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Possible error

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I'll leave people more familiar with the island to deal with this, but the article states that Saint Anthony Parish is too dangerous to inhabit, yet the community of Garibaldi Hill - located within the parish at its northwest corner according to Google Maps - is listed as a safe zone location and appears to be inhabited. Question is whether Saint Anthony Parish still exists as a political entity or if Garibaldi Hill is governed by Saint Peter Parish. On a related note it seems some parts of Saint Peter, such as St. George's Hill, fall within the exclusion zone. 23skidoo (talk) 21:43, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 16 September 2024

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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. After extensive discussion, no consensus has developed that the island territory "is not the primary topic for Montserrat". Experienced editors in support as well as opposition reasonably cite WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. Most agree this topic meets the criteria of that guideline. I note that this request has already been closed twice by experienced editors and reopened twice by request. Based on further comments by participants after the relisting comment, it is clear that further discussion will not result in consensus to move this article at this time. Station1 (talk) 18:10, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]


– Montserrat (British Overseas Territory) is not the primary topic of Montserrat. Montserrat (mountain) in Catalonia, Spain is also commonly searched and read. Actually, by searching "Montserrat" in Google you will likely find that most results on the first page of search results are on Montserrat (mountain) in Catalonia, Spain. John Smith Ri (talk) 06:30, 16 September 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. Dekimasuよ! 10:25, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Curiously, the top hit for my search was Montserrat (typeface), although I also had results for the BOT and the mountain. The BOT article seems to get considerably more page views, but otherwise there's a case to be made here. CMD (talk) 07:19, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    The page views at the presumed primary topic are affected by the >5k incoming links. WikiNav for last month indicates 46% (+ possibly another 5% filtered) of measurable incoming views came from other articles, ~30k/month. The combination of traffic that we know comes from search engines and the traffic we don't know the source of amounts to about the same volume. We know from other examples that search engines would also modify their behavior if we were to change our navigation, but we don't know the ratios until it happens, we don't really know the exact organic level of reader traffic interested in a presumed primary topic unless/until we make a change to navigation to be able to measure it better. --Joy (talk) 11:25, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose. The territory is the primary topic. O.N.R. (talk) 07:29, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • As I first thought of the human name, and then looked at the population of this island, this has strong Saba vibes, but I'll try to explicitly fight this bias :) and just look at the data.
WikiNav for Montserrat shows the hatnote, though not particularly high up (I'll follow up with historical clickstream data later). WikiNav for the disambiguation page shows a healthy spread of topics, though some of it does go back to the presumed primary topic. Mass views:
* All-time mass views for all topics linked from Montserrat (disambiguation)
* All-time mass views for all topics linked from Montserrat (given name)
* All-time mass views for all topics linked from Montserrat (surname)
So the island gets 2,287 views/day, mountain gets 308/day, the Christian pilgrimage site in Catalonia articles get 189/day for the abbey and 154/day for the concept, Montserrat Caballé 644/day, Montserrat Lombard 149/day, Montserrat Oliver 85/day etc. Without further looking into the long tail, that's 2,287 : 1,529 or 1.5 : 1 already. So that's in the suspicious territory, though still reasonably strong. If we were to proceed with the move, the island would still absolutely have to go to the top common section (MOS:DABCOMMON).
It would be good to have a more coherent argument on long-term significance - is the British territory something that the average English reader is strongly associating with this term? --Joy (talk) 09:43, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The mountain and the Christian pilgrimage site in Catalonia is somehow the same place. Besides, it is unlikely that non-British English readers (especially non-native users of English) know such an isolated island and territory with only thousands of residents (there are much more people living around Montserrat mountain). John Smith Ri (talk) 10:04, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
By the way, British Montserrat is somehow named after Montserrat mountain. John Smith Ri (talk) 10:05, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Here's what I found in the clickstream archive:
Snapshot of clickstreams from Montserrat to hatnote and other possibly ambiguous destinations

