Talk:Submergence (film)

Requested move 8 May 2017

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. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: my read of the discussion is that there is a consensus for move as proposed -- Aunva6^{talk - contribs} 18:07, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

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(non-admin closure)

Submergence (film) → Submergence – According to WP:PTM, partial title matches should not be on a disambiguation page when no possible confusion exists. A hatnote for submerge (disambiguation) should be enough. Timmyshin (talk) 18:01, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

• Support per nom. Totally unnecessary and unjustified disambiguation and dab page. Even ignoring the partial dab issue, the film is clearly the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC and there should be no dab page per WP:TWODABS [1]. See also: Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Submergence. --В²C ☎ 19:06, 8 May 2017 (UTC)
• Well, it's a tough question. I did some thinking about it... if you want the nickel summary skip to the "Summary" section at the bottom of my comment. I won't vote yet until I hear other voices and think about this some more.

I edited the dab myself a bit (boldly, anyone else is invited to improve it of course) and right now we've got Submergence (film) and Submersion as the only two terms, but with a "See also" section of Submerge, Deep-submergence vehicle, Deep-submergence rescue vehicle, and Submersible. Some or all of those could be promoted to the main section, it doesn't much matter. I think these first three are justified as something a reasonable fraction of editors might be looking for. The last is arguable, but enh, its a short list. I didn't include Immersion as a "See Also"; you could make an argument for adding it, maybe... Immersion, Submersion, ESL readers... I dunno.

So page view stats:

• Submergence (film) has about 700 daily views
• All the other uses together have about just half that, at 350. Breakdowns are
  • Submersion, 10
  • Submerge, 10
  • Deep-submergence vehicle, 90
  • Deep-submergence rescue vehicle, 60
  • Submersible, 180
  • (If you added Immersion which is quite a stretch, that'd be another 50)

But wait. Of the (for example) 180 views for Submersible, of course the great majority are people searching on that string: "Submersible". Few are going through the dab page. How many? 10% it says here. That gives 700 for the movie against 35 for everything else.

But those 700 pageviews are a temporary spike. And it's going to spike a lot higher when the movie is released. But after its been out of theatres and in the videotape version has come and gone, where are those 700 pageviews going to be? We want a title that will be good ten years from now and longer. A lot depends on whether the film tanks or becomes a classic or whatever. We don't know that. But let's pick a random sample and see what that shows.

Looking in Category:2002 films (15 years ago) and randomizing by picking the top English-language films from #-A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I... let's see what we get for pageviews.

• The 4th Tenor: 14
• A.F.R.I.K.A.: 9
• BaadAsssss Cinema 9; it is a documentary so let's add another "B", next English one is The Bacchae (film) and it's at 12
• Cabin Fever (2002 film): 936, wow! However, it did have a recent remake, Cabin Fever (2016 film), at 867. Huh. A bit lower than the 2002 film. There's also a Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever and Cabin Fever: Patient Zero, so apparently American moviegoers are quite eager to see films about the irritability and listlessness resulting from long confinement indoors during the winter. TIL.
• D-Tox: 148. Really? Who are these 148 people? I hope I never meet them. Featuring Sylvester Stallone and a gun. Oh OK "A blizzard seals everyone in the rehab center with no outside communication". It's the Cabin Fever people! There appears to be a lot of hitting, shooting, stabbing, and all-round wounding. MAGA!
• The Earth Will Swallow You: 4 despite the excellent title. It's a documentary so let's add the next, Easter (film), 5. I read the book so I can see why movie might not have caught on.
• Falcons (film) is mostly English it says. It is at 4. "Mostly" English so let's also do the next, The Fall of the Louse of Usher, a Ken Russell film. only 12, Russell must be losing his cachet.
• G (2002 film): 35.
• Hacks (2002 film): 3. It's an indy mocumentary, so let's add in the next which is Half Past Dead. It not only stars but was produced by Steven Seagal, so it comes it at 197. Ja Rule is also in it, and of course he is extremely popular right now.
• Skipping I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco since its a black and white documentary and a bunch of foreign films gets us to I Spy (film), at 274 which makes sense. It's a long-running franchise and has two big stars.

So let's see, just the raw numbers, I get 1662 / 14 = 120. I mean, there's a huge range, single digits to 936. If you knock of the two outliers, you get (1662-936-3) / 12 = 60. And I mean the median is 13 (the modes are 4 and 9). I think the mean is skewed high by the one movie with the recent remake. You can go with it if you want. Or the median. I'll split the difference between the mean and the median which is 67.

I mean if Submergence (film) stays at Cabin Fever levels, that'll be different. We don't know and can't know. But I mean "In a room with no windows... an Englishman, James Moore, is held captive... Thousands of miles away in the Greenland Sea, Danielle Flinders prepares to dive in a submersible to the ocean floor. In their confines they are drawn back to the Christmas of the previous year, where a chance encounter on a beach in France led to an intense and enduring romance" sounds artsy and all, but I don't see it competing with Cabin Fever's "When she shaves her legs the flesh begins to peel off and she runs outside in a panic, where she is chased and killed by Dr. Mambo who tears her apart" and so forth. Not in America anyway. If they have the submersible attacked by a Kraken that might help.

