Talk:Concerned

Article title

I'm bringing this topic back here, because I don't think we should impose on Wikiproject Comics anymore; they graciously helped out with the interpretation of their disambiguation guidelines, and the discussion has now gotten back to specifics of this article.

As I understand it, diego_pmc is suggesting that since Concerned is now a redirect to Concerned (comics), there is no reason for a disambiguation phrase, so the article itself should go back to Concerned. I'm not sure I understand that — I don't see a connection between where Concerned redirects to, and whether or not it would be a confusing title for the article.

Pending some clarification of diego's position that brings to light a factor I hadn't thought of (always a possibility, obviously), I'm opposed to renaming the article to remove the disambiguating "(comics)", because I believe links from other articles to Concerned would be intrinsically confusing. That is, I think it is preferable that other articles have links that look like this, [[Concerned (comics)]], rather than like this, [[Concerned]]. I could go on about my position on this, but before I get into details of my position that might be entirely beside the point at hand, I'd like to understand diego's position better. Pi zero (talk) 19:10, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Concerned redirects here now, right? And you put that note on top of the article, so that it would point to Concern, in case someone as looking for something else. Since Concerned redirects here, and that note is placed on top of the article, why should we keep the disambig phrase?

Here's an example. that article red has a note that points out to Red (disambiguation), in case someone is looking for something else. Is there a reason why Red should be called Red (color), since it has that note? It wouldn't help clarifying the subject anymore than if the note was there. diego_pmc (talk) 19:27, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

My preference is that this should be at Concerned with a hatnote to Concern.

If it was felt that Concerned should redirect to Concern (and there is no good reason I can think of for it) then yes keep this at "Concerned (comics)". However, if Concerned redirects here there is no reason things couldn't be simplified by having this there. (Emperor (talk) 19:56, 22 August 2008 (UTC))

I'll try to clarify my position.

• The particular example of "Red" seems to me to be a nearly opposite situation from what we have here, in that if someone saw a link [[Red]], or entered "Red" directly, they would expect to be sent to an article about the color. Even a disambiguation page under "Red", from which they could be taken to "Red (color)" would seem a bit odd, since the color is the main sense. (I'm apparently not the only one who thinks so, since "Red" is not a disambiguation page.) If "Red" took them to an article on another topic, with a hatnote to a disambiguation page from which they could get to "Red (color)", that would seem very strange.
• Here, though, if you found a link [[Concerned]], I think it would look strange and a bit perplexing. Sometimes people turn ordinary words into Wikilinks (whether as vandalism or simply though a misunderstanding or miscalculation of standard procedure), and [[Concerned]] looks, on the face of it, like that sort of inappropriate link. Perhaps they'll do a double-take, and decide to test the link to see if it's really as silly as it looks, and they'll find that the article really is about the webcomic (that they'd probably deduced, from the context of the link, was the subject that the link ought to go to, if anything — only I certainly would at least check an odd-looking link like that if I found one, and probably some people would just summarily delink it). My point is, there's no need to choose an article name that's going to cause all that double-taking and the rest, when simply calling the article "Concerned (comics)" in the first place is still very short indeed and will cause not so much as an extra blink, let alone a double-take, when people see [[Concerned (comics)]].
• Note that when people enter "Concerned" in the Wikipedia search box, that's a different case. Wikilinks from other articles use the name of the article rather than a redirect, but it's expected that if you enter some plausible variant of the article name, Wikipedia will take you to the right place, or at least to somewhere from which you can get there. So if you really are looking for "Concerned (comics)", you might enter "Concerned", hoping that'll take you there without all those extra keystrokes (and extra chances for a typo) and figuring that if it doesn't, you'll be able to get where you actually want to be by clicking on links from where it takes you. Pi zero (talk) 20:19, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

I'll keep it short, as it is late over here.

1. Red was just an example to clarify what i emant, not that it was the exact same situation.
2. As Concerned redirects here, this argument isn't all too valid, since whether the article is called Concerned, or Concerned (comics), they would still end up viewing this article.
3. That would be just as valid if it was named simply Concerned.

:-) diego_pmc (talk) 21:32, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

As long-winded as this post is going to be, it's actually only parts of what I wanted say. I'll probably mess things up dreadfully by saying too little about too many things.

