Talk:Lusitania

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: no consensus. (non-admin closure) —Compassionate727 ^(T·C) 01:48, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Lusitania → Lusitania (Roman province) – or simply Lusitania (province), for disambiguation. The vast majority of readers looking for Lusitania on Wikipedia are likely to be looking for the famous ocean liner that was sunk by a torpedo during the First World War. Pageview comparison here. (Note that Titanic is about another famous ocean liner that sank a few years earlier. The two most popular articles on Wikipedia that start with "Sinking of the" are about these two ships.) —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 22:58, 29 February 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. – robertsky (talk) 03:08, 10 March 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. estar8806 (talk) ★ 01:33, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

• Lean oppose: the ship has more daily page views, but the title of that article also has natural disambiguation: "RMS Lusitania". With the hatnotes at both articles—and the lead of the ship article mentioning that it was named for the Roman province—this move seems unnecessary. P Aculeius (talk) 12:23, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

  That article has an unambiguous title, but this article has an ambiguous title. The ship is commonly referred to simply as "the Lusitania", like "the Titanic". I suspect relatively few people know it had an "RMS" in front of its formal name. It was primarily a passenger ship. The Titanic is similar. Officially, it was the RMS Titanic, but it is generally known as simply "the Titanic" (and its Wikipedia article title doesn't even include the "RMS"; the article about the RMS Lusitania might not either if not for the ambiguity problem). —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 19:35, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

• Support Lusitania (province) and Lusitania (disambiguation) → Lusitania, and dab should mention the famous ship close to the very top. In addition to the ship getting 6x pageviews, Google Scholar results for lusitania are split (9 province—10 ship—1 other, on the first two pages) and Google Books gives results for only the ship until page 10, suggesting the province does not have long-term primary significance for this name. Hameltion (talk | contribs) 18:12, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

Note: WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome has been notified of this discussion. RodRabelo7 (talk) 18:41, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

Note: WikiProject Portugal has been notified of this discussion. RodRabelo7 (talk) 18:41, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

Note: WikiProject Former countries has been notified of this discussion. RodRabelo7 (talk) 18:41, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

Note: WikiProject Spain has been notified of this discussion. RodRabelo7 (talk) 18:42, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

• Support Lusitania (province) and Lusitania (disambiguation) → Lusitania. No primary topic. -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:58, 5 March 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose. I'm more WWI buff than ancient Rome buff, yet I would still think of the Iberian region before the ship. We should bear in mind that (nearly) everybody knows that the ship is named after something. Almost nobody will assume that 'Lusitania' was invented to name a ship. By the principle of least astonishment, I think the status quo is best. Srnec (talk) 21:09, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

Note: WikiProject Ships has been notified of this discussion. - Davidships (talk) 00:04, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose clear primacy to the province, and the hatnote is adequate for linking to the ship. Andy Dingley (talk) 00:10, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

Primacy based on what? The ship and its sinking are very well known and historically important. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 03:07, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Relisting comment: Initially closed as not moved, relisting for clearer consensus. – robertsky (talk) 03:08, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Support Lusitania (province) and Lusitania (disambiguation) → Lusitania as per Necrothesp and Hameltion. There is no primary topic for the term. --MtPenguinMonster (talk) 10:17, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Oppose per User:Srnec; the province has its tentacles in history, geography and linguistics and is a metonym for contemporary Portuguese language and culture (nb Lusophones, Lusosphere). —  AjaxSmack  15:50, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

• oppose The ship's prefix is a wp:NATDAB, i'm not convinced the ship is the PT per Srnec and Ajax—blindlynx 16:08, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

  Did anyone say the ship is primary? I don't recall seeing that. The ship does not need to be primary in order for disambiguation to be used. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 18:43, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

  Sorry misread the proposal, either way i don't think this being the PT is a problem wrt the ship especially how many things are named from the province—blindlynx 19:07, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

