Talk:Ghost train

Merge

merge this with Ghost train for crying out loud. DreamGuy 05:58, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Beirut ghost tram

The Lebanese civil war only started in 1975, so it's unlikely that the Lebanese rail network was lost during the civil war in the 1960's. The story seems a bit dodgy anyhow. References would be good. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.114.244.158 (talk) 20:39, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

I've actually heard this story before, I think this entry was probably written by some kid without historical knowledge. The idea is that if you stand in the old square and around the old tram stations past ten o'clock that you'll hear a very loud trolley bell and a screech. That's all the info I have though.

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

No consensus to move. Vegaswikian (talk) 22:49, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Ghost train (spiritual entity) → List of ghost trains — Relisted. Vegaswikian (talk) 22:42, 30 November 2010 (UTC) per WP:List#List articles & WP:LISTNAME - 86.180.255.89 (talk) 23:29, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

No I don't think so - for me, a "ghost train" is a fairground ride. This article is not a list of ghost trains as described in some other article called ghost train - it's an independent article (admittedly mostly consisting of a list) which deals with a different meaning of the term "ghost train". It might be possible to think of a better title, but I believe the one proposed here is worse.--Kotniski (talk) 12:48, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Ghost train is a dab page. For the fairground rides, see Dark ride. If there was to be a list of such rides, it would be named List of dark rides, not List of ghost trains. This isn't an article mostly consisting of a list of ghost trains, it's an article entirely consisting of a list of ghost trains. If there's a better title, specify it - otherwise move as proposed per WP:LISTNAME. 119.42.96.248 (talk) 06:34, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Requested move 3 April 2022

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 section.

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Result:
Moved. See consensus below to rename these pages as proposed. Thanks and kudos to editors for your input; good health to all! P.I. Ellsworth - ed. ^put'r there 07:28, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

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• Ghost train (folklore) → Ghost train
• Ghost train → Ghost train (disambiguation)

– Clear primary topic of the title at this capitalization. Virtually all other terms on the disambiguation page are at Ghost Train. BD2412 T 20:25, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose. That's not the case, BD2412. See the first four entries in Ghost train#Other uses, which also include Dark ride, Parliamentary train and Rear-inflow jet (lower-case "ghost train" is a synonym for all of these: the first two articles mention the term, the third one doesn't, but the fact is easy to verify online). I really can't see the weird paranormal thing as having more long-term significance than those three combined. Also, the Wikinav usage data for February shows that only 22% of the visitors to the dab page followed the link to this article, and even if you only restrict yourself to the four lower-case entries, the distribution – which for January was 52 for this article, 18 for the actual trains, 22 for the type of amusement ride, and 26 for the atmospheric phenomenon – clearly shows there's no primary topic with respect to usage. – Uanfala (talk) 21:09, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
  • The paranormal thing is the thing for which all the others are named, and none of them has "Ghost train" in their title. BD2412 T 21:13, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
    • It looks much more plausible that the other concepts have names formed out of the usual words "ghost" and "train" rather than deriving from a wacky folk belief (the ghost train in an amusement park is a train that lets you see ghosts, it's not a train that is a ghost, etc.). But regardless, etymology is irrelevant. Also irrelevant is which of the several synonyms the given articles will happen to use in their titles. When deciding if there's a primary topic for "X", we're not concerned with comparing the articles with "X" in their titles, what we should be comparing is the topics that "X" can refer to. – Uanfala (talk) 21:28, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
      • No, this is a question of what should occupy this title. If these other things were primarily known as a "ghost train", their title would be, e.g. Ghost train (ride) or Ghost train (Parliament) or Ghost train (jet). Nor are any of these things household terms, even at their current titles. There is precisely one thing that is primarily known as a "ghost train" in all lowercase terms, and if someone told you they had seen a ghost train, the one that would typically come to mind. BD2412 T 21:35, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
        • Will you also suggest that we should exclude the article United States from deciding the primary topic for America because it doesn't have "America" in its title? – Uanfala (talk) 22:12, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
          • Are you asking whether America should redirect to United States? Probably not, and for a long time it was a disambiguation page on its own. BD2412 T 00:24, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
• Support Per my previous bold move. This is the clear primary topic, with the theme park ride being based on the supernatural phenomenon, and only being a subtopic of a larger topic. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 07:44, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
• Support per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. Looking over the disambiguation page, this does seem to the the primary topic, as most other articles that share the name are derivative of this topic. The usage of the term for a dark ride is also not very common. Rreagan007 (talk) 17:56, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
• Weak Support per WP:GOOGLE. This is a tough one. I was going to close in support but Uanfala's argument gave me pause. Then I had a comment ready to make in support, and then I did a straight Google search which had me leaning to oppose. On the one hand it's highly likely people searching with "ghost train" are looking for the ride or any of the Ghost Train uses. On the other hand the page views indicate this folklore article gets far more hits than the dab page. But that just reflects how many people use outside searches to get to WP articles. Ultimately I'm supporting because of this Google search. According to Google stats, when you limit searching for "ghost train" to the English WP the top hit is this folklore page, then the dab page, then various Ghost Train uses, and Dark ride doesn't show up until the second page. So I'm confident most people searching with "ghost train" are looking for this article and it's the primary topic. If after six months we see the dab page is getting far more hits after the move, I'll be the first to argue this move needs to be revisited. --В²C ☎ 14:11, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

