Talk:Bento (disambiguation)

Requested move 9 August 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: not moved. Strong consensus against moving Bento to Bento (food). The idea of moving said article to Bento box was brought up, and enjoyed some support, but the move proposed here had clear consensus against. If Joy wants to start a second RM proposing Bento —> Bento box, they are welcome to do so, but I think that's outside the scope of this discussion. To avoid scope creep of this discussion, I'm closing it now. Thanks, (closed by non-admin page mover) Cremastra (talk) 18:00, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

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• Bento (disambiguation) → Bento
• Bento → Bento (food)

– no clear WP:PRIMARYTOPIC per page views [1] Joeykai (talk) 04:51, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

• It's not a food, so just as we would be unlikely to title an article Lunchbox (food) or Egg carton (food), another disambiguator is necessary if the article is to be moved. Dekimasuよ! 05:17, 9 August 2024 (UTC)
• Strong oppose: By historical significance, and by what the term would ordinarily mean when used by itself without context, the current position of the eating-related topic is correct. Second Life fails WP:DABMENTION and "Bento" is not a reasonable alternative title for it, so it doesn't really belong in the list at all (its Bento was apparently some minor subtopic that's no longer mentioned at all). The Benthos article also does not mention "Bento" (and it's just a "See also" subject on the dab page). The footballer's popularity is WP:RECENTISM – he's a current player and there is no indication he will still be especially interesting to readers in 20+ years. The topic in the Keyboard Cat article is not the main subject of the article and its popularity is also recentism (Bento was apparently the second in a series of three Keyboard Cats so far, and it died six years ago and was rapidly replaced – and the topic is the meme, not the cat itself). The topic in the OpenDoc article is not the main subject of the article (Bento is just a former name of some element of that defunct format and is mentioned only once in the article) and its popularity is also recentism. Ben-To is not spelled "Bento" and its popularity is likely to fade, and the "bento" discussed in that manga series is the type of food box. The database is a discontinued computer application that will continue to fade in reader interest. Et cetera. The rest of the subjects in that list are getting 5 views per day or less (and the book publisher's logo is a depiction of a bento box, so it is obviously derivative of that meaning, as are many of the other topics). Massviews do not consider whether a subject is the main topic of an article or a minor subtopic, and do not consider historical significance. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 16:12, 9 August 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose Another case of Apple vs. Apple Inc., where we can and should ignore the pageview statistics. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 17:14, 9 August 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose per BarrelProof and King of Hearts. Bento is the primary topic by long term significance and close enough so in terms of page views. Skynxnex (talk) 20:00, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

  I think Joy's suggestion (moving to bento box and leaving a primary redirect) could be fine. That natural disambiguation is better than any parenthetical one I've seen or thought of. Skynxnex (talk) 15:13, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

• Support, no PRIMARYTOPIC. Not sure why the food would be a primary topic over the relatively common Portuguese name.--Ortizesp (talk) 02:06, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

I'll give you two reasons. Let's ignore any differences about historical persistence and prevalence for the moment (although I think I could make an argument that more people – even English-speaking people – routinely encounter the meals than the people with the name). One reason is that, based on the view data given above, readers are more than 100× more likely to read the article about the meal than the article about the name. The second is that there is very little we can say about the name. That articles is only two sentences long, plus two boring-to-read and short lists of 11 people with the given name and 3 people with the surname. Compare that to the Bento article, 27 kbytes long and rich with photos and discussions of various issues. It's a much more interesting article, and readers intuitively know it's likely to be that way. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 17:36, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

• Per WP:DPT, let's have a look at the statistics of all topics named Bento:

• All-time mass views of all topics linked from Bento (disambiguation)
• All-time mass views of all topics linked from Bento (name)

It does seem like navigation is prejudiced here in favor of topics that aren't naturally disambiguated: the Bento article gets 622 views/day yet Paulo Bento gets 312/day, Bento 47/day, Rui Bento 23/day etc, but it takes no less than two clicks to navigate to those from a lookup of "Bento", which is just going to be bad for those kinds of navigation outcomes. The software gets 27/day, too. That's already 409, and there's some long tail, so the numbers are generally comparable.

It's doubtful that the average English reader associates this term strongly enough with the Japanese topic for it to be overwhelming.

I found it interesting that our article about the Japanese topic says the term "bento box" is actually the common one in English-speaking contexts, while just "bento" is more originally Japanese.

I think it would make most sense to move this article to bento box which would appear to fit English usage better, leave a primary redirect pointing there for at least a few months until the traffic patterns settle.

Afterwards, we'll be able to compare the amount of views of the Bento redirect with the amount of clicks on the hatnote. This would give us a more accurate reading of where the reader interest really lies. --Joy (talk) 10:32, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

I think you may be misreading the article. As far as I can tell, it does not say that "bento box" is the common name in English. It just says that "Outside Japan, the term bento box may be used". "May be used" is different from "is usually used". The statement is also unsourced. It may also be important not to conflate the box with the meal. I don't see a problem here that needs fixing. The footballer's popularity is merely recentism. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 00:08, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

Well, there may be something to that statement, though, there could be a reason some editor noted it.

Let's have a look at Google Books Ngrams for the terms "bento", "Bento" and the most common adjoning words for them. Mentions in written works should be a reasonable approximation of average encyclopedia reader interest...?

Even if we remove the 16th century data points as an outlier, and just look at the later data, it still looks interesting. The uppercase term seems to start appearing more consistently in sources in the early 19th century. There doesn't seem to be much in bento#History that would explain that.

The popularity of the lowercase term seems to start to rise about 25-30 years ago, and this does match the history as described (Bentos regained popularity in the 1980s, ...). The term bento box is the next most commonly used one like that. It's interesting that the phrase "Japanese bento" is one of the more popular ones, indicating a natural disambiguation.

The popularity of the uppercase term likewise starts to match the Japanese term better since then, but its overall pattern is distinctly different. Various references to São Bento, which is apparently Portuguese for Saint Benedict, are found for centuries before, esp. in 20th- and 21st-century works. The most common references to another person are to Bento Gonçalves, which could be a number of such topics, as well as Bento Pereira, which looks to be the same (I quickly found three Brazilian historical figures on Portuguese Wikipedia that could plausibly match that, but there's no proper index to confirm that).

I tried doing a Google Books search for "bento" in books from 1500-1750, but the search engine seems to just give a lot of the same Portuguese terms and works, with the uppercase "Bento" instead.

Doing the simple search for present-day results gives a lot of cookbook results, which aren't really quality sources either. Technically they're in English, but it's just a lot of promotional fodder. Regardless, some examples of cookbooks found there include this one from 2014 (60 pages) which uses the terms "bento" and "bento box" interchangeably, or this one from 2008 (70 pages) which consistently uses "bento box".

The most popular footballer seems to have been active in international competitions (where the average English reader might have become more likely to encounter them) since the early 1990s, and since the early 2010s as a coach.

Looking at it like this, it seems there's some amount of WP:Recentism in both the Japanese and Portuguese cases.

Regardless, it seems more likely than not that the average reader would recognize the uppercase term as distinct from the lowercase one which is usually associated with the "box".

We can't distinguish uppercase and lowercase singular in Mediawiki, however, so handling that navigation issue with disambiguation is the next best thing. --Joy (talk) 05:38, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose. Clear primary topic by long-term significance. -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:36, 13 August 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.