• The Roman province is the original, and the others are named after it, but does that necessarily make it the primary topic by our conventions? I am inclined to think there is no clear primary topic for Lusitania, but if there is it, is more likely the Roman province. In the absence of such clarity, I Support renaming with the disambiguator. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 07:16, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose - The Roman province has more long-term significance than the ship, and the "RMS" is a natural disambiguator. UmbrellaTheLeef (talk) 14:18, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose per UmbrellaTheLeef. I think the Roman province, which covered a large portion of the Iberian peninsula and was likely a hugely significant entity in the ancient world, has an unambiguous lead in terms of long-term significance compared with the ship. For comparison, one might consider renaming the city of Belfast, because there's a well-known ship at HMS Belfast, but I don't see anyone considering that move. Yet Lusitania was a much larger entity than Belfast (by area anyway, I don't know what its population was) and of arguably greater significance in the long run.  — Amakuru (talk) 13:35, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

This is a seriously tortured analogy. Belfast is the largest city in a current major European country that practically everyone in the Western World has heard of, where a half-million people currently live who refer to it by that name. Unlike the Roman province that no longer exists in any meaningful way, the city of Belfast is of great relevance to people who have no interest whatsoever in ancient Roman history. And the HMS Belfast is nowhere near as well known and historically important as the Lusitania. Ask random people on the street, and a significant percentage of them will be able to tell you there was a famous ocean liner called the Lusitania that sank with a very large number of civilian casualties (around a thousand, in fact). A much much smaller percentage will be able to tell you there was a province called Lusitania somewhere in the ancient Roman empire. Lots of people will be able to tell you that Belfast is a city in Ireland. Very very few will be able to tell you there was (or is) a ship called the Belfast that ... umm ... well ... um ... was one of thousands of ships involved in the Second World War and was damaged and repaired and is now a minor tourist attraction somewhere along with a collection of other war memorabilia. I'm not necessarily claiming the Lusitania ship is a clear primary topic for Lusitania – only that the ancient Roman province is not . —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 22:15, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

I think the main point of the comment was that the province is primary by long-term significance; scholars are still researching and writing about it two thousand years later. The ship is chiefly remembered for sinking, and a debate about whether it was or wasn't carrying weapons that contributed both toward its being targeted and the damage from which it sank. There's not a lot of new scholarship or new perspectives on it, and more than a century after it sank, I doubt most people on the street could tell you that Lusitania was a ship at all, if you didn't prefix "HMS" to it. That's probably true of the Roman province as well, although technically it does still exist as a region, which is probably why there was a ship named for it—not out of a shipbuilder's fondness for Roman history! But the ship is probably not going to have as much ongoing scholarship as the province, as it has faded from public memory, and it is unlikely that much that is new will be discovered about it. So while usage may yield an ambiguous result for two topics that relatively few people can remember, by long-term significance, the province is primary. P Aculeius (talk) 15:34, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

Some of that is unduly speculative. The directors of Cunard Line clearly had a penchant for choosing names of historic territories of this general type, Roman or otherwise - well over one hundred names from the 1860s onwards. I am not sure that I share your speculation about how the public would respond to "Who or what is Lusitania?" (though "HMS Lusitania" would certainly confuse as she was not a warship). However we can substitute visitors to WP for the street strollers, and I would certainly be interested in seeing the comparison of the chosen destination of those landing initially on this article, and on the dab page - I think that we have expert colleagues who can produce such analysis. I don't think that speculating about future research is at all relevant and is redolent of the policy imperatives of WP:NOTCRYSTAL. - Davidships (talk) 01:49, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

My mistake, "RMS". I knew the distinction, but was careless and mixed them up. Either way, the label signals to people that it was a ship. Without that, I doubt most people would be able to recall either the ship or the region without any further prompts or context. If you did get someone to recall a ship, chances are most people would have only the vaguest recollection of it from a high school history class. If that doesn't come to mind, chances are the person would guess that it's some place in Europe—maybe in Spain. But if only a small percentage of people can remember either without help, then usage is a wash. Telling us about the destination of readers on Wikipedia isn't that helpful, because it doesn't tell us whether the general public is likely to know of or search for either.

