Talk:Tupelo

Requested move 17 February 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.

The result of the move request was: moved. The discussion shows a division in opinion, but the support for the move slightly outweighs the opposition. The supporters provide a more data-driven argument, citing specific statistics and examples where similar moves have been beneficial. The opposition relies more on the principle of the original source of the name and the natural disambiguation of other uses, which is less compelling in the face of the presented data. The suggestion to rename the tree genus to "Tupelo (tree)" is well-received and appears to be a reasonable compromise that addresses the concerns of both sides.

Based on the arguments presented, the consensus leans towards supporting the move. The pageview data and the examples of similar past moves suggest that the term "Tupelo" does not have a primary topic by current usage or long-term significance. Therefore, it is reasonable to move the tree genus to "Tupelo (tree)" and allow the disambiguation page to occupy the primary title of "Tupelo". This move aligns with our guidelines on usage and significance as the criteria for determining primary topics. (closed by non-admin page mover) Vanderwaalforces (talk) 12:18, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

---

• Tupelo (disambiguation) → Tupelo
• Tupelo → ?

– Yet another disambig with no primary topic. From pageview data, Mark Knopfler, Tupelo, Mississippi, Tupelo Honey, and Uncle Tupelo are all more prominent than the tree genus Tupelo. Duckmather (talk) 18:58, 17 February 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. Adumbrativus (talk) 09:15, 26 February 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. BD2412 T 18:50, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

• Strong support the plant has 1,917 views but the place in Mississippi has 10,752, the song has 430, the place in Oklahoma has 153, the place in Arkansas has 51, Mark Knopfler has 113,657, Uncle Tupelo has 4,913 and Tupelo Honey has 4,641[[1]]. Move the plant to Tupelo (genus) or perhaps Nyssa (genus) per Category:Nyssa (genus) and Commons. Crouch, Swale (talk) 20:28, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

  We should not be looking at the top line number for Mark Knopfler here, because it's not him who's called "Tupelo" (at least not according to his article here), it's just part of the name of a single song of his (which is also not mentioned at his main article). The existence of the song merely supports the contention that Elvis put the Mississippi city on the map, but not to the extent implied by the huge numbers. --Joy (talk) 09:47, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

• Procedural comment. Refactored to a multi-move request. This was a true "incomplete request", not one of those that wanted to move to the fake title "deleted to make way for page move".
  Possible targets for Tupelo include the existing redirects Tupelo (tree) and Tupelo (botany). – wbm1058 (talk) 02:01, 18 February 2024 (UTC)
• Let's look at all-time views to confirm the pattern from latest 20 days - it seems to.
  It should be noted that Uncle and Honey are WP:PTMs and do not affect this consideration - it's mostly the city in Mississippi that does.
  If we look at WikiNav for Tupelo, last month there were 2.8k incoming views, 726 identifed outgoing clickstreams, of which 89 to the hatnote. Those ~3% or ~12% aren't immediately impressive, but we've seen this pattern elsewhere already, we don't really know if the ratios can make sense as search engines are major drivers of traffic, and they avoid our navigation. The city is also linked from the first named section, and there's 31 identified clickstreams there. WikiNav for the disambiguation page also confirms that people are mostly clicking through to the cities and the Nick Cave song.
  It's worth a shot to try to disambiguate fully, and check the stats later.
  A Google Books search confirms references to the tree and the location are both common. Books Ngrams search to compare tupelo and nyssa isn't conclusive, I'd keep the base name at tupelo as nyssa is also ambiguous. Tupelo tree seems like a reasonable title, too, there's several articles here that already used that phrase.
  At the very least, we could switch "tupelo" to a primary redirect, to be able to check more precise statistics later. --Joy (talk) 09:33, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

• Strong Oppose. Tupelo is the name of the plants which the city, the honey, etc. are named after. This makes as much sense as saying that redwing is not the primary topic because Detroit Red Wings gets more views and therefore the bird page needs to make way for the redwing (disambiguation) page. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 05:40, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

