Talk:Saba (island)

Pronunciation

What is the source of the pronunciation /ˈsɑːbə/ given here? As far as I know the name is pronounced /ˈseɪːbə/ (SAY-ba) in English and /ˈsɑːbɑː/ (SAAH-baah) in Dutch. Vernoeming (talk) 08:40, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

I just visited and you are right, every local person agrees, I made the change 184.75.115.98 (talk) 18:54, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

@Nardog:, Thank you for adding the Wells (2008) reference. Question: since /ˈseɪbə/ is the American pronunciation, while /'seːbə/ is the local pronunciation (and pan-Caribbean pronunciation), is there anyway to add and/or distinguish those pronunciations? Thank you for your help! :) CareAhLine (talk) 18:48, 11 June 2022 (UTC)

Please see WP:DIAPHONEMIC. /eɪ/ is a diaphoneme that basically means "whatever is the sound in face" rather than a specific phonetic quality. So unless [eː] in [ˈseːbə] is not the sound in face but a realization of another phoneme, there's no reason to "add and/or distinguish those pronunciations". Nardog (talk) 09:38, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for providing that explanation CareAhLine (talk) 00:22, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

Etymology

I was unable to find out the etymology of the word 'Saba' :(

sdrawkcabSdrawkcab (talk) 17:40, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

Hi! I have added an Etymology section, based on information from Hartog's "History of Saba" book. Let me know your thoughts, since I am new to editing. Thanks :) CareAhLine (talk) 03:54, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

Move challenge

@Joy: I am challenging your bold move, please return the pages to their original homes and get consensus for the move. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:29, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

Um, just move it back then?  :) is there a technical problem I am missing here? In any event, my rationale is there in the edit summary. Can you provide one of your own perhaps? --Joy [shallot] (talk) 17:40, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

Lol, yeah you move it back. You were mistaken that the move wouldn't be controversial, you can only make bold moves which are uncontroversial. You need WP:CONSENUS otherwise. See WP:MOVE. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:43, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

Honestly, have you even read the page you are pointing me to in such an increasingly rude way? Please refer to WP:UNDOMOVE - if you want to undo a move, you can and should undo it yourself (see also WP:BRD). --Joy [shallot] (talk) 17:54, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

It is considered impolite to undo a move without first seeing if the mover is willing to self revert. You made a bad move, thats OK but now you need to clean up your mess. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:28, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

So anyway, let me try to get back to what's important here. The rationale for the move is that there's been a presumption of WP:PRIMARYTOPIC for the island, but no elaboration. There's some value to implicit, organic consensus about it, but I've seen so many badly handled page titles before that I wouldn't be surprised if this was just a long-standing issue that merely didn't get attention.

So, the data points I examined were:

• There's a rather large hatnote, and a rather large and reasonably diverse disambiguation page
• Three of the items there already have more views than the island, cf. https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/massviews/?platform=all-access&agent=user&source=wikilinks&range=latest-20&sort=views&direction=1&view=list&target=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saba%20(disambiguation)
• One of the most popular outgoing links on the page is indeed the disambiguation page per https://wikinav.toolforge.org/?language=en&title=Saba
• Google Books search for the term seemed inconclusive to me, as it was nominally clear the island wasn't the primary topic there, but there was also quite a lot of San Saba in the sample, which may or may not be muddying the water
• I went spelunking in page history some more (I had checked that there were no move actions before) and actually found that the initial revisions of the article were already a bit ambivalent about the assumption of primary topic, where folks noticed the ambiguity in the space of a few months and a few edits.

So I leaned toward moving towards implying just WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT for a start. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 18:15, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

It does appear to be the primary topic, when I search "Saba" on google or academic search engines almost all of the results are for this subject. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:28, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

I don't think I see anything like that when searching. There's only one result about the island among the first 10 results on Google and Google Books, with none on Google Scholar (which returns authors with the name, so not useful any way). Uanfala (talk) 12:29, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Clearly the primary topic. The headnote also indicates it (Sabah (with h)) is a differently written one then Saba the NL island. I have reverted it per wp:BRD. Feel free to start a move discussion. L.tak (talk) 19:50, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

By 'headnote' you mean hatnote?