From meta:Research:Wikipedia clickstream:

clickstream-enwiki-2023-09.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(disambiguation) link 480
  • Montserrat Virgin_of_Montserrat link 138
  • Montserrat Santa_Maria_de_Montserrat_Abbey link 112
  • Montserrat Main_Page other 67
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(mountain) other 16
  • total: 24808 to 214 identified destinations
clickstream-enwiki-2023-10.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(disambiguation) link 594
  • Montserrat Virgin_of_Montserrat link 148
  • Montserrat Santa_Maria_de_Montserrat_Abbey link 130
  • Montserrat Main_Page other 68
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(mountain) other 14
  • total: 26853 to 209 identified destinations
clickstream-enwiki-2023-11.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(disambiguation) link 514
  • Montserrat Virgin_of_Montserrat link 138
  • Montserrat Santa_Maria_de_Montserrat_Abbey link 118
  • Montserrat Main_Page other 85
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(mountain) other 12
  • total: 24545 to 209 identified destinations
clickstream-enwiki-2023-12.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(disambiguation) link 439
  • Montserrat Virgin_of_Montserrat link 121
  • Montserrat Santa_Maria_de_Montserrat_Abbey link 121
  • Montserrat Main_Page other 67
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(mountain) other 11
  • total: 24687 to 211 identified destinations
clickstream-enwiki-2024-01.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(disambiguation) link 421
  • Montserrat Virgin_of_Montserrat link 144
  • Montserrat Santa_Maria_de_Montserrat_Abbey link 125
  • Montserrat Main_Page other 45
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(mountain) other 12
  • total: 27820 to 229 identified destinations
clickstream-enwiki-2024-02.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(disambiguation) link 390
  • Montserrat Virgin_of_Montserrat link 117
  • Montserrat Santa_Maria_de_Montserrat_Abbey link 105
  • Montserrat Main_Page other 74
  • total: 24899 to 214 identified destinations
clickstream-enwiki-2024-03.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(disambiguation) link 478
  • Montserrat Virgin_of_Montserrat link 153
  • Montserrat Santa_Maria_de_Montserrat_Abbey link 127
  • Montserrat Main_Page other 59
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(mountain) other 16
  • total: 29639 to 226 identified destinations
clickstream-enwiki-2024-04.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(disambiguation) link 507
  • Montserrat Santa_Maria_de_Montserrat_Abbey link 150
  • Montserrat Virgin_of_Montserrat link 134
  • Montserrat Main_Page other 87
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(mountain) other 15
  • total: 27135 to 221 identified destinations
clickstream-enwiki-2024-05.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(disambiguation) link 508
  • Montserrat Virgin_of_Montserrat link 151
  • Montserrat Santa_Maria_de_Montserrat_Abbey link 138
  • Montserrat Main_Page other 72
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(mountain) other 12
  • total: 31254 to 230 identified destinations
clickstream-enwiki-2024-06.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(disambiguation) link 463
  • Montserrat Virgin_of_Montserrat link 135
  • Montserrat Santa_Maria_de_Montserrat_Abbey link 122
  • Montserrat Main_Page other 51
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(mountain) other 15
  • total: 25844 to 214 identified destinations
clickstream-enwiki-2024-07.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(disambiguation) link 481
  • Montserrat Virgin_of_Montserrat link 122
  • Montserrat Santa_Maria_de_Montserrat_Abbey link 112
  • Montserrat Main_Page other 45
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(mountain) other 16
  • total: 27073 to 220 identified destinations
clickstream-enwiki-2024-08.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(disambiguation) link 434
  • Montserrat Santa_Maria_de_Montserrat_Abbey link 96
  • Montserrat Virgin_of_Montserrat link 93
  • Montserrat Main_Page other 70
  • Montserrat Montserrat_(mountain) other 13
  • total: 24728 to 217 identified destinations
So every month, about five hundred readers consistently click the hatnote. A couple of hundred a month check out the Christian eponym topics - these may or may not be happier with a more prominent link, we can't tell from these stats alone.
A dozen readers generate these 'other' clickstreams towards the mountain - there's no link, so they have to manually go to their destination. It's usually a worrying sign for bad navigation when there's enough of these that it shows up in the stats (and at that level there's a substantial chance the anonymization threshold of <10 is also hiding more of these).
I've included the similar kind of clickstreams towards the Main Page for comparison, with those readers we don't know if they went back to the start because of a problem in navigation or if they just wanted to go there to read the news or start fresh or whatever the reason there may be. --Joy (talk) 10:57, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There's also Google Books Ngrams that can tell us which words most commonly appear next to 'Montserrat' in books. Looks like the usual suspects, with a recent spike probably coinciding with the 1990s disaster. Mentions of Caballe are visible during her lifetime, too. When I went deeper into the "of" and "and" variants, like this, it looks like a lot of the earlier spikes are old typos for stuff at list of rulers of Montferrat. Speaking of which, we have a distinguishing hatnote for that, too, and that gets some traffic, too.
Snapshot of clickstreams from Montserrat to Montferrat

