindlynx:Last time you opposed the move. Did you mean to oppose this time too, or did you mistakenly add 'per last time' to your message? Mindmatrix 18:14, 20 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

  Sorry my mistake. blindlynx 22:23, 23 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

  Thanks for fixing that; I wasn't sure which you had intended. Mindmatrix 19:59, 24 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

• Oppose, nothing has changed in the 14 months since the last time this idea was shot down. Repeating my argument from last time: "per WP:CANSTYLE#Article_names. Vaughan is by far the largest place by the name - the others are a small village or unincorporated town names. Per CANSTYLE, "Cities that either have unique names or are unquestionably the most significant place sharing their name can have undisambiguated titles," which fits this situation. PKT(alk) 00:44, 20 February 2023 (UTC)Reply
• Support per nomination; ╠╣uw; In ictu oculi; Walrasiad; Crouch, Swale and blindlynx. There are 17 entries listed upon the Vaughan (disambiguation) page, with no indication that Canada's 17th-largest city, population 323,103, possesses international renown to the extent of overwhelming the combined notability of the remaining 16 entries. —Roman Spinner (talk • contribs) 01:17, 20 February 2023 (UTC)Reply
• Oppose. (Yes, I read everything written by Joy.) Of the entries at Vaughan (disambiguation), only the placenames are mononymously referred to as 'Vaughan', and of those, the Canadian city is the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC (the others are unincorporated communities). All other entries are known by compound nouns containing 'Vaughan' (for example, entries at Vaughan (surname)), but not solely by 'Vaughan'; anybody looking for these can follow the hatnote. Over the past month, there have been an average of about 300 daily hits to Vaughan, of which fewer than 10 continued on to the disambiguation page, fewer than 50 a day land on Vaughan (surname), and fewer than 5 on Vaughan (given name). So, readers looking for those other entries already knew their final target, and the few that didn't followed the hatnote. By the way, if you're going to apply the logic of page views and mass views for compound nouns, take at look pageviews for London (2022-11-20 to 2023-02-18) and massviews for London (also 2022-11-20 to 2023-02-18). Lauren London gets more daily page views than the city; so should we move London to London (disambiguation) using the same arguments you cite? (Expanding the date range to 2 years changes the values in favour of the city, but entries in the name category would collectively have roughly 75-100% of the pageviews as the city, so the argument wouldn't change much.) I would bet such a proposal would be snowball closed with oppose votes. There are other articles that have the same issue (Dallas, Santiago, Sydney and others; for example, compare four year view totals for Sydney (name) (massviews) and Sydney (pageviews) - the city isn't even at the top of the list for things named 'Sydney' over a four year period). Mindmatrix 01:38, 20 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

  The reason why I don't think the primary topic status of British London can really be in doubt by usage is that the numbers for Lauren might be comparable, but the others are not (next in line Jack gets an order of magnitude less traffic than the city), so there's no critical mass for such an argument like there is for Vaughan. Likewise, https://wikinav.toolforge.org/?language=en&title=London doesn't even show the hatnote being one of the top 20 links to be clicked, at best it could have <1.42k/485.6k clicks which is < 0.29%, and the outgoing traffic in general scatters to 842 destinations. Certainly this is also caused by the generally large long-term significance of that one, but the difference is still pretty stark, as Canadian Vaughan has hatnote as high as #5 and overall only scatters to 48 destinations. London is one of the applications of primary topic guidelines that would be really hard to dispute, while Vaughan is different from that by orders of magnitude in every respect. Similarly, Sydney Sweeney is the only Sydney that gets more views than Sidney the city, and the next in line Sydney Pollack doesn't get half as much as the city, so there's just not enough critical mass in there, unlike here. --Joy (talk) 09:16, 20 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

  Less than 2.2% of readers follow the hatnote dab link from Vaughan. The fact that this ranks "as high as #5" and that the article links "scatters to 48 destinations" are irrelevant. Also, the pageviews for Sydney show that there are two others with that name that have at least 1/3 the pageviews, well within the dab considerations. (Above, you note that Frankie Vaughan has about half as many pageviews as Vaughan, one of the examples you cite "as a whole commanding a huge amount of reader attention" compared to the article at the plain title.) So what's the threshold? (Why should the city of Sydney hold the plain title when there is at least one other Sydney with significantly more page views?) Where is it defined in policy? If there is no such definition, perhaps we should establish one before making such moves, and moreover set a policy regarding plain titles vis-a-vis compound word titles for disambiguation pages. What about redirects such as Austin? (See pageviews for Austin, massviews for Austin (given name), and massviews for Austin (surname) for the past four years, which has dozens of entries with pageviews each exceeding those for the city.)

  I reiterate that, for such discussions, in my opinion only those entities known by the plain title (in this case Vaughan) merit consideration for use of the plain title, and that a disambiguation page should be at the plain title only when two or more such entries do not qualify as primary topics. All other entries can be reached via hatnote to the disambiguation page having "(disambiguation)" in the title. That's their purpose. (For example, I do not think that the article about Sydney or the Austin redirect should change.) Irrespective of that, note also that WP:PRIMARYTOPIC specifically states that the "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"; this fast-growing city will easily satisfy that criteria. Mindmatrix 18:11, 20 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

  It's not irrelevant, because it provides context. Both indications for primary topics are substantial differences compared to the other topics known by the same name. Like I said before, the issue isn't specifically a Frankie - the issue is that there's two dozen people who demonstrate orders of magnitude more interest than the city, plus the long tail after those. I'm finding it hard to argue further, because we're disagreeing on the fundamentals. If you're not willing to entertain the idea that the average reader doesn't only care about the strict mononymous usage for the purposes of encyclopedia navigation, we'll just have to agree to disagree. --Joy (talk) 09:55, 21 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