  @MtBotany the fact that something is the eponym does not have to factor with insurmountable weight into the discussion of whether there's a primary topic for the term now. Note how WP:DPT says: Being the original source of the name is also not determinative. Let's rather try to examine for example does the fact that all these things were named after the plant contribute to the plant's long-term significance, or is it orthogonal to it? --Joy (talk) 09:33, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

  Also, in the case of redwing vs Red Wings, there's probably also a non-trivial difference that makes these two terms more distinct in usage, and this is already reflected in Wikipedia navigation. --Joy (talk) 09:35, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

  Tupelo and Tupelo, Mississippi are also non-trivial. The examples where you linked are Iron Maiden and iron maiden as trivial differences. If Wikipedia had a policy of putting US towns at their simple names you might have a point, but as things stand this is unnecessary. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 13:55, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

  Well, this would imply that every reference out there to the MS town has to be disambiguated, but we already have examples to the contrary in this discussion, so that doesn't make sense. --Joy (talk) 15:58, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose The towns were named after the tree and the songs were about the town (or tree). The names of the other articles includes Tupelo as part of the names and show up in the dropdown search list so won't usually need to be found from the disambiguation page. —  Jts1882 | talk  09:42, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

  @Jts1882 see above about being the eponym not being determinative. But also, why does plant being the eponym for the town mean something, but town being the eponym for something else not in turn mean the same thing? --Joy (talk) 10:23, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

One is the primary eponym, the other is secondary, so they are not equivalent. Anyway my main objection is that the change is unnecessary. Tupelo just forms part of the article name in those other articles and the names show up in the dropdown list when searching. People find them easily enough without using the disambiguation page; Tupelo, Mississippi has 14k views while disambiguation page has 92 views. Over 200 pages link to Tupelo so a move requires lots of changes for no real benefit. I'd argue for the status quo if the plant name was disambiguated. This is change for change sake. —  Jts1882 | talk  11:39, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

The benefit of changing this would be to stop making readers who aren't looking for the plant jump through hoops to get to where they're going. This sounds more like a general argument against WP:NOPRIMARY - it's possible for the average reader who's in the wrong place to get by even if the navigation isn't optimal. I would much rather hear a positive argument, something along the lines of "we need to point everyone looking up Tupelo to the plant because it's so much more significant than the place and all the other topics". --Joy (talk) 16:02, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

• Support per nom and move to Tupelo (tree). No primary topic. The fact that the others were named after the tree is irrelevant. -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:56, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

  Question: Do you think it relevant that the total views for the three years prior to this requested move of Tupelo was 119,295 and Tupelo (disambiguation) was 4,825, or about 3.9% of the views. Adding in the additional direct navigation to the disambiguation page would mean that about 4.5% of Wikipedia users would prefer the disambiguation page to the page about the Tupelo tree genus.

  @Joy is there a standard or general guideline about how many people should be navigating to a disambiguation page to show that No Primary Topic applies? 🌿MtBotany (talk) 22:44, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

  Sadly this is less than determinative because we don't usually control all of our navigation - the search engines short-circuit a huge amount of our readers most of the time. We only see this indirectly, by observing e.g. the incoming view categories in the clickstreams/WikiNav. In January, the largest incoming view categories at these articles were 7.19k clicks from Elvis and 6.52k search views to the MS place, and 1.28k search views of the tree. The 103 views total of the disambiguation page are completely out of whack with any of that, that's what makes it hard to assume that the 4.5% measurement is accurate. We can't really tell what's right without making some sort of a navigation change, which would provide us with different measurements.

