Talk:General hospital

What should be the redirect?

I've twice changed the redirect to General Hospital, because I'm confident that the vast majority of people who search in Wikipedia for "general hospital" are searching for the TV series, and quite naturally don't capitalize their search. Twice it's been reverted by the same user, for two different reasons. The most recent reason was a link to WP:DIFFCAPS, which is actually an article about article titles, and the debate about whether to change the title of General Hospital already happened, with no consensus. Also, the diffcaps article includes the sentence, "The general approach is that whatever readers might type in the search box, they are guided as swiftly as possible to the topic they might reasonably be expected to be looking for, by such disambiguation techniques as hatnotes and/or disambiguation pages." That supports my redirect change, since an average of about 1930 WP users view the General Hospital article every day, while only about 1650 view the entire hospital article, and only a tiny fraction of those would have got there because of an interest in general hospitals per se.

That said, a reasonable compromise that is in line with the recommendation in WP:DIFFCAPS is to redirect to the disambiguation page, as I have done. This will be WAY less inconvenient for the vast majority of users who are looking for the TV show. The redirect to the general hospital section of hospital is crazy inconvenient, because a user would have to first figure out what the heck happened, then scroll up in the hospital article to find the hatnote to the disambiguation page, where they can find the link to the TV show. My change serves those wikipedia users reasonably well, while also serving the occasional outlier that will actually be looking for information on general hospitals as a kind of hospital. Jbening (talk) 15:55, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

The most appropriate redirect would be to Hospital, which has a hatnote to the disambiguation page. Doing so prevents having dozens of articles linked to a disambiguation page and still allow users to find the TV series (which is not the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC). SounderBruce 06:56, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

The two main criteria from the primary topic article:

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.

Criterion one clearly favors the General Hospital TV show article, for the reasons I've already given. It will be quite some time before knowledge of the TV show dwindles to the point that more Wikipedia users searching "general hospital" are actually looking for the hospital type, so criterion two also favors the TV show for the foreseeable future. It would take just a few minutes to change the links in the dozens of Wikipedia articles that currently link to general hospital. Jbening (talk) 13:43, 24 April 2020 (UTC)