Talk:O'Brien

Royal line vs. surname

   I admit it's way cool to share a surname with royals, but WP has standards for naming Dab pages.
   Every native speaker of English either knows "O'Brien" is a surname, or misspells it as "O'Brian". Virtually no one knows about the royal and noble lines, unless they were born in Eire or have an ancestor with one of the two names. If you sincerely believe i am mistaken in saying that, you should do the G-test to show otherwise (in hopes of making a fool of me by posting the results here). (If you change it back without doing so, i intend to come back here, attempt to demonstrate what i consider obvious, and thereby make a fool of one of us. Is it clear to you how certain i am that the fool won't be me?)
--Jerzy•t 23:56, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

   I discovered only later that the Rdr bore this red-flag (emphasis & link added):

This is a redirect from a surname.

It is used because Wikipedia has only one biographical article of a person by this surname, or because one individual is ubiquitously known by this surname (other persons sharing this name might be listed at a primary topic disambiguation page).
For more information, follow the category link.

   I don't claim that's what makes the change a slam dunk, but IMO a decent respect for the project should have called for an explicit argument for the silly (or unfoundedly prideful) choice.

--Jerzy•t 00:45, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

@Jerzy: I added Walter O'Brien and Walter A. O'Brien to List of people named O'Brien, and elevated that article to co-primary-topic status in this disambiguation, to make the surname page easier to find. Someone else didn't find it either, and created a fork at O'Brien (surname), which has been merged to the "list" page. – Wbm1058 (talk) 13:04, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

   @Wbm1058: A search that is probably successful in being inclusive (the hits include variations as to hypenation, quotation marks, and grammatical number) found only 4 previous instances of usages paralleling your "co-primary-topic" term. Of those, the two from the last 9 months seem to be making the point that the concept would have unacceptable consequences. Another, from 2008, uses it only parenthetically, in disputing a claim that a particular topic is primary. The remaining one, from the same year, uses it outside the sphere of the WP sense of "primary topic": suggesting that a journalistic article has two topics, not that a term (whether a WP article title or not) pertains to two topics. It may be that you are reaching beyond your policy awareness, and (blamelessly) working with too simple a mental image of how WP can do its job.
   I was, above in this talk section, perhaps not so much WP:BOLD as "make-my-day"-ish, but unless you've misleadingly described your change in this section, no discussion here is going to definitively approve what you seek: that would take a change in policy reached on the appropriate WP-namespace pages. I'm reverting based on your own counter-to-well-tested-policy description. That attended to, i'll examine what exactly it is that you've done, and comment further here if it seems to merit that.
   The O'Brien (surname) matter you mention is actually more urgent than that further examination, and i will look into that. I recall seeing some goofy things in at least that general "direction" from here, and it may need more attention than this currently does.
--Jerzy•t 19:43, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Requested move 30 March 2015

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. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Moved. Note: move will require admin assistance, which I will request. (non-admin closure)  — Amakuru (talk) 11:04, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

---

O'Brien (disambiguation) → O'Brien – Several topics have spent some time as the WP:primary topic for O'Brien: O'Brien (Nineteen Eighty-Four), disambiguation (no primary topic), List of people named O'Brien, O'Brien dynasty, and most recently, O'Brien (TV series)– (see the cut-and-paste-move repair holding pen page for recently completed repairs). Between the surname and the dynasty, I don't believe there is a primary topic. Wbm1058 (talk) 12:47, 30 March 2015 (UTC) * Oppose as frivolous.Requestor responded to my preceding post pointing out the need for Google-test to justify a different primary topic, and replied without a G-test, but with an argument referring to the groundless and counter-policy concept of "co-primary-topics".
--Jerzy•t 20:09, 30 March & 10:09, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

What I meant by "co-primary-topic" is at MOS:DABORDER. Sorry, I should have given that shortcut earlier. An example given there, Mojave, has "three primary topics". Sorry, if my invented terminology to describe this was confusing. I haven't done any Google tests, but internally our encyclopedia has both a lot of articles linking to the O'Brien clan and to biographies of people named O'Brien. Wbm1058 (talk) 21:13, 30 March

COMMENT:
   Thanks for clarifying that.
This is not the place to go into how much worse than "confusing" and how nonsensical "co-primary-topic" and phrases like

has "three primary topics"

are. But that is not completely irrelevant to this proposal; no one should take my initial confusion as evidence that everything's fine here in River City. I've opened discussion elsewhere on the problem, for those interested.
--Jerzy•t 10:09, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

• Support completely reasonable move. In ictu oculi (talk) 21:31, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
• Support – There really isn't any clear primary topic here. As Iio says above, a completely reasonable move. RGloucester — ☎ 00:07, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
• suport per nom -- 65.94.43.89 (talk) 04:29, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
• Support, seems a no-brainer that there is not a primary topic. Any assertion that there is requires evidence.older ≠ wiser 12:19, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose as untimely:

   Nom'r has proposed (as if it is a substantial motivation) to exploit a format described at pt. 1 of MOS:DABORDER, which clearly was not

1. anticipated when MOS:DABINTRO was last carefully looked at, in its page-context, by the community at large,
2. nor added with adequate attention to making those two sections consistent in the context of the new material, on the same MOS page, that is now inconsistent with it, and
3. thus is unlikely to have been adequately evaluated, since the change was made not only in a relatively obscure place (In contrast, it's hard to work on Dabs at all without grasping the perhaps less intuitive DABINTRO!), but one to which its relevance is probably more obscure than it is to the intro section,

so if the validity of that is indeed a motivation, the stability of the apparently obscure approach should be examined first. (I've barely thot about whether WP or Google search could count instances of applying either or both of the "pt. 1" formats, and have no idea what WMF or volunteer wizards could do on short notice. Anyone?)

   Further, as i recall WP:DAB (tho i may be due for a good solid review after all these years), its first priority is solving the problem of multiple topics for each of which the exactly same name would be its most preferred name. (A question only tenuously related to that of whether they are entity most often meant when that name is used!) Unless i'm mistaken, the things that worse informed, forgetful, or more careless users solve by typing in somewhat sub-ideal names (especially unreasonably short names), are what we have a final "See also" section for. They aren't undeserving users, but trying to serve them with convenience equal to what users who have in mind a name that is exact (but for not knowing what disambiguating suffix or other substitute we've settled on) can't help the vague users as much as it would handicap the precise ones. If i'm modelling the process correctly, it seems to me that it follows that anything that could justly be pushed down to the See-also doesn't count toward the 50%+ of interest that the supposed primary topic has to account for. In this case, i'd argue that O'Brien as dynasty, clan, and modern surname might well be too interwoven for a legitimate O'Brien article summarizing the surname's wrinkles (but not its SIA), the dynastic history of the Taioseachs (wow, didn't think i could spell that; i doubt i can pronounce it!) or whatever they're called, and the clan article, to be outweighed by the bare placenames (since

• the stadium, islands, and county,
• O'Brien City and O'Brien Corners -- if they were here-- and
• all but the first two of the "Other uses" entries,

need not apply, as "O'Brien" is just a nickname for each of them), and indeed the no-brainer answer may fall short.
   IMO,

clock on this move should be restarted at 0 when relationship between MOS:DABINTRO and pt. 1 of MOS:DABORDER is clearer, and

brain-ful consideration then given to possibility of a broad-topic "O'Brien" article being primary.

   Sorry that attacking the more global issue first leaves me weighing in so late in the process.
--Jerzy•t 10:09, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

• Strong support per nomination. Red Slash 20:02, 6 April 2015 (UTC)
• Support.--Brianann MacAmhlaidh (talk) 21:21, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

---

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