Talk:Pearl River

What are the coordinates of the Pearl River? Like those for the Yangtze River and Yellow River. Utc-100 12:44, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Uh, the Pearl River is not one river... Hill Crest's WikiLaser (Boom). (talk) 14:21, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

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) 22:29, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Pearl River (China) → Pearl River –

1. To begin with, article traffic alone, with 83,462 hits (including the two variant forms and derivatives) last monthJanuary to May as compared to 6,296 hits for the Pearl River in the Southern US, 3,512 for the town in Louisiana, 1,572 for the Mississippi town, 13,918 for the hamlet in New York, and 3,975 for the Mississippi county. This was changed from considering May alone because in the US, this year's insane tornado season may have well upped the numbers...normally the river in MS and LA cannot even reach 1,000 views a month whereas the river in Southern China is guaranteed to have over 5,500 views. Extrapolation based on the fact that most Wikipedia readers are from the US even further pushes the Zhu Jiang into the spot for primary topic.
2. The Zhu Jiang is of immense economic importance to China and the entire East Asia region, with the great cities of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and Macau along its banks; could a similar position be said for any of the other Pearl River locations? Obviously not. —HXL's Roundtable and Record 01:04, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

• Support. I think the primary topic has been demonstrated by the nominator. Rennell435 (talk) 04:15, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
• Support with Guangzhou (Canton City), Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen and Zhuhai being on this river, and it being mentioned in relation to all five, and the province Guangdong (Canton Province), it is highly prominent with this being a manufacturing and financial center of the world (not just China). 65.94.47.63 (talk) 05:59, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
• Oppose: 2–3× more hits is not sufficient to be called a primary topic, in my opinion. –CWenger (^ • @) 06:05, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

• It only receives 2–3× more hits here because, as I said, Americans form the majority of Wikipedia readership. We care about what the whole world thinks. —HXL's Roundtable and Record 14:50, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

• I look for about an order of magnitude more page views for the top hit versus the second hit for WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, regardless of national ties, and this threshold is not met here. –CWenger (^ • @) 02:51, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

• Um, but a close to 6:1 ratio is nothing but overwhelming. —HXL's Roundtable and Record 02:54, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

• Comment For future reference, this should have been formatted as a multi-move, as Pearl River will have to be moved to Pearl River (disambiguation) if this move request is successful. Jenks24 (talk) 10:06, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
• Oppose per CWenger. Primary topic does not obviously apply here, and there's no problem with the current scheme that let's people know right away that there are several Pearl Rivers that they might be looking for. Dicklyon (talk) 15:31, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
• Oppose because Google is terrible at estimating search returns. The real number is closer to 430 and does not take into account for Google putting the same result in multiple times. Page views are the best metric and the primary topic should outnumber the rest of the candidates combined or better. Marcus Qwertyus 00:40, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
• Oppose I Googled "Pearl River" -wikipedia and on the first page of results I see Pearl River, New York; Pearl River County, Mississippi; Pearl River Resort in Choctaw; and Pearl River Community College, but no Pearl River, China until the second page. Kauffner (talk) 13:06, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

• Damn Americans hijacking this move. Do you live in the US? Google gives returns partially based on the location of your IP and the number of links from other websites, which both explain the results you came up with. A Google mainline search, save for exceedingly large ratios, is a poor indicator of primary topic. —HXL's Roundtable and Record 14:24, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

• It's not about Google hits to me, it's about page views, and like I said, I look for about an order of magnitude. If you look at all the move requests I have voted in over the past several months you will find I have been consistent on this. And I'm not swayed that we should arbitrary penalize articles with American ties since they happen to be in the majority of our readership. –CWenger (^ • @) 16:04, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

• Well we have 80,000 something views (when including all derivatives) as compared to 13,900 for the New York hamlet, and besides, I was able to get this city moved when the page hit ratio between the #1 and #2 topics was barely less than 3 to 1. And my point regarding "arbitrarily penalising articles with American ties" still stands; it distorts the picture of 'what the world thinks'. Honestly, do you sincerely believe (at most) trivial towns with at most populations in the tens of thousands are more important than a river that has tens of millions residing on or around its shores? —HXL's Roundtable and Record 16:32, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

