Talk:British Open

Disambiguation/Redirect

The British Open article was originally a disambiguation page used to list the various British Open articles on Wikipedia, as is now currently done at British Open (disambiguation). However, the disambiguation at British Open was moved to British Open (disambiguation) by User: Clindberg (see [1]), and the British Open was set to redirect to The Open Championship (see [2]). The reason given for this move was that the "The Open Championship is by far the most common usage of British Open" ([3]). This was a unilateral decision undertaken by User: Clindberg and there was no discussion.

However, WP:PRIMARYTOPIC clearly states decisions are made by discussion between editors to decide whether a topic should be designated as the "primary topic". There was no discussion and User:Clindberg actually dismisses the instruction to discuss the issue: [4]. This clearly is not in accordance with the guidelines.

Furthermore, this is what WP:PRIMARYTOPIC says about deciding if an article should be made the primary topic:

Although a term may potentially refer to more than one topic, it is often the case that one of these topics is highly likely – much more likely than any other, and more likely than all the others combined – to be the subject being sought when a reader enters that term in the Search box. If there is such a topic, then it is called the primary topic for that term. If a primary topic exists, the term should be the title of (or redirect to) the article on that topic. If there is no primary topic, the term should be the title of a disambiguation page (or redirect to a different disambiguation page, if more than one term is combined on one page).

So the decision for making an article the primary topic is based on whether that article is the most sought by a reader when entering the search term into the search box. So it is irrelevant whether The Open Championship is the most popular article, what makes it the primary topic is if more readers are searching for the The Open Championship than all the rest of the disambiguated terms put together when they type "British Open" into the search box.

This is yet to be established in the context of this redirect, so it's important to consider the numbers:

The Open Championship was accessed a total of 28759 times during October: [5]

British Open only accounted for only 1318 of these redirects over the same time period: [6]. It's pretty clear then that the British Open term only accounts for a relatively small proportion of the accesses to The Open Championship (and that's assuming that everyone who was redirected was indeed looking for the golf tournament).

In view of that, it's worth considering the access stats for all the other disambiguated articles as listed at British Open (disambiguation).

Women's British Open: 2150 [7]
British Open Show Jumping Championships: 317 [8]
British Open Squash Championships: 1720 [9]
British Open (snooker): 744 [10]

This amounts to 4931 accesses for the other disambiguated terms, as opposed to 1318 accesses for the redirected British Open. This clearly breaches the principle that the subject being sought when a reader enters that term into the search box should be more likely than all the others combined. This is not the case. Yes, more readers access the The Open Championship than the others, but the other articles combined receive over three times as many hits as The Open Championship does under the British Open redirect. For this reason it does not satisfy the requirement to be made the primary topic, and should not be redirected. The British Open article should redirect to British Open (disambiguation) and ideally the disambiguation page should be moved back to the main British Open page. Betty Logan (talk) 21:34, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

:-) No, not really, not at all. The fact that the Open Championship article was accessed 30,000 times in that same period when the most of any other related article is 2,000 should give an indication of how dominant that particular topic is. Due to WP:ENGVAR, since it is a topic strongly related to the UK, the article title is kept as to what it is usually referred to in that country. Much of the rest of the world, especially the United States, use the term "British Open" for the tournament, with "The Open Championship" term often not even being recognizable (though recent branding efforts have helped a tiny bit there). I have no issue discussing the issue, but you were making a change to a long-standing status without discussing it first.

First, you were only using Wikipedia statistics. WP:PRIMARYSOURCE lists other ways it can be determined. One obvious one is a Google search -- if you do that, you get pages and pages of results relating to that one particular golf tournament, with only intermittent results about other topics (and this from a search engine which tries to weight results such that alternative topics do show up early). The very first result is to the tournament's web page (which doesn't actually use the term "British Open", again per branding efforts). The second is the link to the WIkipedia article, *directly* to "The Open Championship" title, and not going through the redirect. Due to WP:ENGVAR, it has been typical practice to use the term "Open Championship" on articles strongly related to the UK, such as British golfers, but to use the term "British Open" on similar pages strongly related to the U.S. (or other countries which more commonly use that term). Because this has been the status for a long, long time, pretty much all links have been converted to go to "The Open Championship" directly, even if the visible text reads "British Open". Your statistics are the result of "The Open Championship" being the main article title for a long, long time, not any change in how the world uses the phrase. That does not mean that users typing in "British Open" want something different -- the Google search result on the same exact term makes very clear what most people are looking for when searching for that term.

