Talk:Mario/Archive 8

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: not moved. Having the arguments put forth and the criteria to determine the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC of this name, it very much is the Nintendo character. While it is a very common name to the point that the character was given said name because of its commonality, the character itself has now become the subject associated with it, and not any other historical figure, current celebrity, or other fictional character sharing the name. This fulfills the first criteria of it being the most common usage when referring to the name "Mario", most people are talking about the Nintendo character. As for long-term significance criteria, this one is less obvious than the first criteria, but this character has existed for over 40 years and have overshadowed any other subject that shares the name, besides the character's franchise, which is, again, named after the character and not vice-versa. (non-admin closure) Turtletennisfogwheat (talk) 04:17, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

• Mario → Mario (character)Mario (character)
• Mario (name) → Mario

– Per the recent move from Luigi to Luigi (character), I am now suggesting the same be done to Mario. As with Luigi, in spite of easily being the most well-known Mario, the name is very common in real life (in fact the character Mario was named after a real person), to the point that the real life given name should take precedence. Specific disambiguation of (character), (Nintendo), etc. could be done later, but at the moment we should make Mario's page name consistent with Luigi's. Unnamed anon (talk) 20:23, 1 July 2025 (UTC) — Relisting. CoconutOctopus talk 13:05, 9 July 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose - the character is the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. Sergecross73 msg me 20:34, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

  This is just an assertion, not a clear reason, cf. WP:CONS. (I happened to notice you've posted a similar !vote in the Luigi discussion, so this needs to be said.) --Joy (talk) 09:49, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

  Yes, and a lot of the "support" stances boil down to vague assertions of "There's a lot of other Mario's out there you know". It's often the nature of these sorts of discussions. As I mentioned below, this is the only Mario that's one of the largest global franchises in existence. That's enough to be a valid stance. And there's nothing wrong with keeping it short. We don't all need to WP:BLUDGEON every dissenting comment like you appear to be intent on doing. Ironically, you could be one of the biggest reasons this defaults to no consensus, with the way you're bogging things down. Sergecross73 msg me 13:53, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose: Per Sergecross' reply. If someone searches for the "Mario" article, it's probably more likely that people are looking for the character than the general name. Luigi could be seen as an exception due to recent events regarding a real person also named Luigi. Signed, SleepyRedHair. (talk - contribs) 20:55, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

  We don't actually know that it's probably more likely, we're mostly just guessing. If we at least moved to a clear list format, this contention would become more easily measurable. --Joy (talk) 09:51, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose, and frankly I'm shocked Luigi moved. I wish I'd seen that RfC when it was running, I would've opposed. As for a rationale: for single names, we shouldn't consider every person that has that name, but rather figures known mononymously by that name. This includes common names (see Britney, Adele). That's because nobody that wants a person with that name would search for just the first name, everybody would include the last name. For example, Mario Lemieux is one of the greatest hockey players ever, but everyone looking for him would include "Lemieux" in the search, so he's not a primary topic contender. So the only people relevant here are people known just as Mario. As far as I know, that's just this character and the singer, and the character dwarfs the singer in importance. This is reflected by pageview statistics, which show that 391 of the 58,600 people that came here in May ended up at Mario (name), which is a whopping 0.7%. That's miniscule and far more people would be disadvantaged by having this page moved. Ladtrack (talk) 01:57, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

  The apparent focus on mononymous use only in navigation is not based on measurable data. We've had several examples of names where readers showed us with their behavior that they are interested in navigating to naturally disambiguated topics, not just mononymous ones.

  The most stark one has been the one at Tito where we were able to measure both before and after a move and we know for a fact that even in the presence of a primary topic by editor consensus there's a large subset of viewers who still look for the non-mononymous usage. With a name even more popular than that (see for example Google Books Ngrams comparison of mentions of Mario, Luigi and Tito), I would expect this effect to be even more pronounced, certainly not less.

  I've spent many months over the last few years trying to measure if there is any reliable correlation in the percentages of hatnote views, documented in WT:D archives 56, 57 (several threads), but there was none. The page view statistics that you quote are most probably biased by the fact that most of our navigation is handled by external sources.

  For example, at WikiNav for Mario we can see that ~40% of the incoming traffic is identifiable to search engines, ~28% is not identifiable (but still possibly searches from browsers set to more private settings), and another minority scattered probably largely from current internal links to Mario which have been allowed to assume the character is meant. The search engines naturally side-step our navigation, by taking every context hint they might have about the reader in order to send them to what they meant, rather than letting us handle the ambiguity. So we just can't make these sorts of conclusions based on that.

