Talk:Bold

Requested move 23 December 2023

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. Consensus seems to be that a move is warranted at this time, and to track DAB views afterwards. (closed by non-admin page mover) Skarmory (talk • contribs) 23:42, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

---

Bold (disambiguation) → Bold – "Bold" has 2 primary meanings, when text is in bold which redirects to the Emphasis (typography) article which has 1,166 views and MOS:BOLD refers to. The other is Boldness which has 1,564 views and which WP:BOLD refers to. Both of these meanings appear to have similar usage and long-term significance in the real world and on Wikipedia, even though we may put text in bold more often we talk about being bold commonly and the "WP" shortcuts are significantly more common than the "MOS" shorts. "WP:BOLD" has 154,300 links while "MOS:BOLD" only has 2,252 links. The decoy has 790 views, the band has 359, the detergent has 266, the place in St Helens has 94, the Angie & Debbie Winans album has 38, the horse has 37, the book has 33, the TV channel has 18, the surname has 15, the EP has 9 and the river has 4. Its also interesting no note that the "Bold" redirect has 224 views but the DAB page has 191[[1]][[2]] which suggests most people hadn't wanted the typography. Google returns the dictionary definition for boldness first then the typography. Images and Books also seems to be split. Crouch, Swale (talk) 17:24, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

• Support I don't see the font face being notable over the concept of being bold. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 18:57, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
• The long-term significance argument is pretty obvious; a word with no Flesch-Kincaid grade score and whose common etymology gives rise to these two sets of dictionary meanings is pretty obviously ambiguous to the average reader.
  By usage, we can look at the comparison of traffic to the terms, which indicates a clear possibility of ambiguity that isn't recognized well by our current navigation setup.
  From clickstreams, we know that current destination for bold gets ~2k views a month and this hatnote is on top, though not with a lot of traffic, and some of it actually comes back there which could also be in part due to other disambiguated terms. Meanwhile the other destination gets ~2.3k views a month.
  Another person noticed this issue in 2016 at Talk:Bold, and the history of the Bold redirect is somewhat messy as well, with attempts to change this in 2006, 2011, 2014, when it was protected (in retrospect, that was perhaps too permanent of a solution for a single student abuse incident).
  I'd give it a shot, have the first two links to these destinations per MOS:DABCOMMON, and let's see how it affects reader navigation then. (Support) Worst case we can revert based on clearer usage data. (The ambiguity in meanings between namespaces is also indicative, though the choices of probably a handful of editors are not statistically relevant.) --Joy (talk) 12:08, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

  Removing a 9 year old protection seems like a good idea as we should only protect when necessary however DAB pages (or redirects if this isn't moved) tend to need less editing from new users and the title "Bold" is an obvious target for test edits and vandalism so if these happen I'd just reprotect the title. Crouch, Swale (talk) 17:47, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

  No, let's cross that bridge when we actually get there, cf. WP:PREEMPTIVE. --Joy (talk) 20:25, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

  It occurred to me I didn't compare the clickstreams in the Emphasis hatnote with the views of the redirect "Bold". A look into the archive shows the former are:

  • clickstream-enwiki-2023-08.tsv:Emphasis_(typography) Bold_(disambiguation) link 51
  • clickstream-enwiki-2023-09.tsv:Emphasis_(typography) Bold_(disambiguation) link 58
  • clickstream-enwiki-2023-10.tsv:Emphasis_(typography) Bold_(disambiguation) link 59

  So the comparisons are:

  • August 51 / 335 = ~15%
  • September 58 / 346 = ~17%
  • October 59 / 323 = ~18%

  If this was <10% I'd say it was a good primary redirect (IOW if an order of magnitude more readers are happy where they came and never click the hatnote). Like this, it's a bit suspect, so we should give full disambiguation a shot and do the same measurement later to see what happened.