  Note also there's always a variety of possibilities at play that we don't measure - there could be a contingent of readers who see the botany article while looking for something else and instead just stay and learn something - that's a good scenario because we imparted some more knowledge on them; likewise, there could be a contingent who see the botany article, but then just go back to the search engine and navigate to something else from there - that'd be a bad scenario, because they count towards the article's views yet we failed at actually getting them to learn about it. --Joy (talk) 07:30, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

  @Joy That most people are arriving via google or other search and then navigating away using the search engine is something I had not thought of. However, the article Tupelo is not the top Wikipedia result for that search on google, duckduckgo, or bing. Tupelo, Mississippi is the top result that links to Wikipedia and Tupelo is three spaces down under sites for the government of Tupelo, MS and Tupelo Park City. I think it unlikely that there is a significant amount of traffic arriving at the Tupelo page unintentionally both from the evidence we have and looking at where search engines place it in the results. Do you have a reason to think this is otherwise? 🌿MtBotany (talk) 15:10, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

  @MtBotany we don't know which search strings or other circumstances the readers used to get to the article, IOW we don't know if these views were from them just asking the engines for "tupelo" or something else entirely, so it could be both "tupelo tree" or maybe link number 7 from some wood carving search that is ostensibly unrelated, but relevant based on the searching user's session, location, tracking cookies, ... Even if two people do the exact same search string like "tupelo", that doesn't mean the same output in the same order will be shown to others. --Joy (talk) 15:32, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

  How does that support the case for moving the page? 🌿MtBotany (talk) 15:52, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

  Because we don't know if the 1.3k search-originated views a month at the botany article or the 6.5k search-originated views of the MS place were from people looking for the ambiguous form. If the reality is that e.g. Google resolved 1.2k queries for "tupelo" to the tree and 1k more queries for "tupelo" to the place, which is just ~15% of the total for the place, that's already a clear situation where there's no primary topic by usage. --Joy (talk) 19:00, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

  That's like saying, "we don't know, therefore aliens." While it is not complete, the available evidence clearly points towards Tupelo being the primary topic. Unless you can show me evidence from another move or somewhere else that the 4.5% is inaccurate the lack of complete evidence is not a reason to move this page. I am not convinced. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 17:12, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

  Indeed, Tupelo seems to be the primary topic for "Tupelo", but not for "Tupelo something else", with the latter self-ambiguating.This makes the case for the move very weak. —  Jts1882 | talk  20:28, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

  @MtBotany no, that would be the case if this was the sole reasoning, but it is clearly not, I'm also combining this with other information, as you can see from the start of the discussion above.

  The most recent examples where statistics flipped that I can remember right now include:

  • Talk:Charlotte#post-move where the hatnote got ~0.7% before the move, yet there were hints that it could do better if reorganized because of ~20% measurements related the primary redirect (which we sadly can't do with Tupelo), and then afterwards the previous presumed primary topic gets just ~21%
  • Talk:Ultra#post-move where the hatnote got ~2% before the move, and it was likewise moved, and afterwards the previously presumed primary topic gets just ~30%
  • Talk:Tete#post-move where the hatnote got ~11% before the move, and it was likewise moved, and afterwards the previously presumed primary topic gets just ~6%
  • Talk:Major#post-move where the previously discussed primary topic was moved after a lot of discussions, and afterwards it shows up with ~25% of reader interest.
  • Talk:Bold#post-move where the previous stats indicated up to ~20% interest in the hatnote, but after the move it's ~16% interest in the previously presumed primary topic

  There's a pattern evolving here, it looks like our ability to estimate how readers navigate is not exactly great, I wish I was just making this up but the cases keep piling on. (I'm going to continue collecting these at WT:D.) --Joy (talk) 15:15, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

  I don't understand the point you are making about the Charlotte move.

  I looked at Charlotte (disambiguation) page views Jan & Feb 2023 and the new disambiguation page at Charlotte page views Jan & Feb 2024. That seems like it is going in the opposite direction of what is wanted with views up 47% from 2714 to 3999. Is not the point of a move to get more users to the page they want and not to a disambiguation page? 🌿MtBotany (talk) 22:24, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

  So we had a primary redirect, which received X monthly views, but we only saw at best (20% of X) clicks on the hatnote. This nominally sounded like 80% of the readers were happy with navigation. However, once we changed the navigation to show these people a choice, we did not observe 80% of them continuing to read about the city, rather only about 20% did.

