Talk:Brand New

message: * I have no idea what COCA has to do with primary topics, but here is my analysis. I googled  and checked the first two pages of results. There were 15 results for band, two were dictionary entries, and there was one hit each for "Brand New Conference", "52 Brand New", and "Brand New Awards" -- all partial title matches. Since only one topic came up that corresponds to a relevant Wiki article, that should settle it. But I did a page view analysis as well: 120467 / (120467 + 146 + 3799 + 2138 + 691). Bottom line: 95 percent of relevant traffic is for the band. Kauffner (talk) 14:44, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: * Yes, but it appears that such evidence can be disregarded when it is inconvenient for editors who prefer titles to include preemptive disambiguating information. older ≠ wiser 15:37, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: * You are disregarding great solid blocks of evidence, ≠ wiser. Anyone reading the discussion above must be struck by that – unless they have a prejudice favouring your own rusted-on opinion, of course. NoeticaTea? 03:24, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

text: * No, that does not settle it.  The clear primary meaning of "Brand New" is to refer to things that are brand new.  Partial title matches are of worth, because often people can only remember part of the title.  Beyond this, the fact that the various songs named Brand New did not come up early in your search in no way indicates that they are less notable.  The main problem is that brand new does not refer to the band, it just means that something has just come into existence.John Pack Lambert (talk) 02:08, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

text: * Your continued assumption that we can compare the page views of what you have forced to be the primary topic to the other topics is just plain rubbish.  People looking up the other topics have to proactively search for them, and most likely will have looked at the band page first.  This is also true of people looking for Brand New Me and who knows what else.John Pack Lambert (talk) 02:09, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

text: * "". Time you learned, then. It's the biggest most widely consulted resource for frequency studies and other analysis, by academic linguists and others interested in current English usage. Especially US English, and as such its content may be presumed to favour US bands, right? Yet comparable Australian, South African, and Norwegian bands with much lower WP pageviews show up in COCA, while Brand New, a US band, apparently does not. Something strange about the pageview evidence, then!As for your Google evidence, don't presume to understand how Google elevates its hits to the top of the list. There is a whole industry out there to make that happen. A close member of my family works in that exact niche. Have a look at search engine optimization, a major internet marketing strategy. It's all very commercial; big money changes hands! But Wikipedia is not about commerce or big money. It's about true notability, and serving a worldwide readership's diverse needs.NoeticaTea? 03:24, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you realize your analysis is the ultimate argument to support the move? If the different metrics are not correlated, and thus we don't have any reliable evidence, it means that there's no way to establish whether the band is a primary topic, something to which you agree. But if the topic can't be established as primary, WP:PRIMARYTOPIC makes it crystal clear that the disambiguation page should be located at the base name. If the page views (the only evidence offered so far towards the band being primary) can't be trusted, the guideline mandates to revert to the neutral situation with no primary topic defined. Diego (talk) 23:00, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Not quite. Two points to make. First: usage stats are only one way to establish primacy. Even if we were to discount them entirely in this case (which I have not done, incidentally), there are other ways to determine primacy. Second, and more important: WP:PRIMARYTOPIC only applies when "a word, name or phrase may refer to more than one topic covered in Wikipedia". An important caveat in this case, as WP:Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and there is no WP article on the dictionary meaning of "brand new". The best we can do is provide a link to the Wiktionary page (which the dab page does, and the band page likely should). Since the dictionary term is not "covered in Wikipedia", it cannot contend for primacy. And nor should it: even if we were to conclusively prove that 90% of the page traffic for Brand New was intended for the dictionary definition, what then? There is no WP article about the dictionary definition to send them to, simply a dab page with a bunch of articles they were not looking for anyway. In such a case, it remains best for our readership to send them to the article they are likeliest to be looking for. Dohn joe (talk) 01:44, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: You keep saying something "not covered in Wikipedia" cannot contend for primacy, but there's nothing in policy supporting that, and there are several hints to the contrary. PRIMARYTOPIC is about what readers will want to learn. WP:NOTDICTIONARY is about what Wikipedia editors want to write about; those are quite different things. Certainly NOTDICT doesn't say that navigation and disambiguation of dictionary words shouldn't be used; it actually says the opposite. You have a nice contradiction in you argument: you say there is no WP article about the dictionary - but there is a Wiktionary article, which NOTDICT supports including navigation to help readers find it, which is linked from the DAB page; so if "brand new" is proven to be what readers are looking for, sending them elsewhere can't be the best for the readership. Diego (talk) 07:17, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Diego - I added a link to Wiktionary on the Brand New article. So now, there is a Wiktionary link both there and at the dab page. Does that help address your concerns? Dohn joe (talk) 20:46, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: It would, if not for the inconvenient fact that it must violate every rule in the manual of style for links as well as WP:UNDUE. But I appreciate the attempt to build consensus. Diego (talk) 21:29, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: P.S. Thinking about that, maybe yours isn't a bad solution after all for articles like this one, where the primary meaning is a dictionary word. Though it would imply to get consensus to pass it as an exemption to the manual of style, so it belongs in a separate discussion. Diego (talk) 21:36, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, if we think it would benefit the readers, let's WP:Ignore all rules, do it here, and start that discussion elsewhere. What do you think? Dohn joe (talk) 22:13, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I've looked through several MOS and WP pages, and I don't see a rule against putting a link to Wiktionary in an article. The more I think about it, the better I like this solution. I realize that this proposal is now buried in the middle of a loooong discussion, but perhaps it would be worth proposing below? Dohn joe (talk) 05:24, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