  The comparison above is not exact because of the presence of other incoming redirects and organic traffic coming to Bold (disambiguation) anyway, the former of which we can measure exactly so perhaps the ratios are more like this:

  • August 51 / (335 - 12 - 11) = ~16%
  • September 58 / (346 - 22 - 12) = ~18.5%
  • October 59 / (323 - 13 - 16) = ~20%

  The measurements of the organic traffic don't tell us much about the nature of those views, we just know that there were 98 views from search engines, 40 with empty referrers and 29 from other Wikimedia projects. --Joy (talk) 09:40, 28 December 2023 (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

https://wikinav.toolforge.org/?language=en&title=Bold now shows that in January '24, we had a total of 677 views of the list, and could then identify a total of 162 outgoing clickstreams (~24%). Of those, 107 went to boldface (~16% or ~66%), 34 to boldness (~5% or ~21%), 11 to band (<2% or ~7%), 10 to the medicinal imaging topic (<2% or ~6%), which is actually linked next to last in the other uses section.

Because the anonymization threshold is <10, presumably there's a bit of scattering of outgoing traffic we're not seeing, too. Of the two top-line numbers, the previous presumed primary topic is high above the threshold so it's fair to assume that number is unaffected.

So with that being at only ~16% of incoming clicks while being the #1 link in the list, that's an indication that it probably wasn't a bad idea to disambiguate. It's interesting how the numbers flipped so drastically. --Joy (talk) 15:27, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

In February '24, there were 769 incoming views, 150 total identifiable outgoing, of which 113 to typography (~14.7%), 23 to boldness (~3%), 14 to detergent (~1.8%). --Joy (talk) 21:08, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

All-time monthly page views indicate a spike in the viewership since disambiguation. --Joy (talk) 21:18, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

In March, there were a total of 741 incoming views, 154 views of the Bold (typography) redirect (mostly used from here so that's up to ~20.8%), and

clickstream-enwiki-2024-03.tsv:

• Bold Emphasis_(typography) link 136 (~18.4%)
• Bold Boldness link 23 (~3.1%)
• total: 159

--Joy (talk) 15:11, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Interesting. I'm guessing a fair number of readers go to wiktionary or are satisfied by the short definitions given, and then maybe the clickstream doesn't properly track the links to WP:BOLD or MOS:BOLD? Those feel like they should have more clicks than they do, especially with the amount of people taking this redirect and not going to one of the entries on the DAB. Skarmory (talk • contribs) 14:47, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

@Skarmory yes, I don't think the Wiktionary link is tracked. It sounds like it's a bit on the lower side, but note that it's a somewhat long list, it's plausible that some readers just look for an overview, and we definitely don't see the long tail (e.g. each of the other links could have a dozen outgoing clickstreams but we wouldn't see it due to anonymization). I also posted the last two months below. It looks like we might want to make changes to try to improve navigation to the detergent article, because readers consistently find it, even as it is buried in the bottom section as item #4 out of 12. --Joy (talk) 10:43, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

I split up the other uses section now, let's see if it affected the stats (most likely for July onwards, as most of June is with the old layout). --Joy (talk) 10:51, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

In April, we saw 940 views, and clickstream-enwiki-2024-04.tsv showed:

• Bold Emphasis_(typography) other 114 (~12.1%)
• Bold Boldness other 32 (~3.4%)
• Bold Bold_(detergent) other 13
• total: 159 to 3 identified destinations

In May, we saw 930 views, and clickstream-enwiki-2024-05.tsv showed:

• Bold Emphasis_(typography) link 133 (~14.3%)
• Bold Boldness link 24 (~2.6%)
• Bold Main_Page other 10
• Bold Bold_(detergent) link 10
• total: 177 to 4 identified destinations

--Joy (talk) 10:39, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

Here the same stats for June and July:

721 views, clickstream-enwiki-2024-06.tsv:

• Bold Emphasis_(typography) link 111 (~15.4%)
• Bold Boldness link 29 (~4%)
• Bold Bold_(detergent) link 14 (~2%)
• total: 154 to 3 identified destinations

914 views, clickstream-enwiki-2024-07.tsv:

• Bold Emphasis_(typography) link 115 (~12.6%)
• Bold Boldness link 21 (~2.3%)
• total: 136 to 2 identified destinations

Looks like the patterns are pretty stable, but so much of the long tail is close to (and probably below) the anonymization threshold of 10, it's hard to see much. --Joy (talk) 09:49, 19 August 2024 (UTC)