  Prior experience from name discussions like at Talk:Orlando or Talk:Charlotte indicates we should not assume any sort of disadvantage from a move to a disambiguation page, so I think that's a reasonable compromise. --Joy (talk) 10:04, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

  I don't agree with your conclusion that the Tito move was a mistake. The two years prior to the move, Tito averaged just below 2,500 views, while the two subsequent years, Tito_(disambiguation) averaged only about 750 views. That means over 75% of people were successfully serviced by this move, and this is without factoring in that some of the remaining 25% of people may have ended up at one of the other Titos and then clicked the hatnote because they were looking for Josip Bronz (42 of 62 people who clicked out of Tito (disambiguation) in May did this). I think this is a high enough percentage that it suggests the page move was correct.

  As an aside, I appreciate you giving additional numbers for people clicking out of Mario. I missed the other links you gave. By my count, this puts the number up to 1%, from the inaccurate 0.7% mentioned previously. If you don't mind, where do you get data for every entry? Do you just dig through the clickstream, or is there a way to access an expanded version of WikiNav? Ladtrack (talk) 04:12, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

  The key point isn't whether that RM was a mistake, it's that it does not matter whether it was, because we could still measure similar levels of interest for other Titos before and after the move. That's the catch.

  The absolute number of the level of traffic at the base title can't matter, because we simply don't control most of it. Google Search can make a change in their algorithm and send us 25,000 views there, 2,500 views, or no views. The 75% change you're seeing there is a change in those outside circumstances, not in the actual level of ambiguity of that word.

  I'll post a bit more about this at Talk:Tito (disambiguation) to avoid too much of this tangent here. --Joy (talk) 08:21, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

• Support this is a common name with hundreds of extremely notable people with it and hundreds of years of history. Having it be targeted towards a recent fictional character is honestly absurd and our Anglophone bias at its worst. Pageviews aren't helpful here because of what we tend to search but historical significance is obviously at the name as the primary topic. PARAKANYAA (talk) 03:29, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

How is it an Anglophone bias when the characters were created by a Japanese company? Also this is English Wikipedia. cookie monster 755 13:00, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

I don't know about all of that. He's a Japanese-created fictional character of a pretty global franchise, so that all feels like a bit of stretch... Sergecross73 msg me 13:07, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

It's Anglophone bias because this is a very common name, but less so in the English speaking parts of the world. Anglophone exposure to the name comes primarily from fiction. But it is a very very common name with its own history and usage, it doesn't matter that the character is from a Japanese company because the name is not Japanese. We wouldn't usurp a basic name for a fictional character if that name was common in America or the UK. PARAKANYAA (talk) 23:24, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

I'd totally get what you're saying if it was just a "big in Murica" thing, but again, it's like one of the biggest global franchises in entertainment. If it was "Mario the Hedgehog" or "Mario the Cat" there would be no confusion or conflation of issues here. This is more like Garfield if anything. Sergecross73 msg me 02:14, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

I don't think the Mario franchise had quite the same reach as the Garfield one had, because the latter was on mainstream TV much more in its heyday.

Likewise, all-time mass views for people named Garfield is quite a bit shorter and with a quite bit less reader volume than with Mario (linked below). --Joy (talk) 10:44, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

I don't think the Mario franchise had quite the same reach as the Garfield one had, because the latter was on mainstream TV much more in its heyday. If this was ever true, it certainly is not now. Mario is the best-selling video game franchise of all time, and the franchise has made over $8 billion, including a billion-dollar film. Garfield was popular back in the day, but it was never this popular.

Likewise, all-time mass views for people named Garfield is quite a bit shorter and with a quite bit less reader volume than with Mario The key difference here is that unlike with Mario, there is a very historically important person sometimes known mononymously as Garfield. So, in a way, James has a stronger claim to just "Garfield" than any of the people named Mario do to "Mario". Ladtrack (talk) 14:25, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

I think the issue with that comparison is the assessment of what is mainstream. Huge chunks of reader population just don't have a lot of interest in video games. In the heyday of television, everyone was well aware of it, so the potential scope of popularity was much larger. I had a look at that table, and scrolled up above Mario, and immediately saw items that I thought are way more popular than the character, and items that I barely ever heard about. I wouldn't assume that that list is necessarily representative of much.