text: Yes, Diego. Dohn joe's attempt at a refutation would not justify the present arrangement even if it did succeed in nullifying the assembled evidence. Not remotely! No one has shown that the raw pageview statistics favour the band from Long Island, which appears to get no mention at all in a huge unbiased sample of American English since its beginnings in 2000. Yet other bands from that year, even from Norway, Australia, and South Africa, do turn up in that huge sample. More soon. NoeticaTea? 16:56, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

text: I have addressed the failed refutation below. See the subsection #Count the psychopaths. NoeticaTea? 05:17, 2 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Discussion

message: At Categories for discussion ... Category:Brand New, the category for the article about the band has just been moved:
The result of the discussion was:  rename per nominator  to :Category:Brand New (band). --[User:BrownHairedGirl]
Add this to the evidence assembled above, and the support it has had from editors arriving after it was presented and analysed.
I now propose a closure in favour of the move. Let "Brand New" be the DAB page, and "Brand New (brand)" be the accurately labelled title for an article about a band. See evidence at a related RM for the article Big (which is about a film).NoeticaTea? 12:55, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I would move to table this motion, given the rigorous analysis above which throws Noetica's conclusions into severe disarray, and casts grave doubts upon the support !votes which were based on such faulty analysis. Dohn joe (talk) 18:49, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: No analysis has called into question the fact that "Brand New" is a generic English term not heavily associated with the band or that lots of other things are named "Brand New" in a way that people might be looking for them.John Pack Lambert (talk) 21:35, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

text: Well now! Dohn joe appears to believe he has a refutation of all the evidence I assemble above. But unfortunately, he has achieved no refutation of anything. His is no "rigorous analysis", but a mere distraction from the line of argument I pursue. And John is right: Even if Dohn joe had succeeded, that would only demonstrate a general failure to bring any useful evidence to bear on the question of primary topic for this extremely multivalent title "Big". And when there are no rational grounds for finding a primary topic, call things what they are, so everyone gets to the desired article without diversion. More later. It's way past midnight here in Australia. NoeticaTea? 16:42, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

text: I have addressed the failed refutation below. See the subsection #Count the psychopaths. NoeticaTea? 04:59, 2 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move to close 

message: Yes, count the psychopaths. The sample is way too small for Dilbert to use that correlation.
A little basic statistics, Dohn joe. I'll keep it really simple – for the benefit of anyone who has not succeeded in completing a PhD in mathematics. (☺!)
Your argument presented earlier, like my own, draws attention to some very low numbers of mentions in Rolling Stone: 2, 6, 8, 11, 12, 19. Now, mentions in Rolling Stone are a skittish and chancy affair. It is not possible to draw strong inferences from such low numbers about other measures elsewhere. To demonstrate correlations, our counts must be larger. After all, no one at Rolling Stone says: "O look, Wikipedia pageviews for the Australian band Architecture in Helsinki are averaging 6000 a month. Let's mention them a couple more times to preserve a constant ratio." Nor do people flock in precisely the right numbers, each month, to the article Futureheads because, well ... Rolling Stone mentioned them 12 times in the last 12 years. It just doesn't work that way. On the other hand, look at some numbers that do reliably show a correlation, using the same measure you propose. I add "Brand New" for comparison:
 Google site searches; 90-day pageviews; ratios
 (using site:http://www.rollingstone.com) 
 