• 1. I appreciate that "Red" was only an example to clarify what you meant. My own comments were intended similarly.
• 3. On the result of entering "Concerned" in the Wikipedia search box, the point I was trying to make was that that is a separate case, independent of my current concern about the article name. We are in agreement that the result of entering "Concerned" in the search box has no bearing (for now, anyway) on which of these two names the article should have.
• 2. There are two different kinds of confusion that one might choose to talk about here, and I think you may have been talking about one while I have been talking about the other.
  • Confusion could result from "Concerned" not taking the reader where they thought it would. I'm not worried about that. If they enter it in the search box, as I said before, what happens under either article title is reasonable; and if they follow a link from another page, either they get what they expected to get, or that link should be changed.
  • Confusion could result from the fact that a link on another page is called "Concerned". This isn't about what happens when someone clicks on the link. This is about what happens when an editor sees the link. In the earlier post, I tried to describe in detail some of the problems with links [[Concerned]]; its possible I could do that better, but in the interests of space I won't try. The essential point is that a suspicious-looking article name in a link can create cognitive dissonance, and more work, for editors who pass by, and we can save them from all that simply by keeping the dab phrase in the article name.
• There is actually another, very different way of describing my position, one that looks more at the big picture, rather than at specifics of what editors do when they see a link. (This may make more sense to you, or sound like gibberish; this sort of reasoning appeals strongly to some people but not to others, I realize.) It's just this. A provision of WP:DAB says that if there's a primary topic for a term, much more used than any other, the unadorned term should be the name of that article, with a hatnote to a separate dab page. The difficulty here is that there is a primary, well, meaning for "concerned", but it will never have an article, nor even a dab page because "Concern" is already a dab page. At the moment (until something else comes along that's also called "Concerned"), it seems quite reasonable to have "Concerned" redirect to "Concerned (comics)", because there doesn't seem to be any very likely reason the user would enter "Concerned" unless they wanted the comic — but actually putting the comics article under the name "Concerned" would be violating the principle that the unadorned title shouldn't be assigned to something other than the primary meaning. This is why I said the "Red" example was opposite to "Concerned": with "Red" the question is whether to put the primary topic under the unadorned name, whereas with "Concerned" the question is whether to put something other than the primary meaning under the unadorned name. My earlier point about what an editor thinks on encountering [[Concerned]] is a sort of concrete realization of this conceptual problem with assigning the dab-less name to the comics article.

:-) Pi zero (talk) 04:03, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

About your last point: well, of course, but at this very moment there is no article that would require the name "concerned", and as such there is no conflict. In case such a conflict should arise, we will simply sort it out through dabs, however until then the dab on this article's title is of no use whatsoever, it only produces a longer title, which can't be a good thing, per reasons stated in the last discussion on this. diego_pmc (talk) 10:05, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

That wasn't what I was (no doubt inarticulately) saying. I agree, and said above, that there is no article for the primary meaning of "concerned", and there never will be anything like one; the closest thing there could be to it would be a dab page, and I don't think there ever will be a dab page called "concerned" because even if, sometime in the future, there were multiple content articles associated with "concerned", "concerned" would simply redirect to the dab page at "concern". My big-picture point was that it is undesirable to have a content article whose name is a single word that is also a common word in the language; a dab phrase should be used. One could say that that is both of the points I've been trying to express: the last point of the above post says it from the high-level perspective, while the reiterated point from the earlier post describes specific mechanical consequences of an editor looking at a link whose name is a common word of the language, but they're just two ways of looking at the same problem — looking down on the problem from above, or looking up at it from below.

As for whether a longer title can't be a good thing: I suppose you mean simply that there is always some price to pay for increasing the length by adding a dab-phrase. Under generic circumstances, that seems a very solid proposition — that of course, there must be some price to pay, and the question is whether the benefit outweighs that price. For example, if you've got an article called "Deranged cow", there is clearly a price to pay for lengthening the name to "Deranged cow (comics)", so that you wouldn't add the dab-phrase unless the context of related articles created a positive net benefit to doing so. However, if you have an article whose name is sufficiently common in the language, it may be intrinsically awkward to use the dab-less name, in which case the "price" and "benefit" become hard to separate from each other. That is, you no longer have to refer to the context of related articles in order to find benefit to using the dab-phrase. This effect seems to me to be very strong if the dab-less name would be a common word in the language. (A much-diluted form of this blurring could occur even with very common two-word phrases, though the blurred-together net benefit would probably favor the dab-less version. Imagine naming an article on a comic book called Fruit juice.)