I don't mean to imply that the 19th-century American president isn't significant from the perspective of the encyclopedia, it's just that there's relatively few others that are in any way comparable (mainly the modern-day actor Andrew). Also, a typical reader from outside the US might not recognize James Garfield's name at all, just like a typical reader from outside of Europe might not recognize Mario Draghi's name at all. A typical reader might be aware of the Mario character, but at the same time they may well know a few people named like that, because there's relatively many that are in some way comparable. --Joy (talk) 15:40, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

I don’t mean to sound condescending, but this view is probably due to your relative lack of familiarity with this subject rather than the lack of the character’s fame. There is a reason people are talking about how iconic the character is up and down this RfC. Mario isn’t just any video game character. He has the same importance to Nintendo and video games as a whole as Mickey Mouse does to Disney and animation as a whole. (Incidentally, he’s also better known than Mickey Mouse.) This character is literally the mascot of the entire industry. He’s in the same league in terms of significance as Superman, Snoopy, and Sherlock Holmes. There are probably hundreds of millions of people that are vaguely aware of Superman but couldn’t tell you why he’s important, but that doesn’t make Superman less significant of a cultural figure, does it? Mario is the same way, except this time, you’re one of those hundreds of millions of people. Just to give you a fraction of an idea, when introducing Japan as the next host at the ending ceremony of the 2016 Olympics, the Prime Minister of Japan dressed up in a Mario hat and popped out of a green pipe. An estimated 5 billion people watched that Olympics, and there was virtually no confusion on who it was supposed to be or what it represented. I truly promise you, this character is more iconic than Garfield was. If you believe that there is no fictional character that could warrant this name without disambiguation, then that's fine, but if there ever was one, it would be this character. Ladtrack (talk) 02:50, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

So the director of Nintendo has touted a single survey of American children in 1995 that reflects well on his company's product - surely that just sounds like business as usual? The average English encyclopedia reader in 2025 is neither necessarily an American child, nor should we assume that all of the American children who grew up around this time now operate identically to that sample back then, or that they're somehow unaware that the name Mario is associated with topics other than the Nintendo character. Likewise for the fun stunt by the Japanese politician - of course they're going to promote Japanese products, and that is fine, but it doesn't negate the fact that this name is just not as strongly identified with only or mainly these products in general.

I don't think the comparisons to Superman, Snoopy and Sherlock Holmes are relevant here with regard to navigation, because these names are comparably far more unique - there isn't such a huge breadth of other topics with the same names. The closest we come are the names Sherlock and Holmes, and neither of those redirect to Sherlock Holmes, either. Clickstreams there show that the Sherlock readership is mainly split between two topics from that franchise (the TV series and then the character article), while Holmes readership is mainly split between the two name lists, while the character article is only third.

On that note, another detail about Garfield might be worth mentioning - the Garfield article currently describes the comic strip, while Garfield (character) describes the character in particular. We also have several hints in the Mario statistics that readers might be looking for other elements of the franchise, like the volume of clicks to the various movies from the disambiguation page. This might be another reason to question whether the character article should be the default point of navigation for Mario, in addition to the matter of biographies. --Joy (talk) 11:49, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

Obviously, this isn't a 1-to-1 comparison; it is much easier to disambiguate those other topics than this one. The franchise vs character stuff is a little more complicated: we have cases where the character rather than the central work is regarded as the base topic, such as Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan and Mickey Mouse and Hercule Poirot and a whole bunch of comic book characters, and I always assumed this was one of those. But, more to the point, let's say that Mickey Mouse had just so happened to be named Mario instead of Mickey Mouse (keeping all the attached fame and name recognition and historical significance), and thus was a contender for this title. Would there then be a stronger case to keep a character at the basename, or would you still feel like he disambiguation page is undoubtedly the way to go? Ladtrack (talk) 05:33, 5 July 2025 (UTC)

I see what you're saying and I would assume a stronger case because of the comparative age and comparatively more mainstream status of Disney. At the same time, it would have to be measured and weighed and contemplated, just like we're doing here.

On that note, we currently know that general interest in these two topics has typically been in favor of Mickey by about a factor of 2, while more recently they got closer (although the time period when this happens largely matches the ChatGPT era so it's harder to pinpoint).

In Google Books Ngrams, we can also look at words that appear next to the search words, so we can query both Mickey * and Mario * to try to see if these are most often mononymous references, to the presumed primary topic, or not. In this graph, I seem to see a lot of ambiguity, and no obvious hints that the Nintendo character is commonly referenced, but we can go a few steps further and compare a bit more like this. That graph is interesting because it shows a large number of these possessive references to Mario back in the 19th century and in the 1950s. The overall growth since the 1980s happens for both names. The phrase "Mickey and Minnie" is much more prominent compared to the phrase "Mario and Luigi". If we go a bit deeper still, we can notice that over time, there's been many seemingly mononymous references to Marios, such as paired with Grisi or Lablache, and more recently Mario and the Magician.

