Talk:Parachutes (Coldplay album)

The following discussion is an archived 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: Page moved: per discussion Ground Zero | t 01:00, 16 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong rename per nom. The primary topic is the device used to jump out of an aerial vehicle and descent to the ground safely. -- 65.94.169.222 (talk) 06:34, 5 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - per above. Sergecross73 msg me 11:19, 5 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per nom; every other topic will have been named after the primary topic anyway. No astonishment will come from a
  WP:PLURALPT redirect. bd2412 T 13:29, 5 September 2014 (UTC)[reply
  ]

  Parachutes suggest the primary topic is for the plural form? Dohn joe (talk) 21:39, 6 September 2014 (UTC)[reply

  ]

  In this case, the incoming links tell me that the title is linked in a lot of templates, which generate links irrespective of use in pages. bd2412 T 21:47, 7 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  Can you separate template from non-template links? (I don't know.) What do they tell us? Dohn joe (talk) 22:06, 7 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  If this were a disambiguation page, incoming links would be useful to tell us if editors who were unaware of the content of the page were overwhelmingly making links to one particular topic on the page. Since it is not a disambiguation page, we need to separate out the links made by editors who were aware of the content (and only linked to that title because they checked it first) from links made by editors who were unaware of its content. I note two things in this regard. First, there area substantial number of incoming discussion links from the redirect,

  Ordnance Factories Board, Joint Precision Airdrop System, Operation Courageous, Everard Calthrop, 1963 Elephant Mountain B-52 crash, Albert Leo Stevens, The Sky Pirate (novel), Parachute Industry Association, Beatty-Johl BJ-2 Assegai, Scranton Lace Company, The Great Waldo Pepper, Scorched 3D. bd2412 T 12:28, 8 September 2014 (UTC)[reply

  ]

  Hmm, maybe I don't get things, but when I looked at "what links here" for

  Parachutes: see Coldplay, Chris Martin, A Rush of Blood to the Head, etc. How does that make sense? Second - how do you know which links were made by people who checked the title first? We can rightfully assume that links going to the aerial device were not checked first, but we have no way of knowing how many Coldplay editors just assumed the title was "Parachutes" versus checking it first. And in any event, the number of links still shows that the album is linked to much more often than the aerial device, regardless of how they got there. Btw, I changed those links to [[Parachute]]s because regardless of where this title goes, that is a more stable solution. Dohn joe (talk) 14:34, 8 September 2014 (UTC)[reply

  ]

  So far as I can tell, there are more than 75 links to Parachutes (album), which is a fair number for a title for which people are supposed to expect the topic to be undisambiguated. As for Coldplay editors assuming the title without checking, you are correct, we can't know whether they checked or not; this therefore is of little value in showing that people expect the title to be there, rather than having merely checked the title. bd2412 T 16:35, 8 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  What I was saying here, though, is that if you actually look at those articles, they do not link to "(album)" - they directly link this article. At least 80% of the ones I checked fell into that category. Please doublecheck my work, but that's what I found. Dohn joe (talk) 16:57, 8 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose per
  Chairs was viewed 504 times.) The fact that the album got more views than the aerial device shows that the album has established a separate primarytopic. It's the number 12 best-selling album of the 21st century in the UK. This is exactly the sort of situation envisaged at Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(plurals)#Primary_topic. Dohn joe (talk) 13:43, 5 September 2014 (UTC)[reply
  ]
  • Even if we grant that it is of roughly equal recent interest, it still massively fails primacy in terms of historical importance of the term. bd2412 T 14:33, 5 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

    Thanks for the response. But the point is that they are not roughly equal in interest. In the normal situation, the singular form outdraws its plural by 10:1 or 20:1. So in a normal scenario,

    WP:PLURALPT encourages us to do. When plural usage creeps above 10%, we need to ask why. And we need to ask if it actually serves our readers to redirect the 90% to an article they are not looking for. Dohn joe (talk) 15:02, 5 September 2014 (UTC)[reply

    ]

    • Compare Apple and Avatar. What serves our readers is for the encyclopedia to be serious enough to accord primary topic status to topics that are clearly the most important historically. The album may be popular and critically lauded, but has nowhere near the importance in human history. bd2412 T 16:38, 8 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

      But there is a distinction here. We are dealing with a plural form, not a singular. Look at what

      WP:PLURALPT

      says:

      "Because readers and editors are used to seeing titles at the singular form, and can be expected to search for them/link to them in the singular form, the intentional use of a plural form by a reader or editor can be evidence that a separate primary topic exists at the plural form."

