Talk:Poison the well

What this should redirect to...

As it stands, "Poison the well" currently redirects to Poisoning the well and not Poison the Well, despite being only one capital letter away from the latter. So anyone trying to get to the article about the band from this page must make a rather large circle (being automatically redirected to Poisoning the well from this page, then to Poisoning the well (disambiguation) then to Poison the Well (band) which redirects to Poison the Well). In terms of page views, the band gets more hits per month than any other related page (Poison the Well: 10532 page views in June 09 – Poisoning the well: 6976 page views in June 09 – Well Poisoning: 1017 page views in June 09 – Stargate Atlantis (season 1): 2067 page views in June 09) and should therefore have this article link to the band. In terms of the data provided, on July 9 the band released a new song on their MySpace causing a spike in page views which can be seen on both the band's page, and more noticeably on the logical fallacy's page – likely due to users trying to navigate to the band page through the other. Why not have this page redirect to the band, and place a link to Poisoning the well (disambiguation) there as well? This way the majority of people searching for anything related to poisoning and wells can stop at "Poison the Well" and then rest can trickle down through the disambiguation page to the article they are looking for. Is that not what a disambiguation page is designed to do? Wikipedia's policy on disambiguation is not much help in this case, as it largely discusses what to do when articles have the same title. In this case we have a grouping of very similar titles, and I figured that by using page views it would comply with wikipedia's policy on a neutral point of view and create a non-biased solution. Fezmar9 (talk) 16:20, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Common phrases are inherently more notable than minor bands that happen to use the name. Anybody looking for the band would go for the capitalized version. Anyone looking for the phrase would go for the lowercase version. Anyone looking for the band who isn't bright enough to realize its copyrighted would still find their way back. It's better to inconvenience a small number of people than to inconvenience all the peopkle looking for the far more common phrase. DreamGuy (talk) 17:00, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Because this page could be used to redirect to either the band under "Redirect from other capitalization" or the logical fallacy under "Redirect from related word" would it make more sense for this to redirect to Poisoning the well (disambiguation)? Fezmar9 (talk) 00:31, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Actually, having this redirect to the logical fallacy voids the "Go" mixed-capitalisation redirect according to WP:MIXEDCAPS. This will now redirect to the band, and a disambiguation template will be placed there as well. Fezmar9 (talk) 01:52, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

You'll have to get consensus to do so, which you do not have. This is lowercase, and the band is extremely trivial compared to the phrase. You have no reason to send it to the band. DreamGuy (talk) 04:12, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

According to WP:MIXEDCAPS, the reason for having a redirect from an alternate capitalization: "Articles whose titles contain mixed-capitalization words (not all initial caps, or not all lower case except the first word) are found only via an exact case match. (Articles, including redirects, whose titles are either all initial caps or only first word capitalized are found via "Go" using a case-insensitive match.)" If the fallacy article was titled "poison the well," it would be different. Because this page is spelled EXACTLY the same as the band minus one capital letter, this is the definition of a "redirect from other capitalization." Trivial or not, the band is spelled the same as this page – the fallacy is not. Fezmar9 (talk) 05:39, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Per the invite at Wikipedia Talk:Redirect, I looked at the redirect. In particular, I looked at the inbound links using that redirect. Pageview statistics may give you a sense of readership ratios of pages but it can not tell you anything about our reader/editor's intent in the creation of the link. Worse, as was noted above, pageview statistics don't give you any data on readers who clicked though one title looking for the other page. 'What links here', on the other hand, is a very effective way to guage how our reader/editors are using the phrase. That makes it, in my experience, a far more reliable indicator of the utility of a redirect.
In this case, I found 86 inbound links and spot-checked a round dozen. All but one referred to the logical fallacy. My selection of links to check was not entirely random. I went out of my way to find usages that might refer to the band and still only found the one. The usage referring to the logical fallacy is by far the more common.
Regardless of our rules on MIXEDCAPS, the overriding goal must be to make navigation as easy for our reader/editors as possible. In most cases, MIXEDCAPS accomplishes that goal. MIXEDCAPS, however, is an editing guideline which recognizes that there may be exceptions and should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. In this case, strict compliance with MIXEDCAPS it would take far more readers following the link to an unwanted page about the band than it would take band-seekers to the logical fallacy page.
I also note that both pages already have the disambiguation top-hat templates to help the minority of readers who land on the wrong page. Rossami (talk) 18:55, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for stepping in. Ultimately, I did not care about the outcome of the discussion, but rather the reason why this could not redirect to the band. Certainly you must understand my confusion of why one capital letter was not a sufficient enough reason for a redirect. However, you have provided a very thorough explanation, and I am content with result. Fezmar9 (talk) 19:12, 31 July 2009 (UTC)