Talk:Anax#Requested move 19 June 2025

40px This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 22 September 2021 and 10 December 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): AshOrchid2254. Peer reviewers: Sappho Cornelia Catula, AFineDouglasFir.

{{small|Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 12:04, 18 January 2022 (UTC)}}

{{requested move/dated|multiple=yes

|current1=Anax|new1=Anax (Greek)|current2=Anax (dragonfly)|new2=Anax|}}

• :Anax → {{no redirect|Anax (Greek)}}
• :Anax (dragonfly) → {{no redirect|Anax}}

– The Greek word is certainly not the primary topic. The dragonfly genus likely is. Cremastra (talk) 03:20, 19 June 2025 (UTC)

I was surprised to find this article without a disambiguation, so I searched on various search engines, Google things, and the Internet Archive to determine whether the Greek word is the primary topic for "Anax". Here's what I found, of the first 20 search results with the search term "Anax" (in quotation marks).

;Google Scholar [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=0&q=%22Anax%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5]

• Dragonfly: 16 (80%)
• Greek word: 1 (5%)
• Other: 3 (15%)

;Google Books [https://www.google.com/search?udm=36&q=%22Anax%22]

• Dragonfly: 9 (45%)
• Fiction: 5 (25%)
• Greek word: 2 (10%)
• Something computery: 2 (10%)
• Abbreviation of Anaxagoras: 2 (10%)

;Google Search [https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=%22Anax%22]

• Companies and products: 11 (55%)
• Greek word: 2 (10%) – this article and the wiktionary entry.
• Game something: 5 (25%)
• Dragonfly: 1 (5%)
• Anax (mythology): 1 (5%)

;Internet Archive full text search [https://archive.org/search?query=%22Anax%22&sin=TXT]

• Fiction: 10 (50%)
• Dragonfly: 8 (40%)
• Abbreviation of Anaxagoras: 1 (5%)
• Other: 1 (5%)

{{Pie chart

|label1=Anax (dragonfly) |value1=42.5 |color1= olive

|label2=Fictional characters named "Anax" (various) |value2=18.75 |color2 = yellow

|label3=Companies and products named "Anax" (various) |value3=13.75 |color3= blue

|label4=Greek word "Anax" |value4=6.25|color4=black

|label5=Other|value5=18.75|color5=gray

}}

Summing these up (80 results), we arrive at:

• Dragonfly: 34 (42.5%)
• Fictional characters: 15 (18.8%)
• Companies & products: 11 (13.8%)
• Greek word: 5 (6.3%)
• Other/unidentified: 15 (18.8%)

Of the notable topics (Anax (dragonfly), Anax (Greek), Anax (mythology), and Anaxagoras), the dragonfly genus clearly predominates: if we remove the minor topics we don't have articles on, we're left with 43 results, 34 of which (79%) refer to the dragonfly genus. Therefore, the Greek word is clearly not the WP:PTOPIC of this title, and, given the available topics, Anax predominates and thus should occupy the base page name, rather than have a disambiguation page. Cremastra (talk) 03:20, 19 June 2025 (UTC)

• Comment: This is an extremely odd methodology: adding together two pages of various Google search results and averaging them to create a pie chart! The results do not seem to tell us much about what Wikipedia should do, as we appear to have only these two pages under the title Anax without natural disambiguation (as is the case with individual species of dragonfly). The search results imply that a great many other topics are more important than the current one (or at least more likely to be searched for), but partial title matches aren't actually relevant to this proposal, and no other exact matches seem notable enough—at least under this title—to be listed in the encyclopedia at all!

:However, if we actually read the guidelines under WP:PTOPIC, we'll note two main criteria typically used to determine whether there is a primary topic. These aren't necessarily exclusive, but they both point rather unambiguously against the proposed move:

:#A topic is primary for a term with respect to usage if it is highly likely—much more likely than any other single topic, and more likely than all the other topics combined—to be the topic sought when a reader searches for that term.

:#A topic is primary for a term with respect to long-term significance if it has substantially greater enduring notability and educational value than any other topic associated with that term.

:By long-term significance, the concept of anax as "king" would be primary—it's the source of meaning for all other uses, and has more than three thousand years' worth of usage, from the earliest period of the classical world through to modern scholarship, compared with a little over two centuries for the dragonfly genus—which of course is named after it, and is of interest primarily to entomology. I see this a lot with Roman gentes; half the names of Roman families have been borrowed by entomologists for various genera of insects or spiders, presumably because they ran out of other things to call them, and if not in entomology then for some genus of fish, amphibians, plants, etc.

:For usage, the easiest measure of significance is to look at page views. Over the last ninety days, the dragonfly genus gets an average of about 15 page views, compared with about 77 for this article. That suggests that five times as many readers are looking for this topic as the genus of dragonflies, and that would seem to be decisively against the proposed title swap. We know that most of these readers weren't actually looking for the dragonflies because they didn't click the hatnote or navigate there through some other means; if they had then there'd be more than 15 daily views for that topic.

:But for the sake of thoroughness, let's look at the [https://wikinav.toolforge.org/?language=en&title=Anax WikiNav clickstream for Anax]. Of the incoming streams, the ones that are identified are all Greek historical topics; of outgoing streams the dragonfly genus is eighth or ninth on the list over the last two months, following a number of Greek historical topics. Flipping the stream to Anax (dragonfly) doesn't really tell me as much; the takeaway for me is that 5% of incoming views come from here—that is, less than one per day.

:So I don't think there's a very strong case for the proposed primary topic swap; if there is a primary topic for Anax, it is most likely this article, and not the genus of dragonflies. P Aculeius (talk) 12:58, 19 June 2025 (UTC)

:Comment: not opposing or supporting a move, but if this article does need to be disambiguated it should be "Anax (word)" or "Anax (title)" ―Howard • 🌽³³ 13:03, 19 June 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose. I oppose making the dragonfly primary. P Aculeius has said enough so I won't say more. I do not necessarily oppose making a dab page primary, but agree with Howardcorn33 that the proper disambiguator would be 'word' or 'title'. Another option is to use wanax (i.e., natural disambiguation) for the title article. Srnec (talk) 20:26, 19 June 2025 (UTC)

:Note: WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome and WikiProject Greece have been notified of this discussion. TarnishedPath^talk 07:31, 21 June 2025 (UTC)