Talk:Toilet roll holder

Vertical pole

Originally intended to hold a stock of replacement rolls, the vertical pole has become the only paper holder in some households. It is particularly useful in homes where the family has mixed handedness.

I don't get it. How is a vertical pole better than a horizontal pole in terms of handedness bias? The roll is still oriented and it's even more difficult to use it one-handed than a horizonzal one (with or without a holding mechanism, like a metal plate with a spring).

I don't see how a horizontal pole's toilet roll orientation (upward/downward) could be more biased towards handedness than a vertical pole's (left/right). The only factor biasing against one handedness or the other is the (vertical OR horizontal) toilet roll holder's position relative to the toilet seat (left, right or in front/behind/above it).

Left-handed people have a lot of reasons to complain, but I don't see how horizontal toilet roll holders qualify. Especially when considering that fetching toilet paper off a roll doesn't exactly require high levels of manual dexterity (wiping your butt may, but you don't have to use the same hand to fetch the toilet paper AND wipe your butt -- especially when the toilet roll holder lacks some kind of holding mechanism and you have to use both hands anyway). — Ashmodai ^{(talk · contribs)} 18:00, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

I suppose the charges of bias were supposed to be aimed at the kind of holders that are attached to the wall on one side and face the seated with the side of the roll. I've never encountered any of these in real life (they might just not be very popular in any part of the world I've been to so far: Germany, Czech Republic, Belgium, Netherlands, France, England and Wales) but possibly they are so common somewhere that the original author figured comparing the vertical ones to these implicitly would make sense. I've only ever encountered the version with the surface of the roll facing the seated (the roll being impaled on a pole of a holder that may be recessed into the wall or reside in a wall-external box) and the one with multiple rolls on a vertical pole, although I've never seen that one used for dispensing (probably because you'd usually need to bend down a bit to reach it and the used roll would be placed on a bathtub wall or window sill for convenience in the absence of a proper dispenser pole).

Do I smell cultural bias here or have I somehow only ever been to places representing a toilet roll holder and dispenser counter-culture? Not to start any toilet roll holding wars here… — Ashmodai ^{(talk · contribs)} 18:13, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

kind of holders that are attached to the wall on one side and face the seated with the side of the roll.

Do you mean where the axis of the roll is pointed at the user? The only place I've seen these is in public washrooms. They look something like this:

Dual-roll holder

Ian01 (talk) 04:33, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

You guys are sick! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.230.208.149 (talk) 12:22, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Photos

Why is there no picture of a standard toilet paper holder? We have some fancy ones, but we're not even covering the basics?? howcheng {chat} 22:24, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

I just changed the photo. the old photo wasnt a holder at all. It was just fancy way to store the rolls but not a holder for use in toilet. Uziel302 (talk) 16:25, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

Translations

• Spanish: Dosificador de jabón, Dispensador de jabón

Fructibus (talk) 10:51, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Merge Toilet paper orientation to Toilet roll holder

Toilet paper orientation was created in 2010 as a stand alone article. It seemed like a good idea, and I enthusiastically took on the GA review: Talk:Toilet paper orientation/GA1. It was almost passed as a Good Article, but I felt there was an excess of unnecessary material, and rather too much original research. I wanted the article to be good, but unfortunately on examination it was trivial, light-hearted, and padded out with tenuous material. After some discussion, it was felt that no progress was being made, and it was failed. I moved on. Last year, Oct 2021, I landed on the article due to concerns about the further reading section. I noted that there were a number of concerns voiced on the talkpage over the years, suggesting that the state of the article was poor, and the jokey, trivial tone was not helpful to Wikipedia's reputation. I stayed on to help tidy the article, trim the excess, and then to hopefully build it into the sort of helpful and well sourced article we hope to have on Wikipedia. After two months of researching and editing I had about the right amount of information (though I feel there is still a degree of fluff and nonsense, and too much coverage for what turns out to be a fairly trivial topic) and merged it into what I felt to be the most appropriate location so the orientation of the toilet roll could be read in context: Toilet_roll_holder#Orientation. That merge has now been undone, so I'm opening a discussion to get a consensus on what to do with the article. Should it be a stand alone, or should it redirect to Toilet_roll_holder#Orientation? SilkTork (talk) 14:21, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

I think Toilet Paper Orientation should continue to stand alone - it's a quirky topic that is of interest not because of the mechanism involved (and frankly, a whole article about toilet roll holders seems ridiculous to me) but because of semi-jokey, semi-serious interest in people's habits and interactions. But I don't feel strongly either way. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 14:48, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

I Strongly oppose a merge. The merging of the two articles seems very odd when the toilet paper orientation article , when this article both a) has a long history of public attention, and a robust set of sources focused exactly on the topic (thus meeting general notability) and b) persistent high pageviews, showing that there is a readership demand. Sadads (talk) 14:13, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

And also, the toilet paper holder article would be overwhelmed by what the socialogical examination of a preference, whereas the article could/should be focused on the engineering and the design of the holders. Sadads (talk) 14:14, 9 March 2022 (UTC)