None of this is determinative, but the sum of it makes me think that the average reader has encountered this name in so many various contexts that they probably don't think that it unambiguously refers by default to Mario the character or Mario the franchise. --Joy (talk) 08:04, 5 July 2025 (UTC)

I'm not sure how you intend me to interpret the first Ngram: obviously there are a lot of cases of people named Mario showing up in books, and most of those will not be the video game character, but rather random results from either authors named Mario or about people named Mario. I would expect that, and wouldn't argue otherwise. This data doesn't seem particularly useful to me.

The second one is more interesting. Usage of "Mario's" quadruples between 1985 and 2022, with relatively low numbers and little change between 1900 and 1985, and unless something that rose in popularity at the same time is dramatically skewing the results, my intuition is that this is the Nintendo character we're looking at. "Mickey's" spiked dramatically around 2013 before dropping considerably (I can't say exactly why, but there was a TV series that premiered in 2013), but as of 2022, "Mickey's" was just over 20% higher than "Mario's". I don't think the "and" results indicate too much, since they're minuscule in comparison and have a lot of false positives like Mickey and Mallory or Mario and Floria.

Meanwhile, in the last five years, we can compare views of the two Wikipedia pages. Full disclosure, I am excluding the first few days of January 2024, which is when Mickey Mouse entered the public domain (a one-time, unrepeatable occurrence that obviously isn't the norm but massively spiked the average). Excluding January 1-4, Mickey Mouse has almost 6.9 million pageviews, compared to 5.46 million pageviews for Mario. That is, again, just over 20% higher.

I also decided to check Google Trends, just to get another angle. While it is infuriatingly difficult to navigate and find solid numbers for, here are the graphs for Mickey Mouse vs Super Mario (just Mario as a search term brings in everything called Mario, not just relevant searches) for the past five years. Again, full disclosure, I have excluded results for most of the duration of the Mario movie's release period because it massively sways results in favor of Mario and I would again consider this an outlier. Graph for 2020-2023, and 2023-2025. These skew towards Mario, particularly the second graph, but even the first one by about 10%.

Put together, these seem to indicate that these two topics are of comparable significance. Mickey Mouse is probably a tad higher (this was a little unexpected to me, so I suppose I learned something through this exercise as well), but not substantially more so. Ladtrack (talk) 05:51, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

I think it's useful enough to show us a general ambiguity over time. It's not absence of data, but rather a big amorphous spread. If a topic becomes prominent in that big a mass, fair enough, it can be primary, but the threshold for that is a bit high.

With regard to "Mario's" in the most recent decades of books, we can actually look up the words that appear around that, like this. The words that were most popular after Mario's were face, eyes, voice, father, etc. These seem very generic to me, so we can't really know which Mario they refer to. The odd ones were Mario's Villa, Mario's Restaurant, Signor Mario's, which are all unrelated as the time periods don't match.

With Mickeys, it's similar, except that the more specific items are Mickey's Toontown, Mickey's PhilharMagic, Mickey's Christmas Carol, so it's much more obvious that the most common Mickey is the mouse - all in roughly this same time period since the '80s.

Now, obviously book searches for a longer historical period will be inherently more favorable towards older works. But we I still think we need to be seeing at least a modicum of better hints that a new prominent mention of this Mario character/franchise has arisen since the '80s.

If you progresively add Super Mario's, Super Mario, Mario to the above Ngrams search, to end up here, it looks like the franchise/character is noticable, but nowhere near the overall numbers. The growth in mentions of Mario since the 1950s-1970s baseline clearly exists, but it is less than double. So even if all that growth was character/franchise, and we're just completely missing it, the mentions of character/franchise haven't necessarily become a majority. The old baseline of Marios would have to had noticably dropped off for that to have happened. And that in turn seems exceedingly unlikely with what we know about all the various recent other popular Marios.

I agree with you about Google Search Trends in general, but I also think that we can at least try to compare apples with apples by looking at the trend of the overall graph between those searches, and the visually matching trend of the overall graph between Google-identified topics. Because these trends and spikes generally match, it does seem exceedingly likely that the typical trending Mario search has referred to the character/franchise.

I think the main takeaway there is that there was a genuinely huge amount of interest around 2011 in the Mario character/franchise. The previous discussions we had were around that time, and it's probably fine to have had navigation short-circuited to the character/franchise during this time.

At the same time, another clear takeaway is that this swell of interest has clearly dissipated. Now we can also observe the 2023 spike in interest, presumably because of the movie, which was large, but nowhere near as large or as lengthy.

