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Talk:Myron (given name)

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Requested move 23 December 2024

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– The given name is the primary topic. How many people know about the ancient Greek sculptor? Clarityfiend (talk) 05:25, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Per WP:DPT, the reader interest can be gauged with some stats:
The sculptor's article gets 75/day, so it's already surpassed by 467/day for Myron Rolle, 144/day for Myron Scholes, 124/day for Myron Floren, 122/day for Myron Boadu, 108/day for Myron Mixon, 100/day for Myron Ebell, 87/day for Myron Healey. I for one have no idea who these people are, but it seems fairly clear that the average reader will recognize this as a name of many notable people, not a mononymous reference to a single person, even if significant. Trying to force readers to read this and then click twice to get to the rest is just bad navigation.
There's also chrism saying myron is a synonym, so some of the 185/day there may also be relevant (sadly the topical redirects weren't in use here until now).
WikiNav for November shows 104 identified clicks to the hatnote at #2, and 220 filtered clickstreams, so that's a tad suspect as well. WikiNav at the disambiguation list happens not to show anything other than further 58 clicks to the given name list, and 20 filtered clickstreams.
Looking at the all-time monthly page views for the top items - with logarithmic scale - it's apparent that the one big spike in hatnote traffic corresponded with interest in Rolle's article.
(Support) --Joy (talk) 08:43, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. There are two main ways of determining the primary topic for a title: long-term significance, and page views. By long-term significance, Myron the sculptor is clearly primary; for comparison I note that Homer the epic poet is also primary, despite the many places and persons named Homer, including Winslow Homer and Homer Simpson; and as with Myron, anyone who does not know or cannot remember the surname of a specific Homer would be led first to a disambiguation page for all uses, and from there to a list of other persons named Homer; so in other instances, expecting people who do not know the correct title of an article to make "two clicks" is acceptable.
By page views, the sculptor would also seem to be primary. His article receives more than four times the daily page views as the name list, and all of the subjects on the list contain natural disambiguation by virtue of their surnames. None are likely to be searched for mononymously. We know that people searching for "Myron" are not generally looking for other topics, because the disambiguation page linked in the hatnote at Myron receives hardly any traffic at all; if people who do not know the title of the article they are looking for cannot be bothered to click once, then it seems pointless to fret about them having to click twice—but the number of clicks could still be reduced to one, simply by adding the name list to the hatnote: Homer has three disambiguation pages in his hatnote. I also think that we can dismiss any concern about people searching for "myron (chrism)" since that redirect has received precisely three page views since it was created last April. P Aculeius (talk) 13:25, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The claim that the sculptor is clearly primary by long-term significance should be accompanied with some sort of an analysis beyond an assertion, because it's a complex comparison between one biography and dozens of them.
The comparison with Homer may or may not be relevant, because the topics are of distinctly different scale. For example if we look at a comparison of reader interest in Myron, Homer and Rodin, all mononymously known people, the difference is about 30 : 1 and about 10 : 1. Not everything that applies to Homer or Rodin necessarily applies to Myron when we're talking about differences of an order of magnitude.
You can't make these sorts of far-reaching claims on user interest with people searching for Myron, because our statistics do not distinguish people who land at Myron with distinct purposes. If you have a look at WikiNav first graph, it nicely illustrates how most of our traffic is at the Myron article comes either from external search engines, or from internal links inside the topic area (Discobulos, Polykleitos, etc), or from other-internal meaning other Wikimedia projects.
The largest of these categories, external search, is opaque to us, as the search engines don't tell us how they decided to guide that traffic to us. We can't know that all these readers came here with the expectation of reading about a primary topic for the term "Myron" or just came here because any number of characteristics of their search led them there. We can try to glean some insight from Google Trends here, for example with a search like this, where likewise there's little apparent correlation between general traffic for the search term "Myron" and the traffic they identified was for the sculptor topic, and big spikes of interest seem to correspond to some other people with the name. And at the same time they warn against comparing search terms and topics, so who knows how reliable this is, too.
At the same time, all three of these categories of incoming traffic are at least mutable by us - in the sense that if we change the title of the article where the sculptor is described, all of this traffic will soon switch over to wherever that is, because the search engines will learn that, and we'll update the internal links to disambiguate them.
Beyond those three, there's a small uncertain category of other-empty (where the user browsers don't tell us where they come from), and a small uncertain category of filtered (clickstreams that are anonymized). To figure out what these kinds of users want, our system has no better tool than to present them with a simple list where we can try to measure further.
Bad navigation patterns prejudice user navigation - it's not that users cannot be bothered to click once - we're actively dissuading them from doing that by presenting a layout that effectively tries to convince them that all other meanings are way less relevant. Again, we just can't make far-reaching claims about readers when we already decided what to show them first.
