Talk:Columbus

message: :Add *Support or *Oppose followed by an optional one-sentence explanation, then sign your opinion with ~~~~
*Oppose per earlier discussion below . older ≠ wiser 02:32, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Survey

message: I believe that this page should redirect to Columbus, Ohio. It is by far the largest city with that name, having more than five times the population of the next largest city of the same name (Columbus, Georgia). Further, those searching for Christopher Columbus almost certainly know his first name. Thus it is unlikely that they would end up here by accident.
Like all redirects, there should be a disambiguation link at the top of the page. It would read as follows: "This article is about the state capital of Ohio. For other uses, see Columbus (disambiguation)"
This kind of redirect has precident on Wikipedia. For an example, see Topeka.
If no adverse comments are received, I will make the change in a week or so.
Bcirker 22:43, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Um, ever hear of someone named Christopher Columbus, often referred to as simply "Columbus"? older ≠ wiser 01:58, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

text: In a general context, no one (at least not with half an ounce of warm gray matter) would link to Love and expect the link to go to the relatively insignificant musician. In contrast, it would not at all be unusual for someone creating a link to Columbus to expect the link to go to the world-famous explorer. But because they could also very well expect the link to go to the city in Ohio, disambiguation is appropriate. In order to claim primary topic status, you need to demonstrate (provide evidence, not merely make an unsupported claim) that one use of a term is predominant over all the others. older ≠ wiser 13:25, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

text: Sorry, my comment about gray matter was not directed toward you personally. Google should only be taken as a very, very rough gauge of notability. There is considerable systemic bias inherent in Google web searches. If you think you have a reasonable case for renaming the articles, then go ahead and make the proposal at Wikipedia:Requested moves. However, I'd be very surprised if it garnered even a modicum of support. older ≠ wiser 17:16, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

text: Please elaborate more about the bias at Google. I'm not aware of any as such. Bcirker 00:19, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: See Wikipedia:Search engine test and Wikipedia:Systemic bias. older ≠ wiser 12:22, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Redirect 

message: I've visited this disambiguation page many times.  I admit, I like to track the national and international perception of my city.  Yes, I would like to see Columbus redirect to what I consider the Columbus, but that would be unfair to Christopher and a small but not insignificant minority of people living in places called Columbus.  So I accept the decision to have the Columbus article be a disambiguation page.  In all my previous visits, the biggest city called Columbus was listed first, and quite rightly.  On a recent visit, I noticed there was even a brief note describing why that Columbus is more notable than the others.  But today, it's just another item sorted alphabetically in a long list.  What the crap?  If people are looking for information about a place called Columbus, they're probably thinking of the one in Ohio, so that should be the first item listed under the Places heading.  Perhaps the small cities in Georgia and Indiana could be listed next, followed by the alphabetical listing of the rest which don't generally even show up on state maps.  And maybe somewhere there should be a link to Colón, Panama because that too was named after Christopher Columbus.  99.177.172.109 (talk) 12:11, 12 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: This has been proposed in various forms previously (see above sections) and rejected. Consensus can change, so you are welcome to propose moving the disambiguation page again, but I see no evidence other than your opinion. How do you know that 99% are looking for the explorer or the city in Ohio? And the guidelines for disambiguation pages WP:MOSDAB recommend keeping descriptions to a minimum and avoid inclusion of content that is not relevant for disambiguation. older ≠ wiser 15:43, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Most notable place 

message: Reverted back to the annotations that provide additional clarification for those looking up Columbus. Also agree with the above section. There is a Manhattan, Kansas but does that mean the Wikipedia article for 'Manhattan' should redirect to ambiguous. Go try to search Manhattan and see what comes up. There is a Cincinnati, California, Arkansas, Iowa, and Indiana but do you honestly think that when you type in Cincinnati it should redirect to an ambiguous. 99% of people who search for Columbus are either looking for the famous explorer Christopher Columbus or Columbus, the capital and largest city in Ohio which is one of the largest states in the United States. Please use common sense. Reverted back to an appropriate and reasonable annotation.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.101.50.10 (talk) 20:57, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: This has been proposed in various forms previously (see above sections) and rejected. Consensus can change, so you are welcome to propose moving the disambiguation page again, but I see no evidence other than your opinion. How do you know that 99% are looking for the explorer or the city in Ohio? And the guidelines for disambiguation pages WP:MOSDAB recommend keeping descriptions to a minimum and avoid inclusion of content that is not relevant for disambiguation. older ≠ wiser 15:43, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Most notable place continuation 