The wikinav data does not indicate a swell of outgoing pageviews from the link to Sabah, rather it goes to the final part of the hatnote, the Saba disambiguation page. I would posit that this is a clear hint that the hatnote is not formatted well - if we know the readers are skipping over the links to Sabah and Sabaeans to get to the disambiguation page, the navigation isn't set up properly.

Now, does this trump the island's claim to being the primary topic, that part isn't clear.

Which academic search engines did you use?

The aforementioned search on Google Books was https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=Saba&pws=0 which shows me:

• #1 a reference to the island
• #2 and #3 San Saba
• #4 and #5 about the island and neighboring ones
• #6 San Saba
• #7 Umberto Saba
• #8 and #9 fiction books where a titular character is named Saba
• #10 a tourist guide to the island
• #11 San Saba
• #12 islands
• #13 #14 #15 San Saba again
• #16 a reference to a Abdullah bin Saba
• #17 Mar Saba
• #18 Umberto Saba
• #19 Mar Saba
• #20 a Saba Yisroel

That spread alone was pretty indicative of there not being a primary topic. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 23:17, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

I don't understand your point, when you exclude all of the results which aren't for Saba but just have saba as part of a longer name the island is clearly the primary topic. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 23:23, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

But can you exclude that? Do we know for a fact that people never refer to the San Saba terms as Saba?

Anyway, even if we arbitrarily just decide to omit San Saba, the human names are not just "parts of a longer name" but rather distinctly recognized names of the said people. In other words, you can't just say a person with the given name or surname Saba is not a valid use for "Saba" or not a valid search term for "Saba".

Especially coupled with the statistics that say that several of those people are in fact similarly or more commonly looked up as the base name. Here's a view of just the top of the list (long tail notwithstanding!): https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&range=all-time&pages=Saba%7CSaba_Azad%7CSaba_Qamar%7CSaba_Ali_Khan%7CSaba_Hameed%7CSabaeans%7CSheba%7CSaba_(rapper)

Saba Azad actually skews the statistic so much it has to be removed to get a better view of the rest.

Yet even if you drop all three people that became popular more recently, so we don't necessarily know their long-term significance, the graph that compares the rest is pretty clearly not a primary topic graph. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 15:10, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Yes you can exclude them, they aren't named Saba they're named something else. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:30, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

That, well, just doesn't make any sense to me. It's literally the name of those people. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 19:07, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Its literally *part* of their name. Is that what you meant or maybe you didn't mean literally? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:19, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

I've elaborated on this below, there's actually no point re-hashing it here. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 20:07, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Hi! I know the discussion of this matter has moved below, but I wondered if the following example could help provide some evidence to why persons who have "Saba" in their name but aren't exclusively known by the singular name "Saba" should be excluded, as @Horse Eye's Back recommended above.

Here's the example: Virginia is the primary topic as it relates to Virginia (disambiguation), right? This is despite the fact that Virginia Woolf gets a very similar number (and on average more) page views than Virginia (if I have run this query correctly, that is). So Virginia would not be a primary topic if, when determining if it is more likely than all the other topics combined, we included persons such as Virginia Woolf. But it is indeed the primary topic, correct? Or have I misinterpreted something? CareAhLine (talk) 15:00, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

It seems to me that you missed the glaring fact that the US state of Virginia may well have other claims to WP:PTOPIC, such as it's relatively large area, population, ranking based on various parameters, and likely a number of other conventional attributes that contributed to a determination of primary topic in that case. Speaking of which, Virginia (disambiguation) is weirdly formatted, relegating the people with the given name to the 'other uses' section, and in turn the given name article has a relatively short list of people, so it's all pretty bad. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 18:18, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

No, CareAhLine has it exactly right. No one would expect an article about the state of Virginia to be titled "Virginia Woolf" and no one would expect an article about Virginia Woolf to be titled "Virginia". The number of pageviews each gets is therefore irrelevant, just as which one has a larger population or which one wrote better books are meaningless comparisons. (And I see nothing terribly wrong with Virginia (disambiguation).) Station1 (talk) 04:25, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

