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Talk:David Williams (footballer)

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The talk page history is a bit involved, following a page move... feel free to add any clarification below that you feel is helpful. Below is probably best under the talk page guidelines.

And if you archive or set up auto-archive on this page, best to consider this section exempt IMO. Andrewa (talk) 18:35, 13 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Andrewa: You left out several possibilities:
What's involved about the talk page history of any of these? They all look pretty routine to me.
Why do we need to have a talk page on an {{R from incomplete disambiguation}} redirect page? Doesn't seem like there's much to talk about here. wbm1058 (talk) 21:54, 24 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Wbm1058, I think it's convenient to have a pointer to the RM that moved the page formerly at this article name, and also to the talk page formerly at this page name, as they do not match. You seem to disagree?
But providing all these extra links seems pointless to me, and perhaps even pointy. What are they expected to achieve?
Is it somehow related to this equally puzzling post? Andrewa (talk) 09:11, 25 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Andrewa: Of course they are related. These two talk pages are the two primary examples you cited in making your case for a policy change at Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion/Archive 62#G6 should not be used to create permanent redlinks in namespace 1.
Broadly speaking, we are on the topic of ensuring that historical talk-page discussions don't get lost, and are relatively easy to find by any editor, not just admins, who wants to search the background of a discussion, correct?
In my opinion, the biggest problem we have in that regard is with how our archiving system works. Even though this conversation is less than two months old, I already had to dig into the archives to find its origins, and when I do that I add archive links to help the next guy who wants to follow the trail. See this edit, this edit, and this edit. We do have bots that make these connections, but there are a lot of gaps in their coverage. While it would be nice if the participants in these discussions would watchlist them for when they are archived, and then update the links after they enter the archives, most don't do that, and I doubt that a consensus could be achieved to mandate that archiving editors (whether they are humans or bots) fix all these links at the time of archiving. I'm probably an exception in that I endeavor to make sure all the links in my personal talk archives keep linking to the originally intended destination.
The other case I can think of (there may be other scenarios I'm not thinking of at the moment) is the one you're focusing on, that is when the WP:primary topic for a title changes. When the primary topic does not change, for example, moving New York to New York (state), or reverting that, there are no problems because the redirects are always maintained to the same target. Occasionally special efforts must be made to place notes on the talk page(s) involved so the links to the discussions are still maintained. The one that first comes to my mind is Talk:Hardware. For a long time, the primary topic for that was what we now call household hardware. I wanted to keep the talk page that is now hidden at Talk:Household hardware/Archive 1 at Talk:Hardware, but others objected to the idea of splitting a talk page away from its corresponding article, so I had to settle for posting a note on Talk:Hardware to indicate that significant old talk about that page was now relocated elsewhere.
In hindsight, I suppose if the discussions had taken place on the Hardware (disambiguation) talk page rather than the Hardware talk page, we wouldn't have had this problem, but you can't always control where discussions start, and they don't always start on what you realize in hindsight would have been the best page.
This case is similar to Kremlin, as with hardware you have the competing meanings of "what you buy at Mitre 10" vs. what you buy at a store that sells computers and electronic gizmos – exasperated by Wikipedia's minimal coverage of the former (Household hardware is still a stub) and extensive coverage of the latter. In your case, the change in primary topic was from Kremlin (fortification) to the one in Moscow. The two relevant talk pages are Talk:Moscow Kremlin and Talk:Kremlin (fortification). As the discussion took place at Talk:Kremlin (fortification), you want to leave a note at Talk:Moscow Kremlin to notify that page that a discussion effecting it took place on another page, Talk:Kremlin (fortification). That discussion made Moscow Kremlin the primary topic for Kremlin. Just a couple of weeks ago, I enhanced RMCD bot to place such a notice – see WT:RM#RMCD bot enhanced to post notices on related pages where the RM implies a change in primary topic. But there's no notice on Talk:Moscow Kremlin because that happened in March, before my latest bot enhancement. So if Talk:Kremlin was edited to become a synchronized redirect to Moscow Kremlin, one could find the note on Moscow Kremlin's talk page, or in its talk archives.
Q. I think it's convenient to have a pointer to the RM that moved the page formerly at this article name, and also to the talk page formerly at this page name, as they do not match. You seem to disagree?
A. Yes, I agree it's convenient to have a pointer to the RM and the talk page (the RM is on that page, so there is a need to point to only one page). Where we disagree is that I, and by consensus most others, feel that the pointer in the pink box is sufficient. There is more than one way to accomplish a task. If you prefer to leave behind a note on the page, that seems to be an acceptable alternative. Whether it's an alternative that helps make the history more clear, or unnecessarily leads to confusion, I'm not sure. I'm speculating that some editors might be confused about why the "see also Talk:David Williams (footballer, born 1988)" note was left behind, as the reason is not readily apparent – recreating the page obscures the log, that in my opinion made the history more obvious.
This scenario of a person with a fairly common name getting pulled off the primary topic is common. So common that I periodically run Bot1058's task #3 to clean up the unsynchronized disambiguation talk pages left behind by such moves. You can check the bot's recent contributions to find some of these. For example, Talk:Edward Packard.
Nobody has ever has a problem with how I do this, so I trust you won't either. Each of the three Edward Packards listed on the new dab that was created @15:18, 17 April 2017 has their own talk page. It's really not that important to know which of the three was once the primary topic for the name, but that can easily be determined by checking the page's history; there's no need to spell it out on the page itself.
Looking at the history of David Williams, I am confused as to why you feel that David Williams (footballer, born 1988) is significant here, or what purpose is supposed to be served by "the pointer" to his talk page.
That page started out as a bio of a musician, which was soon usurped by the dab, and then it appears that the original "primary topic" for the name was deleted by PROD:
Oh wait a minute, I see we're concerned with the partial disambiguation, the original primary topic for that can also be determined by checking the history – you don't need to keep the talk history to be able to find where the article went to – again, I don't know why anyone would be concerned with knowing whether there was an "original primary topic" for a title, but that's easy enough to find. As far as I know, each of the David Williams talkpages are still in tact. Was there a conversation about a specific DW that took place on a different DW's talk page, that needs to be cross-referenced?
Occasionally I run in to page histories that have bios of two different people in them. In such cases I hist-split the histories. The history of any given biographical title should only have articles about one specific person in them. Unless there was just some short-term vandalism or topic change that was quickly reverted. Wow, I covered a lot of ground. – wbm1058 (talk) 18:17, 25 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Agree with most of this, except it's a bit wordy, as was the post listing all those irrelevant links, IMO. The exceptions are mainly behavioral issues, which we should take up on your talk page. Andrewa (talk) 20:58, 25 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
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