  Mindmatrix, so 2.2% of visitors to the city article end up following the links in the hatnote? Tu put this figure in context, a typical article will receive the vast majority of its traffic from either incoming wikilinks or from external sites (most commonly, search engines). Only a tiny fraction of the views (something like one to three orders of magnitude smaller than the rest) will come from readers searching for the article name here on Wikipedia. So, when thinking about primary topics, 2.2% doesn't really tell us much. 10% would be a very strong indication that there isn't a primary topic, while only something like 0.1% would be a strong signal to the contrary. – Uanfala (talk) 21:58, 8 March 2023 (UTC)Reply

• Oppose, it is the primary use of the word as per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. Mattximus (talk) 17:06, 21 February 2023 (UTC)Reply
• Support per nom. Clearly no primary topic here. The given name and surname are far more notable. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:37, 22 February 2023 (UTC)Reply
• Support. The question under discussion here is not whether the city in Canada is primary over the surname, but whether the city in Canada is primary over all other uses combined, including the surname. Of course, the city (like all of the place names) is named "Vaughan" after a person bearing the surname (Benjamin Vaughan). In this regard it is more comparable with a title like Lincoln as against the most populated place by that name, Lincoln, Nebraska. BD2412 T 19:45, 22 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

  I don't think that's an apt comparison, as Lincoln, Nebraska would still be disambiguated had the former president never existed, since Lincoln, England and Lincoln Motor Company (commonly known as Lincoln) both have a similar prominence to the Nebraska city (see this 5-year pageview comparison). Mindmatrix 19:59, 24 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

• Support. BD2412 said what I would have.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:20, 23 February 2023 (UTC)Reply
• Oppose. This is not like Lincoln - it's like Vancouver, Halifax, Charlotte, etc. "Being named after" is not part of WP:PRIMARYTOPIC - and in fact it is warned against as a measure (e.g. Boston). I truly appreciate the analysis of both Joy and Mindmatrix here. I land on the side of !opposing based on the fundamental assumption that most readers will not type "Vaughan" into the search box to find Stevie Ray et al. With that as the assumption, it is easy to assert that the Ontario municipality is by far the primarytopic by usage, with 80 percent of pageviews. Dohn joe (talk) 18:28, 23 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

  That may handle usage, but what about long-term significance? Does the city have substantially greater enduring notability and educational value than any other topic associated with the term? --Joy (talk) 19:15, 23 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

  Actually, I'd say yes. The other topics are either relatively small settlements, or the name articles, which are essentially lists of WP:PARTIALTITLEMATCHes. There's very little encyclopedic content there - the surname article tells you that the name derives from Welsh, but isn't even sure if it means artist or little. And even if not, none of the other topics are primary by significance either, whereas the Ontario city clearly is primary by usage. Given all that, I think the Ontario city is primary by both major criteria, and would still be primarytopic even if only by usage. Dohn joe (talk) 20:17, 23 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

  OK, but that means you've excluded the entire body of people named Vaughan from consideration. I'm not sure that matches the average reader's understanding of the significance of the term Vaughan. --Joy (talk) 13:28, 24 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

  I don't think I'm excluding anything, just trying to assign the correct weight to people who are interested in the surname page (whether to find out about the surname itself or because of interest in someone on the list). And we can see that the surname page gets 1/7 the usage of the city article. Even allowing for the basename bump, it's clear that many more of our readers are interested in reaching the city article than the surname (or any other "Vaughan") article. I think that's an excellent match to the average reader's understanding, or at least as good a match as we can get. Dohn joe (talk) 19:34, 24 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

  I agree that this is like Halifax—which is a disambiguation page. BD2412 T 20:36, 24 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

  Whoops! Struck Halifax. The others still work. I'll replace it with Burnaby (or many others, which was my point). Dohn joe (talk) 20:46, 24 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

  Navigation in Wikipedia in name articles doesn't serve to lead people merely to the names themselves, but to people named that way. Also, I've already talked about how we hid the people named that way behind several different obstacles to navigation. I'm pretty sure that reading into the result of what we did as an excellent match to reader understanding is confusing cause and effect in this case. --Joy (talk) 08:53, 25 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

• Comment. This table presents a comparison of the results of a reader landing on the page Vaughan as it exists today and if the proposed move is successful, where 'target article' is the article the reader wishes to view. Mindmatrix 20:52, 24 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

This is a well-known type of argument, and it's not without merits, but it applies to all cases where a dab page is at the base title, so it's fundamentally against the primary topic guidelines. – Uanfala (talk) 20:23, 18 March 2023 (UTC)Reply

• Oppose per Mindmatrix. Plus, there is simply no benefit to sending everyone searching with “Vaughan” to a dab page. WP is better without this change. —В²C ☎ 14:31, 17 March 2023 (UTC)Reply
• Support. The usage data, as I wrote above, is inconclusive, but it's well within the range where I would normally get suspicious of an existing primary topic. I don't see a primary topic with respect to long-term notability. There are really a lot of people with Vaughan as their surname, and it's common for a person to be referred to by just their surname in many contexts (including when searching for information on the person online). of course, you would assign those topics less weight, but you wouldn't assign them no weight at all. This case is different from London, where the city's enduring significance is beyond doubt, or Vancouver, where the city is a lot more well-known (esp. outside Canada) and there are a lot fewer competing topics. – Uanfala (talk) 20:23, 18 March 2023 (UTC)Reply