I keep pasting this link, but nobody seems to be reading it... the guideline on primary topics at WP:PTOPIC describes what the criteria for this is, and literally none of what you wrote is "therefore irrelevant". Please, let's follow the fine guideline and not invent stuff on the spot. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 07:50, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Everyone here has read WP:PTOPIC, let's stick to arguments not insults. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 13:58, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Population and books and pageviews are all irrelevant when comparing the state of Virginia to Virginia Woolf because WP:PTOPIC is irrelevant when we have two different topics with two different names. It's like asking, Which is the primary topic, apples or apple sauce? We don't have to decide; it's a meaningless question. Station1 (talk) 18:20, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Again, no, that is a pointless comparison, because the contenders for the article title "Virginia" can be Virginia the state, Virginia the given name, etc; not specifically Woolfe. Woolfe's notability -- and a million other notable Virginia's -- merely factors into the weight of the given name's claim to the article title. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 08:07, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

No, thats just not accurate. Those would not be factors in the the given name's claim to the article title... Only coverage of the given name itself and not simply people named that factors into weight. Virginia Wolff could indeed be the primary, it wouldn't for some absurd reason known only to Joy cover the given name Virginia instead of Virginia Wolff. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:56, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

I don't know what to say that would counter these utterly unsubstantiated claims any more. This is not how WP:AT works, it's not how it ever worked. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 08:30, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

Requested move 8 August 2022

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. Post-relist, consensus is in favor of moving both articles, though a future RM could be held to determine the best location of Saba (island). Most editors agree that there are numerous articles that could use the Saba basename, and the island is not a clear primary topic based on long-term significance. (closed by non-admin page mover) Elli (talk | contribs) 08:11, 17 September 2022 (UTC)

---

• Saba → Saba (island)
• Saba (disambiguation) → Saba

– There's been an assumed WP:PTOPIC here for the island for many years now, but when I checked it out in external sources and in statistics, I couldn't justify it, because not a single lookup produced results consistent with the primary topic guidelines. The common and popular human name / pseudonym, together with the historical names, generally seem to have at least comparable long-term significance. The rationale is elaborated at length above in #Move challenge.

Now, what should the disambiguation marker be, I'm not sure. I initially proposed "Saba, Netherlands" -- perhaps the common meaning of "Netherlands" for most readers is Europe-centric, so using that might be too confusing? Maybe some of the more specific terms could be used - Caribbean Netherlands, Dutch Caribbean, Netherlands Antilles (which went out of use)?
Saba (island) (or similar) is a distinct possibility, but there is another eponymous island in the Lesser Antilles, so this would necessitate keeping a hatnote.
Saba (Antilles) is another possibility, not least because of the precedent of Saint Vincent (Antilles).
-- Joy [shallot] (talk) 15:40, 8 August 2022 (UTC) — Relisting. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 16:48, 16 August 2022 (UTC) — Relisting. – robertsky (talk) 18:36, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Just a note that for Saba Island in the USVI "island" is part of the name, thats not true for Saba in the Netherlands. Also note that there is a Saba Rock in the BVI that is also an island but again it isn't named Saba. Theres no conflict here, theres nothing else named Saba which is remotely as important or notable. Stretching it to include names which include Saba but which aren't Saba is inappropriate. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:44, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

I don't know that most English readers will implicitly recognize the distinction of the island of Saba described here and the USVI Saba Island, that seems like a stretch to me, it's just a different position of a common word. (Nobody even mentioned Saba Rock.) --Joy [shallot] (talk) 17:48, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Aren't you going to propose renaming Saba Island to Saba Island (United States) and redirecting Saba Island to Saba Island (disambiguation)? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:19, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

That's an orthogonal issue... but it's safe to say that with the other one having way fewer views, it's reasonable to assume that a hatnote would suffice to aid navigation there, esp. as the other one is an uninhabited islet. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 18:59, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

I'm not sure I see a clear difference from the case here, Saba is clearly the primary of all topics named Saba and not something similar. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:07, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Clearly, this matter is not that clear. :) --Joy [shallot] (talk) 20:08, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

We disagree, its not the end of the world. You want to see something that isn't clear? Look at a Saban family tree bahbumtis. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:43, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