  About the second question, I don't quite understand what you mean, because it's logical that fewer people saw the disambiguation page a year ago as it was behind another click (in the hatnote). Likewise, there could be a myriad reasons why there's a difference in raw incoming views at a title a year apart, not all reader traffic follows a strict pattern. --Joy (talk) 20:40, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

• Support as proposed - origin is irrelevant. Usage and long-term significance are the criteria. Red Slash 05:42, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

  @Red Slash If that were the only argument I would entirely agree with you, but what about the low number of people using the redirect page in comparison with Tupelo? Only 4.5% of the views compared with the Tupelo page. I would expect it to be at least above 10% if this were a case of no primary topic. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 17:16, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Oppose. The three given "more prominent examples are already naturally disambiguated. This move does not serve as an improvement, and the rational that "but google" is irrelevant.--Kevmin § 17:51, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

There seem to be an increasing number of these sorts of comments at RM. The fact that other uses are "naturally disambiguated" is completely irrelevant to primary topic. Always has been. It's just not how we handle disambiguation. The fact that Ludwig van Beethoven is naturally disambiguated does not mean that the next most prominent usage, Beethoven (film), should be moved to Beethoven! -- Necrothesp (talk) 10:24, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT. Crouch, Swale (talk) 19:28, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

I think you may be misunderstanding the point I was making. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:12, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose. The dab page is a small list of not so notable entries and partial title matches. —  AjaxSmack  02:09, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

  @AjaxSmack the places like the city in Mississippi are not partial title matches per WP:PTM, there's plenty of references to them as simply "Tupelo" even if it's also natural to have them disambiguated. --Joy (talk) 22:49, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

• Support. Though there are only a few true title matches on the DAB page, one of them is Tupelo, Mississippi, whose high view count casts a pretty significant doubt on the plant's primary topic status. I'm hesitant to consider the city in Mississippi as PTOPIC either; instead, I agree with the nom that letting the DAB page take the primary title is best. For the tree's article, I concur with the suggestions that Tupelo (tree) is the best option; it's a concise and clear disambiguator. I think the Nyssa genus makes for a suboptimal article title, since the tree has various uses outside of the botany field, and thus a vernacular name is advisable if possible under WP:NCFLORA. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 19:18, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

I've requested closure for this at Wikipedia:Closure requests. Natg 19 (talk) 21:51, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Relisting comment: Relisting for a last chance to generate a clearer consensus. BD2412 T 18:50, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Support per joy’s comments and others suggesting the move to tupelo (tree) Pdubs.94 (talk) 05:53, 3 April 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

In May, there were 566 views and the clickstreams[2] showed (clickstream-enwiki-2024-05.tsv):

• Tupelo Tupelo_(tree) link 81 (~14% / ~42%)
• Tupelo Tupelo,_Mississippi link 80 (~14% / ~41%)
• Tupelo Tupelo_(song) link 17 (~3% / ~9%)
• Tupelo Tupelo,_Arkansas link 16 (~3% / ~8%)
• total: 194 to 4 identified destinations

--Joy (talk) 11:15, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

In June, with 474 views, clickstream-enwiki-2024-06.tsv showed:

• Tupelo Tupelo_(tree) link 133 (~28% / ~62%)
• Tupelo Tupelo,_Mississippi link 63 (~13% / ~30%)
• Tupelo Tupelo_(song) link 17 (~4% / ~8%)
• total: 213 to 3 identified destinations

--Joy (talk) 08:43, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Recent page views[3] show a slightly declining traffic. Outgoing:

July 437 views, clickstream-enwiki-2024-07.tsv:

• Tupelo Tupelo_(tree) link 136 (~31% / ~60%)
• Tupelo Tupelo,_Mississippi link 76
• Tupelo Tupelo_(song) link 13
• total: 225 to 3 identified destinations

August, 434 views, clickstream-enwiki-2024-08.tsv:

• Tupelo Tupelo_(tree) link 130 (~30% / ~59%)
• Tupelo Tupelo,_Mississippi link 76
• Tupelo Tupelo_(song) link 16
• total: 222 to 3 identified destinations

Note that I didn't include filtered clickstreams, and August WikiNav shows 50 or ~11%. --Joy (talk) 14:06, 5 September 2024 (UTC)