User:JFG/sandbox/New York Proposed move, July 2017

Proposed move, July 2017

• New York (disambiguation) → New York
• New York → New York (state)

An August 2016 RfC has concluded that the State of New York cannot be the primary topic for the term "New York", due to the prominence of New York City being often called "New York", and to a lesser extent due to the existence of numerous other topics titled "New York", including songs, books, films, ships, sports teams, the New York metropolitan area, New York County, the historical Province of New York and a bunch of eponymous cities.

Consequently, the existing disambiguation page must be moved to the base title "New York", and the state article requires a qualifier to distinguish it from the city and other uses of the term. A July 2016 discussion on preferred qualifiers has shown overwhelming support for New York (state) vs New York State or State of New York as a destination title. The change will ease navigation and search for readers, and will bring consistency with similar cases such as Washington (state) vs Washington, D.C. and Georgia (U.S. state) vs Georgia (country).

Arguments and evidence in favor of the proposed move

New York State is not the primary topic for the term "New York"

Ever since the early days of Wikipedia, it has been repeatedly discussed whether New York State or New York City were dominant enough to claim the primary topic status for the term "New York". An August 2016 RfC concluded with an overwhelming majority that the state is definitely not a primary topic in the sense of Wikipedia guidelines, neither in terms of popularity nor in terms of long-term significance. Consequently, the current situation with the "New York" title pointing to the state article is untenable with regard to our WP:AT policy on article titles.

New York City cannot be considered primary topic either

While New York City receives roughly twice the traffic of New York State [1] – adding the visits for "New York" and "New York (state)" which are currently synonyms – we cannot conclude either that it is much more likely than any other topic, and more likely than all the other topics combined, to be the topic sought when a reader searches for that term, as would be required to become primary topic under our WP:PTOPIC guideline. New York City and New York State are the top two dominant topics for the term "New York", and they are accordingly given top billing in the dab page.

Internal links to New York are ambiguous

Over 10+ years, the encyclopedia had accumulated hundreds of thousands of ambiguous or incorrect links to the ambiguous "New York" title. Since last summer, a gigantic collective effort has been underway to correct the wrong links and vindicate the right ones; this involved a combination of manual labour, bot programming and editorial discussions. The situation is not solved, and requires constant maintenance and patrolling (hat tip to bd2412 who has volunteered to maintain things, but this is unsustainable).

When New York becomes a dab page, editors linking there will be warned and offered a choice between the potential meanings, and bots will assist in maintenance automatically, as they do for every ambiguous title in the project. Disambiguation of internal links has already helped people find directly the page they want to read instead of first going through the New York state page, which is quite bulky.

Clarify search results and educate readers

Sample search results for New York by typing "new y…" in the search box on the English Wikipedia.
We can't readily find the State of New York because it's just called "New York"; it would be clearer to see "New York (state)" among the other listed items.

A reader looking for New York State does not see it clearly appear when typing "new y…" in the Wikipedia search box, because the state article is the only item that does not have a full "New York something" title. Foreign readers may also wrongly infer from this list that "New York City" and "New York" are just two names for the same article, if they are unaware that there is a U.S. state called New York – therefore the new title contributes to the educational goal of Wikipedia.

Results and page previews from external search engines will also be clearer with "New York (state)" appearing alongside "New York City"; see for example a search on Google.

Arguments and evidence against the proposed move

New York is the official name of the state

Indeed it is, and this is why the proposed title is "New York (state)", not "New York State" or "State of New York" (see prior discussion). Besides, Wikipedia does not necessarily follow WP:OFFICIAL names, and even the state's official site – http://www.ny.gov/ – takes care to show a prominent "NEW YORK STATE" logo on every page, surely to avoid confusion with New York City. The mention of "city" or "state" in each article title is healthy for both city and state.

The move would harm the New York state article

It has been suggested in the 2016 discussion that this change would harm the visibility of the New York state article and reduce its page views; this has not been confirmed by experience when the move was performed in July 2016. Since then, the traffic to the state and city pages has been relatively stable when we add visits to the "New York" title with visits via the "New York (state)" redirect put in place to correct internal links.[2]

Traffic may indeed decrease a little after the move, but the only traffic the state page will "lose" is traffic that was meant for the city page or another one among the dab entries. With regard to visibility, a clear "New York (state)" title in the search box will indeed make the state article more visible to casual readers.

New York State contains New York City

It has been argued that New York had primacy as a higher-level jurisdiction than New York City. However, this consideration does not help readers, and the encyclopedia has several cases which go both ways. For example, Lagos (city) is primary topic against Lagos State although Lagos State is a higher-level jurisdiction; same for São Paulo vs São Paulo (state) in English, and the opposite situation in Portuguese, with the state considered primary pt:São Paulo vs pt:São Paulo (cidade).

Status quo is no problem

Some editors have argued that the long-standing status quo has proven stable and therefore should not be changed: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". The reality is that:

• The status quo actually creates many problems: wrong links, surprise effect, loading of a large page, hatnote invisible on mobile app, search box unclear, etc.
• Arguing that several prior discussions have upheld the status quo is misleading: most of those discussions had identified the issues and the change was not enforced because there was no sufficient consensus or because there were too many possibilities to choose from.
• We are facing an absurd historical situation – dating from 2001 – of a non-primary topic occupying the subject name. "Old habits die hard: occupy New York!"

This proposal makes a reasonable case that consensus can change; improvement to the encyclopedia should not be blocked by status quo stonewalling.

Title choice for the state article

WP:ATDAB suggests a number of ways to qualify the title of the state article. The best choice is a matter of opinion. This proposal suggests New York (state) for five reasons:

1. retains the state's common name per WP:COMMONNAME, qualified as necessary
2. consistency with Washington (state), Chihuahua (state), Rio de Janeiro (state) and many others
3. clarity: New York (state) appears to be the most concise unambiguous title
4. technical convenience: New York (state) is an existing redirect and is already used for most links to the state article
5. strong consensus in a prior discussion about the preferred title in case the New York article is moved

Survey on the proposed move

Please indicate your Support or Oppose opinion with a brief rationale. Longer arguments should go to the #Discussion of the proposed move section below.

Discussion of the proposed move

Debate goes here.