Talk:Mormon

Where should Mormon redirect?

I see Mormon as being a fairly important redirect, as it gets nearly a thousand hits per day. However, there seem to be several opinions about where Mormon should go. Before the Mormons article was created, I think it redirected to Mormonism, but for the past several months it has been to Mormons. I think there are a number of options. Some are:

• Mormons (the people) (~3k hits per day)
• Mormonism (the religion) (~1.5k hits per day)
• Mormon (word) (the word) (~10 hits per day)
• Mormon (Book of Mormon) (the prophet) (~50 hits per day)
• Mormon (disambiguation) (a disambiguation page, including all of the above links) (~50 hits per day)

I think that word and prophet are bad ideas, because they don't appear to be the most sought-after terms. Likewise, the disambiguation page only gets around 50 hits per day, even though it has a prominent position in the hatnotes of Mormons and Mormonism. That leaves us with just Mormons and Mormonism.

I personally think Mormon should redirect to Mormons because it's the obvious singular. If somebody were looking for the religion, I think "Mormonism" or variations on "Latter-day Saints" are common enough terms that the searcher would use those instead. Also, I think Mormon->Mormons is closest to the Principle of least astonishment.

That said, I will admit I am slightly biased on this, because I like the Mormons article better than the Mormonism article. I also welcome any other input people might have on this. For now, I will change the redirect back to Mormons. -- Adjwilley (talk) 19:33, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

A simple search on Google will show that a search for "mormon" gives priority to Mormonism over Mormons, confirming my previous argument that most people searching for the term "mormon" are looking for information on what the people believe (i.e. the religion). Perhaps the reason why Mormons gets more hits than Mormonism is simply because Mormon redirects there. Do you have the statistics on Mormon? -- Piguy (talk) 06:12, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

Well, I looked up the stats myself. It appears as if Mormon has around 1.4k hits per day. Since it has been redirecting to Mormons, we can conclude that ~1.4k of the ~3k hits of Mormons are redirect hits. So, excluding the redirect, that makes Mormonism and Mormons about the same as far as direct traffic goes. Taking into consideration the fact that Google has concluded that more people searching for "mormon" want to go to Mormonism than Mormons, we can conclude that most of those ~1.4k hits should go to Mormonism. I'll change it to redirect back to Mormonism where it used to redirect. -- Piguy (talk) 06:34, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

The Google search engine uses very complex algorithms, and cannot be interpreted to to mean that more people who search for "Mormon" actually mean "Mormonism." As a counter example, I performed the search on Bing two minutes ago and got the opposite result. I think the principle here is that "Mormon" is the singular form of "Mormons," not "Mormonism." The word refers most often to a person, not a religion. -- Adjwilley (talk) 14:29, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

Also, the 1.5k you cited for the Mormon redirect is fairly recent spike, and began in October. If you look back over the past few months, a better average is below 1k. -- Adjwilley (talk) 14:37, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

I would think the most logical thing would be to make "Mormon" point to the disambiguation page. It's not immediately clear to me why there should be a "Mormon (disambiguation)" page unless "Mormon" (without any qualification) obviously belongs as the name of some other article. Richwales (talk) 14:55, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

Looking at the page history, it looks like it actually did redirect to the disambiguation page for one day back in March. It was then changed by User:Woohookitty, who said that it "creates alot of disam issues" whatever that means. (Looking at the user's contribution history, it looks like he fixes hundreds of disambiguation links every day.) Two days later, the page was redirected to Mormons by User:COGDEN, where it remained until late September. -- Adjwilley (talk) 15:43, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

This should definitely be talked over by a bunch of people, and an informed consensus reached, rather than just having it moved here and there by "bold" individual editors. I see you put a note about this discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Latter Day Saint movement; hopefully that will get more editors involved. Richwales (talk) 17:00, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

I was asked to comment here. When I made the revert, it was because there are many many many pages linked to Mormon. If it gets moved, then it creates alot of disam links, which are incorrect links. In short, that just means that people want to be click once, not twice. Or when they type a search, they want to go to the direct page and not a search results page, which is what a disambiguation page basically is. In this case, right now, when people type in Mormon, it goes to Mormonism. One click. If it gets moved to Mormon (disambiguation), then its to basically a search page. So then someone (probably me) will have to go in and correct all of the links so they go to the right spot instead of the search page. Just to give you an idea, here is the link to what links to Mormon. And thats just the first 500. If it gets moved, every one of those links will need to be corrected. So its why we need to be careful when we move or redirect pages, especially to disambiguation pages. --User:Woohookitty ^{Disamming fool!} 00:59, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

@Woohookitty: Thank you for your input. That's good to know, and I will certainly be careful about moving redirect links, especially to disambiguation pages.

