Talk:Okinawa

Requested move 30 August 2024

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: moved as proposed. There is some support for (and some opposition to) going further and making the island primary; no prejudice against an RM on that subject once the incoming links have been dealt with. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 06:43, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

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Okinawa (disambiguation) → Okinawa

Okinawa → Okinawa (disambiguation)

Sources immensely vary on what Okinawa refers to without qualification, with the island, the islands, and the prefecture all commonly being referenced by that name; I cannot find a clear primary topic at all here. Despite this, Okinawa is currently just a redirect to the prefecture, with the dab hatnoted.

Dictionary definitions are unhelpful, variously describing it as "an island" or "islands", which itself is ambiguous between the island chain and the prefecture. "Okinawa Island" and "Okinawa Prefecture" return similar amounts (18,000 and 19,000) of results on Google Scholar, but "on Okinawa" is much less used than "in Okinawa". Page view analysis shows that Okinawa Prefecture is less viewed than Okinawa Island, but not enough that the island would be a primary topic. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 14:45, 30 August 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. Vpab15 (talk) 15:46, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

Sitting on the fence. I like it that there is now some discussion following the earlier undiscussed changes. Maybe the proposer has a point but as it was, there were 5350 links to disambiguation pages created with that change. I do not say a hard no to the change, I do say a hard no against creating so many links to disambiguation pages. The Banner talk 16:49, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

We've had changes like this before, people like Onel have processed these without complaint and in record time. More fundamentally, we should primarily ponder what makes the most sense for our readers, concerns of editors should be secondary (WP:RF). --Joy (talk) 17:10, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. That is why linking to a disambiguation page is never a good idea. The Banner talk 23:40, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

What I'm saying is that it's a normal part of the process to disambiguate links in case that's the result of the discussion, the end result is that readers following links are short-circuited to the relevant meanings and not the disambiguation page. In that case, the latter serves to handle fresh traffic, usually the random lookups of the term. --Joy (talk) 18:43, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

It should be part of the process, but at least in relation to the maintenance page "Templates with disambiguation links" cleaning up page moves is about 90% (or more) of what I do. The Banner talk 20:11, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Sadly there may be a cost to not examining this for about two decades or so.[1] --Joy (talk) 13:32, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

• Based on a scan of what links to Okinawa, the vast majority (maybe effectively all of them?) intend to reference the island, not the prefecture. By that metric, the redirect should actually point to the island instead. Parsecboy (talk) 21:35, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

  The current state of those 3072 links is the result of what a few hundred or a few thousand editors happened to write about over a period of a few decades. It does not have to match either the overall state of scholarship writing about topics named Okinawa, nor what the average English reader expects to see when they navigate to "Okinawa".

  We could also have a look at things like Google Books Ngrams for Okinawa and the words immediately around it to try to get clues as to what is out there. It seems rather ambiguous, because the largest single spike of references is most probably about the WWII battle, while prefecture, island and trough all appear in the top list. --Joy (talk) 18:52, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

• Should be a concept dab just like Kansas City Red Slash 19:03, 2 September 2024 (UTC)
• I would have expected the island to be the primary topic. Maybe I read different topics, but all the mentions of plain "Okinawa" I've come across have referred to the island. It's true that ngrams shows more instances of "in Okinawa" than "on Okinawa", but sampling the hits for the former on Google books, many of them (especially those by English-speaking authors) seem to be talking about the island, e.g. "US forces in Okinawa", "in Okinawa proper". Japanese authors writing in English often use it for the prefecture, though. Kanguole 21:50, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

  Does checking the words around these phrases help there? Like this. Looks like a lot of these references could be to something like Naval Base Okinawa? --Joy (talk) 05:21, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

  Indeed if we delve deeper into the top entry, it seems to become more and more generic, like this, indicating a need for a broad concept article.

  I noticed Okinawa Islands is formatted similarly to that, and then there's also a Names of Okinawa. --Joy (talk) 05:27, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

• Support Okinawa (disambiguation) → Okinawa. The prefecture isn't primary over the island. -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:44, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Relisting comment: Rough consensus that the prefecture is not the primary topic. Opinion split on whether there is no primary topic or the island is the primary topic, so relisting. Vpab15 (talk) 15:46, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

• Support. Often the prefecture is primary over a city with the same name in Japan, except in the case of cities designated by government ordinance, but here the main conflict is with Okinawa Island instead, and in this particular case there is no primary topic. Further, I am quite sure that the island is not the primary topic. Many if not most geographic references to Okinawa mean the area (roughly equivalent to the Ryukyu Island chain or the prefecture) rather than the island specifically. Dekimasuよ! 02:41, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

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.

And now the polite request to clean up the many links to disambiguation pages created by this move. The Banner talk 10:12, 14 September 2024 (UTC)