Talk:Sinai

Requested move 17 August 2019

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: page moved. Have also reviewed the RFD discussion, and the discussion at what is now the dab page Sinai (disambiguation) (as the redirect was being replaced with the disambiguation, the discussion had to be preserved somewhere. The main argument against moving was the amount of links directing to redirect existing on pages that refer to the peninsula. However, as others have pointed out, the work required to clean up links is not reason enough to prevent a page move. Additionally, the nominator and Narky Blert have made compelling arguments to argue against the peninsula being a primary topic to a sufficient level to justify the move. I would recommend redirects be fixed up as soon as is practical. (closed by non-admin page mover) Steven Crossin ^{Help resolve disputes!} 02:20, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

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Sinai (disambiguation) → Sinai – No primary topic. Per WP:DETERMINEPRIMARY: (1) Incoming links shows Sinai Peninsula with ~3000, Mount Sinai with ~1000 and Biblical Mount Sinai with ~700; (2) Pageviews shows Peninsula with 23k, Mount with 29k and Biblical Mount with 19k; (3) Google Ngams shows Mount consistently more popular than Peninsula [1] and a plain search for “Sinai” in Googlebooks shows a real mix. In summary, Sinai in religion-based articles means the mountain, Sinai in geography-based articles means the peninsula; as an aside, the peninsula was previously known as the “Peninsula of Mount Sinai”. Onceinawhile (talk) 22:26, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

• Comment. This proposal is a WP:DISCUSSFORK of Talk:Sinai#Primary topic, started on 14 August 2019, and discussion should not be continued here. Narky Blert (talk) 03:57, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

  Although this is probably the correct place to start a move request. There is also another discussion at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2019 August 17#Sinai. Crouch, Swale (talk) 07:48, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

  @Narky Blert: WP:RM is the correct venue to discuss a page move. You were happy to start a separate discussion at WP:RfD so you can't really cry foul now, but as I pointed out elsewhere, WP:DISCUSSFORK does not prohibit moving a discussion to a more appropriate venue, in fact it encourages it. PC78 (talk) 13:43, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

• Support. The nom's argument is compelling (even if links may be broken: they can be fixed). Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 15:18, 18 August 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose A fourth way to determine a primary topic is to look at incoming links. The redirect alone points 600+ time to the peninsula. Sinai Peninsula is linked from more than 3000 pages, Mount Sinai is linked from a bit more than 1500 pages. So there is a clear primary topic: the peninsula. The Banner talk 15:28, 18 August 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose Unless Mount Sinai is routinely referred to as just "Sinai", then a direct comparison of pageviews (or any other stats) is not appropriate. How likely is someone seeking information about the mountain to search for "Sinai" rather than "Mount Sinai" or "Mt Sinai"? I would imagine it is rare. I'm open to any evidence to the contrary. Colin M (talk) 23:10, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

Of 577 source links to Mount Sinai, surprisingly, 21 are of the form [[Mount Sinai|Sinai]]. However, I think about half of them are incorrect, and were meant to target Sinai Peninsula. Another 2 are in contexts where the word "mountain" is already present nearby in the text, as in one of the three Holy Mountains of the Orthodox Christianity (The other two being Athos and Sinai). The same search with Biblical Mount Sinai instead of "Mount Sinai" gives 27 results - I didn't check those for correctness. But then there are 850 links of the form [[Sinai Peninsula|Sinai]] (despite Sinai being a redirect), so I still think the peninsula is much more strongly associated with bare "Sinai". Colin M (talk) 23:25, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

This is because this redirect has pointed to the peninsula article for a very long time, so editors of articles have gone for the easy option and put in just the single word. Most editors check, hence most links intended to point to peninsula were done correctly via this redirect. Some were done incorrectly, as they meant to point to mount.

The vast majority of those [[Sinai Peninsula|Sinai]] were created by me in the last couple of days as I attempted to clean up the redirect links per The Banner’s concern.

I’ll have a think about to provide an external (non-wikipedia-based) assessment of your very valid point re single word “Sinai” usage statistics. Onceinawhile (talk) 21:50, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

• Support disambiguate. No WP:PTOPIC. From that guideline:

A topic is primary for a term with respect to usage if it is highly likely—much more likely than any other single topic, and more likely than all the other topics combined—to be the topic sought when a reader searches for that term.

A topic is primary for a term with respect to long-term significance if it has substantially greater enduring notability and educational value than any other topic associated with that term.

The modern meaning, in news reports and the like, is almost invariably Sinai Peninsula. No examples need be given; read any newspaper

The historical meaning is Mount Sinai.

In the third month, when the children of Israel were gone forth out of the land of Egypt, the same day came they into the wilderness of Sinai. / For they were departed from Rephidim, and were come to the desert of Sinai (King James Version, Book of Exodus, 19:1-2). Arguably those verses refer to the peninsula rather than to the peak, but anyone reading them with a Christian upbringing would connect them with the important events on Mount Sinai not the peninsula.

"Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top / Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire" (Milton, Paradise Lost, I:6-7, 1674). Undoubtedly the most famous long poem in the English language.

Two C21 examples where Sinai means Mount Sinai:

carrying the tables of the law from Sinai. D. Ward, Coleridge and the Nature of Imagination, Springer, 2013.

Like Adam in the Garden of Eden and Israel at Sinai. S. Spector, The Jews and British Romanticism, Springer, 2016. Narky Blert (talk) 23:56, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

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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.

Common uses

Further to the page move, @Colin M: at this edit I reverted the introduction of a test to determine page views. The arguments presented above that prompted the page move were not based on page views and any result of the test would not be useful. Furthermore, because all users searching "Sinai" are going to land here, it's very important that the common uses are at the top, and short and snappy, to get users where they need to be (which usually isn't here). I'm not even sure the "also known as Mount Moses" is really required after Mount Sinai—I'd prefer not to have it—but I'll leave it for now. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 08:29, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

@Shhhnotsoloud: I respectfully disagree on a few counts:

1. I don't think it's true that there's no potentially useful outcome of the test. If it turned out that, say, 75% of readers who arrive at this dab page go on to click the link to Sinai Peninsula, that would be pretty strong evidence that the peninsula should be primary, and another RM would be worth considering.
2. Page view stats were mentioned in the nomination of the above RM.
3. re it's very important that the common uses are at the top, and short and snappy I agree, but I don't see how a WP:DABTEST affects that. My change didn't change where the link to Sinai Peninsula appeared on the page, or how it appeared to readers. (Maybe you've conflated my edit and the one by Onceinawhile?) Colin M (talk) 15:34, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

OK @Colin M: I'll put your test back. Regards, Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 16:51, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

Much appreciated! I'll try to remember to restore the unpiped link in a month or so, once it's had a chance to accumulate some data. Colin M (talk) 16:57, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

Dabtest results

We have almost 3 weeks of data now. During that time we had 701 views of the dab page. Of those, 454, or about 65%, went on to click one of the big 3 candidates (peninsula, mountain, biblical location). (I imagine most of the other 35% didn't click through to any of the entries. See BarrelProof's comment at WP:DABTEST). Of those 454:

• 349 (77%) clicked the peninsula
• 77 (17%) clicked the mountain
• 28 (6%) clicked the biblical location

The decision in the RM above was that no topic was primary wrt usage (because the overall number of pageviews for each of the three articles above were similar), but I think the results of this test contradict that. It seems that someone searching for "Sinai" is more likely to be seeking the peninsula than all other topics, and much more likely than any single other topic (4.5x as likely as the next most popular topic). Curious what others think about this data. Worth opening another RM? Colin M (talk) 15:06, 7 October 2019 (UTC)