Talk:Belgique (disambiguation)

Requested move 8 April 2020

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: No consensus to move. Any editor who believes this dab page should be deleted is welcome to open an WP:AFD nomination. (non-admin closure) Iffy★Chat -- 19:06, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

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Belgique (disambiguation) → Belgique – Belgique currently redirects to Belgium, which is fair enough as that's the country's name in French and the only other thing with the name is the unincorporated community of Belgique, Missouri. Even leaving aside the question of how likely it is for the French term to be encountered in English sources, I would still argue that – whether there's a primary topic or not – it will be better overall for the dab page to be at the base title, if only so that a major article like Belgium won't need a hatnote to an obscure hamlet just because of a seldom-used redirect. The redirect has about ten incoming mainspace links, but as far as I can see they all seem to be artefacts from translations from the French wikipedia. – Uanfala (talk) 13:39, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose Belgium is clearly the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. KingSkyLord (talk | contribs) 14:03, 8 April 2020 (UTC)
• Strongly Oppose. When someone types 'Belgique' (the official french name of the country) in the search engine, they are probably in most cases looking for the article about the country and not about an unknown community in Missouri. N.Hoxha (talk) 14:52, 8 April 2020 (UTC)
  • We can't know for sure what these people are looking for, but we know exactly how many of them there are. For last year, the redirect Belgique received 7 hits per day on average. This contrasts with over 7,200 daily hits for the target article [1]. What these numbers mean is that for every reader who may get where they want to go a little bit quicker because of the redirect, there are more than a thousand people who will have to go through a hatnote they do not need. – Uanfala (talk) 15:05, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

But the country of Belgium is the primary topic, so I'm not sure it's a good idea. N.Hoxha (talk) 15:50, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

That doesn't follow at all. All we know is 7 people per day hit "Belgique". If n of them want Belgium then they're there, which means 7-n go on to click the hatnote with an extra click. If there's a 2-dabs page instead, all 7 have to click an entry. Since 7-n is obviously less than 7, more readers get to where they want without an extra click if you have a primary redirect and a hatnote. (In fact, more readers get to where they want without an extra click if you have an arbitrary redirect and a hatnote, and for this reason, 2-dab pages are rarely a good idea: everyone who lands there is a loser.) Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 07:38, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

There are two points here:

• Your argument is generally directed against WP:TWODABS. This has been debated many times before, and the usual response is that in the absence of a dab page, n people might get where they want but the remaining 7-n will have to first wait for the massive article to load before they're able to navigate away using the hatnote; that's a greater inconvenience than that brought upon the remaining n readers were the tiny dab page to be at the primary title
• My point was about something else: if Belgique, which receives 7 hits a day, remains targeted to Belgium, which receives 7,000, then the article will need to have a hatnote catering to the needs of whatever subset of these 7 people are looking for the other topic. Hatnotes occupy prime real estate at the top of articles, and Belgium already has another, unavoidable, hatnote for Belgium (disambiguation), so clutter is a factor. Keeping a primary redirect means saving the inconvenience of using the dab page for the fewer than 7 people who are looking for the country, at the expense of adding the inconvenience of having to go through a hatnote they don't need for the 7,000 who view the article. I'm not equating the two types of inconvenience, there's obviously different weighting (otherwise hatnotes would never exist), but this definitely becomes an issue if the redirect is very obscure and the article very popular. – Uanfala (talk) 11:35, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I see now, thank you. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 09:16, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

• Comment. I would support deletion of the Belgique (disambiguation) page per WP:ONEOTHER, especially since a hatnote atop the article Belgium has been directing users — "Belgique" redirects here. For place in the U.S., see Belgique, Missouri. —Roman Spinner (talk • contribs) 01:29, 9 April 2020 (UTC)
• Support move as proposed. As this is the English-language Wikipedia, I find it hard to say that there is a primary topic in English for the word, "Belgique". BD2412 T 18:00, 9 April 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose. See my reply above. I would also support the deletion of this page as not required per WP:2DABS. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 07:38, 10 April 2020 (UTC)
• Support per WP:IAR and Uanfala's point in the thread above. Yes, Belgium is way more important than Belgique, Missouri, but it is also way more important than Belgique - so much so that concerns about clutter on the main "Belgium" page override the desire to be technically correct and identify the primary topic of a term which is barely searched in English. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 04:11, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
• Support per traffic stats, which support King of Hearts conclusion (and doesn't even require ignoring rules). -- JHunterJ (talk) 16:05, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

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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.