message: * Christopher Columbus, navigator, explorer, and colonizer who captained the first European ship to reach the Caribbean
???
Neil Armstrong "only " set a foot on the Moon.??
C'mon ,it is reductive.I temporarily reworked it.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Newsrivers (talk • contribs) 11:16, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Most notable people

message: We now have another editor who's decided not to move the page this time, but rather to remove Columbus, Ohio from the list of items at the top of the page as "most common references", in spite of past discussion indicating that these are both commonly notable references. As this is flying in the face of past consensus on this issue (and includes some inappropriate editorializing - in particular, the "where it belongs" bit in the original edit comment makes it very hard to WP:AGF), perhaps this should be formalized somehow. --Viqsi (talk) 21:16, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: This archived move discussion on Talk:Birmingham is another interesting example of the total lack of international perspective shown by some editors here... - Tom | Thomas.W  talk 21:34, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I would then argue that the duplicate link to be removed is the one lower in the page, among the list of cities with that name. "Columbus" is indeed frequently used as a reference to the explorer, but it does not unambiguously identify him - so the "Birmingham example" may not necessarily apply for determining WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. I understood that to be the loose consensus arrived at from previous move debates. --Viqsi (talk) 21:59, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

text: Additionally, it should also be noted that with regard to that "whole bunch of cities" consideration, pageview stats show that the Ohio capital is consistently ahead of the rest, generally by a large margin. (There's one exception on February 24th that was due to a tornado ripping up Columbus, Mississippi on that day.) --Viqsi (talk) 22:09, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  For some reason you "forgot" to add Christopher Columbus when you looked at page views, so I did it for you, and the resulting graph shows that the the article about the man whose name was adopted by all of those cities gets several times as many visits per day as all of the city articles combined, totally dwarfing the importance of all of them, including Columbus, Ohio... - Tom | Thomas.W  talk 19:43, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  I didn't add that because it's not particularly relevant to the debate. What goes on top of a disambiguation page are the most common topics, and nobody disagrees that Christopher Columbus is the most common topic. A look at pageviews for every page on this disambiguation page pretty clearly reveals that Columbus, Ohio is the #2 topic on this page by a considerable margin (presuming one disregards the Disambiguation help page, which is otherwise a close third). --Viqsi (talk) 22:12, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  It is totally relevant since the explorer is commonly known as just "Columbus" in a large part of the world. So Columbus, Ohio is a very distant second to the explorer when it comes to notability, and should be listed only among the cities further down on the page, not at the top of the page next to the explorer. - Tom | Thomas.W  talk 07:16, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Familiar nickname does not a primary topic make. Let's look at some other examples: 'Washington', as another "person versus places named after him", or 'Dutch', as another example of one topic completely overwhelming the others but other topics still getting top-of-the-page recognition because they're an exact name match instead of a recognized nickname. I am frankly unclear as to why a different standard should apply to American cities, particularly when one is a blatant standout in terms of notability compared to the others. --Viqsi (talk) 13:16, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  ... and that brings us back to my first comment here: your exaggerated view of how important Columbus, Ohio is to the world, and Wikipedia. If Columbus, Ohio had been even half as notable, and important to the world, and Wikipedia, as you seem to think it is, it would have had a very large number of page views per day here, but it hasn't, heck, it's not even a stand-out when compared to other cities in that region, or even other cities in Ohio, as can be seen in this graph, showing that Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis and Louisville, Kentucky on average get about as many page views here as Columbus, Ohio does, i.e. hovering around the 2,000-mark, while Atlanta and Boston, although not shown in that graph, average around 5,000 page views per day, San Fransisco averages around 6,000 page views