Talk:Tree diagram

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was no consensus. --BDD (talk) 22:38, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Tree diagram → Tree diagram (disambiguation) – There are a large number of incoming links to the disambiguation page Tree diagram. It appears that most of them intend to link to Tree structure. Therefore, I think it would be best to move the dab page, make Tree diagram redirect to Tree structure, and add that as the main use at the dab page. Relisted. BDD (talk) 17:38, 19 November 2013 (UTC) Cnilep (talk) 03:13, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

• Oppose. I cannot validate "most incoming links to the disambiguation page mean this" as being a reason to move a page. Just because most links to a specific disambiguation page that exist on Wikipedia refer to one specific subject neither means that is the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, nor does it mean that all of the links represent one topic. If disambiguation is a concern, there are other methods to correct them, such as dab solver. Also, per the the list of the top 1000 disambiguation pages with links, there are currently only 15 links to Tree diagram; those could be processed rather quickly. Steel1943 (talk) 05:37, 7 November 2013 (UTC)
  • Steel1943 is correct to note that the existence of incoming links alone is not a reason to make something a primary topic. On the other hand, the fact (which can be verified by looking at the incoming links from article space) that most references to "tree diagrams" – almost by definition – intend some type of tree structure does make tree structure the primary usage, in my opinion at least. Cnilep (talk) 06:36, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

• Cnilep, I'll give this comparison to you. I was doing a brief skim through the articles that have links to Tree structure, and on the skim alone, I am seeing more than 100 non-userspace and non-talkspace links to it. In addition, I took a sample of a few of them, and from the sample I took, about half of them had piping links to Tree structure, but none of the piped links appeared as Tree diagram. From this, I would have to say that it seems like at this point there is a clear difference between Tree structure and all of the other articles listed on the Tree diagram disambiguation page. Steel1943 (talk) 06:50, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

• Comment I would prefer that this disambig page would be rewritten into a general article about the topic "Tree diagram", similar to the article on the German Wikipedia. It seems parts of the tree structure diagram could the be moved here. -- Mdd (talk) 20:29, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose - tree diagram has some very specific meanings, for example in probability theory. And furthermore, a "tree structure" isn't really a type of tree diagram, meaning such a redirect would be inaccurate. A tree diagram is a representation of the a tree structure. For me, the disambiguation page serves readers best.  — Amakuru (talk) 13:53, 15 November 2013 (UTC)
• Support - more because tree structure is a broad concept article than it is a WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. All the other articles linked from the DAB page are instances and usages of tree structures, including the tree diagram in probability. Therefore, it makes sense to drive readers to the description of the basic concept of a branching diagram, instead of having it buried in the fourth section. All those links in the DAB could be merged into tree structure instead of having a separate disambiguation with only a subset of the links (articles like Tree (data structure) or Tree (graph theory) are missing). An equivalent situation is the Particle article, where the DAB page is primarily for articles unrelated to the concept in physics. Diego (talk) 22:24, 17 November 2013 (UTC)
• Support, but note that, per WP:MOSDAB, all titles on the page that do not contain the term, "Tree diagram", in the title will need to be removed, as they are not page matches, and are therefore not ambiguous to the title. Disambiguation pages are a navigational device to distinguish unrelated concepts that happen to have identical titles; they are not a place to clump together related concepts with different names out of laziness about writing an actual article on their relationships. bd2412 T 04:37, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
  • Actually, the standard is whether the concept is referred to by the ambiguous label, not whether the Wikipedia article uses that label as its title. Note Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Disambiguation pages#Examples of individual entries that should not be created: "For instance, Oxford (disambiguation) should link to University of Oxford and Catalina might include Santa Catalina Island, California. If there is disagreement about whether this exception applies, it is often best to assume that it does." Cnilep (talk) 00:09, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
    • What evidence is there that any of these concepts is even referred to as a "tree diagram" outside of being a kind of tree diagram? Every single entry on the page currently fails WP:DABMENTION, much less having sources indicating an alternate name of the concept. To be clear, there are no sources in any of these articles supporting such a relationship, except tree diagram (probability theory), which is itself about a particular use of a tree diagram. I suspect that if I edited the ledes of all of these pages to add "also known as a tree diagram, I would be swiftly (and correctly) reverted, just as I would be if I edited the lede of Coca Cola to say "also known as soda. The fact that Language family says "the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram" does not make "language family" a synonym for "tree diagram". bd2412 T 18:10, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment: No, these other entries must not be removed, I'm sorry to be emphatic but that would have a devastating effect on the reader experience, which is our bottom line. Many if not most visitors are non-specialists and do not appreciate the distinction between the diagram and the structure, a distinction so esoteric that many if not most elementary textbooks on this and related subjects ignore it completely. If you read further in the MOS, the correct procedure here is to move these entries to a see also section of the DAB. Andrewa (talk) 18:35, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
    • Since they are all examples of the use of a tree structure, why not merge the whole thing into the "examples" section of tree structure? bd2412 T 18:46, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.