Talk:Gish

Requested move 12 November 2025

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: pages moved. Andrewa (talk) 19:55, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

---

• Gish (disambiguation) → Gish
• Gish → Gish (album)

– No primary topic; Gish gallop gets more views than the current gish article, and of the items on the surname page, Annabeth Gish and Lillian Gish both get even more. Duckmather (talk) 19:34, 12 November 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose All three examples cited in the nomination are WP:PTMs. Justified primary topic. 162 etc. (talk) 20:30, 12 November 2025 (UTC)

  Maybe you missed it, but we've documented in numerous examples, as well as in the text of the very guideline you linked to - WP:PTM, that naturally disambiguated human names are not mere partial title matches. --Joy (talk) 08:04, 13 November 2025 (UTC)

  There is no evidence that Annabeth Gish or Lillian Gish are known mononymously as "Gish". A reader would not expect to land at either of these articles by typing in "Gish". 162 etc. (talk) 03:33, 14 November 2025 (UTC)

  Individually, they are not, because their names are naturally disambiguated. There's no evidence that the reader would expect to land at an article layout pretending that the word Gish only has a single primary meaning, either. --Joy (talk) 06:24, 14 November 2025 (UTC)

• The album is probably primary by usage[] for the single word but maybe not by long-term significance. Crouch, Swale (talk) 21:40, 12 November 2025 (UTC)
• As it so often goes, we just have to follow the spirit and letter of the applicable policies and guidelines. Per WP:DPT, we can have a look at some standard stats:

• WikiNav clickstreams for Gish

So the hatnote doesn't get a lot of traffic, it's at #14 with 100 identifiable clickstreams in October. We don't usually know if this matters, because other origins of reader traffic pre-filter them. In this case, we can see that most incoming traffic actually doesn't come from organic search, rather it comes from other articles about the band. This is on the left side of the first graph shown by WikiNav. Of the top five sources, the general categories of other-search and other-empty are only #2 and #5, while #1, #3, #4 are our articles. That also means that if we disambiguate the links from those articles, that readership immediately moves to the new title, and there's no issue for the readers.

Other than that, the clickstreams also indicate people click on Lillian Gish from here (183 identifiable clicks), who is linked as the eponym of the album. This is interesting because it means the average fan of the album will also recognize that the word is not unambiguously referring to just the album.

• Monthly page views at Gish and at the disambiguation list

In the first graph of page views, one has to click logarithmic view to be able to notice that the spikes in traffic at each of these topics do not correspond to one another. This can be read two ways - both that there hasn't been a lot of occasions where readers land at Gish and then have to click the hatnote, and that there's external sources of traffic at the Gish (disambiguation) page that cause spikes there. The former probably bodes well for the status quo, while the latter probably means that we're leaving navigation to the search engines.

• WikiNav clickstreams for Gish (disambiguation)

The clickstreams at the disambiguation list show that readers are proceeding to another entertainment topic, the video game, and the name list. The numbers are not impressive in general.

• All-time mass views for all topics linked from the main disambiguation list

I don't know how often people use to gish as a verb in place of the proper to gish gallop. At the same time, the general viewership of that phrase is larger than that of the album (on average 545/day vs. 385/day), so even if a minority of readers do that, it could be relevant.

• All-time mass views for all topics linked from the surname list

1. Views of Gish album 385 (10.9%)
2. Views of top 5 Gish biographies 3,139 (89.1%)

And then when we look at the general viewership: at Annabeth Gish it is 1,477 / day, Lillian Gish 974 / day, Sheila Gish 337 / day, Dorothy Gish 189 / day, Lou Gish, 162 / day, etc. A pie chart to the right compares these visually so the difference of an order of magnitude is hopefully a bit more obvious.

• Monthly page views for the top items by readership

A historical view of those topics shows this is fairly consistent, there's no huge WP:Recentism issue. Even if we ignore all the spikes at Annabeth's article, she's still become the topic of most interest. And because of this application of the WP:NAMELIST guideline, a reader would need to click two times to get to that article after looking up the surname, which is pretty bad.

It seems more likely that the average reader knows this term as a surname than as the name of any single topic. The album is clearly the best known mononymous use of the term. At the same time, the standard for a primary topic is higher - and I don't see that the album meets it either by usage or by long-term significance. (Support)

This reminds me of Talk:Rumours, except that the word Gish is much less common. It is tempting to say - hey, they picked a niche word, they get to 'own' it. But I don't think any readers will be surprised that we recognize that the word is still ambiguous. --Joy (talk) 08:44, 13 November 2025 (UTC)

Support per Joy (incredible comment!). Juwan (talk) 10:27, 13 November 2025 (UTC)

• Support. Gish (surname) is just as important. -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:21, 14 November 2025 (UTC)
• Support per Joy. Album does not seem to be WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. – LuniZunie ツ_(talk) 18:45, 16 November 2025 (UTC)
• Support But mainly due to Gish (video game) which is not a WP:PTM and is a competing primary topic. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 09:57, 19 November 2025 (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.

post-move

Since the move the page views from the album article have largely migrated to the new title. Since the data stabilized, we have two full months, and the views and clickstreams in those months say:

1. Clicks to album 389 (42.2%)
2. Known clicks to other topics 108 (11.7%)
3. Anonymized clicks 61 (6.62%)
4. Views that can't be correlated with outgoing clicks 364 (39.5%)

January 918 views (actually 922 with redirects)

clickstream-enwiki-2026-01.tsv:

• Gish Gish_(album) link 389
• Gish Gish_(video_game) link 74
• Gish Gish_(surname) link 23
• Gish Gish_gallop link 11
• total: 497 to 4 identified destinations
• total: 857 from 5 identified sources

61 filtered

1. Clicks to album 326 (37.2%)
2. Known clicks to other topics 166 (18.9%)
3. Anonymized clicks 71 (8.11%)
4. Views that can't be correlated with outgoing clicks 313 (35.7%)

February 867 views (actually 876 with redirects)

clickstream-enwiki-2026-02.tsv:

• Gish Gish_(album) link 326
• Gish Gish_(video_game) link 135
• Gish Gish_(surname) link 21
• Gish Gish_gallop link 10
• total: 492 to 4 identified destinations
• total: 796 from 4 identified sources

71 filtered

Also, clickstreams at Gish (surname) show Lilian Gish was observable there in January. When I looked at the last year there, it was mostly low or anonymized, with a few exceptions:

clickstream-enwiki-2025-03.tsv: Gish_(surname) Annabeth_Gish link 15

clickstream-enwiki-2025-06.tsv: Gish_(surname) Lillian_Gish link 11

clickstream-enwiki-2025-07.tsv: Gish_(surname) Annabeth_Gish link 10

clickstream-enwiki-2025-08.tsv: Gish_(surname) Annabeth_Gish link 10

clickstream-enwiki-2025-12.tsv: Gish_(surname) Lillian_Gish link 13

clickstream-enwiki-2026-01.tsv: Gish_(surname) Lillian_Gish link 10

I think if we put these two links directly at Gish, it's quite possible we'd see the same or higher numbers here, too. --Joy (talk) 21:00, 4 March 2026 (UTC)