• don't move This is clearly the primary topic. Many other names bare the name Saba using either a different spelling, or have Saba as part of the name. The remaining options (eg the city) are relatively small, which is also shown by the size of their wikipedia page. I propose leaving things as they are. L.tak (talk) 16:56, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

First of all, WP:CLEARLY :) Secondly, this argument is nonsensical, it amounts to saying that human names on disambiguation pages are all WP:PTM violations. That is grossly out of touch with long-term practice. Saying that the preponderance of people looking up "Saba" are never going to be looking for the people named Saba or the historical kingdoms or any of the other topics in the long tail of disambiguation, that might be an argument, but it requires some justification other than "clearly". Especially because we are talking about a place that is relatively small by a number of conventional standards (like area and population). --Joy [shallot] (talk) 17:34, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

• Weak support, it's the most popular page, but there are tons that are on the DAB and it's hard to say if it's more popular than all of those combined. I would also probably split of a separate article for the Saba (name).--Ortizesp (talk) 18:16, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
• Support per the nominator and Ortizesp. ╠╣uw [talk] 08:59, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose. Clear primary topic. And Saba, Netherlands is a terrible title in any case, given it's nowhere near what most people would think of as the Netherlands. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:39, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

Necrothesp how is it clear, can you please elaborate a bit based on the guideline? (I've addressed the latter issue above.) --Joy [shallot] (talk) 19:43, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

I see nothing else on the list that comes close to it in terms of long-term significance. -- Necrothesp (talk) 07:56, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

Not even the human name attested to for over a millenium? --Joy [shallot] (talk) 11:04, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

Only as part of a name. The name by itself is not especially notable. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:25, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

That's a curious argument, but isn't it a slippery slope? What is it that gives special notability to given names? --Joy [shallot] (talk) 20:41, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

The same thing that gives wp:notability to anything else, significant coverage in independent WP:RS. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 23:29, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

The point that seems to evade you here is that even the most notable given names will not have huge amounts of significant coverage in independent reliable sources. There can only be a handful of sentences about what "John" or "James" are, but that doesn't affect the fact that they are what people are conventionally navigated to when looking that up. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 10:30, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

The point that has evaded you is that such a name is by definition not notable. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:08, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

I thought by showing egregious examples that go glaringly against it it would become clearer how that is not really a meaningful point. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 15:13, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

We don't have an additional notability criteria for names, they have to comply with standard WP:N. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:22, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

Which they do, if you read that guideline and apply it as intended - with some common sense. If you try to use it as a tool to beat people with... --Joy [shallot] (talk) 15:26, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

The given name Saba has enough coverage to pass WP:GNG? This I will have to see... Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:33, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

The given name and the surname are obviously of very low notability. However, what's relevant here is not the tiny group of readers who may be looking for information about the name, but the much larger group who use the surname to look up a particular person with that surname. And that's a valid search strategy: people with a particular surname are often referred to mononymously using the surname alone. Uanfala (talk) 12:27, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

The same goes for given names, I bet there's a plethora of such references in the press in reference to the celebrities whose Wikipedia articles get more views than anything else. I just did a quick search and found "Saba's latest bridal shoot for Indian magazine leaves fans dumbfounded", "Hrithik-Saba party with Suzanne-Arslan Goni in Goa", "Actress Saba gets emotional while narrating her ordeal at airports" etc. It's often naturally disambiguated in these sources as well so it's not a major concern, but assuming that there will be no readers simply looking up 'who is this Saba?' would be short-sighted. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 11:05, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

This isn't google, someone searching 'who is this Saba?' on wikipedia is doing it wrong... It doesn't work like that, our system can't interpret questions like google can. See the returns[1] (note that this page is still the first result returned and will be regardless of name, if this is a genuine concern changing the name will have zero impact on it). Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:00, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

Or the country of the ancient Sabaeans? Srnec (talk) 21:00, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

The Sabaeans are certainly notable. But the use of Saba to refer to their country is rarely seen. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:25, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

It's fairly easy to find examples to the contrary:

• https://www.britannica.com/place/Saba-ancient-kingdom-Arabia
• https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/saba-sheba
• https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/saba-and-sabeans
• https://www.infoplease.com/search/encyclopedia/Saba
• https://www.worldhistory.org/Kingdom_of_Saba/

But more to the point of this discussion, whenever I did a search in these same sources for just the term "Saba", it never short-circuits to the island in the Antilles. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 10:30, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

Taking a gander at that list I don't think any of those are currently WP:RS in good standing. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:08, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

I don't understand what you're saying at all, these are links to other English-language encyclopedias. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 08:12, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

But not all of those English-language encyclopedias are WP:RS, we care what WP:RS say but any argument based on what "other English-language encyclopedias" other than RS say is either disingenuous or incompetent. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:36, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

Well-known encyclopedias are both recognized as reliable tertiary sources and also this has little to do with comparing methods of navigation. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 18:31, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

• Support its probably the most likely topic for the single word[[2]] but unlikely to be primary. Crouch, Swale (talk) 09:10, 10 August 2022 (UTC)
• This was relisted, so in an effort to make progress, I swapped out the proposed new title to "Saba (island)", as there was also a specific complaint against the previous proposal; the rationale remains the same. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 17:28, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose per WP:PRIMARYUSAGE. This article gets almost 70% of pageviews among articles that are titled "Saba". The hatnote and dab page are sufficient for the minority of readers seeking other uses. Station1 (talk) 06:44, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

  You got that graph only by going out of your way to exclude all the people named Saba. We have actually had this argument before, so completely skipping over it and pretending it doesn't exist doesn't feel like a collaborative editing process :) --Joy [shallot] (talk) 07:02, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

  I didn't go out of my way at all. It was easy! Seriously, none of them were included because, unless I missed one, none of them are called simply "Saba" and therefore none of their articles would be titled simply "Saba". As others have correctly noted, they are partial title matches and irrelevant to the title of this article (with the exception of the rapper, who I did include). Station1 (talk) 07:30, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

  But did you actually read what the partial title match guideline you linked says? "A link to an article title that merely contains part of the disambiguation page title, or a link that includes the page title in a longer proper name, where there is no significant risk of confusion between them, is considered a partial title match". How is there not a significant risk of confusion between people called Saba and the island and all the other topics called Saba? A similar thing holds for the kingdom of Saba, just because there's "kingdom of " that doesn't mean it's merely a partial match - it's a kingdom indeed referred to as Saba. It's like calling a John Smith not a 'John' and not a 'Smith' and the Kingdom of Denmark not a 'Denmark'. This is just not how normal readers behave. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 10:49, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

  The answer to your first question is yes. Your second question is a non-sequitur: Of course there is "a significant risk of confusion between people called Saba and the island and all the other topics called Saba", because those topics are not partial title matches; they are full matches. The chances of anyone expecting to find information about Lady Saba Holland, however, under the title "Saba" are practically zero. That is an example of a partial title match. We need not consider any article that could not be reasonably titled "Saba". Station1 (talk) 23:42, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

  Just like the existing Saba disambiguation page has listed people named Saba for years now, endless other terms have linked to eponymous people and anthroponymy articles. If the chances of anyone expecting to find information about that under those titles were practically zero, surely someone somewhere would have noticed this purported gross systemic error. Do you have any reference for this blanket assertion or anything similar to support it, such as previous discussions to this effect where such a consensus was reached (but somehow never propagated in practice)? --Joy [shallot] (talk) 00:07, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

  Yes. Consensus is that lists of PTM names should not clutter up dab pages. Most lists of names are separate articles, if they exist at all. Please see WP:NAMELIST and MOS:DABNAME. - Station1 (talk) 00:31, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

  The links you named explicitly refute your earlier argument - they actually describe how people are listed at the eponymous titles, but are formatted variously depending on volume. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 10:44, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

  Not sure how you're getting that, but it's a tangential issue anyway. The main point is that the island is the primary usage for the title "Saba". Station1 (talk) 01:05, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

  I'm still not seeing support for that assertion. Who are these readers who make this fine distinction between names and titles? It just seems too contrived to me. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 13:50, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