Long-term significance is in favour of a region; not only is it much older and still the subject of scholarship, but people can still discover epigraphy, analyze archaeological remains, discuss descriptions in Roman writers for centuries to come, and keep coming up with new perspectives and conclusions. It's a lot harder to see how new discoveries will shed light on the RMS Lusitania in time to come. No, we don't have a crystal ball—but the remains of the ship are deteriorating and have a finite amount of material that can be analyzed, and there are a limited number of conclusions that would be of interest to historians—either it was packed with munitions, or it wasn't, and our ability to determine a conclusive answer will only decrease with time.

But ultimately, I don't have to prove that the province is primary. I was just explaining why Amakuru's viewpoint wasn't absurd, and why someone could reasonably conclude that the province is primary by long-term significance. You can disagree with that conclusion, but editors are still entitled to have it. That was my point. P Aculeius (talk) 02:12, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, of course we can agree to disagree. I don't understand your point about WP readers, though. They are the general public - and are precisely who we are here for; understanding what they are seeking when they type "Lusitania" in the WP search box should be of interest to us, and is potentially helpful in this discussion. - Davidships (talk) 22:56, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

What I'm trying to get at is that discussions of primary topics in Wikipedia article titling based on usage generally consider overall usage among English-language speakers, not merely Wikipedians, or even sources published since Wikipedia came online.

There is no perfect way to determine this: popular means include broad Google searches and more narrowly-focused ngrams, both of which are flawed and neither of which is likely to help here: it would be difficult to distinguish the results without very painstaking analysis, and the results would be biased by what's available on the internet, and how that's treated by Google searches.

Pageviews give you some idea of reader interest, but that may be only a small fraction of overall familiarity, and can be affected by various factors, such as how words turn up in the search window, the number of incoming links, the availability of hatnotes, etc. So at best all we can hope for is a very fuzzy idea of "Lusitania" vs. "HMS Lusitania" based on usage. Hence the preference of some editors to focus on long-term significance, which is often easier to assess. P Aculeius (talk) 01:48, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

• Support disambiguation. Clear absence of a primary topic for the term, given the plethora of meanings (including the people of the region as distinct from the region itself). BD2412 T 17:30, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

  The people of Lusitania would be Lusitani or Lusitanians, not Lusitania. The ship is the only serious contender for the primary subject, but the title of its article already includes natural disambiguation, and it's not going to be moved to "Lusitania" irrespective of the outcome of this discussion. P Aculeius (talk) 15:24, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

  The fact that the disambiguation page has lots of entries on it is not in any way an indicator that there isn't a primary topic, and there self-evidently isn't a "clear absence" of a primary topic, given the number of people above who have asserted with reasoning that the province is indeed the PTOPIC. As P Aculeius notes, only the province and the ship could even remotely be considered as contenders for this, and even considering those two it's still absurd to think that a single ship could be the equal of an entire province that existed for hundreds of years and encompassed most of modern Portugal plus a large chunk of Spain besides. And sure, unlike Belfast it doesn't exist any more, but WP:RECENTISM tells us take the long-term, historical view not just focus on what exists in 2024. Add to that the enduring legacy of the name, not just in providing the name of the ship, but of other derivations such as lusophone, and there's really no case to answer here. The principal argument I'm seeing above in favour of the move appears to boil down to WP:NWFCTM, which as we know is not a major consideration for primary topics.  — Amakuru (talk) 11:26, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

Relisting comment: No clear consensus. Relisting for further discussion. estar8806 (talk) ★ 01:33, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

• Support Lusitania (province), and move DAB to base name.--Ortizesp (talk) 13:58, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

I've requested closure for this at Wikipedia:Closure requests. Natg 19 (talk) 00:17, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

• Support, no primary topic, many will be looking for the ship. --JFHutson (talk) 17:47, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
• Strong support, WP:NWFCTM is strong here on both sides, which leads to me thinking we need a disambiguation page so that everyone can quickly and painlessly find the article that happened to come to their mind! Red Slash 06:29, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose. Long-term significance is clear. It makes no more sense to disambiguate this than it would to move Arizona because of the USS Arizona, which is at least as significant as the Lusitania, if not more. Since there's a hatnote specifically for the ship, making the disambiguation the primary would not help anyone quickly and painlessly find the article on the ship - it's one click either way. It might even take longer, since the link would no longer be the first blue text on the page. Egsan Bacon (talk) 00:36, 13 April 2024 (UTC)