2782: Wikipedia Article Titles

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Wikipedia Article Titles

Title text: I would never stoop to vandalism, but I'm not above discreetly deleting the occasional 'this article contains excessive amounts of detail' tag.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by MERYL STREEP'S SECOND SEAGULL - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

Meryl Streep is a famous and often acclaimed actor, for whom there is definitely a Wikipedia page covering her various biographic details. It may be that Randall normally has little interest in reading this page, when finding a link to it. But certainly he appears to have less interest than he would have of reading more about the seagull, for which a page also exists; albeit as an automatic redirect to Gull, as "seagull" is a commonly used colloquial misnomer verging on being a tautology. Both these pages are located at up at the "slow end" of the line indicating how quickly his interest would be grabbed, one unlabelled 'unit' apart, though we don't know how many real things might appear outside this page (top or bottom), so we only a have the rough idea of his priorities when opportunities arise to read such info.

Two more units down from the seagull, he hypothesises the article entitled "Meryl Streep (Seagull)", which would seem to be significantly more likely to succeed as clickbait. A further three units beyond, is a page which clearly describes an "incident", which hints heavily at something less mundane than merely (e.g.) a one-time participation in the Anton Chekhov play that was somehow deserving of a wikipedia page/section-redirection of its own.

Perhaps this is an incident in which a seagull notably caused Meryl Streep problems. Or a time when Meryl Streep notably caused problems for a seagull. Or perhaps both of these, or other variations, in multiple incidents as the final imagined wikipedia page is a 'disambiguation page' of this, which is a further four units 'quicker' to be clicked upon. Such a page is only necessary when there are multiple possible articles of sufficiently similar name that may need to be documented seperately to avoid confusion. However, the titles of disambiguation pages rarely appear in links -- you generally only reach them as a result of a search for an ambiguous term (as you would if you searched for "seagull"). So the notion of clicking on this is paradoxical.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[Chart title:] Hypothetical Wikipedia article titles

[Chart subtitle:] Ranked by how quickly I would click on them

[A vertical axis with eleven evenly spaced positions marked along it, without units or magnitudes]

[An abbreviated arrow to the left of the axis indicates that downwards is:] More quickly

[Alongside the topmost checkmark:] Meryl Streep

[Alongside 2nd checkmark:] Seagull

[Alongside 4th checkmark:] Meryl Streep (seagull)

[Alongside 7th checkmark:] Meryl Streep seagull incident

[Alongside 11th, and final visible, checkmark:] Meryl Streep seagull incident (disambiguation)

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Discussion

Of course, I had to search for those keywords and found this: Playbill: Bulletin: Meryl Streep in Talks to Do Seagull in Central Park. Couldn't find anything about a Seagull *incident*, however. We may have to wait until the production has completed. Shamino (talk) 13:44, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Or doesn't happen at all. The incident might be a fight between Streep and someone involved in the production. Barmar (talk) 14:07, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Whatever happens we need to somehow inject the name "Meyrl Street seagull incident" into the news coverage so that the Wikipedia article can be created. 172.70.162.101 14:24, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Ah-HAH! https://www.salon.com/2001/08/27/seagull/ "a 40-ish man was found dead in the bushes from a single gunshot wound near the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, just yards away from where Philip Seymour Hoffman offs himself with a single gunshot wound every night as Konstantin Gavrilovich in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull." (in which Streep was his co-star.) Thanks to ChatGPT-4's WebPilot plug-in, by the way. 172.69.134.214 17:24, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Re the transcript: I don't think they're called checkmarks. Tick marks, maybe. 172.71.182.232 18:00, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

✓ Done 172.69.134.96 18:14, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Well, given that Check mark and (redirected there, anyway) Tick mark don't actually refer to those things, I changed the transcript to use the Graduation (scale) terminology as the best(?) of various such terms that I'd more happily use. Which probably is going to annoy someone else, so maybe expect it to change again... 172.70.162.179 20:36, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

I did not do this transcript, but I have used the tick marks in numerous transcripts using charts like this. I'm not native English speaker, and there have never been anyone changing it before, and seems like another user also believed tick mark could be used... So it would be nice to find out of it is actually normal to use tick marks for the "ticks" on a graph axis, else there will be 100 of transcripts to fix (as I have been involved in writing most of them). I have never head of the graduation scale terminology...--Kynde (talk) 07:55, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Quick serach came up with this page using tick marks as I have always done, first after the wiki article on check marks which I have never heard called tick marks before. I will correct back to tick marks --Kynde (talk) 07:56, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Microsoft refers to them as Tick Marks - don't know whether or not that counts as supporting evidence.172.70.91.152 15:39, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

(...not sure MS is an authority, but...) Personally, I read "tick" as a ✓. And "check" is either such a tick or a cross (there's also one with a tick/cross ambiguity, prompting much speculation here about positive/nevative meaning, but I can't recall which that one is right now).

