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Countries?

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It's unclear if Russian Federation and France really belong here, since it doesn't seem likely anybody would enter "RF" if they were looking for either of those. I'm leaving them in for now, but if anybody's got opinions one way or the other, I'd like to hear them. RoySmith 14:36, 19 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well, maybe, someone could appreciate the little RF in the French euros and try to guess what it is by entering it in WP... --euyyn 23:59, 4 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Primary topic

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Radio frequency is the primary topic and should have this title. The existing page should be moved to RF (disambiguation). Does anyone object to this happening? SpinningSpark 07:33, 20 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Since no one has objected, Ihave moved the article. SpinningSpark 15:30, 21 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 21 July 2022

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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. No consensus after extended discussion. (closed by non-admin page mover) Vpab15 (talk) 08:59, 8 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

RF (disambiguation) → RF – The base name RF is being used as a redirect to radio frequency, which is not the primary topic for the acronym. There are 27 different "RF" articles listed at the dab page. Dr. Vogel (talk) 23:07, 21 July 2022 (UTC) — Relisting. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 19:22, 30 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support. It is nearly impossible for a two-letter combination to have a primary topic, and this is not one of these rare cases. BD2412 T 00:26, 22 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    For every rule there's an exception. There's evidence this is an exception. ~Kvng (talk) 01:31, 4 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per nom. There's no clear primary topic for this two-letter combo — so the safest bet is to move the disambiguation page to the basename. Paintspot Infez (talk) 04:20, 22 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. This will just revert an undiscussed move from 2013. Station1 (talk) 05:00, 22 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose "RF" is most likely referrant to "radio frequency" as in radio frequency radiation (radio). A basic GOOGLE search shows dominance of radio frequency topics in the first 100 results. And in Google Books [1], almost all the results are about radio-frequency topics. And in Google Scholar [2], almost all the results are about radio frequency topics. Thus there is a marked and massive predominance of radio-frequency topics meaning "RF" in long term significance and scholarly work. -- 05:45, 23 July 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.229.88.43 (talk)
  • Weak support this may be the most common abbreviation but it doesn't seem primary[[3]]. Crouch, Swale (talk) 10:47, 25 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Relist comment Relisting the RM after an oppose voter (who didn't manage to vote during the RM itself) complained on my talk page that Crouch's evidence made no sense to them because the massviews gets jumbled when a pageswap happens. I've tentatively reverted the pagemove so that the evidence makes more sense again. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 19:30, 30 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. There are multiple claims here that radio frequency is not the primary meaning, but precious little evidence that this is so. I agree that "most common" meaning does not necessarily mean it is primary if there is one or more other widely found uses. However, the google books results show that not only is radio frequency the most common usage, it is overwhelmingly so. The first hundred results are all for radio frequency (with the exception of a couple of person's initials and non-abbreviations). SpinningSpark 07:11, 31 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    How does the fact that it's the most common meaning found on Google Books prove that it's primary? Dr. Vogel (talk) 09:43, 31 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    When over 99% of usages are for one meaning then it's primary by any sensible definition of the term. That's fully in line with WP:DPT. How are you defining primary? SpinningSpark 09:52, 31 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    That is in one place. Books are not the only source of information. What evidence do you have that this generalises so much that radiofrequency should be the primary topic for the acronym RF over and above all 27 other articles listed at the dabpage? Dr. Vogel (talk) 11:28, 31 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    It's already been stated that similar results are obtained from gscholar and a general google search. Similar results from all other browsers I tried, in fact both Google and Chrome are so sure that is what I am looking for that that is what is displayed in their infoboxes. Let's turn it around – do you have any evidence that any of them even come close? SpinningSpark 16:02, 31 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    ...and what is wrong with books anyway? They are generally a better source of information than rubbish chatter on the general internet. Also, the first three suggestions in WP:DPT for testing by reliable sources are ngrams (which guess what - uses book corpora), gbooks and gscholar. SpinningSpark 16:17, 31 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. In line with what Spinningspark has shown, RF is clearly primary. Merriam-Webster shows only RF meaning radio frequency and Rf meaning rutherfordium; Collins adds a few other things (right field and right fielder) for rf, but for RF it's only radio frequency; Oxford English Dictionary first attests RF as radio frequency to 1918 with no other meanings (R.F. is attested for "representative fraction" in cartography.) —Carter (Tcr25) (talk) 20:44, 31 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Beyond the dictionary definitions, looking at what links to RF and RF (disambiguation), everything in an admittedly quick check that links to RF is referring to radio frequency; the only things linking directly to RF (disambiguation) are radio frequency and lists of acronyms. It's clear when someone puts RF in an article they are, 99% of the time, referring to "radio frequency." —Carter (Tcr25) (talk) 20:53, 31 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Note that RF had even more incoming links for "radio frequency" until dozens of them were bypassed in the time between this discussion being closed and reopened. SpinningSpark 22:54, 31 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Also note that dab pages normally aren't supposed to have incoming links, and if indeed most of the incoming links to the redirect RF intend the radio frequency article this only means that editors haven't been inserting a whole lot of blatantly incorrect links. When we have more direct data about usage on Wikipedia (as I've shown below), we don't need to bother with incoming links, but if we're going to look at them at all, we need to make more meaningful comparisons. For example, there at most 400 articles where a link to "RF" intends the radio frequency article [4], and at least 750 istances where the term "RF" is a piped link to something else [5]. Uanfala (talk) 11:45, 3 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    And within that second search more than 400 of the results are linking to Right fielder. This means there are more RF links piped to right fielder than to radio frequency. -- Fyrael (talk) 17:04, 3 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Where is the evidence that isn't not the primary meaning? Other articles may have more pageviews, but that doesn't mean they more commonly use the RF acronym. -Kj cheetham (talk) 20:48, 31 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Use of the acronym "RF" for radio frequency is overwhelmingly common. I don't see any other use of the acronym on the dab page that rivals it. Radio frequency is a clear primary for RF.--Srleffler (talk) 22:02, 31 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. More than enough evidence has been presented that "Radio Frequency" is the primary topic. PianoDan (talk) 05:27, 2 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. In June, the redirect RF was followed 212 times [6]; for the same period, the redirect target's hatnote link to RF (disambiguation) was clicked 108 times [7]. This means that slightly under half of readers were happy with the existing primary topic, and that number would get even lower if you consider that many of them probably came via incoming links rather than searches. As far as I'm concerned, this settles the issue about usage. Distributions of web search results and the like tell you nothing about what readers seek on Wikipedia. What other sources do could be relevant in deciding how we should title our articles, but that question's not being discussed here: all that's at stake is the fate of a redirect and a dab page, and there's no reason why we should be patterning those after external websites. Uanfala (talk) 11:45, 3 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Just seeking clarity here Uanfala, you're saying that the linked tools show 212 people clicked on RF in June and then 108 of them used the hatnote on Radio frequency to find some other target on RF (disambiguation). Is that correct? I'm not sure either tool is showing that exact path or relationship, but the WikiNav chart you linked to does clearly show that most of the people leaving RF (disambiguation) head to Radio frequency (with a smaller number heading to Russia). In a case where there isn't a primary topic, I would expect that chart to look more like the one for Cabal (disambiguation) where the clicks away from the disambig page are more diverse and not as concentrated on a single target. —Carter (Tcr25) (talk) 18:18, 4 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    There are two links above. One is https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2022-06-01&end=2022-06-30&pages=RF and it shows the pageviews for the redirect RF: you can see the relevant numbers in the pane on the right: 212 total for the period, and a daily average of 7. The second link is from Wikinav https://wikinav.toolforge.org/?language=en&title=RF_%28disambiguation%29. It shows the sources and destinations of traffic for the dab page. Look at the left-hand side of the first graph: these are the sources, the size of the "pipe" for each source is proportional to the traffic coming from there. You can see the absolute numbers for each source by hovering yoru mouse over it. That's where the figure of 108 comes from. You're commenting on the right-hand side, which shows the desinations of traffic from the dab. While it is true that the radio frequency article tops this list, you need to notice that it only gets a tiny proportion of the