  I'm glad you brought this up @Station1. I was wondering why there are so many persons' names listed on the Saba DAB page, when according to WP:NAMELIST and MOS:DABNAME, the DAB page should only list people "frequently referred to simply by the single name (e.g., Elvis, Shakespeare)". So Saba's DAB page should only include names of people like Saba (rapper). Right? According to WP:NAMELIST, Saba's DAB page really ought to have "Saba (surname)" and "Saba (given name)" links listed, which link those lists of relevant people. Am I misinterpreting something? Thanks in advance for the clarification! CareAhLine (talk) 23:50, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

  Yes, it's just that someone needs to go through the trouble of creating the said anthroponymy list articles (by doing a bunch of cut&paste). This doesn't impact the primary topic discussion much, though. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 09:45, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

  I agree. Or they could all go to Saba (name) as Ortizesp suggested above. I don't mind doing it, but we should probably wait until this RM closes, so as not to prejudice the discussion. Station1 (talk) 10:24, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

  I'm happy to bring it up again after this RM closes; and I'd be happy to help with the project of moving things to Saba (name) page (thanks for pointing out Ortizesp's suggestion). However, I wondered whether it did impact the primary topic discussion we are having since some people were including in their support arguments references to the the "sheer amount of" and "tons of" topics on the DAB page. No? CareAhLine (talk) 23:17, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

  Yes, I agree it certainly has. Station1 (talk) 05:42, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

  While it's possible that casual readers mistook the sheer volume of people as individually qualified to be a primary topic, which is incorrect, them as a group are nevertheless a factor in the primary topic discussion even if you move them to anthroponymy articles. Any superficial analysis of Wikipedia content is likely to produce invalid results that do not serve actual readers. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 08:21, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

  The figure of 70% is based on a comparison with only 8 other articles, out of a total of over a hundred listed on the dab page. How were they selected? If the aim was to compare only the most popular articles, then that doesn't work as it excludes many at the top of the list [3], including, for example, the article about the kingdom of the Sabaeans. Or was the aim to exclude apparent partial title matches? That doesn't work either, as many eligible entries are excluded, like Saba (condiment) or, again, the ancient kingdom, which can be referred to as just "Saba". Uanfala (talk) 12:27, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

  They were selected as having the largest number of pageviews of all articles that would be titled simply "Saba". There are others not shown but their pageviews are negligible and do not significantly affect the outcome (unless I've made a major mistake). The significant articles are primarily Saba at not quite 70% and Saba (rapper) at around 20%. Everything else adds up to around 10%. Saba (condiment) gets fewer than 1%. The strongest argument is for Sabaeans, but there is no proposal to change the title of that article, so there is no title conflict with that article and it is easily accessible directly from the hatnote on Saba. Station1 (talk) 23:42, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

  If the aim of the selection was to pick the most popular articles, then that wasn't clear at all: it included articles like the Iranian village with a single daily view, but excluded the condiment, which gets 8x as many. When deciding on the primary topic for a term, we need to look at all the extant encyclopedic topics that the term can refer to, not just the ones that have that term in their titles. If pageviews are to be used at all, then we'd need to take into account all the articles concerned [4] (notice the island is barely the third most visited one?) and then apply lower weighting to the topics that can also be referred to using other names. Doing that for a hundred topics would be a tall order, and I don't think we need to in the first place: pageviews by themselves carry very little information about either usage or significance. Uanfala (talk) 11:39, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

  How do you do that math and end up with a topic other than Saba as the primary? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:03, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

  I honestly don't know how I could be clearer than "This article gets almost 70% of pageviews among articles that are titled 'Saba'." I would have added the condiment to the chart if I had noticed it, but at 8 views per day, or <1%, it is statistically insignificant. The island still gets close to 70% of pageviews. Your use of Massviews includes many irrelevant partial title matches. Eliminating those shows a high correlation with the Pageviews chart. Station1 (talk) 01:05, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

  The other 100 entries on the dab page are not "irrelevant". We may disagree about the weighting we may assign them, but there's no reason why we should exclude them completely. The figure of 70% based on a small sample of pages is as meaningless as, for example, the figure of 8.5%, which you get out of the massviews if you apply to everything a weighting of 1. Uanfala (talk) 10:28, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