Search engine results and pageviews of course have their place as rough indicators of significance, but there's no need to use them for indirect guesses about usage on Wikipedia when we already have the exact data for that usage. We have it now because the dab page is at the base title and we can see how many people clicked on each link; this can't possibly get easier: if the article is moved, then it will be impossible to disentangle the sources of traffic and we'll be back in the territory of indirect inferences and guesses.

So, where's that data now? Normally, I'd give you a link to Wikinav, but it's of no use now because it shows the data for March, and that's completely muddled by the fallout from the (belatedly reverted) bold move of this page. For the data, you'd need to dig through the tables in the WP:Clickstream for earlier months. I've got the data for January at hand, here it is – it shows how many times during the month each of the links on the dab page was clicked on:

Destinations with >9 clicks for the month	Clicks	Percentage of clicks listed
Dark ride	22	7.6%
Death train (disambiguation)	18	6.3%
Ghost Train (1927 film)	10	3.5%
Ghost Train (2006 film)	24	8.3%
Ghost train (folklore)	52	18.1%
Ghost Train (TV series)	15	5.2%
Haunted Train	19	6.6%
Nazi ghost train	17	5.9%
Parliamentary train	18	6.3%
Phantom train	14	4.9%
Rear-inflow jet	26	9%
The Ghost Train (1931 film)	10	3.5%
The Ghost Train (1941 film)	28	9.7%
The Ghost Train (play)	15	5.2%

Only 18% of the clicks are for the proposed primary topic. You can make the analysis more rigorous by taking into account the existence of links with 9 or fewer clicks for the month (they don't make it into the published dataset for privacy reasons), by allowing for the redirects to the dab page [1], or by filtering out traffic for the dab "See also" entries – whatever you do, you're not going to get substantially different results in this case. The most drastic attempt to make the data look more favourable to the proposal can be done by discarding the articles in title case ("Ghost Train"). There's not much reason to do that (readers mostly ignore case differences when searching), but even if you do, then among the 4 generic lower-case topics listed above, the proposed primary topic won't get more than 44% of the clicks.

Whichever way you can possibly look at the data, the proposed primary topic gets a minority of the usage on Wikipedia. – Uanfala (talk) 15:22, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

I consider the dab page click results to be practically useless because they’re biased towards people who didn’t find the page they’re seeking, almost all via external browser. So a user Google’s for “ghost train” and the first WP hit they get is this page. They come here and either they’re satisfied or they hit the hatnote link to the dab page. So the click stats on the dab page are missing most of the users who found the folklore page they were seeking. I might be wrong but I doubt it. We’ll know six months after the move. —- — Preceding unsigned comment added by Born2cycle (talk • contribs) 23:19, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't think I completely get the picture, В²C. What sort of data should we look at in 6 months, and how are we going to determine usage then? – Uanfala (talk) 23:43, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

Just compare page views here to dab page views. Obviously if the dab page is getting anywhere near the hits the page at the base name is getting, this is not the primary topic. —В²C ☎ 04:42, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

Oh, but that's not going to happen. The overwhelming majority of an article's traffic comes from incoming links or external searches (not from readers searching on Wikipedia), so an article will always get at least an order of magnitude more traffic than the corresponding dab page. There's no useful data that you can extract from comparing the two (see WP:PPT).