That's why I'd feel much more comfortable presenting the readers a reasonably simple choice - do you want to read about the character, the entire franchise, possibly also the latest movie or whatever other thing becomes popular next year, or about the various popular people.

If we can do it for the likes of Mickey and Sherlock Holmes, it can also be done for Mario. BTW Mickey doesn't redirect to that Mickey, and doesn't even have it in the hatnote - I'll go fix that now. --Joy (talk) 09:19, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

BTW, Poirot is interesting here as it's a primary redirect to the character. This seems warranted, as it's far more read about than anything on the disambiguation list or on the surname list, with only the ITV series coming anywhere close. Hercule is disambiguated, and WikiNav there doesn't show people going for Poirot much.

Tarzan mass views and clickstreams are generally about the character's topic area, too. The nickname sounds like the story of "Super Mario", except here only the British lord is possibly relevant. Still, the reader interest in the top three articles, about the character, is 10 : 1 compared to the interest in that biography, and there's a a scarcity of interest in the nickname list. --Joy (talk) 11:32, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

In the heyday of television, everyone was well aware of it, so the potential scope of popularity was much larger. Can I consider this as WP:OR? Coz you can't even prove this, but meanwhile you also said Huge chunks of reader population just don't have a lot of interest in video games., right? Why people would more interest on television media in older days, if they don't interest on computer entertainment era now? Awdqmb (talk) 05:58, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

I don't think it's hard to prove that broadcast media is generally more mainstream and popular among the average readers compared to video games. Our readership stats indicate that the Marios that people most commonly read about have been sportspeople and TV personalities - something people largely learn about through broadcast media, not often through video games. Even within the franchise, the 2023 movie is the latest big topic of interest. --Joy (talk) 10:51, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

Then prove it anyway. At least in your Garfield example, I can't see the "obvious result" of "everyone was well aware of it". I will insist this again here: Why people would more interest on television media (especially a cartoon series) in older days, if they don't interest on video games in such a computer entertainment era now? Or I can also argue like: "Huge chunks of reader population just don't have a lot of interest in TV cartoons". Awdqmb (talk) 12:36, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

I just told you two glaring indicators. What further proof are you after? In general, the Garfield issue is a bit of a tangent, because the argument to move Mario doesn't rest on a strict comparison to it specifically. Indeed, it's less relevant, as there are few other Garfields to compete for primary topic, unlike with Mario. (And elsewhere in this discussion we also had many other comparisons with other global franchises and how the primary topic guidelines are applied in those cases.) --Joy (talk) 16:13, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

Based on the review of popular articles, I don't actually think this is correct - Anglophone exposure to the name may come primarily from various notable Italian Americans in the US and Canada, and from various Europeans in the UK, Ireland. Not sure about other English-speaking countries. --Joy (talk) 10:39, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose Previous close of Luigi was a clear WP:BADNAC - it was no consensus. The rationale falsely claims that Luigi Mangione motivated the oppose comments when they mentioned Mangione but were clearly about the larger issue of a lack of other people solely referred to as Luigi. In this case it is equally true that there are no other people solely referred to as Mario who are similarly primary and the given name certainly isn't since that is just a glorified list of names. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 07:33, 2 July 2025 (UTC)
  • In fact, three of the oppose voters made a point of comparing Mangione to the character. Two of those made it their sole rationale for opposition. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:10, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

    This is because the proposal mentioned Mangione as a primary topic contender. Oppose voters were attempting to refute the proposal, while support votes made different, more cogent arguments that unfortunately went unrefuted. I do think that the proposal was closed correctly based on the arguments that were presented, but I would like to, at some point down the road, see another RM with better arguments. Ladtrack (talk) 16:34, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

I've previously refuted these bad closure claims by Zxcvbnm at User talk:Cremastra#Luigi (character) WP:BADNAC.

With regard to the argument about not glorifying a list of names, that's why I think we can just move to a disambiguation page, that continues to group these up instead, as a reasonable compromise. --Joy (talk) 10:08, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

I think the user did the appropriate move considering the balance of the arguments presented. However, I think it would be better to have Luigi as a DAB with the Nintendo character and the given name listed as the top two items, rather then having the given name as the base name. cookie monster 755 15:18, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

