User:Yiba/sandbox/When you can't balance

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

One example of the cases where there is no way of achieving balance has been discussed on assignment of an article title to one or the other of two articles.

In this case, a German car maker "Porsche AG" made huge investments into other car makers, and changed its nature to a holding company. en.wikipedia had an article titled 'Porsche' describing the company. When the company changed its name to "Porsche SE", and spun off its car-making operation to form a new "Porsche AG" subsidiary, it was deemed prudent to split the Porsche article into two articles describing the parent and the subsidiary.

While many en.wikipedia editors felt the article on subsidiary should inherit the 'Porsche' title because the cars and its maker are the primary use of the word "Porsche" for them. However, it was argued there exist a not insignificant number of potential en.wikipedia readers in the range of 8 to 100 million who may not know about Porsche cars, where WP:PRIMARYTOPIC describes "topic sought when a reader searches for the term". As only the parent had its shares traded on public exchanges with much larger consolidated economic activity than the subsidiary, and as the parent had retained the Porsche brand operation for sunglasses, bags, etc., the stand point of WikiProjects Companies and Brands would favor the parent, and WikiProject Automobiles would favor the subsidiary to have the 'Porsche' article title. Both views seemed to have valid WP:COMMONNAME and WP:PRIMARYTOPIC arguments for the title.

The solution agreed on this case was to give the 'Porsche' title to the disambiguation page, which used to be "Porsche (disambiguation)".

This example illustrates "not giving the benefit (of being easier found in a search) to either of the two points of view" may be a solution in cases where balancing or weighting of two or more points of view is not an option.