From meta:Research:Wikipedia clickstream:

clickstream-enwiki-2023-09.tsv:
clickstream-enwiki-2023-10.tsv:
clickstream-enwiki-2023-11.tsv:
clickstream-enwiki-2023-12.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montferrat link 70
clickstream-enwiki-2024-01.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montferrat link 222
clickstream-enwiki-2024-02.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montferrat link 198
clickstream-enwiki-2024-03.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montferrat link 224
clickstream-enwiki-2024-04.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montferrat link 245
clickstream-enwiki-2024-05.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montferrat link 211
clickstream-enwiki-2024-06.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montferrat link 207
clickstream-enwiki-2024-07.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montferrat link 220
clickstream-enwiki-2024-08.tsv:
  • Montserrat Montferrat link 202
--Joy (talk) 11:09, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The hole in the stats at the start looks to be because the distinguishing hatnote was only added on December 22 last year, in this edit. While there's some credence to thinking some of these might be misclicks because of the prominent placement of hatnotes, this pattern still does seem to add to the suspicion that there's a substantial chunk of readers who may have issues with our navigation here. --Joy (talk) 11:13, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A bit of experimenting with ngram search queries later, here's a graph that might be more relevant: the Marquis confusion is still visible, then we see a lot of mentions of the island as such, likewise for Virgin and Lady. This would lead me to say that Montserrat (island) (island of Montserrat) would be a better choice for disambiguation if we were to do that. There's a variety of mentions of just "Montserrat" that seem to generally mean the island being listed together with other nearby places, though the volume of these is still comparable to the volume of e.g. mentions of the monastery. The question is how to summarize this mass of references. It would be nice if we could know how much of this comes from mundane statistical references and how much from customary references which would lead the average reader to assume the word as such means the island. --Joy (talk) 11:38, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I tried to get a sense of what are some of the more complete phrases that include these interesting ambiguous groups, by including more words in the wildcard search queries.
For "of Montserrat and the *" there's:
  • Commissioners of ... and Presidencies of Montserrat and the Virgin Islands - looks like a reference to Royal Montserrat Police Service, which has existed since 1967, but the graphs actually largely flatten in the 1950s so this doesn't quite make sense
  • Marquis of Montserrat and the Grand Master ... - is this a reference to The Talisman (Scott novel) first published in 1825?
  • colonies of Montserrat and the British Virgin [Islands] - seemingly a large spike throughout the 1970s, but when I look for that, Google Books Ngrams says Search for "colonies of Montserrat and the British *" yielded only one result.
  • Government of Montserrat and the ... - seemingly a reference to the island but again when I try to search further for that last word I get Ngrams not found: Government of Montserrat and the *
For "Montserrat and *" there's:
  • Montserrat and Nevis to the southeast ... and searching further fails as above
  • Montserrat and Antigua in 1632 ... and searching further fails
  • Montserrat and St. Kitts and Nevis ... ditto
  • Montserrat and Virgin Islands Gazette ... ditto but this seems like a reference to The Antigua, Montserrat and Virgin Islands gazette, mentioned in The Leeward Islands Gazette as something that started in 1872
At this point I started to suspect that this method isn't great, because it seems to be zeroing in on rather specific works and the swings between historical periods are pretty wide. Another example was trying to search into industry in Montserrat is * which just ended with Search for "industry in Montserrat *" yielded only one result. and the last graph it showed flattened off after the 1960s, with a single tiny spike in 2005, and that's it.
This doesn't sound like it would be a reliable proxy for average English reader interests today. --Joy (talk) 09:31, 18 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per others, the island is the clear primary topic
Kowal2701 (talk) 20:09, 17 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Previous discussion