Here, we have evidence that readers and editors are intentionally using "Parachutes" much more often for the album than they are for the plural of "parachute". This is what

parachutes.... Does that make sense? Dohn joe (talk) 16:57, 8 September 2014 (UTC)[reply

]

Avatars redirects to Avatar. bd2412 T 17:06, 8 September 2014 (UTC)[reply

]

Yes, because in August:

• Apple = 97,264 views
• Apples = 2,263 views

whereas

• Bookend = 936 views
• Bookends = 7,852 views

and

• Window = 19,186 views
• Windows = 16,675 views

compare

• Parachute = 17,416 views
• Parachutes = 18,969 views

Apple shows the normal situation, where the singular form vastly outdraws the plural. Bookend and Window show the unusual case where the plural form has a large number of views on its own.

WP:PLURALPT tells us that this is strong evidence that the plural may have a separate primarytopic. Parachute is much more like Bookend and Window than it is Apple, wouldn't you agree? Dohn joe (talk) 17:40, 8 September 2014 (UTC)[reply

]

Not in terms of relative historical importance. Although the window is an important invention, the Windows operating system is also far more important historically than any music album; by comparison, the bookend is a relatively trivial invention. Based on its age and importance in military history, I would put the parachute many more levels above any music album in importance than that. bd2412 T 18:19, 8 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I would, too,

Parachutes last month were looking for the album? Dohn joe (talk) 19:32, 8 September 2014 (UTC)[reply

]

• Support. The pop music album will quickly prove ephemeral and go back into old history. Parachutes as used in airplanes are the primary meaning. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 05:21, 6 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak support Neutral. I see both sides of this issue--the album is no minor ephemeral pop music phenomenon; nevertheless, it seems a little bit
  WP:PLURALPT as an example. Red Slash 20:30, 6 September 2014 (UTC)[reply
  ]

  Chairs? Dohn joe (talk) 14:39, 10 September 2014 (UTC)[reply

  ]

• A thought. Would anyone be interesting in running a little experiment on the current setup to see how many people who come to this page are actually looking for Parachute? We currently have the hatnote directing people to that page. We can turn the link in that hatnote into a special redirect and track its usage over a brief period of time to count the number of people who click over to the parachute page. That would give us further evidence of usage that could inform the benefits of this move request. Thoughts? Dohn joe (talk) 15:28, 8 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • It's an interesting idea, but I suspect that the outcome of such an experiment (assuming it is a brief experiment) might be biased by traffic that is generated by links (including links on locations external to Wikipedia) that exist primarily because of the historical location of the articles rather than producing a measure of what would happen as time moved on. There is also the general transient nature of the popularity of music to consider. This is a relatively recent work, not something released several decades ago. —BarrelProof (talk) 19:53, 15 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

    I can see your point, but we can still get some rough idea of how many people are dissatisfied with being presented this article. I may go ahead and do this one now, and run it at least until the close of the RM. Dohn joe (talk) 20:06, 15 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose per Dohn Joe. People searching for information on the fabric device used to slow the motion of a moving object would search for "parachute" not "parachutes." This is a solution in search of a problem.
  Talk To Me 22:40, 8 September 2014 (UTC)[reply
  ]

See the list of mislinks BD2412 gave:

Ordnance Factories Board, Joint Precision Airdrop System, Operation Courageous, Everard Calthrop, 1963 Elephant Mountain B-52 crash, Albert Leo Stevens, The Sky Pirate (novel), Parachute Industry Association, Beatty-Johl BJ-2 Assegai, Scranton Lace Company, The Great Waldo Pepper, Scorched 3D. This proves conclusively that making Parachutes (album) (according to WP:SONGDAB) the subject of "Parachutes" is just creating disruption for users and editors. Likewise when the Coldplay template is corrected to (album), immediately 47 "Parachutes" links are corrected. In ictu oculi (talk) 22:57, 8 September 2014 (UTC)[reply

]

• Support per nom. Utterly obvious primary topic. It's not just what people search for; it's what editors link to that matters. Are we really saying that editors who type [[parachutes]] are more likely to be trying to link to the album (which many won't even have heard of) than to the plural of an extremely common word (which everyone will have heard of)? Really?! I don't think so. -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:13, 10 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  WP:PRIMARYTOPIC does not put ease of editing above interests of readers. Isn't it clear that, even with the several incoming links meant for Parachute, the vast majority of people who came to this page were looking for the album? Isn't it very reader-unfriendly to send 90% of them somewhere they don't want to be, when we know better? Dohn joe (talk) 14:39, 10 September 2014 (UTC)[reply

  ]

  So you are saying that more people will be looking for this album than for the thing used to jump out of an aeroplane? Amazing! I hadn't realised that Coldplay were so phenomenally popular that their album title had usurped a common English word. Although I have a sneaking suspicion that only dyed-in-the-wool Coldplay fans would think that! Many of the rest of us haven't even heard of it! -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:13, 10 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  Um, yes. Didn't you read this discussion before you !voted? See pageviews for August:

  • Parachute - 17,416
  • Parachutes - 18,969
    .