The number of clicks on the redirect myron (chrism) is likewise not indicative of much because it wasn't even linked from myron (disambiguation) until yesterday. Just because a redirect exists, that doesn't mean anyone will use it, especially not such a relatively contrived one. --Joy (talk) 17:26, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose 2nd, support 1st. No clear primary topic so disambiguation is best. Crouch, Swale (talk) 19:57, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Disambiguate. I tend to be skeptical of Joy's argument for WP:PTM reasons, but in this case even the other articles on the disambiguation page are together getting more views than the sculptor (even though the latter has a primary-topic advantage). The long-term significance argument is real, but I don't think it's enough to get us to a primary topic on its own. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 00:59, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per long-term historical significance, and none of the other people listed are notably known by their first name. Myron is a major sculptor, and his Discobolus alone is reason enough for the primary designation. Also per P Aculeius's reasoning and analysis. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:18, 1 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    This is the second assertion of long-term significance, but I'm still not seeing a clear rationale for primary topic status specifically.
    Let me try to illustrate with another example - when I enter "myron" into Google Books, like this, I don't get the sculptor on the first page at all, which really shouldn't happen for primary topics. On the second page, at #12 I finally get a book on history of Greece, but it talks of a couple of people named Myron from the 7th century BC Sicyon, not the later sculptor. Then more random people, finally at #16 a book talks of Myron and Kresilas. Then more random people, and at #19 and #20 it's the 7th c. people again.
    Okay, maybe something is horribly, horribly wrong with that book search engine, perhaps I'm running into a bug. I tried myron greek to try to weed out the others, and this finally gave me the sculptor at #1 and #2, but #3 was a biographical dictionary that mentioned four different Myrons from ancient Greece before going on to describe the sculptor at length.
    So I can't escape the conclusion that the term 'Myron' was ambiguous even in antiquity, let alone now.
    Just in case, I tried checking what the readers get from other online references for the same search:
    • At https://www.britannica.com/search with the query=myron (I can't paste the exact URL because of some blacklist, d'oh) it lists the sculptor in a framed entry at the top, then six other people, then Discobolus, then another person, then Myron of Priene the historian from 3rd century BC, then another person, and then Chrism.
    • At https://www.encyclopedia.com/gsearch?q=myron I get five random people, then the sculptor, and then more random people.
    • At https://www.oxfordreference.com/search?q=myron&searchBtn=Search&isQuickSearch=true there's an overview entry on top for the sculptor, then an item about the name, then six entries about the sculptor, then an entry about the 3rd century BC historian, then four more entries about the sculptor, then five about random people, a rhyming dictionary entry, another entry about the name itself explaining how the early Christians made the name popular, and an English dictionary.
    As others don't seem to be doing the short-circuiting the way we are, even while generally recognizing the importance of the sculptor, maybe we shouldn't try to be more Catholic than the Pope, either. --Joy (talk) 00:46, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Joy, good analysis, but the point is that Myron is known as "Myron" while the other Myron's are known by their full names. The sculptor seems primary for the one-word title, Myron, similar to Elvis's long-term historical importance but in the field of ancient sculpture. Randy Kryn (talk) 02:26, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Mononymous use is certainly significant, but it's not solely determinative because there's scopes to it - I think we should weigh it according to how broad the scope of readers might be.
    I don't think anyone would be surprised to have to click the first entry in the list to get to the sculptor, neither readers who are well aware of ancient Greek artists nor others.
    The singer, by comparison, is probably much more broadly known (illustration of orders of magnitude higher reader interest), so the risk of surprising readers by not providing a primary redirect is probably a fair bit higher. This isn't necessarily absolutely fair, but it seems fairer than not weighing that. --Joy (talk) 16:07, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Long-term significance does not lessen in time. Elivs=Myron, of course, is an outlandish example, because Elvis is still remembered by many alive while he was alive. As well as by history. That Myron achieved his significance in the timeline of the human race a bit before Elvis does not lessen that significance, hence the term and the criteria. Randy Kryn (talk) 23:22, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Sure, but that still doesn't address the scope issue I mentioned. At their respective times, within their respective fields of endeavour, let's say they were both superstars. However, a huge chunk of the total population knows about popular music, knows about Elvis Presley, and associates the given name with him. The same probably can't be said for Myron, because it's less likely that the average encyclopedia reader is that well acquainted with ancient sculpture. With regard to the passage of time, I would expect that a diminishing amount of the total population associates the given name Elvis with that person, and we eventually trend toward dropping that primary redirect, not the other way around. --Joy (talk) 14:49, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Hopefully, per long-term historical significance, Elvis will be Elvis for thousands of years too. "Long-term" is the key phrase, not "Kind-of-long-term". Randy Kryn (talk) 15:05, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Well, if the same name continues to be used for new notable topics with the passage of time, the relative significance of a topic's contribution to the body of relevant work under their name would tend to drop, so it necessarily becomes harder for a topic's notability and educational value to endure and eclipse all other topics associated with that term. Indeed, that seems to be what happened with the saint called Elvis? --Joy (talk) 18:12, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Myron (the sculptor) gets 54 pageviews per day[1], as compared to 19 for the given name disambig[2] and 4 for the general disambig[3]. There seems to be no need to change this, also taking into account long-term significance. Fram (talk) 16:10, 2 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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