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@Joy: A 2005 discussion about the article title was archived on 8 August 2023. I noticed that you were still hoping for more discussion on the matter, so pointing this out, in case you missed it. I've added an {{Old moves}} template at the top of this page. Those who forget past discussions are condemned to repeat them ;) – wbm1058 (talk) 14:18, 24 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Wbm1058 thanks for the note! I didn't see that before. Granted, it's a discussion from about two decades ago, and it's hardly well structured - indeed I seem to see a lot of violations of the civility policy there. So I'm not sure if you're trying to say that this was an example of how we have consensus and shouldn't discuss this further? Or just that we know from experience that this discussion will be a particularly contentious one? --Joy (talk) 14:32, 24 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Also, it should be noted that the 2005 discussion was somewhat more extreme in the other direction - they wanted to make the mountain article primary topic, which I would see no reason to support based on the current level of information. --Joy (talk) 14:36, 24 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Right, the RM process wasn't so refined back in 2005. Just thinking you could review the opinions of other editors; maybe some points were raised back then that weren't discussed more recently.
From my perspective, there are over 3,500 links to this, so moving this off the primary topic and forcing disambiguation will create a huge amount of work. What I usually look for to decide the need for this is links to the base title which are intended for the mountain in Spain or some other target. You might find these introduced by Spanish editors who are unaware the island exists. I'm not finding any obvious mislinks, so am satisfied with the status quo. – wbm1058 (talk) 14:48, 24 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, that would be the cost of the change. I still wouldn't treat this as a showstopper because if it would help readers, per WP:RF, that would be more important than helping editors.
Thankfully even there a lot of the links should be artificially created, through templates - there seems to be a fair few obvious ones.
With regard to edited information referring to the island, the main thing to figure out is whether that corresponds to real-world information about the island which in turn would be larger than that of the rest of these topics, and in turn the real-world reader interest - or if there's a meaningful discrepancy between these ratios.
Let's have a poor man's comparison of link counts for a start, for the topics mentioned before:
(171+116+275+814+51+30+284+296 = 2037)
We can see that there's a significant discrepancy between the reader interest in page views and editor interest in links. Where we saw page views at roughly 60 : 40 = ~1.5, these links to these top items amount to only 5602 : 2037 = ~2.75.
Individually the discrepancy is even larger: for example, the ratio of page views between Caballe and the island article is 2286 : 643 = ~3.5, but of links 5602 : 814 = ~6.9, while with the Buenos Aires place it's 2286 : 19 = ~120, and 5602 : 296 = ~19.
So, some things get relatively more readership, some relatively more links, these two variables aren't correlated well. That's why I wouldn't prioritize concerns about editors having to fix links.
Let's also note for the record the data for the most common typo:
Just to match the units, the ~220 clicks/month for that hatnote mentioned before - would be ~7/day.
Also, just in case it flew under the radar - some amount of existing readership and existing links going to the base title and in turn the island article - could just be wrong. This might also help explain the relatively high amounts of clicks on hatnotes. --Joy (talk) 09:38, 25 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]