outgoing traffic (you don't see any of the other targets apart from Russia because source-destination pairs with fewer than 10 monthly hits don't make it into the dataset). Uanfala (talk) 21:36, 4 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Right, I see where the numbers come from, but your comment above was that "slightly under half of readers were happy with the existing primary topic" because of the number of people who went from the RF redirect ended up using the hatnote to get to RF (disambiguation). I don't think that's completely accurate. It's two different data sets. One showing the number of people who got to Radio frequency via RF and the the other showing the number of people who got to RF (disambiguation) from Radio frequency. Are there some who did the two actions sequentially? Probably, but certainly not everyone did. The 108 clicks on the hatnote are from the 22,076 visitors to Radio frequency, not those who got to the page from the RF redirect. My point about the right-hand side of the Wikinav data was that there's a clear indication in that that Radio frequency is the primary topic for RF. —Carter (Tcr25) (talk) 01:22, 5 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    That's a valid observation. The unspoken assumption of my brief analysis above was that the hatnote link was followed primarily or exclusively by the people it's aimed at. Otherwise, why would any other reader of an article be interested in the unrelated meanings of a random abbreviation? Of course, you can't completely rule out misclicks or readers with pathologically exhasutive curiosity, but I don't think it's at all reasonable to assume that their numbers would be significant. If an article has a hatnote that says "Foo redirects here, for other uses see Foo (disambiguation)", then all, or almost all, of the readers who click on the link to the dab page would be ones who have followed the redirect "Foo" without landing at the article they wanted.
    As for the right-hand side of the Wikinav graph: that would be what we'd be looking at if the dab page were at the base title, but it isn't, so it isn't of much use in our case (other than as a sanity check in case of extreme data). The crucial bits you appear to be missing here are: 1) the link for the radio frequency article gets followed by merely 13% of visitors to the dab page, and 2) the guidelines require a primary topic with respect to usage to get more usage than all the other topics combined, not just more usage than the next most popular topic. Uanfala (talk) 11:53, 5 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    That "only" 13% of visitors to the dab page followed the link to "Radio frequency" is not at all evidence in your favour. It is surprising that anyone at all followed that link. One has to ask why anyone seeking "Radio frequency" has ended up on the dab page given that "RF" redirects to "Radio frequency". Perhaps they misclicked on the choices in the search box, or perhaps they first went to "Radio frequency" looking for something specific, saw that there was a disambiguation page, went there to see if there was a better choice, then came straight back to "Radio frequency" on seeing there was not. In any event, the occurences should be extremely rare. That they are not is because "Radio frequency" has a large readership. And they're not by a wide margin – "Radio frequency" is 70% of the outgoing pageviews of the dab page when it should be more or less zero. That's evidence of primary topic if there ever was. SpinningSpark 17:22, 5 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Well, it's partly for the reasons that you set out that those righ-hand-side figures are useless here. But you brought them up, so I had to respond with clarifications. And I'm going to have to correct you again. The radio frequency does not account for 70% of the outgoing traffic from the dab: that figure is only relative to the total of two taret articles with 10 or more monthly clicks. Those with fewer than 10 clicks aren't recorded in the dataset. There are a large number of entries on the dab page and you're effectively assuming that all of them got zero clicks and that the vast majority of visitors to the dab page arrived then and just did nothing. We don't know exactly how much of the outgoing traffic was for your article, but we do know that only 13% of the visitors to the dab page followed the link to it. And as clear from all the above, this is an entirely irrelevant number!
    When you state that the clicks for the radio frequency article should be expected to be zero, you're assuming that 100% of the traffic to the dab page will come from the hatnote in that article. That's also not correct. As shown by Wikinav, that percentage is 23%. Three quarters of dab visitors don't arrive from there, so naturally some of them will be seeking that article. Uanfala (talk) 23:08, 5 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    No, I didn't assume that all the incoming traffic is from the hatnote. I said as much in my analysis by mentioning the search box. That's the only way incoming links can come from the main page for instance, and probably applies to other pages as well since we do not deliberately link dab pages in article text. The biggest categories of incoming links are search engines and empty referers. Again, one has to ask how users are arriving from search engines. If I type "RF" into Google, it jsut doesn't offer the dab page as a possible target. The fact that there are so many incoming links just screams bot and crawler activity to me. That is, not human activity so ignore.

