Talk:Rivers (disambiguation)

Requested move 14 June 2019

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 after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: not moved -- JHunterJ (talk) 12:44, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

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Rivers (disambiguation) → Rivers – Raised on behalf of Toploftical as requested on my talk page. Certes (talk) 10:09, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Comment Toploftical gave the following rationale:

1. Just because "similar change previously reverted" does not mean that the change is incorrect. Perhaps nobody questioned the change as I am now doing.
2. To have a link for "Rivers" is not particularly helpful. Everybody knows what a river is. The only time such a link might be sensible is in a discussion of, say, topography, in a statement such as, "streams and Springs should not be grouped with rivers in analyzing the soils of the region." One should simply link to the singular form as I have done here. The whole idea of having plural nouns redirect to their singular form just adds an unnecessary level of complexity to WP IMHO.
3. The most common reason that somebody might have the word Rivers in an article is because it is the name of something. There are many things named Rivers. Almost never does a page need a link to the plural of river.
4. A person who can't remember what province Rivers, Manitoba is in, or the first name of songwriter Johnny Rivers, or the first name of football player Derek Rivers, and so on for the many other people with the last name Rivers, will be frustrated if they type in Rivers. They simply get taken to the page River which is absolutely no help.
5. Somebody looking for a person named Rivers is taken to river and may not even realize that a disambiguation page for Rivers exists. Most users are not sophisticated enough to type in the words Rivers (disambiguation). WP should try to help people, not hide things.
6. On the page Category:Redirects from plurals we find the statement, "When editing Wikipedia and using wiki markup, in many cases it is preferable to add the plural directly after the link (example: links)." I could not agree more.

– Certes (talk) 10:09, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose Rivers means rivers. In ictu oculi (talk) 12:57, 14 June 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose plural of a common word. -- Netoholic @ 22:34, 14 June 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose I'm definitely not opposed to having cases where X is a ptopic but the plural of X goes to a dab page, as discussed in WP:PLURALPT with the example of Paper vs. Papers (also discussed in an interesting recent RM at Talk:Ravens). But I don't think there's a good argument for this being one of those cases. The only non-partial match that competes with the plural of river is a tiny community in Manitoba that no longer exists under that name. Colin M (talk) 21:52, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

  Papers isn't comparable anyway since while one would say "1 river" or "many rivers" one would say "1 piece of paper" but still "lots of pieces of paper" since "paper" is a mass noun. If WP had a convention to use plurals for things then the article would still be at "Paper", compare the category namespece where the flow of water is at Category:Rivers and Commons:Category:Rivers but both Category:Paper and Commons:Category:Paper don't include the "s". Crouch, Swale (talk) 09:09, 18 June 2019 (UTC)

  Okay, then take Balls and Suns (dabs) vs. Ball and Sun (ptopics). To be clear, I'm not talking about when policy dictates using a plural form as the article title. I'm talking about cases where the singular form goes to a PTOPIC and the plural form goes to a dab page. Colin M (talk) 18:00, 18 June 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose Clear WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT._{ZXCVBNM (TALK)} 22:41, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose by PT#2 the flow of water is clearly primary and by PT#1 the only major contender appears to be Rivers State and its unlikely that that would be referred to as plain "Rivers" often due to the ambiguity of the name. Readers who search for "Rivers" probably expect to be taken to the topic that WP convention makes in the plural for (WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT/WP:RPURPOSE). Its unlikely that someone searching for a person named (or surnamed) "Rivers" would use just "Rivers", see WP:NAMELIST. While rivers shouldn't be linked to much (WP:OVERLINK) its still a useful redirect for searching which is the main purpose of a redirect. Crouch, Swale (talk) 09:06, 18 June 2019 (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.