 Performer          Rolling Stone   pageviews  ratio
                              (RS)        (PV)
 
 Linkin Park                  332      833156   2510
 Mariah Carey                 433     1325327   3061
 50 Cent                      457     1270949   2781
 Eminem                       967     2521518   2608
 
 Brand New                     11      120485  10953
Once again, spot the anomaly. A Rolling Stone count of 11 is still very low, and subject to chancy variations; but we have meaningful data here. We know that there is something like a direct correlation between RS count and PV count, and that can be confirmed by selecting a range of comparable performers randomly, and checking. The correlation need not be tight, because there are many variables that are ignored here (genre, years of main activity, SEO marketing, manipulations of Wikipedia for promotion, and so on). Take the ratio from those famous performers whose names are not confusable by bad title choices on Wikipedia ("Mariah Carey" is not a common English expression occurring over a hundred times in OED!); and estimate from that ratio the expected number of pageviews for the band "Brand New" if its article were named with precision. We would expect it to be nearer to 30000 than 120000.
Again, note that Brand New gets not one mention in COCA's sampling. And in reply to your comparison for leaders of two bands, note these numbers based on our external sources (one specialised, one general):
 Performer        Rolling Stone     COCA
                        (Google)
 
  Colin Meloy                88        9
 (The Decemberists)
 
  Jesse Lacey                 0        0
 (Brand New)
You can pick and choose as you will, Dohn joe; you can apply rough measures of correlation between measures that are simply ridiculous for very low counts; you can draw in whatever gerrymandered statistics will suit your purpose. But you have certainly not worked with sufficient rigour to make the pageviews for the band Brand New at all plausible. The better hypothesis, by far: those pageview statistics are inflated because readers do not know what to expect at "Brand New". It's time we admitted it: simplistic rules and unanalysed data are worthless.
Help the readers; do not feed editors' obsession with conciseness.
Remember, Dohn joe: it's surprising what judicious investigation with simple statistical tools can reveal.
NoeticaTea? 04:56, 2 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Indeed. That article should be disambiguated, and that title redirected to Architecture of Finland, with an "Architecture in Helsinki redirects here; for the Australian band see Architecture in Helsinki (band)."  We're already doing disambiguation like this with The Presidents of the United States of America (band) for the same reason. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ  Contrib.  12:41, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Count the psychopaths 

message: Repost from User talk:Jenks24
*While other websites use SEO to bring in as many readers as possible, Wiki introduces unnecessary disambiguators for the express purpose of driving them away. I don't have any interest in this band myself. But this tells readers who are that it is an unworthy topic, like we are holding our nose when we present it to them. Kauffner (talk) 06:16, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: The band is #1 on the list, which would seem to be a prerequisite for primary topic based on usage. No other Brand New (disambiguation) item cracks the top ten. I can only conclude that either the long-term significance criteria neutralizes the usage criteria, for this title, or  is included when determining usage. There is no primary topic for this title, because of the long-term significance and enduring notability and educational value of the marketing term "brand new," even though Wikipedia doesn't yet have an article on the topic, or "more likely than all the other topics combined" includes  in the other topics list. It seems clear that this is a case where there is some conflict between a topic of primary usage (the band) and one of primary long-term significance (marketing term), and consensus determines whether the band is the primary topic. Then there is the question of how high the bar is set on consensus. I think it's supposed to be significantly more than a simple majority of !votes. Wbm1058 (talk) 14:37, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: The article was getting 1,400 views a day before the move, and now its getting 250 views a day. Unless you can show that the missing 1,150 readers a day are now happily going to another Wiki article, I think that can be fairly described as "driving readers away." I don't see how they could be going to an article on the generic term, since we don't have such an article. There is a song named "Brand New", as well as three albums with this name, but they get only 5-7 readers a day each. Kauffner (talk) 00:08, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: That's yet another subjective (and rather superficial, no offence) interpretation of the search result. You don't credit the average reader with any intelligence or determination, that they would stumble at the first hurdle and then say 'blow it'. It's equally if not more plausible that they used to search for and but found it wasn't what they were looking for. Now, they type in the search box (or google) and know straight away, that the band article isn't what they were after, obviating a 'wasted' page hit.  Nothing would account for the large proportion of 'disappeared' clicks: readers don't just evaporate. The band article appears clearly as one of the possible alternatives in the undisambiguated page 'brand new', that the reader genuinely looking for the band article would click just once more, and 'presto'. The new page locations, instead of deterring readers, is actually helping them to find the article they are after with greater speed or otherwise wastes less of their time. -- Ohconfucius ping / poke 00:39, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: My point was just that the move has caused readership to decline, which you are not really challenging. Why has it declined? If you google , you'll see that the DAB has retained the google rank earned by article when it was at the "brand new" lemma. So readers click on this result expecting an article, but get a DAB instead. These readers have never seen a DAB before and have no idea what to do with one. So they back out and try something else. There are plenty of results about this band. Wiki is not the universe. If we don't give the readers what they want, they'll go to the next site on the list. Kauffner (talk) 01:19, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Google doesn't react quickly to our moves. Give it some time, and Brand New (band) will float to the top of Google's results, I'm pretty confident of that. Wbm1058 (talk) 01:30, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

