Talk:John Barnard

message: The followings are pointed out on the note of Japanese edition;
* Barnard moved to Ferrari at the end of 1986, not 1987.
* Benetton B192 was not his work, but Ross Brawn and Rory Byrne.--K.F. 09:05, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Two corrections 

message: :Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with *Support or *Oppose, then sign your comment with ~~~~. Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's policy on article titles.
*Oppose, mainly because I tend toward maintaining the status quo when there is no overwhelming need for change. The fundamental stats are similar to the last discussion: there are still almost twice as many hits (61%) on this page as all the others combined; this page still gets more than five times as many hits as the next most popular; at most, only 3.5% (down from 6% last time) of people arriving at this page head on to the dab page. I see no fundamental problems being caused by the current structure, and increased inconvenience to our readers outweighs any benefit. Pyrope 04:57, 6 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Survey

message: :Any additional comments:
Page view stats (last 90 days):
* John Barnard: 5526
* John G. Barnard: 1052
* John Barnard (musician): 855
* John Barnard (British politician): 357
* John Barnard (supporter of James II): 286
* John Barnard (biographer): 275
* John Barnard (clergyman): 260
* John Barnard (cyclist): 182
* John Barnard (musician and clergyman): 165
* John Barnard (cricketer): 132
:Total = 9090
* John Barnard (disambiguation): 192
:Just a quick skim to facilitate discussion, so that each editor doesn't have to go ferreting around for these each time! Pyrope 04:01, 6 December 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Some rather confusing (dabs) there; I've moved John Barnard (musician and clergyman) to John Barnard (music publisher) and John Barnard (musician) to John Barnard (composer) as primary notability in each case, and John Barnard (clergyman) to John Barnard (American clergyman) given that the music publisher was a canon at St Pauls. In ictu oculi (talk) 06:35, 6 December 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I disagree with your assumption that Google Books provides a better metric or that page views should be considered "minor". For topics such as these, that are not commonly in the public eye, all Google Books is telling you about is the preoccupation of a very small slice of society: those people who write scholarly works. As there are orders of magnitude more works on military history than any other topic, is it surprising that in this sample the military figure is the more common? Taking a look at what another slice of the general public are interested in, you could consider any number content repositories. Take YouTube, for instance. Here, a search for "John Barnard" gives two videos on the subject of this page in the first page of results, four on the organist or his works, three on an MMA fighter for whom we have no page, and three on a minor club racer who again has no page. I've skimmed down through a few pages of results and I see nothing on the general. Of course, YouTube is itself biased toward subjects popular amongst people with the ability to record and post digital video, so that sample isn't very illustrative of the wider general public either, but it shows what sort of bias you can induce if you assume things about the representative nature of any source. The only place that we have to record the interests of Wikipedia users – who are our target audience! – are the page view statistics on Wikipedia. Here, a comparison of numbers between the main topic page and a hatnoted dab page is the most useful measure of the degree to which our audience's interests are not being served. As mentioned above, currently this runs at 3.5%, and that is a worst-case measure as it makes the assumption both that all dab page views are coming from this page and that people viewing the dab page are not interested in the subject of this page, rather than curiously heading off after reading it to see what sort of other people have been called John Barnard. Pyrope 17:18, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

text: I'm not sure which of my comments you took to be the "narrow" part. That I consider the users of Wikipedia today to be more important than what their great grandchildren might be searching for using implanted brain chips in 2050? Oh well, priorities vary I guess, and if our cyborg progeny decide that the subject of this article isn't the more interesting to them, then they will be perfectly capable of adjusting the page names at that point. If you are talking about a topic that has flared up in the last few months then I can see the advantage in taking the historical long view as they will probably fall from public favour in a few short weeks, but this page has been maintaining its page views for many years now. Getting nearly two thirds of all page views is not "marginal", and when you consider that the next most viewed gets only 11% it looks pretty obvious that the subject of this page is indeed "much more likely" to be the topic of a search than any other single John Barnard. Five times more likely than its nearest rival, in fact, and twenty times more likely than most. Marginal? Come on... Pyrope 17:14, 10 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Discussion