Talk:Adam Young

Requested move 29 August 2016

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. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: not moved. Rough consensus that there is no primary topic. Andrewa (talk) 12:47, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

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• Adam Young → Adam Young (disambiguation)
• Adam Young (singer in Owl City) → Adam Young

– Owl City is the primary topic of "Adam Young" for the purposes of disambiguation. Firstly, "Owl City" is a solo project run by Adam Young, making it more like a pseudonym or an alternative name rather than a band name. For several years, Owl City was a part of Republic Records, a major record label in the United States. Two of Owl City's songs, "Fireflies" and "Good Time", peaked at position 1 in the national music charts of multiple countries, and top 10 in numerous others. The other topics have not nearly received the amount of coverage that the Adam Young of Owl City has. We should move the redirect at Adam Young (singer in Owl City) here because it contains a ton of useful page history that could be merged into the Owl City article per this consensus. Additionally, (and this isn't an argument for moving, but good to note) there are currently about a hundred links to Adam Young, and the overwhelming majority of them refer to Adam Young of Owl City. Mz7 (talk) 02:33, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

Pinging the participants of this discussion, which ended up creating this disambiguation page: @BarrelProof, PC78, Walter Görlitz, Nohomersryan, and Roman Spinner: Mz7 (talk) 02:38, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

• I'm not sure what the second part of this RM is asking. To move Adam Young to Adam Young (disambiguation) and have Adam Young redirect to Owl City? In which case, I support. I said I would only support a DAB page last time, but it seems obvious that the best setup is to have Adam Young be a WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT to Owl City. Nohomersryan (talk) 03:22, 29 August 2016 (UTC)
  • I apologize if that was not clear. Yes, that is essentially what I am proposing. The reason I set it up this way is because the redirect at Adam Young (singer in Owl City) contains the old history of the Adam Young page that was merged into the Owl City page following the AfD. I want to restore that history to the Adam Young, in the event that Young becomes independently notable in the future or when editors want to merge additional information, they know where to find it. Mz7 (talk) 10:50, 29 August 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose with full knowledge of the numerous links flowing to Adam Young from music oriented articles and talk pages, virtually all of which relate to Owl City's Adam Young. Examining these links makes it clear that most of these make little if any specific differentiation between Adam Young the person and Owl City the project and, in fact, conflate the two. I would, however, support (if such a proposal were made) the move of Owl City → Adam Young, with Owl City redirecting to Adam Young and the dab page then becoming Adam Young (disambiguation). The present arrangement, however, does not support WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT per examples (Danzig, Einstein, Defamation) given there. The examples confirm that the WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT is expected to be of such overriding notability that virtually all of the other dab page entries refer to it or are based upon it. That is not the case at the Adam Young dab page where all of the other entries have no connection to Owl City's Adam Young. —Roman Spinner (talk)(contribs) 04:29, 29 August 2016 (UTC)
  • Comment The real problem was when the discussion to merge Adam Young to Owl City happened because the assumption was that they were one and the same, when they are not. Sleep in the (flaming ignorant bed) you have made. Arrange for a bot to fix the redirects and leave me out of the discussion. I was opposed to the merge and I'm still opposed to it. Walter Görlitz (talk) 04:37, 29 August 2016 (UTC)
  • I would be opposed to such a move. Although Owl City is by and large Young's most well known project, he has created several side projects that are worth a mention. I kind of acquiesced to the merge in the end, but Adam Young is, in fact, a broader topic than Owl City. See my comment at the AfD for sources. Mz7 (talk) 10:50, 29 August 2016 (UTC)
    • To clarify, what I mean is that Owl City and Adam Young are, in fact, different topics. This happens to be one of those cases where the subtopic (Owl City) is more notable than the broader topic (Adam Young) per the AfD. My reading of WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT doesn't preclude us from redirecting Adam Young to Owl City, provided we have a hatnote to a disambiguation page with the other topics. Mz7 (talk) 11:56, 29 August 2016 (UTC)
• Support: The other Adam Young topics seem relatively obscure, so I support the suggestion to move the dab page and convert Adam Young into a WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT. I also have no objection to moving Owl City to Adam Young or undoing the prior merge, as I don't know enough about the topic to really have an opinion about that. —BarrelProof (talk) 06:34, 29 August 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose. No primary topic here. Is the singer overwhelmingly well-known? No, of course he's not. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:50, 31 August 2016 (UTC)
  • @Necrothesp: I don't participate in requested moves often, but my understanding is that "overwhelmingly well-known" is not the standard we use to determine primary topics, and that seems like something where WP:Systemic bias factors in: what may be "overwhelmingly well-known" to one part of the world might not be so for a different part. What's more relevant is how reliable sources balance their coverage of the topic relative to the other topics, and how that affects which topic our readers will most likely be searching for. Here, the topic Owl City certainly has more significance (perhaps even overwhelmingly so) than the other topics for the ambiguous name "Adam Young". As I stated above, two of the Owl City Adam Young's songs became the number one songs in multiple nations around the world, something that the other topics don't seem to come close to. This has generated more than ample coverage: New York Times, Star Tribune, another Star Tribune – see more at Owl City and through cursory Google/HighBeam searches. Many sources discuss two of Young's musical projects outside of Owl City: [1][2][3][4][5][6]. The sources do mention Owl City, but the focus of the sources are on either Young as a person or on one of his projects outside of Owl City. Mz7 (talk) 17:50, 31 August 2016 (UTC)
    • Would the majority of people have the first idea who Adam Young (or even Owl City) was? No they would not. That's the point. He cannot possibly therefore be the primary topic. -- Necrothesp (talk) 07:46, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
      • Seems like we'll have to disagree with each other. Primary topics are the topic that readers will most likely search for when they search for the topic. It is not (or should not be) based on whether the "majority" of the human population is familiar with a topic. (And how do we even verify that beyond looking at coverage in reliable sources, as I provided above?) "Fireflies" was a massively popular song worldwide back in 2010. Many people would remember that song and connect Owl City – and, by direct extension, Adam Young – to it. Mz7 (talk) 12:58, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
        • if "majority" is the threshold then almost all articles on Wikipedia fail the threshold and we should have DAB pages for all of them. Walter Görlitz (talk) 14:21, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose 6 entries and no evidence that Owl City musician is clear primary topic. The politician, the only Adam Young with an article only on himself, would seem to at the very least challenge and likely surpass the musician on the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC criteria: 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. Boleyn (talk) 16:20, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