@Piguy: I have moved the page tentatively back to Mormons, because it has been stable there for several months, and I'd like to avoid screwing up any redirects pointing to "Mormons" until we come to a consensus here.

I think the redirect should be Mormon --> Mormons. I think if someone types "Mormon" they most likely want to know more about the more general topic of Mormons, rather than Mormonism, which is only subset of information about Mormons. The fact that there are more views of Mormonism is probably due to the fact that there are fare more wikilinks to the older Mormonism article than to the relatively new Mormons article. The number of views does not tell us what people are looking for when they type "Mormon" into the search bar. There is also a plausible argument for making the Mormon article a disambiguation page, but I can't think of any good reasons why that would be preferable to a direct link to the Mormons article. COGDEN 05:48, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

There are over a thousand articles that redirect through here, and many of them seem to use [[Mormon]] interchangeably for referencing the religion (Mormonism) and the people (Mormons). I'm going to work on fixing some of these by bypassing the redirect. For instance, I plan to change [[Mormon]]s to [[Mormons]], and [[Mormon]]ism to [[Mormonism]]. This will also help to make the linking articles immune to somebody who decides to move this redirect sometime down the road. ~Adjwilley (talk) 22:35, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

I continue to disagree. I believe that "Mormonism" is the more general subject, of which "Mormons" (as adherents) is a subset. This is manifest by similar articles, such as how "Methodist" redirects to "Methodism" and "Catholic" redirects to "Catholicism." Pi-Guy (talk) 18:39, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

That's not a perfect comparison, because in both those cases there is no page simply about the people; "Methodists" redirects to "Methodism" and "Catholics" redirects to "Catholicism", so the issue is not whether it is singular or plural. A better example is that "Jew" redirects to "Jews" and not to "Judaism". UnequivocalAmbivalence (talk) 05:01, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

That makes sense. I still feel that the end result is not completely on par with what the typical reader is searching for, though. In my opinion, the typical person who goes to "Mormon" is more interested in the religion than any perceived cultural divisions between adherents. I would feel more comfortable with the current redirect if the "Mormons" article placed more emphasis on beliefs. Perhaps I'll continue my discussion on the "Mormons" talk page. Thanks for your input! Piguy (talk) 18:21, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

How should the term "Mormon" be used?

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is frequently, though inaccurately, referred to as "the Mormon Church" or "the LDS Church," both of which terms are considered slurs. (The Mormons page implies that the Church has only requested that its members be called Latter-day Saints since 2018, but this is demonstrably incorrect. There is copious evidence of the Church doing so since its organization in 1830, and Latter-day Saints believe that the general commandment has been in place since at least c. AD 34.)

Beyond this, the Mormons page already states that "Mormonism [is] the principal branch of the Latter Day Saint movement," and that the term "most often refers solely to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." However, when I edited the paragraph to state that Mormons is merely a nickname for Latter-day Saints, @ChristensenMJ reverted my changes because, in his words, "Mormons is more broad than just the LDS Church". While this is obviously true--a few small groups also use the term "Mormon" as a descriptor--I don't think this is relevant to my edit. Regardless of how many groups use the term, it is a nickname at best, a slur at worst.

Finally, it is all well and good that people have referred me to MOS:LDS. This is certainly a good source from which we can reach a consensus. But what reason do we have to believe that the Manual of Style be correct in this case? As I told @Doug_Weller in February:

"I feel that the MOS, in its current form, is far too permissive in its terminology. Including the adjective or improper noun 'Mormon' in direct quotes is obviously appropriate, as is the use of the nickname 'LDS Church'; but more general use of those slurs is inappropriate. It’s akin to calling [dark-skinned] people of African descent 'Niggers', or speaking of the 'Yids' killed in the Holocaust. (Indeed, it’s probably more like the latter, since at least 'Niggers' were considered valuable; the slur 'Mormons' was used to justify laws requiring anyone who came in contact with a Latter-day Saint to kill him or her.)

TheOtter (talk) 06:21, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

I don't think this is the appropriate forum for the question you pose. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 03:29, 15 April 2021 (UTC)