• I would be very interested to see what has been done in other cases of naming an article whose dab-less name would be a common word in the language that wouldn't otherwise have an article at all (not even a redirect — I'm guessing there was no article "concerned" before the article on the webcomic was created). Presumably there are other cases of this improbable combination of factors, because Wikipedia is... well, huge scarcely even seems adequate. It's rather big, anyway. Of course, the other examples may be more very-low-quality articles that oughtn't be imitated, but we can't judge that until we find them, and I'm not sure how to find them. There aren't any examples under Category:Comic book titles, but that's just a drop in the bucket. What makes the case of "concerned" really odd, it seems to me, is the fact that it's a commonplace inflection of a more basic word; so the fact that the basic word, "concern", does have a dab page doesn't really help. Pi zero (talk) 13:44, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

An example of such an article would be Risen. For the note, this Risen is made by me, but before this, there was another Risen, which used no dab phrase initially, but which I moved, as the game seemed to be more prominent than the album.

About "concerned" being a common word, you're absolutely right, however, this article was named initially Concerned, and in two years there's been no such mistake with someone placing a link to this article, when they meant something else. It is highly unlikely that something, somehow will suddenly change that now and erroneous links to Concerned will start rising all of the sudden. diego_pmc (talk) 17:45, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

I have a couple of very minor comments, and one big comment.

• "Risen" — I like this example. Perfection cannot be asked for, but it fits the situation here pretty closely.
• I actually didn't mean to suggest that the link name "concerned" would result in mistaken links to this article; I really wouldn't have expected it to. I was suggesting that it would push editors to do extra work to check such links because the link name would look odd. However,

My main comment. The following passage appears in WP:NAME, and seems to bear directly on my concern about confusion by editors:

The names of Wikipedia articles should be optimized for readers over editors, and for a general audience over specialists.

Since I stand by my agreement that entering "Concerned" in the search box goes to this article, it follows logically that the simpler article name should be preferred, "Concerned".

• I think this means we've reached consensus. Pi zero (talk) 20:01, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, this ended nicely. Now we need to ask an admin to move the page. diego_pmc (talk) 20:19, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

I think the way it's done is to ask an administrator to delete the existing redirect page that's in the way — I got that from WP:MOVE, here. Pi zero (talk) 22:06, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

(Sorry, I've never had occasion to do this before.) I'm adding a {{db-move}} tag to the redirect page. Pi zero (talk) 03:57, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Thoughts on the FAC

Here's my take on what might be done to improve this article further, based on my interpretation of weaknesses suggested by the FAC. If not preempted or otherwise dissuaded I imagine I'll probably get to all of these sometime in the next few weeks (unless it's days or months). The third of these is pretty straightforward, but the other two really aren't.

• The prose of the article as a whole should be polished further. FA criterion 1(a) is that "its prose is engaging, even brilliant, and of a professional standard". The professional standard part seems to be providing cover for mundane things like ungrammatical or unencyclopedic content, and I don't think that's an awful lot of a problem for this article by now. Engaging, though, is subtle and will take some deep thought. Ideally, a reader who knows nothing about the subject will find the article an interesting and enjoyable read right from the start (the start being all they'd ever see if it didn't grab them there), and may quite possibly keep reading all the way through to the end.

• The plot summary, in particular, should probably be overhauled, to make it more... engaging. It's now a long sequence of events open to criticism as rather meaningless to someone who hasn't either played the game or read the comic. One might rewrite it based on a different strategy of presentation; simply cutting it down might work, but would probably require taking out anywhere from a quarter to a half of what's there, and the prioritizing involved would amount to rewriting anyway. Possibly, the way to go about this could be to ask what about the plot one wants the reader to take away other than a sequence of events. More deep thought.

• There is a specific problem with primary sources appearing too prominent in the discussion of themes. Whether it's only an appearance doesn't change the need to address it in the article. My guess at what's going on here is that Livingston included discussion about the comic with each strip, and citations of these meta-discussions look just like citations of the strips — which makes them look like original analysis. If I'm reading that right, a solution that might redress the objections is to somehow change the forms of the citations of these meta-discussions so that it's obvious when reading the citation that it's citing a statement by Livingston about the strip, not citing the strip itself. Maybe something like title "Commentary on Issue #053" instead of just "Issue #053"? (Or maybe something other than "Commentary on" would be better?)

Pi zero (talk) 19:45, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

The only one I am able to address, and which I did was the 3rd one. I said "Notes on", just like in the other cases. About the prose, I feel kinda embarrassed, but ATM this is my level of English. I'll ask User:Tony1—I noticed he has extremely good English skills, which are rare even among natives. Maybe he'll be able to take some of his time to help us with Concerned. Diego_pmc ^Talk 19:57, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Half-Life 2: Episode 2 reference/cameo/appearance/thing

I remember HL2:EP2 contained a reference to the Concerned Comic (warning, humor-spoiler: I think it was the section with the mechanics talking about escaping the dystopian job or whatever, someone was named Frohman and showed Freeman to the... something)...