I'm not convinced by this. The politician – who is now a high school teacher – served one two-year term in a state legislature, and I can find almost zero substantive, in-depth sources that are about him. I'm trying to improve his article, but I fear that it may end up being a WP:COATRACK article about all of the bills he's supported. There's little in-depth coverage about anything that he actually sponsored himself (cosponsoring ≠ sponsoring). If you look at the balance of coverage available in reliable sources, the musician is definitely the one with long-term significance (there has been continuous coverage on him since 2009 to present day). Mz7 (talk) 01:27, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose. The Owl City singer is not widely known apart from his musical monikers, and thus is not the primary topic for persons named Adam Young. Chase (talk | contributions) 20:33, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose - The policitian Adam Ryan Young has a page, and the musician does not. Therefore, there is no likely primary topic. --Jax 0677 (talk) 01:31, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

@Jax 0677: This argument isn't in line with WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT, which states that The title of the primary topic article may be different from the ambiguous term. In many ways, Owl City is Adam Young. As I mentioned in my nomination, "Owl City" is more like a pseudonym or an alternative name, which is why a redirect there is appropriate under PRIMARYREDIRECT. Mz7 (talk) 01:34, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose has no article. Adam Young (politician) does. No likely primary topic. In ictu oculi (talk) 20:57, 6 September 2016 (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.