@Zxcvbnm I have responded on my talk page to your WP:BADNAC allegations. (Also, I don't especially see how my close meets BADNAC specifically: I suppose the discussion could be said to be contentious and my close controversial). However, I'd rather you not complain about me behind my back. If you still disagree with my close, you're welcome to take it to MRV. I stand by it. Cremastra (talk) 20:50, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose as the Nintendo character and the game is certainly the primary topic for Mario, and not the given name. I also opposed the Luigi move as I also believe the Nintendo character is primary topic over the given name. As Ladtrack, there is no person who is overwhelmingly known mononymously by those names over the Nintendo characters and the given name is not either. cookie monster 755 12:59, 2 July 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose. Unlike Luigi where an argument can be made, Mario the character is the clear WP:PRIMARYTOPIC when it comes to "Mario". Anyone who doesn't get what they want can go to Mario (disambiguation). JOEBRO⁶⁴ 13:26, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

  Speaking of which, we can also look at the numbers of these people who we so casually force to go elsewhere when they don't get what they want :)

  From the meta:Research:Wikipedia clickstream archives:

The eponym Segale is inherent to this article, so we can't tell how many of those readers were just following a link in context out of curiosity and how many may have initially wanted to read about that Mario. Likewise for the person mentioned in the paragraph as those nicknamed Super Mario. But for the two hatnotes, and the link tagged 'other', those are clearly in this category. So a total of over 600 identifiable clicks were badly navigated here in May.

To double-check a few months before:

Here, the long-tail of 'Super Marios' is better identifiable, but the base three numbers stand, over 700 identifiable clicks in March were from readers who weren't navigated well.

For comparison, with Luigi we had:

That's over 700 and over 1500, probably higher because of the recent matter of Mangione. Let's go a bit further back:

So even without Mangione, that was 300-350 identifiable clicks.

So this comparison of 600-700 vs. 300-350 may actually reinforce the hint that the current navigation at Mario is on average serving readers worse than Luigi was doing. --Joy (talk) 10:23, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

• Support. Clearly not the primary topic for this very common name. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:04, 2 July 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose per Ladtrack, although I will add that Mario (franchise) is also competing for the mononymous name and I could maybe see an argument for Mario (franchise) being the primary topic over the character (doubtful), but the given name is definitely not the primary topic. You Know Her? (talk) 16:08, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

@You Know Her? so you wouldn't mind Mario being a disambiguation page where we list on top Mario the character, Mario the franchise and Mario the given name? --Joy (talk) 10:26, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

Earlier I would've said that's the second-best option, though looking at your later comment with more data, that may actually be a better option than status quo. The current "commonly refers to" on Mario (disambiguation) seems to be satisfactory in that regard. You Know Her? (talk) 14:46, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

• Support, but instead of moving Mario (given name) to Mario, I would suggest making Mario a disambiguation page instead. Some1 (talk) 18:04, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

  I suggest everyone look at Mario (disambiguation). The video game character, the name, the franchise are all listed at the top. Some1 (talk) 15:41, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

  And so is the singer Mario Dewar Barrett. 1isall (talk/contribs) 15:45, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

  Ah yes, forgot about him. And his appearance on the Masked Singer was fairly recent too (2024). Some1 (talk) 15:54, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

• Support While Mario is highly iconic, the fact that Mario is itself a very common name means that the video game character likely shouldn't be considered the PRIMARY topic when the name itself has a larger real world significance. Magneton Considerer: Pokelego999 (Talk) (Contribs) 21:17, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

  Just because Mario isn't a real person does not mean he lacks real world significance; certainly the character and his generated revenue and cultural impact amount to a larger significance than anyone else with the name. DecafPotato (talk) 20:42, 13 July 2025 (UTC)

  Possibly anyone else individually, but not everyone else combined (which is the usual threshold for primary topics). Also, the educational value aspect is obviously debatable. --Joy (talk) 20:49, 13 July 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose It is so extremely apparent that the character is the primary topic here. We are talking about a character who is of a similar level as cultural consciousness as Mickey Mouse. When you search for "Mario", the first result is the character. When you compare the pageviews and interwikis of other topics with the name "Mario", the only one that even remotely compares in page views is Mario (singer), with about 16,000 page views in the past month. The character, on the other hand, has almost 56,000. The page for the given name doesn't even have 2,000 monthly page views. This is not to argue that pageviews determine how important a given name is, but it's apparent what people are looking for when they search for Mario. If Mickey Mouse were, for whatever reason, only ever referred to as "Mickey" and was located at Mickey, would you give the upper hand to people with the actual name of Mickey or what people would undoubtedly be looking for when they search for Mickey. Also, it is entirely possible for one specific character/person with a name to be the primary topic for that name. For example, Trump redirects to Donald Trump, because it's clear that most people would probably be looking for Donald Trump, even though Trump (disambiguation) and Trump (surname) both exist. λ NegativeMP1 21:22, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

  I don't think Mickey Mouse is a relevant comparison here because neither Mickey nor Mouse redirect to the Disney character.