I might accept a "tally" marker (vertically, across x-axis, it 'counts' similarly to "five-barred" tally-marks, without the barring). "Graduation" (Graduierung?) does mean both this and the event of graduating (or undertaking the Eksamen?), but has less semantic overlap than a two-stroke diagonal and a single-stroke perpendicular (both of which feature in various comics). I think I'd ignore/change prior "graph axis 'check/tick' marks", depending on context, but it would be better to be unambiguously a scale-marking and not a confirmatory "this exists" indicator. If the right word can be found. (Grad-mark? Unit-mark?) 172.70.90.129 10:33, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

just look at Hatch mark (which is what these are), first line claims they are also called Tick marks. The existing redirect is incorrect. 108.162.245.70 10:49, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Looks like that page also suffers from arguments about what means what, which I'm not at all inclined to get involved with myself. Hatching, to me is more strictly pen/pencil-line shading across an area, but that's just my understanding and it takes all sorts. (Also, you shaved off the datetime signature of the comment you replied to. Repairing that.) 172.70.86.2 11:45, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Hatching, Hash Marks and Hatch Marks, to me, are what the yanks call a "pound" symbol, and we call a hatch or hash mark. # (our "pound" is £, as it used to be our money before we moved on to Aussie dollars) the hatch mark does, I agree, look like pencil shading across an area. Thisfox (talk) 22:23, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

The pound (#) is a different usage to the pound (£), as it refers to weight, not money, having evolved from a stylised 'lb', from the Latin for 'pound weight'.172.70.90.254 08:19, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Although with UK version of ASCII putting £ where # sat upon the 'international' standard, it remained a long-standing replacement for many years. e.g. had to set the dip-switches just right on my Epson FX-80 printer to get it to print an actual £ from my BBC Microcomputer, instead of #, and other 7-bit electronic communications often just assumed the non-UK codepage or equivalent.

Lasting well into the era where some systems 'changed' "&"s into "&"s then others rendered those as "&" as web-coded text was badly 'reconverted'/treated as literal... some aggregating job-advertising websites ending up suggesting something like "#20k/year & bonus", or similar, for UK web-programmers/whatever, not even anything like "GB£20k/year"!).

Even if we knew that #=="lb" (librum, pl. libra) and once saw it in common use on market-stalls (before/alongside metrification), it was so common to see it representing "£" (originally derived from a 'pound' of silver, so actually not so different, but clearly differentiated in prices such as "two pounds a pound", i.e "£2/- per #") and we quickly learnt that Americans would refer to the hash-key on a keypad phone as the pound-key (usually, perhaps just coincidentally, the key we might suggest to "pound" (...push hard and often) when frustrated with an automated system and trying to get the call-handling system to go through to a 'real' person).

None of this helps anybody (not intending to jump in a time-machine) but as we're talking of these things... 141.101.99.147 10:28, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_mark specifically says that "tick" and "tickmark" for "checkmark" are regionalisms. And from direct experience tickmark is also a Britishism. By all means try to accommodate non-standard English, but be aware some of these are shibboleths and there are many situations where you can't win.162.158.158.14 14:51, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

And of course that page states "… is a mark (✓, ✔, etc.) …", in amongst a lot of very similar descriptions, with seemingly no mention of graphs/charts at all. 172.70.85.146 15:15, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

"User disambiguation pages" also exist. See http:/ /esolangs.org/wiki/User_talk:XKCD_Wrong_Times_Table and http://esolangs.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/XKCD_Wrong_Times_Table_(disambiguation) . 172.69.22.126 02:07, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Those pages are not on Explain xkcd, is this spam? --Kynde (talk) 07:55, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

The first link looks like perhaps unintentional spam. I'm delinking it. In any case, the message is unclear. 162.158.166.175 08:34, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

I think that an important addition to the possible "incident" would be one where a seagull named Meryl Streep caused or was the victim of it. I'll let you work out how to word it. 172.68.19.7 14:52, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

I suppose it could also be some incident between a mononymous Meryl and a streep seagull, whatever that is, but it feels like we're stretching. 172.69.247.43 21:15, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

It could also reference an incident involving some (non-seagull) entity named 'Meryl Streep Seagull'. 172.70.91.171 08:21, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

This is probably a reference to Jimmy Carter rabbit incident which has been previously referenced by xkcd. 172.71.254.161 14:32, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

There is a new article on Unencyclopedia: http://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/Meryl_Streep_Seagull_Incident_(Disambiguation) -- Solav (talk) 16:00, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Someone made a draft page on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Meryl_Streep_Seagull_Incident_(Disambiguation) 172.70.214.168 07:21, 8 June 2023 (UTC)