You made a fair point earlier about readers who find what they're looking for without the aid of the dab page. I don't think there's a way to find out how many of them there are (though I don't expect the ratios for them to be very different from what we see from the clickstream). I don't think they are relevant here: these users have already found what they were looking for regardless of what primary topic decisions we've made. And as for your earlier point about using Google: the ordering of Google results doesn't necessarily correspond to preferences among Wikipedia readers, but if that data is going to be taken into account, then we need to bear in mind that Google personalises search results (see for example the same search you performed earlier but this time with a search engine that doesn't do that: [2]: the first result is not the folklore article but the dab page); and if you don't explicitly specify Wikipedia in your search query you'd get different results (on both engines, what I see in first place is not the folklore article, but the 1941 film). – Uanfala (talk) 13:15, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

With Google add &pws=0 to the search url to depersonalize. I get folklore on top with DDG results. My point stands. If we make a move in the wrong direction in terms of primary topic then we’ll see a significant jump in page views on the dab page. If we don’t see such a jump… no harm; no foul. —В²C ☎ 18:19, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

You're suggesting that it's possible for a disambiguation page to start getting more views after no longer being at the primary title? How can that happen? – Uanfala (talk) 19:15, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

Well, everyone who used to get to it by searching for “ghost train” who wasn’t looking for the folklore article will still get to the dab page via the hatnote link. So maybe not more but not significantly fewer if so few are looking for the folklore use. But I expect a significant drop and no significant drop in views of the folklore page. If so, that will indicate fewer are being needlessly sent to the dab page who should be sent directly to the page they’re seeking: the folklore page. —В²C ☎ 09:25, 23 April 2022 (UTC)

So, we can only expect the views for the dab page to go down, and to the extent that the future pageviews may allow interpretation, the reduction would be by about 20% (the proportion of visitors currently seeking the folklore article). Still, I don't understand why we should move the pages around and wait months, just so that we can get some indirect indication when we already possess the hard facts. – Uanfala (talk) 14:02, 23 April 2022 (UTC)

We will also be able to compare dab page view counts to this folklore page view counts. As long as the latter dominates we’re not causing problems for significant numbers. Bigger fish… —В²C ☎ 23:00, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

@Born2cycle: The terms are also useless because we don't know that any people are coming to "Ghost train" looking for non-matching titles like "Dark ride" or "Rear-inflow jet". Certainly "Death train (disambiguation)" doesn't belong in the calculation. BD2412 T 23:49, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

I've notified WikiProject Disambiguation of this discussion. – Uanfala (talk) 23:48, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

• Support not for any of the above reasons but for more long-term educational significance. Red Slash 19:20, 26 April 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose not broken so don't fix. Check newspaper articles: "ghost train" is generic as can be seen in newspapers from rides such as Thorpe Park in Surrey, or steam society Halloween rides such as https://www.northnorfolknews.co.uk/things-to-do/north-norfolk-railway-ghost-train-experience-this-month-8395480 - there is no primary here, and removing (folklore) will not benefit readers. In ictu oculi (talk) 08:16, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

  in the Russian version of the story about 1994, at the Polova station (Irkutsk region) after 23:00, a person saw an old train with an inscription in yellow Latin letters slowly passing nearby. I remembered the conductor in a brown uniform and a hat with a band, there was a collar fastened to his shirt. I noticed several people in the windows . The arrival of the train was not announced, it was on someone else's way. 176.65.96.224 (talk) 05:36, 21 March 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.

Ghost Train

I've seen Ghost Train in Hungary.

Please add that to geographical locations. Adryanesp1 (talk) 12:43, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia isn't original research, so not really. 104.187.66.104 (talk) 22:22, 15 August 2023 (UTC)