Anyway, I'd add it myself, but I obviously don't remember it. And, if added, would it simply be put in a trivia section? How would it be worded? "Valve showed their appreciation for the Concerned comic by including an allusion to Concerned by naming a character".... or "Frohman makes a cameo appearance" or... well, what?

DEMONIIIK (talk) 02:28, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Unless there's some reliable source that talks about that, it should't be included in the article. Also, as you've said, it's pretty much just trivia. Diego_pmc ^Talk 09:14, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

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Tone?

@Rickraptor707: Could you be more specific about the tone issues this article is suffering from? I don't really see the problem, but I'd like to see if I can fix it. ~Mable (chat) 08:12, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, for starters, this paragraph reads more like a publicity blurb on the back cover of a book or movie than an encyclopedic explanation of the comic.

"While Half-Life 2 takes the player through a dystopian future as protagonist Gordon Freeman, Concerned follows a similar path through the eyes of Gordon Frohman, a hapless, lethally clumsy oaf who arrives in the setting of the game a few weeks before Freeman. The comic's dark humor is derived from its contrasts with the game, and through references to the game's shortcomings. On several occasions in the comic, Frohman becomes the cause of various disastrous circumstances that Freeman will later encounter."

Rickraptor707 (talk) 09:14, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

I suppose the main issue there was the "colorful" description of Frohman ("a hapless, lethally clumsy oaf") and the somewhat emotional phrase "... takes the player through ...". I hope this is better? ~Mable (chat) 09:59, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

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Requested move 9 May 2022

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 for now. @BD2412: has suggested that an article on "concern" could be written, and he is the absolute king of creating articles on such topics, so it's highly likely that consensus will change once there is an actual primary topic to compare it to. In the meantime... (non-admin closure) Red Slash 19:25, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

---

Concerned → Concerned: The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman – "Concerned" is an ambiguous title - the primary topic is Concern. Per WP:NATDAB, using "an alternative name that the subject is also commonly called" (a natural disambiguation) is preferred over a more correct but ambiguous title. casualdejekyll 19:02, 9 May 2022 (UTC) — Relisting. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 17:33, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

OK, I admit that a disambiguation page cannot be a primary topic, but, well, yeah. There's probably a better phrasing for what I mean. casualdejekyll 19:06, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

Alternatively, I would also support a move to Concerned (webcomic) casualdejekyll 19:12, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose WP:NOTDICTIONARY. Concern just goes to a disambiguation page. There is no other article on Wikipedia called "Concerned". ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 20:24, 9 May 2022 (UTC)
• Support, per nom. Esolo5002 (talk) 21:52, 9 May 2022 (UTC)
• Support per my arguments at the afd. An emotion is a much more likely search expectation for readers than a barely notable webcomic. Not to mention it is easily the more encyclopaedic topic. I would redirect Concerned to concern which would further redirect to Worry as synonyms and leave a hatnote there pointing to the DAB page. Aircorn (talk) 23:28, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

  If Concern is not a primary redirect to Worry, then Concerned is a valid place for an article. In other words, the move discussion of Concern to Concern (disambiguation) needs to be held before, or at the same time as this one for that to at all be valid. However, I believe that a discussion like that will fail, primarily due to Concern (business). ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 08:53, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose – I have to agree with zxcvbnm, there simply isn't another encyclopedic topic this title should link to. The only item listed in concern that a user might want to find instead is worry. The other items on that disambiguation page are all purely nouns. ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 09:19, 10 May 2022 (UTC)
• Support per nom. The long title is actually the more recognizable title. 182.1.86.152 (talk) 00:44, 14 May 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose. An adjective to a dab page to a not-quite-synonym is always a stretch, especially when we have an actual encyclopedic topic for that term. Additionally, it does not look like there are any misplaced wikilinks, so editors and readers are not confused by the current setup. Dohn joe (talk) 14:06, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
• Support move to Concerned (webcomic). Wikipedia is missing an article on the topic of "concern" as an emotional state, which may be something distinct from "worry". BD2412 T 02:51, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

  I would support moving it too if there was such an article and it was notable, but this is putting the cart before the horse. If and when the Concern (emotion) article is created and approved, we can have a new move discussion. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 11:58, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

• Weak support per WP:SUBTITLE though I agree creating an article on the general concept first may be desirable. Crouch, Swale (talk) 06:32, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
• Weak oppose, the "official" name of the webcomic is Concerned per seen here in the web page title, though it would be neat if a new article on "Concerned" mood was created and this was renamed to "Concerned (webcomic)". Merko (talk) 01:19, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

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.