  Also, we already know from previous examples that long alphabetically-sorted lists of people aren't that great for navigation, either. This does not mean that the raw number of viewers at those lists is strictly indicative of the level of recognizability and general interest in the holders of those names, however.

  The Trump example is also not great because that was the topic of many, many discussions, and the present-day consensus is fairly fresh. Likewise, the Trump example would point to the need to move the character article to a more naturally disambiguated name for it, and then have Mario redirect there. I think the former idea has merit, but the latter idea doesn't go far enough. --Joy (talk) 10:30, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

• Right from the get-go, I would assume it's unlikely to shift the consensus to this particular extent in this particular case because of two things - scale of popularity of the presumed primary topic, and a history of previous discussions. However, let's not dwell on assumptions and instead apply the standard WP:DPT advice.

• Requested moves: in 2007 - no consensus, in 2010 - not moved, in 2014 - no consensus
• All-time monthly page views just comparing Mario and Luigi
• All time mass views for all items linked from Mario (disambiguation)
• All time mass views for all items linked from Mario (name)
• All-time monthly page views for the top 10 Mario articles

The topic of most interest is, surprisingly enough, Mario Balotelli, averaging 4,305 / day, while the Mario character article gets 2,712 / day, Mario Lopez averages 2,398 / day, Mario Cuomo 2,149 / day, Mario Götze 1,894 / day, Mario Mandžukić 1,592 / day, Mario Batali 1,319 / day, Mario Andretti 1,315 / day, Mario Lemieux 1,219 / day, Mario Gómez 1,153 / day, Mario Puzo 1,136 / day, Mario Van Peebles 984 / day, Mario Draghi 899 / day, etc. The Super Mario Bros. noticably gets 2,112 / day, and Mario (franchise) another 793 / day.

So this actually looks somewhat similar to the discussion we had about Luigi: 5617 for the three Nintendo character-related articles and 23075 for the twelve other topics.

The separate Super Mario articles also may be relevant here, per mass views for that separate disambiguation, and the franchise one gets 1,955 / day. The readership is probably overlapping, though. In retrospect, I don't know if these 1955 should be added up with the franchise article readership, or if any of it should. It's all just ballparking.

At the same time, when we ponder long-term significance, it seems less clear-cut: a lot of these people at the top are popular foreign sportspeople and similar. On the flip side, there's a lot of popular people from English-speaking countries like the American TV personality, politician, chef, racing driver, writer, actor, and the Canadian ice hockey player.

So while I would have assumed that the popular video game topic in the US would have overwhelming mindshare, it actually seems more likely that the average American reader recognizes this name as ambiguous, even in the presence of such a single huge topic, because there's this variety of American Marios who are not Super.

The presence of the Italian economist, prime minister and European central bank president is significant, too. Even if we might want to give a bit more weight to the expectations of native English speakers, the global popularity and significance of the Italian name is still obvious, both from the example of the various footballers and others, and the average native speaker probably recognizes this as an Italian given name or similar.

With regard to the principle of least astonishment, we can also ponder the origin of names a bit. The lead of one of the popular German football players called Mario says they also called him Super Mario, which contributes to the idea that the franchise has some significance beyond its specific area of relevance. Most others, however, didn't, instead the etymology of those names seems generally more organic.

This may also point to the fact that the Mario character is most commonly naturally disambiguated as Super Mario, rather than just being known mononymously as Mario.

So I think the case for ambiguity is fairly clear. It is not necessarily clear that we should do this specific move - instead, I think we should move Mario (disambiguation) to Mario, and organize a common section at the top per WP:DABCOMMON. If people would rather proceed with the move as proposed, that is workable as well. Leaving the status quo seems like a bad idea, because after so many discussions, we might as well recognize the need to act. Worst case scenario we get some better measurements in a few months time, and we can reconvene later. (Support) --Joy (talk) 09:48, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

This may also point to the fact that the Mario character is most commonly naturally disambiguated as Super Mario, rather than just being known mononymously as Mario. I've already stated my opinions on equally considering every single person named Mario elsewhere, so I won't repeat them here. However, I will dispute this part specifically. The reason "Super Mario" is a nickname is not because the character is most commonly called that, but for two other reasons. The first is that a person named Mario cannot be nicknamed Mario, obviously, so Super Mario is the only possible Mario-related nickname. The second reason is that the moniker "Super" implies greatness at sport, so including it makes a fun double meaning with a reference to a popular character and an implied statement that this player is exceptional, whereas just calling a player "Mario" loses the second meaning. Ladtrack (talk) 02:18, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