  There's really no fundamental disagreement about that methodology. It's just that I give a near-zero weight to Saba Azad, Help:Disambiguation, Saba Ali Khan, Saba Qamar, Pachira aquatica, Sabians, Saba Hameed, Sheba, Saba Mubarak, etc., because almost no one would expect those articles to be titled "Saba". Station1 (talk) 22:09, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

  Yes, and this also applies to all the other eponymous topics. :) --Joy [shallot] (talk) 17:23, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

  What eponymous topics? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:17, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

  Apologies, the correct term in that case should be homonymous instead (they don't necessarily share etymology). --Joy [shallot] (talk) 20:25, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

  None of the listed topics are homonymous with Saba. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:01, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

  They are though. To repeat a point that has been made several times already (with apologies to anyone who may actually have read the discussion so far!), Sheba is known by other names including Saba, Saba Qamar is also sometimes referred to, in broad enough contexts, as Saba, etc. Reasonable editors may disagree on the relative weight those topics should be assigned here, but I don't think it's a defensible proposition to insist that they should just be ignored. Uanfala (talk) 10:59, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

  Unless we rename the page Sheba to Saba its not homonymous. Saba Qamar is not homonymous with Saba because just Saba alone does not mean Saba Qamar. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:49, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

  You're fundamentally misunderstanding how these things work. We're not interested here which among a set of synonyms happens to have been chosen for an article's title, we're interested in whether there is a primary topic among the articles that can be referred to by a given term. See the first two sentences of WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, as well as the third bullet point at the top of the overarching guidelines. Uanfala (talk) 16:57, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

  I'm not confused, I just know what a homonym is... For example Saba Qamar and Saba are not homonyms despite your claims to the contrary. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:54, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

• Support. Saba is a small island with a population of 2,000 people. Its main claim to notability is the fact that it's not part of any bigger subnational entity and so shows up on the lists of countries and territories that people with a particular type of geeky inclination may use to sort their knowledge of the world. That's not a very strong claim to notability. Among the contemporary places with the same name, there are several with greater population; Sabá alone has 9x as many people. And looking at the other topics with the name: two ancient kingdoms, a music scale, a sura of the Quran, a genus of plants, a make of car, several manufacturing companies, a rapper, an Italian condiment, an early Christian saint... it's really difficult to see why the island could be seen to have greater long-term significance than everything else combined. I don't see any of the primary topic defenses above as holding water either. Uanfala (talk) 12:27, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

That can't be its main claim to notability... Thats only been true since 2010 when the Netherlands Antilles was dissolved. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:14, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Saba has other claims to notability. Mt. Scenery, for instance, is the highest point in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. And Saba's airport, Juancho E. Yrausquin Airport, currently has the world's smallest commercial runway. CareAhLine (talk) 18:22, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

• Support. There are many other notable articles with the same name. The ancient kingdom is also commonly known as Sabaʾ. There is no primary topic. Vpab15 (talk) 09:09, 24 August 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose per Station1. I concur that the people named "Saba" are PTMs and should not be used for determination of the primary topic, and this island gets a lion's share of pageviews of the topics simply named "Saba". Plus, we do not really have a good disambiguator available, so the resulting title would be awkward. I don't see much reason to disrupt the status quo. No such user (talk) 12:19, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

This is the second time there's been a reference to partial title matches, but WP:PTM actually has an elaborate description of specific and generic parts for place names. Even if we steer clear of extending this logic implicitly to human names (where you could have a WP:NAMELIST kind of a debate about what qualifies for listing as the specific part), this still doesn't explain why references to San Saba wouldn't be relevant (where "Saba" is clearly the specific part and "San" is the generic part), since they appear very prominently in source searches for the term Saba, as I've shown in the section above. I went looking for other traffic statistics similar to pageviews, and found https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=saba,%2Fm%2F01qz3s,%2Fm%2F04vf_0 which has a distinction between the island and other terms, and there's no apparent correlation between searches for the island and the search term in general. How is this not a classic of a lack of a primary topic based on statistics? --Joy [shallot] (talk) 16:34, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