• There were 58,520 views for "Pearl River (China)" for 2010. That compares to 28,399 for "Pearl River, New York". Perhaps you are conflating the numbers for this article with those for Pearl River Delta (84,567). In any case, to argue that the primary topic is the article that gets the second highest number of page views on the DAB is....most peculiar. Kauffner (talk) 04:34, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

• Not particularly peculiar when considering the Pearl River Delta is a derivative of this Pearl River...i.e. you wouldn't have the former without the latter. Hence why I have combined traffic data from PRD and this article (in addition to a few name variants) to make my case. —HXL's Roundtable and Record 04:40, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

• Readers do not appear to be using the term "Pearl River" to get to the "Pearl River Delta" article. If you Google "Pearl River Delta" -Wikipedia it is all about the Chinese metropolis and not at all like the results for "Pearl River" -wikipedia. You would not have "America" without Amerigo Vespucci, but he is not primary topic. Kauffner (talk) 05:47, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

• That's because the results for "Pearl River" -wikipedia include the trivial places in the US, and the comparison between 'America' and Amerigo Vespucci and the Pearl River and Pearl River Delta is false. It is clear the Pearl River is the namesake of the PRD, whereas that is not the case for America and Amerigo Vespucci. —HXL's Roundtable and Record 14:52, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

• Regardless of whether you agree with the America and Amerigo Vespucci example, Kauffner's point is valid -- it is misleading to conflate page hits for two distinct topics, even if there is a relation between the two. If you are asserting that "Pearl River" is a synonym for the Pearl River Delta (or even the other related terms), that only adds to the need for disambiguation. older ≠ wiser 15:15, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

• Support Clear primary topic. -- Mattinbgn (talk) 01:50, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
• Support this is a primary topic. SchmuckyTheCat (talk)
• Oppose If Kauffner is correct above about page views in 2010, with Pearl River (China) getting 58,520 views and Pearl River, New York, getting 28,399, perhaps it is also worth noting that Pearl River (Mississippi–Louisiana) got 9409 views--although I calculated 2010 views at 10,264 by adding up views per month, before seeing how to get stats.grok.se to return views per year. Either way, about 10,000 views, plus Pearl River, New York's 28,399 is nearly 40,000 views. I can see how the Pearl River in China might be the primary topic. Yet, personally, when I read "Pearl River" I think first of the one defining the border between Louisiana and Mississippi. I also wonder why China's Pearl River is not given in its Chinese form, Zhū Jiāng. After all, we have Guangzhou, even though I bet most English speaking people would not know that is the Chinese name for Canton. Also, I agree that the Pearl River Delta should not be conflated with the Pearl River (China). The Pearl River Delta is, according to our page anyway, primarily a region of land notable primarily for its extreme population density and economic importance. The page does have a Geography section, with a few paragraphs about region's hydrology, but the bulk of the page focuses on cities, industry, and the economy. In contrast, the Pearl River (China) page focuses on the river, its tributaries and drainage basin, etc. Granted, the page is rather short and could be much improved. Still, it seems to me that the Pearl River page is about the river system itself, while the Pearl River Delta page is about a very important region in China—a very important region for the whole world, in terms of demographics and economics, not hydrology. In short, it seems to me that the Pearl River Delta is the primary topic here, not the Pearl River itself. But the Pearl River Delta already has an undisambiguated page (I can't believe I just used the word "undisambiguated"). All this leads me to change my post here from "comment" to "oppose". Pfly (talk) 09:59, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
  • Comment well the river flows through a Cantonese speaking region of China, and you chose the Mandarin name, so it's not the common name of the river in China either, since the common name would be the Cantonese version, and not Zhū Jiāng. Second, it flows past Hong Kong, which is an English speaking locality, with its own dialect of English, and which uses English as a legal language. Since Pearl River is the name used in English in that location, the river therefore has an English official name, and a common English name. And as this river is referred to that way in many English language sources outside of the region as the Pearl River, obviously, it has an English common name. 65.94.47.63 (talk) 10:55, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
    • I just copied Zhū Jiāng from this page's "Chinese" name mentioned in the lead, not to say the page ought to have that name--just as an example in comparing the names Canton and Guangzhou. Perhaps the comparison is not germane, perhaps the city is commonly called Guangzhou in English but the river is not commonly called anything but Pearl in English. I don't know but thought it worth mentioning. This kind of thing is a perennial issue for place names in non-English speaking countries. Pfly (talk) 18:17, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Oppose per Kauffner. Although the Chinese sense is becoming more dominant, at the present there is enough ambiguity to warrant keeping a disambiguation page at the base name. older ≠ wiser 12:35, 23 June 2011 (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.