    Yes, pages with fewer than ten clicks are not in the statistics, but it's a stretch to think that every unlisted target got ten clicks (probably most did not get any) and in any case ten is still only 12% of what "Radio frequency" got. SpinningSpark 09:37, 6 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Yes, you did mention traffic from the search box, sorry I missed that. Still, you're making the assumption that all this traffic would be down to misclicks, and that's extremely unrealistic. At the very least, you need to observe that radio frequency doesn't appear in the search suggestions for "RF" at all, so any reader looking for it through the drop-down box will likely have to pass through the dab page, which is at the top of the list when you type RF. Bots and crawlers are supposed to be excluded from the dataset (see its documentation), though undeclared bots may account for some of the empty referrers. Anyway, I think I've provided all the input I reasonably could, so I'll be leaving it here. By this point it should be obvious to anyone (at least anyone who hasn't already bet on a horse in this game) that the data is impossible to reconcile with the hypothesis of a primary topic. Uanfala (talk) 10:21, 6 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    "Radio frequency" does not appear in the drop down for "RF" but neither does "RF (disambiguation)". The top result is "RF" which is the redirect to "Radio frequency". Users cannot get to the dab page that way unless they explicitly seek it out by typing some more of its title, otherwise they are going to land on the "Radio frequency" page either by clicking "RF" of just pressing enter. So it is untrue that users are forced through the dab page by the drop down menu. I'm not hearing any credible mechanism either, whereaby users can get to the dab page from a search engine other than by explicitly seeking it out. SpinningSpark 10:47, 6 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    When readers see "RF" in the drop-down box they have no way of knowing this will lead to the radio frequency article. Typing "RF " (RF + space) shows the dab page at the top. Typing "Rf" (notice the lower-case "f") brings out Rf at the top, which is a redirect to the dab page. 12:08, 6 August 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Uanfala (talk • contribs)
    "RF " doesn't show me the dab page at the top, but "RF (" does. -Kj cheetham (talk) 13:54, 6 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Ooops, I had been looking at "rf ". Uanfala (talk) 13:58, 6 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Same with "rf ", the only way I can get the dab page to appear in the dropdown is including the opening bracket. Making me wonder if it's browser or location dependant... -Kj cheetham (talk) 14:16, 6 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I tried three browsers (Firefox and MS Edge on desktop, Chrome on mobile) and whenever I type "Rf " I get the dab page at the top of the drop-down box. This discrepancy is interesting, and I guess I'd need to learn more about how those search suggestions work. But we're going way off on a tangent here. The point was that there are legitimate navigation paths to the dab page (say, you type "rf", with or without space, and hit enter: no matter how the search suggestions work, you'll immediately get taken to the dab), so there's no need to try explaining away the traffic that it gets. Uanfala (talk) 14:26, 6 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Mostly what Uanfala said. When deciding primary topics I think Wikipedia usage data is much more important than any Google searches and it looks to me like that data doesn't show a clear primary topic. -- Fyrael (talk) 17:09, 3 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - Reasonable points have been made on both sides. It's either a toss-up or a decision without major significance to readers. In these cases, we should trust past work and leave things as they are. ~Kvng (talk) 01:30, 4 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    This seems to be an appeal to the status quo. I believe something like that makes sense if we're dealing with articles (as long as they're at least minimally watched), but not here: dab pages and redirects tend not to receive much attention, so I don't think there can be much of an implicit consensus here. Besides, the dab page has spent equal periods of time on and off the primary title (with only a bold move in 2013 separating the two), so the present discussion had better come up with consensus one way or the other. Uanfala (talk) 15:20, 4 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: Seems a fairly clear case of Andrew's principle to me. So it doesn't really matter which way we go. Andrewa (talk) 20:03, 7 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per SpinningSpark ... who basically stated my intended rationale better than I ever could. Steel1943 (talk) 06:13, 8 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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.
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