So yes, more people were looking for the Coldplay album. And way more people were looking for the album than people were looking for the plural of "parachute". See above for just how unusual it is on WP for a plural form to even come close to having the same number of views as the singular, let alone more. Does that affect your decision? Dohn joe (talk) 15:44, 10 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I read it. And discounted it as yet another example of the great "page views are the most important thing in the universe ever" misdirection. Remember what they say about statistics being capable of being used to prove anything... However, they don't, or shouldn't, trump common sense. And common sense says that the plural of a common word trumps an album any day. As I said, I think only a diehard fan would claim otherwise. -- Necrothesp (talk) 08:58, 11 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Funny thing about common sense.

"Common sense said the world was flat; science showed this to be false. Common sense said the sun and the moon were the same size; science showed this to be wrong. Common sense said the Earth was the center of the universe; science showed this to be false."

You are, of course, entitled your own opinions, and your own common sense; but you are not entitled to your own facts. If you have a different interpretation of the above statistics, please present it. Otherwise, I think my interpretation is perfectly reasonable, and, in fact, makes a lot of common sense.... :) Dohn joe (talk) 13:34, 11 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It's more than just common sense, it is policy: "A topic is primary for a term, with respect to long-term significance, if it has substantially greater enduring notability and educational value than any other topic associated with that term". That is exactly the distinction being drawn between devices that people spent five hundred years trying to invent, and which thereafter played a major role in wars and events all over the world, versus an album. bd2412 T 15:28, 11 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Usage is policy, too: "A topic is primary for a term, with respect to usage, if it is highly likely—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." No one is arguing that this album is more important than the aerial device. What we're saying is that the album is primary for the plural form and only the plural form. That is the distinction that we're supposed to draw from

Bookends can co-exist.

Look, I could give a flying fig about this album, which I had never heard of until this week. I'm just trying to get as many readers to the article they're looking for as we can. Dohn joe (talk) 15:56, 11 September 2014 (UTC)[reply

]

I am trying to do the same, but for the next hundred years. In theory, whenever a popular culture topic (that shares a name with a topic of historical importance) becomes hot for a while, we could make the popular culture topic the primary topic, and then go back to the topic of historical importance when the popular culture topic inevitably drops off. We could have done this, were we around at the time, with Emotions (Mariah Carey album), Crocodiles (album), and Incantations (album). I prefer to put things where they should be for the long term. bd2412 T 16:08, 11 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• Support per nom. The concept of primary topic relates to when a substantial majority of potential readers would understand an ambiguous term to mean the same thing. Irrespective of how famous Coldplay are, there is something quite facetious to an argument that everybody would think of the album over and above the life-saving device. The fallacy of the argument is doubly reduced to absurdity, when we remember that pt requires long-term significance. How many 20 year old albums would our knee-jerk opposers to these nominations recognise outside of their own genre favourites? 5 if they are lucky. As for the Parachute/s argument, skydivers jump with parachutes. Adding (album) to the title clarifies and informs, why would anybody wish to object? --Richhoncho (talk) 14:32, 13 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• Solution? Some have expressed concern that when an album, or something else, is a pluralpt, that someone searching for a plural has no choice but to be directed to that album. So I created
  Parachutes (aerial device) as a redirect to Parachute. Now someone searching for the plural form has a convenient redirect, while the majority of people, who are searching for this album, can get straight there. The redirect, plus the hatnote on this article, should take care of most navigation issues, and we can get as many people as possible to the content they're looking for, which should be one of our main concerns. How does that sound? Dohn joe (talk) 16:51, 14 September 2014 (UTC)[reply
  ]

Response. Dohn Joe has created a namespace with a parenthesis to avoid having a parenthesis on the article of this namespace. How does that work? This is the only response I am going to make here (nobody benefits from long to and fro-ing discussions). --Richhoncho (talk) 17:57, 14 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It works the way it always works when we have a primarytopic. The primarytopic is at the base name, and the other topics with the same name are disambiguated. It's how we most efficiently direct our readers to where they want to go. I think this actually is a very workable solution. Any other responses? Dohn joe (talk) 18:04, 14 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There is no rule prohibiting multiple redirects from pointing to an article. Both

