Talk:Van the man

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Requested move

The following discussion is an archived 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. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: No consensus. I can see some arguments for PRIMARYTOPIC but if we go by 'which article are people most likely to be looking for' the amount of page traffic does need to come into it. Van Morrison does not get more than 50% of the total page hits; the two football players are surprisingly popular. Google for 'van the man' johnson -wikipedia and 'van the man' morrison -wikipedia and the movie star is ahead by a factor of two. EdJohnston (talk) 03:50, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Van the man → Van the Man (disambiguation) – I would suggest "Van the Man" most commonly refers to Van Morrison. Notably, the phrase doesn't appear in any of the other articles linked from the dab. The singer predominates in "van the man" -wikipedia, along with recent news stories about van Persie. Curiously, the phrase is essentially nonexistent in Google Books (Martin van Buren??). I'd like to see Van the man and Van the Man redirect to Van Morrison. The capitalization is of lesser importance, but since the phrase is a nickname for a person, it should probably be capitalized. BDD (talk) 18:56, 20 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Van Johnson MGM's Golden Boy in Ruth Rowland, "Van, the Man," Movieland 14 (August 1956) seems to be the earliest use of the phrase. ...but it is pretty generic now Giovanni van Bronckhorst. In ictu oculi (talk) 13:53, 21 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose – the phrase "Van the man" appears only in the article Van Morrison. However, as thin as the titular relevance of nicknames like this are, people looking for Van Morrison will type in "Van Morrison" (or lower case), not "van the man". If people are really so adrift that they're typing in "van the man", then they probably need the dab page. Even though it's logical per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, if you redirect Van the man and keep the dab page, you'll then need a dab hatnote on Van Morrison, which is needless clutter. ENeville (talk) 18:19, 26 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
This is kind of funny, but I'd probably have to support. It's really not that big a deal to just add one more dab hatnote to {{hatnote}}. Red Slash 02:01, 27 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]