But our titles aren't search engine terms. Even if various San Sabas are more popular results for the search term Saba, that does not imply that "Saba" alone is ambiguous. Popularity of "San Saba" has no much value in determining primary topic for "Saba", at least not more that New York has in relation to York. No such user (talk) 20:37, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

The reason is that the typical English reader generally knows about the distinct concepts of 'New York' and 'York', and there's fairly established primary usage for each of these, and then we're comfortable short-circuiting navigation. I don't think we can make such claims for 'Saba' based on the data. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 22:38, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

There is no way that the typical English reader knows about York (a small city of 200k), unless of course by English you mean from England and not a speaker of the English language. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:13, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

So we're discussing a 'small city' of 200k in the discussion of an island of 2k which is supposed to be primary? :) Anyway, yes, there's going to be a modicum amount of bias towards English-native topics in the English Wikipedia. Conversely, there's supposed to be a lack of bias towards other topics. You can see in the aforementioned Google Trends how in the Netherlands, the island clearly tops the charts, but nowhere else. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 18:12, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

Primary =/= known by a majority of the world's english speaking population. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 22:14, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

I don't see how that has any relation to what I just wrote there. It's exactly because the majority of the world's English-speaking population will not recognize the term "Saba" as the island that there is supposed to be a lack of bias towards the island in Wikipedia navigation. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 10:01, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

My point is thats not the standard, you would be hard pressed to find a term which was recognized by the majority of the world's English-speaking population... Such a term might not even exist. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:03, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

I have no idea why we're discussing that straw man argument here. Can we get back to the topic at hand? --Joy [shallot] (talk) 12:36, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Its not a straw man, its literally your argument "The reason is that the typical English reader generally knows about the distinct concepts of 'New York' and 'York'," if you didn't mean to say "the typical English reader" you shouldn't have. You can't screw up and then cover your screw up by declaring your own argument to be a straw man once challenged. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:04, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

It's a meaningless argument because it's in relation to a comparison to York and New York that is not actually relevant here, and I've explained already why that is so (and I disagree with your interpretation of that). We've strayed a few levels of abstraction away from the matter of Saba, and nobody other than the two of us is interested in following this tangent, nor should they be. We're adding more walls of text to a discussion and thereby making it less likely others will get involved. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 17:58, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Also, this distinction between traffic from page views and traffic from search engines is not really clear to me with respect to the determination of primary topic... how are page views better when we've effectively spent the last N years steering people towards this article and away from the others? --Joy [shallot] (talk) 22:46, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

• Support - clear absence of a primary topic, given the page views etc.  — Amakuru (talk) 16:01, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose, this is clearly the primary topic. No other Saba comes close and some seem to be misunderstanding how we treat partial matches. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:11, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

• I would not agree that Sabaeans and Mar Saba are partial title matches, since there is no reason in principle they couldn't be at plain Saba. Srnec (talk) 19:48, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

• We already have a page for Mar Saba minus the critical "Mar" part... thats the guy its named after, Sabbas the Sanctified. Mar Saba could not be Saba. The article Sabaeans is about a people, not their land... Are you thinking of Sheba? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:03, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

• No. Mar Saba = Saint Saba = Sabbas the Sanctified. "Saba" is as much his name as Sabbas. I forgot our Mar Saba page was about the monastery. The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity has him under "Saba, S.", which is how the Oxford Classical Dictionary treats the Gothic martyr. "Saba" was the name of the tribal confederation that became a kingdom. Any distinction between "Saba" (land/polity) and "Sabaeans" (people) is somewhat artificial. (Our separate treatment of Sheba is weird.) Srnec (talk) 20:29, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

• Support – The sheer amount of notable topics with the name 'Saba', combined with the rather weighty long-term significance of some of them like the Kingdom of Saba, strongly suggests that there is no primary topic here. As has been noted by others, Saba (island) seems the most likely search target, but I'm not convinced that it meets the requirement of being more likely than all the other topics combined. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 19:38, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Note: WikiProject Islands, WikiProject Caribbean, and WikiProject Disambiguation have been notified of this discussion. — Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 16:54, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

• Support there is no primary topic. --Privybst (talk) 17:01, 5 September 2022 (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.