Parachutes (aerial device) can point to the clear primary topic of the term by long-term significance, Parachute. Coldplay didn't make up the word. They chose to appropriate an existing well-known word as the title of their album, just as Mariah Carey did with "Emotions", Barbara Streisand did with "Memories", Woody Allen did with the movie "Bananas" and Disney did with the "Cars" movies. However, since we are an encyclopedia of all knowledge, and not just a trivial pop culture encyclopedia, we continue to redirect the plural to the singular form of the topic of greater historic importance. bd2412 T 18:27, 14 September 2014 (UTC)[reply

]

It works the way it always works when we have a primarytopic. The primarytopic is at the base name, and the other topics with the same name are disambiguated. It's how we most efficiently direct our readers to where they want to go. I think this actually is a very workable solution - separate primarytopics for

Parachutes, and appropriate parentheses for the less-viewed alternatives, both singular and plural. Any other responses? Dohn joe (talk) 19:07, 14 September 2014 (UTC)[reply

]

Non-solution doesn't work - it doesn't work: when I search "parachutes" small p, I still get sent to a small silver disc by a London rock band with the first song "Don't Panic". How do I get real parachutes (small p) from searching for parachutes (small p)? In ictu oculi (talk) 22:27, 14 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Try searching again in a day or two - sometimes it takes a while for WP to catch up. In the meantime - does the hatnote not work? Dohn joe (talk) 22:53, 14 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It won't. In a million years parachutes will not take users to parachutes because search/title doesn't distinguish "p" and "P". Do you understand this? In ictu oculi (talk) 23:04, 14 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

But far more people are looking for Parachutes than parachutes. That's why adding "(aerial device)" should help the minority of people who want parachutes instead of Parachutes. Dohn joe (talk) 23:20, 14 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Do you understand that search/title doesn't distinguish "p" and "P"? In ictu oculi (talk) 02:59, 15 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• Support moving per In ictu oculi. I have heard the album, Parachutes, and I have jumped out of airplanes and been carried to the ground by parachutes, and frequently sat on them as they are required for doing aerobatic flying. The album was good, but I could've lived without it. The other kind of parachutes, I literally couldn't have lived without, and that is the case for probably hundreds of thousands of people who have used parachutes at some time in history, including tens of thousands in World War II alone. - WPGA2345 - ☛ 22:18, 14 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  I'm glad that parachutes helped you, but how that does concern the structure of the encyclopedia? Dohn joe (talk) 22:53, 14 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  Easy, the structure of an encyclopedia, when it is addressing words that can mean different things, is to treat more important topics as if they are more important topics. Here that's the one that has been helping to save lives and win wars for over a century. - WPGA2345 - ☛ 00:05, 15 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  I think the point, though, is that WP can have both

  Parachutes as separate articles - especially when the usage/pageviews indicate that far more people want to read this album article compared to the plural version of parachute. Isn't it a good idea to get as many of our readers where they want to go? Dohn joe (talk) 00:13, 15 September 2014 (UTC)[reply

  ]

• Support per
  WP:ASTONISH, the number of English-speaking people on the planet who think of "Parachutes" primarily as an album is certainly much smaller than the number who think of "Parachutes" as things used for slowing movement through air. Moreover, the popularity of music tends to be volatile and fleeting. This album, being a release within the last couple of decades, seems likely to be fading into long-term obscurity, whereas parachutes for slowing movement through air have apparently been depicted, discussed and studied since the 1470s. That is long-term significance. —BarrelProof (talk) 00:17, 15 September 2014 (UTC)[reply
  ]

  I should probably just let it go, but.... The point is that this is not the "normal situation" described at

  Chairs, for example. Here, though, the plural gets viewed more than the singular version. Doesn't that tell us something? Dohn joe (talk) 00:26, 15 September 2014 (UTC)[reply

  ]

  • • As you said above, "funny thing about commonsense..." and with 10 people commenting, 7 in favor of the move, 2 opposed and one neutral I think you'll find you are amongst the flat earthers. Consensus has moved on! --Richhoncho (talk) 08:27, 15 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Rather obvious. There's no way an album is going to have greater long-term encyclopedic significance than the aerial device unless, perhaps, it's a bigger deal than Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club combined. —innotata 17:48, 15 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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.