WP:PRIMARYSOURCE also states the following:

For some terms with primary topics the title of the primary topic article may differ from the term itself (as when the article covers a wider topical scope, or is titled differently according to the naming conventions). In this case the term should redirect to the article (or a section of it). For example, the primary topic for "Danzig" is the former German city of that name, but the article on that city is titled Gdańsk. Therefore Danzig redirects to Gdańsk, and the latter page contains a hatnote linking to Danzig (disambiguation).

That is precisely the situation here. The article title was actually originally "British Open", since that is most common in the U.S. and likely throughout the world, but it was changed per WP:ENGVAR a long time ago, leaving "British Open" as a redirect. The term "British Open" is bolded in the lede as an alternate, primary title, indicating that that term should be a redirect right to that article, and the hatnote explicitly states the same. I did not create this redirect originally; I was mainly cleaning up after a previous move -- the basic redirect existed long before that, and was consensus at the time I believe. I was not making any real changes in status. Carl Lindberg (talk) 16:49, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

Looking through the article history, as far as I can tell the British Open article was originally used as the Wimbledon Championships page before becoming a disambiguation page listing all the British Opens. If that were still the case then clearly that would make the golf article the primary topic, but that isn't the case anymore. Primary topic disambiguation is judged by how the topic is accessed. If those hits are coming directly from other links or google itself then those don't enter into the equation. The fact remains a very low proportion of readers access the article as the British Open by typing in that actual term. British Open and The Open Championship may well get many more hits on google, because if there are more golf articles and all of them note that a variant name is British Open then the combination will return more hits. But ultimately the article isn't being accessed all that often by people typing in British Open, everyone who wants to read the article are obviously accessing it by other names or methods. It's a fair point I could be misinterpreting the guidelines (admittedly I'm no expert on disambiguation), so I'm going to drop a note at the disambiguation project to see if someone can come and set us straight. Betty Logan (talk) 17:35, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

There are two independent questions that can be answered:

1. What is the primary topic for "British Open"? That is, when a reader enters "British Open" in the search box, what article is he or she most likely looking for? If there is one most likely, that's the primary topic for that title. If there's not, there's no primary topic, and the disambiguation page should be moved to the base name.
2. What is the correct name for the article on the topic of the golf tournament sometimes known as the British Open? That's a question that is entirely unrelated to the primary topic of "British Open" or the disambiguation project.

In September, for example, of the 800 people who trafficked through "British Open" to reach "The Open Championship", fewer than 200 needed to then navigate to the disambiguation page to find the article they intended. So there seems to be a clear primary topic. If the question still exists, I would suggest a move request to move the disambiguation page to the base name, to see if there is consensus for that change. -- JHunterJ (talk) 18:23, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, the early history of the article is a bit weird. I'm not sure the page histories capture all the page name moves (that feature was added only later I think), and some of the old redirect pages may have been deleted prior to other page moves on top of them (my creation of this redirect was after one of those episodes, restoring the earlier status quo). I've never, ever heard of Wimbledon being referred to as the "British Open", but apparently, in the very very early days, that was the article title for some reason (and the golf article was at British Open (golf)). That was corrected pretty early on, judging by the comments in the edit history... Wimbledon is no longer even listed on the disambiguation page. At one point (very briefly) The Open Championship article was even turned into a redirect to "British Open". Although, I think that was from when the title was actually still "British Open (golf)", and was a clumsy attempt to move the content into the "British Open" page, which was later accomplished by a rename. At sometime later (2004?) it got renamed again to "The Open Championship", where it has more or less stayed, with "British Open" as a redirect.

As for the name, the term "British Open" is the one used in the United States (and many other countries around the world), and the term that users there would use when searching for it. Outside of hardcore U.S. golf fans, the term "Open Championship" is basically unrecognized (though would be in British Commonwealth countries). That has been a matter of irritation for some (see the talk page over there for ad nauseum discussion), and sometimes editors from one persuasion will go around articles changing usage to one form or the other. To my mind though, hits coming directly from Google or pages *do* enter the equation... the idea is to get people to their intended topic, which is exactly the same service which Google provides, so if there is a dominant topic in the search results there, that indicates the primary topic that the (same) users would want when typing in a generic search term here. WP:PRIMARYTOPIC explicitly mentions that as one quite viable method of determining a primary topic. Most articles by this time have been changed to direct links (even if the link text is still "British Open"), meaning there are relatively few users actually going through the redirect, but that doesn't change the term they would search by if typing it in. The article title itself is, per WP:ENGVAR, the title used most often in its own country, but that is not the case worldwide, where British Open is often more dominant and the common search term. Carl Lindberg (talk) 04:51, 13 November 2010 (UTC)