And of course Submergence (film) might completely tank. In 15 years it might be getting single-digit views. 43% of our random sample are.

Summary

But let's guess in 15 years the Submergence (film) is averaging 67 views. Against that you have 350 views for the other items on the page right now. As I said most of those are people going directly to each particular page without passing through the dab. 90%? 98%? Who knows? Let's guess it's 90%, and 10% are coming thru the dab page. 350 x 10% = 35. That gives our guess for long-term pageviews at:

• A film (Submergence (film)) at 66%
• A bunch of other topics, mostly encyclopedic, at 34%

As everyone knows, WP:PRIMARYTOPIC gives us the two criteria: 1) pageviews, and 2) enduring educational value. These two criteria are in tension here.

The stuff at Submersion and Submerge and the submersibles are more encyclopedic than a movie, but OTOH Submergence (film) is not devoid of encyclopedic value. It's not a Spongebob movie. It's a regular artsy movie with Europeans in it and stuff. So, you know, it's on the bubble. It's not an easy call. Herostratus (talk) 23:41, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

Are you familiar with WP:PTM ("A disambiguation page is not a search index") as referenced by the nom? Please review it. I think your entries, like "submersion", are unlikely to be targets for people searching with "Submergence". --В²C ☎ 02:24, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

Also WP:CRYSTAL. We're not supposed to speculate about page view counts a year from now let alone 15 years; the page titles can be adjusted with usage changes as needed then. --В²C ☎ 02:30, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

Man, I can't memorize all these rules, many of which contradict each other anyway. This isn't a court of law. WP:NOTBURO. What works for the reader is best. Right? Based on this and other recent discussions I infer that you don't agree... since you don't really agree that "what probably works best for the most readers" is particularly important, I expect that we're talking past each other and there's little point to it. Let's let other voices weigh in.

"Submergence" and "submersion" are nearly identical in spelling, etymology, and meaning, and so of course some substantial number of people are going to get them crossed up. Your notion that they can't and won't is quite likely wrong.

And of course we can use our intelligence and data and so forth to try to make educated predictions about what the future holds. Functional people and organizations do this. Whether my sample size was big enough, whether the samples should have been selected differently, whether the data was misinterpreted or other things were done wrong -- this is something that reasonable people can disagree about. The notion that's it's wrongheaded to do this at all is nonsense. Herostratus (talk) 04:06, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

It is an valid question. We use pageviews to determine primary subject. To what extent do we use just current pageviews... what about if some article is in the news and spikes for just a few weeks? Or days? Should we change the primary subject for just those weeks? Submergence (film) is probably going to spike for several months, and take quite a few more months to fully subside to its true base level... and then it might spike again if it is nominated for an award... or something else happens. And it might spike in ten or twenty years if there's a remake or the star is murdered or whatever... WP:PRIMARYTOPIC says " likely... be the topic sought when a reader searches for that term", but it doesn't say "right now". It doesn't not say "right now" either. It also says "long-term significance... enduring notability".

So it is open to interpretation. My interpretation is that we want to use the long-term enduring baseline pageviews as near as we can guess it. I don't like the idea of having to change the primary topic as movies and songs and books rise and fall in popularity -- too much work for one thing. But a case could be made strictly on serve-the-reader-today grounds that we should. Herostratus (talk) 14:55, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

You don't have to memorize it, but it's advisable to not participate in an RM while ignoring the one and only policy referenced in the nom. And, no, it's not "what works best for the reader". Titles are generally not important for the reader at all. Many have noted our titles could be arbitrary random strings and WP would work just as well for the reader (given proper redirects). But yeah, let's let others weigh in, not that we're doing anything to inhibit them. --В²C ☎ 16:43, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

I don't recall many people saying that random-string titles would work just as well for the reader as intelligible ones. Perhaps you meant that one person has said it many times? A range of Wikipedia functionality depends on recognizable titles, including things like watchlists, contribution lists, category browsing, etc.; these features are useful for readers and editors alike, and I know very few people who'd say we'd be "just as well" off without them. ╠╣uw [talk] 19:25, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

You make my point, Huwmanbeing. Watchlists and contribution lists are generally for editors, not readers. I'll give you category browsing, though I wonder how widely they're used by non-editor readers. --В²C ☎ 22:19, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

I thought your point was that random titles would be just as good for readers as intelligible ones. Even if we limit consideration of the many negative consequences of such a scheme to just those that would directly affect non-editors (like making categories unusable), that's clearly not the case... and that's without yet considering how it would impact other aspects of accessibility. To take just one example, search engine results typically display titles; it's interesting to imagine the reaction if "Paris - Wikipedia" instead displayed as "e3ee4681-360d-44eb-9c2b-17d01595a8c5 - Wikipedia"... ╠╣uw [talk] 10:28, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

• Support renaming to the base name and delete the DAB page. This is my first impression given the nomination and looking at the two pages, the DAB page is not a justified DAB page. I see so many old friends already here, I haven't read your posts yet. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:25, 10 May 2017 (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.

Reviewer Comment

I have boldly made Submergence (disambiguation) primary because I have accepted the novel and disambiguated the film. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:03, 14 August 2020 (UTC)