text: *I'm not saying or agreeing with you at all that 'readership' has declined. You made the logical leap from 'clicks' to 'readers', and assumed that all those who landed on the band article wanted to be there, but I'm saying that does not necessarily equate. I'm more interested in overall optimisation – sending more readers to where they want to go in the fewest mouse-clicks, and that may mean some readers will get there with more and some with fewer clicks; it may also mean they will realise quicker what they are looking for isn't here and they will have to go look elsewhere. -- Ohconfucius ping / poke 02:17, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

text: As primary topic Brand New was getting about 1,400 daily views. This included some readers looking for something other than the band, who needed to click the hatnote to go to the dab. Post-move the number of views of the Brand New dab is about 900. To me this seems to indicate a ratio of about 500 views of "all the other topics combined" vs. 900 views of the band, a clear indication of primary topic based on usage. Consistent with this, in the first 4–5 days post move, Brand New (band) was getting ~900 views. Then on April 8, Dohn joe created Brand New (band)(redirect), a clear measure of clicks for the band on the dab page, and this gets ~700 daily views, leaving the band with a little over 200... seems that redirects aren't double-counted. The band is still getting about 900 daily views. 7 of 9 get there by search, then clicking the first item on the dab. 2 of 9 land there by internal links from other Wikipedia articles. No one's been driven away, they've just been rearranged. Arguably we have saved a click for readers who were not looking for the band, at the expense of forcing an extra click from readers who were searching for the band. Since the latter outnumbers the former, more readers "time is being wasted" now. But in the long term, more readers time will be saved, since the marketing term has greater long-term significance. Maybe someone will eventually serve these educationally-minded readers by actually writing an article on the topic. - Wbm1058 (talk) 01:12, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

text: *oic. That would mean that the decline in readership was from 1,400 a day to 950 a day. That's a big change in the math, but I think the general point I was making is still valid. Kauffner (talk) 01:41, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: *Again, all one could say was that the number of clicks has declined. And although it is often generally assumed that the two are directly related/correlated, the ambiguity here means that relationship may not hold true, so i would not be fair to make any inference about 'readership'. By changing the names, and thus reducing that ambiguity, in the not too distant future, we will get a true picture of where those hits were intended. So WP:PRIMARYTOPIC itself does not always work to the best of the project. Disambiguated namespaces, however would allow proper data production and analysis, to the overall benefit to the project. -- Ohconfucius ping / poke 02:34, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Post-move discussion 

message: 178.121.40.14 posted this comment on 12 May 2013 (view all feedback).
I tried to know what means "brand new" literally, and see the difference between this expression and just "new".
Perhaps a new product isn't really new until a branding iron has certified it so by stamping it with a "born on" date. Definitely something for Brand new, and improved (marketing) to answer. Or maybe the lead sentence of this dab, or Wiktionary. Any other thoughts? Wbm1058 (talk) 11:18, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Or it's really bran' new when it's shipped packaged in bran, the ancient version of packing peanuts - Wbm1058 (talk) 19:59, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Not either of those kind of brands. In KJV, a brand is a burning stick. See Zechariah 3:2: "Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?" or Amos 4:11: "ye were as a firebrand plucked out of the burning". So "brand new" is a variation on "firebrand", a stick freshly pulled out of the fire. You could carry one around at night, allowing you to see clearly. Shakespeare used "fire new." Kauffner (talk) 06:40, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reader feedback: I tried to know what means "...