per day, Christopher Columbus around 8,000 page views per day, Los Angeles around 10,000 page views per day, and London around 12,000 page views per day... - Tom | Thomas.W  talk 14:01, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: It's the #2 topic by a large margin, and demonstrably the most notable thing that's just named "Columbus". You yourself have acknowledged that "Columbus" is a translation of Christoforo Colombo's actual name. Meanwhile, several of those neighboring cities you cite that Columbus is comparable to in size and regular viewing here are recognized as being primary topics for those names, so the "it's just yet another item in a sea of non-notability" argument seems a tad misplaced. More to the point, demoting a city because of its neighbors strikes me as silly and arbitrary just on base principles (we don't penalize Birmingham in its notability debate for being closer to similarly-frequently-viewed Liverpool than Columbus is to any of those examples). And finally and frankly, if we're going to start subtextually critically editorializing about motivations, I might venture a word or two about misplaced crusades being launched against American topics for the crime of being American. --Viqsi (talk) 18:25, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Columbus, Ohio is the most important city by that name, but it is so far behind the namesake of all of those cities, Christopher Columbus, that it only merits being placed first among the cities listed, not being placed at the top of the page alongside the explorer, where you want it to be... - Tom | Thomas.W  talk 18:46, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: As has been previously shown, Columbus, Ohio is the most frequently-viewed (and thus arguably most important) anything by that name on Wikipedia save the explorer, by a considerable margin. Not just cities - everything else named "Columbus". Anonymized searches of "Columbus" on Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu show the Ohio capital (and in some cases, Ohio capital-related topics) before they show the explorer. There is therefore so far no demonstrable basis for demoting Columbus, Ohio on the disambiguation page. --Viqsi (talk) 19:02, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  The results of such searches depend entirely on your geographical location (which is known to Google and the others, since they can see your IP...). Searches made in Europe return not a single page about Columbus, Ohio but lots of results for the explorer, and various other things named Columbus, and I bet that searches made in California or other parts of the U.S. also would return far fewer pages about Columbus, Ohio than your searches did... - Tom | Thomas.W  talk 12:39, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm pretty sure Tor rather hinders geolocation-based results. --Viqsi (talk) 13:16, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  No, Tor does not hinder geolocation-based results, all it does is give you a slightly different result than you would get using your own IP, with the result you get depending on where the IP Tor gives you is geolocated (and that's not speculation but something I know for a fact...). Because all Tor does is give you an IP that isn't your own (but the IP you get could very well still be in your general area...). - Tom | Thomas.W  talk 14:10, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: ...so now we've gone from "Columbus only showed up more often for you because your IP was geolocated, so your evidence is wrong" to "but it's distantly possible that you might have still gotten a Tor exitpoint somewhat near you, therefore your evidence is still wrong." This is getting patently absurd. I'm not the only one who's done those searches and confirmed notability (see previous move discussions above), and I think it's more than fair to presume that not everybody who's presented such evidence in the past lives in Ohio. --Viqsi (talk) 14:28, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: This Old Thing Again

message: I happened to come across this by going through the list of places that linked to Charlotte.
https://wikinav.toolforge.org/?language=en&title=Columbus indicates that in October '23, there were 4.9k incoming views of Columbus, a substantial part of which could be identified as 3k clickstreams to 25 destinations. Of those, 2.07k were to Christopher (~42%), 325 to the Ohio city (~7%), 145 to the 2017 film (~3%), 94 to the Georgia city (~2%), 54 to the surname (~1%) and then the long tail. The surname is linked first, but it doesn't lead to a list of people with the surname Columbus, which is instead below (and presumably part of the long tail here).
This seems to indicate there's no primary topic by usage. The archive of clickstreams that goes back to 2017 could be consulted to get a more coherent view of this. --Joy (talk) 14:31, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  current usage stats