Talk:Great Western Railway (disambiguation)

Rename proposal

It is proposed to rename Great Western Railway to Great Western Railway (established 1833) and Great Western Railway (train operating company) to Great Western Railway. If you have a view, please join the discussion at Talk:Great Western Railway (train operating company)#Renaming. Note that comments which are posted here might not be noticed. Stifle (talk) 15:37, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Primary topic

Shhhnotsoloud reverted my edit [1], with es: "Great Western Railway is the primary topic here, at the top. A reader wouldn't be here looking for it". But actually, this reader was lokking for it there, could not find it, and added it to the sublist :-)

Per Principle of least astonishment, a confusing ambiguous name (difference only by years in DAB-brackets) does belong there. They only differ by years of existance, and an unknowing reader cannot be expected to know that there were two. The invoked WP:Primary topic does not help or apply: "serving as the title of the relevant article", which is not the case here (the page is not about that article).

I propose to re-add the name to the list. The top-mentioning can be removed. -DePiep (talk) 04:47, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

@DePiep: To be clear, in this case there is a WP:PRIMARYTOPIC: the railway company of 1833–1947. That is what the article Great Western Railway is about. However, there are other articles that might be otherwise titled "Great Western Railway" and therefore WP:DISAMBIGUATION is required. In this case there is a disambiguation page at Great Western Railway (disambiguation) listing those articles. Disambiguation pages adhere to the guidelines at WP:Manual of Style/Disambiguation pages. There are, literally, thousands of disambiguation pages that use these conventions, including this one. MOS:DABPRIMARY is the part of the guidance that deals with linking to a primary topic. As it stands, there is nothing wrong with the disambiguation page, and the article Great Western Railway should be listed at the top, and nowhere else. The "unknowing reader" would be expected to start at the article at Great Western Railway, realise that they wanted an article about something other than the company of 1833–1947, and follow the links in the hatnote, one of which is to the disambiguation page. If you think the company of 1833–1947 is not the primary topic, then you could use the procedure at WP:Requested move, but note that the proposal at Talk:Great Western Railway (train operating company)#Renaming on 20 April 2020 was (overwhelmingly) not successful. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 16:43, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Nope. The article GWR can be a PrimTopic — I do not even dispute that. My point is: this DAB page cannon claim to be or have a WP:Primary Topic. Also, you did not respond to my noting of Principle of least astonishment. My claim stands. -DePiep (talk) 20:29, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps a colleague from WikiProject Disambiguation can explain this another way... Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 07:38, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

I'll have a go. The reader looking for the historic GWR will search for Great Western Railway and get directly to the article. Alternatively they will get to Great Western Railway (disambiguation) by some other route, possibly from GWR. In which case they will see the link to Great Western Railway at the top of that dab page. The links lower down the page are described as "may also refer to:", so the initial definition/link should not be repeated. That said, I do wonder whether in this particularly confusing case of two British railway companies sharing a name, we ought to add some "not to be confused with the post-1996..." or "distinguish from" in the header section, in a slightly WP:IAR way. PamD 13:00, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

@DePiep and Shhhnotsoloud: I've added a sentence which I think helps the reader while staying very near to MOS:DABPRIMARY. PamD 13:09, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

A non-intuitive distractive solution. As I described, this reader was wrongfooted by this logic. IAR: WP:SURPRISE. It is unreasonable to assume that a reader arriving at this DAB page, grasps the (visually separated) notions of two same-named UK railway companies. -DePiep (talk) 18:50, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

Also, no harm is done (except to wikilawyers' egos) by repeating the name in the appropriate list. -DePiep (talk) 18:52, 9 June 2021 (UTC)