Alternate name?

I see the use of "Perl River" in literature [1], commercial subjects [2], "Perl Strom" in the geonames DB [3].

And others. There is more evidence (especially in chinese local publications) and it seems to me, these are not mere typos. Does that justify to mention that alternate name in the initial sentence of the article, like "also 'Perl River'"? LinguistManiac (talk) 08:49, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

It needs to be more than incidentally used in reliable sources. The first two sources don't seem sufficient to establish that. The alternative name in Geonames, look like a Gernam name, not an English one. —Ruud 22:33, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

According to Pearl River (China), the name in Chinese is literally "pearl river". The translation from Chinese in the first link appears to be an English translation typo by Amazon of the Chinese title. The title of that book is also translated "pearl river" elsewhere online[4]. Captain Conundrum (talk) 10:44, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

Requested move 14 November 2021

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: Consensus to move all - No oppose !votes have been cast and no obvious policy/guideline reason not to move. (non-admin closure) FOARP (talk) 10:33, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

---

• Pearl River (China) → Pearl River
• Pearl River → Pearl River (disambiguation)

– Although a request for move has been made in May, it strike me as odd it concluded with no census. Pearl River literally is one of the three major rivers in China, covering Canton, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Macao, the mother river to some of the most well-developed metropolitan area in the World, think of it as Hudson River of New York. Some comments regarding Pearl River Community College is clearly mistaken, community college bears no weight in this discussion as we are discussing the river, no one would need disambiguation, just as no one is calling the community college a river just because it has the river in its name. just as you don't disambiguate New York steak, or New York Giants with New York, the New York Giants might even have more search results and more prominent than New York when it comes to search result, but it's still clearly secondary. 38.94.109.226 (talk) 07:14, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

• Support as per nom. The Chinese river gets the majority of pageviews and has the greatest significance of any of the topics at the dab page. 162 etc. (talk) 17:46, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
• Support, seems like the primary topic to me. And as noted by User:162 etc., the pageviews bear that out. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 19:05, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
• Comment my only concern is whether this is primary over the Pearl River Delta, or whether Pearl River system would be the appropriate title as the vast majority of the length is in tributaries of other names. User:力 (powera, π, ν) 01:51, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

The concern about the Pearl River Delta is a good point, but it seems to me "Pearl River Delta" is a WP:partial title match; the Pearl River Delta is not often called "Pearl River" by itself in my experience. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 17:51, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

Fixed malformed request by resubstituting template with move request for associated disambiguation page. Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 03:47, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

• Support per nom.--Ortizesp (talk) 19:41, 15 November 2021 (UTC)
• Here's some WP:Clickstream data: for the month of March, the links from the dab page that were followed most often were: Pearl River (China) with 145, Pearl River (Mississippi–Louisiana) – 56, Pearl River Delta – 35, and Pearl River, New York – 12. Unfortunately, links with fewer than 10 clicks don't make it into the dataset. This means that the proportion of clicks for the river in China are known to be with certainty within the fairly wide range 38–58%. – Uanfala (talk) 01:11, 17 November 2021 (UTC)
• Support per nom. Kmusser (talk) 14:13, 19 November 2021 (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.

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is currently the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 3 January 2022 and 18 March 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Lydialzy.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 20:18, 19 January 2022 (UTC)