Sorry, maybe that sentence wasn't precise enough. What I meant to say was that the character is often referred to not just under the mononymous name "Mario", but that people can and do naturally disambiguate that with "Super Mario", because the term Super Mario is very strongly associated with the character and the franchise, and little else (well, with the sheer amount of these athletes, these days it's also somewhat associated with that, but whatever). We can't measure to what extent do people refer to the Mario character as Super Mario on Wikipedia unless we disambiguate Super Mario and then see how many people choose the character over the games, but that would be a whole new can of worms. --Joy (talk) 12:00, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

Interestingly, there's also a concept of "Supermarionation" but it is unrelated to the Mario franchise. --Joy (talk) 08:54, 6 July 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose. Mario is clearly the primary topic. The name is synonymous with the character. I'm also shocked Luigi managed to pass and I would have voted against it - also from looking at the move it seems a majority were against, so that decision doesn't seem to have been correct. Jasp7676 (talk) 10:08, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

  Can you please explain a bit, why do you think it's synonymous? Cf. WP:CLEARLY. Perhaps it's better that we don't approach this with such emotional language. --Joy (talk) 10:32, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

  I believe it's synonymous per LadTrack's arguments - they made a lot of sense to me. If only 0.7% of page viewers came looking for the name, I do not understand why we are bothering to change this. I do also think that the previous close of Luigi was a WP:BADNAC. I completely agree to not approach this with our emotions - I am someone who is not particularly a Mario fan, I haven't really played Mario since I was about 11 years old! However to be frank I do think you are involving your emotions too much on this requested move. You are completely within your right to express your opinion, however, you have commented 12 separate times which seems overly excessive, and make up almost half the comments alone. Whilst I think it's important to consider all sides of the argument, that seems disproportionate to me. Ultimately I oppose this move, but I respect the opinion of anyone who does. Jasp7676 (talk) 16:25, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

  The 0.7% is simply not a correct statistic. Please see my explanation above.

  I find it amusing that I'm told both that my arguments contain too much dry data and that they are too emotional :) --Joy (talk) 17:05, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

  (Personal attack removed) Jasp7676 (talk) 00:30, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

  We have no reason to be rude. I too disagree with Joy's arguments but they are perfectly sensible and not at all low-quality. Ladtrack (talk) 02:04, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

  I think the comment above the comment above this comment would be considered a personal attack. 1isall (talk/contribs) 12:14, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

  Indeed. I have boldly removed it. Cremastra (talk) 20:53, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

  Thanks for doing that! 1isall (talk/contribs) 20:57, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose. Mario the character is iconic and is primary topic by both long-term significance and usage. I've never played any of the games but am well-aware of the character. Luigi, not so much, so it really is not a strong comparison. As for the data, with respect to Joy, you practically need an advanced degree in analytics to make heads or tails out of their data presentation. I see there are relatively few views of the disambiguation page (or the name page) compared to the character page. Yes, there are many people with the name, but are not typically known as simply "Mario". The former NY governor might have been an exception while he was in office, but in current usage, not so much. older ≠ wiser 11:50, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

Sorry about the data presentation. Does the pie chart to the right help illustrate this better?

There's always relatively few views of a navigation index compared to any single well-known article. This is most probably because most of our navigation is handled by external search engines, not our navigation indices. Please see my answer to Ladtrack above.

The main contention is simply that readers know about so many Marios, that none of them are the single primary one. Just because some of them are known as simply "Mario", like the character or the franchise or the singer, that doesn't mean the encyclopedia should present a primary topic. --Joy (talk) 16:58, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

I think it is a distortion in that MOST of the articles you categorize as the "other dozen Mario articles" are rarely if ever referenced as simply "Mario". And regardless of page views (which I don't think are in any way persuasive in this case or are at most inconclusive with regards to primary topic), the video game character is simply so iconic as to make case for PT based on long-term significance alone. older ≠ wiser 19:47, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

Please see my answer above to Ladtrack about mononymous vs. non-mononymous usage.

I don't think it's iconic enough to override the general ambiguity of the name, or the long-term significance of the huge amount of notable non-fictional Marios. --Joy (talk) 20:44, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

I think you are wrong regarding name-holders that are not known mononymously. It is much the same as with any other partial title match. Yes, there is some residual ambiguity sufficient to mention on the dab or to link to the name article from the dab. But the evidence that readers are significantly inconvenienced by not having a PTM name list as the base name is not convincing. As for the long-term significance, we'll see what sort of consensus the discussion determines. older ≠ wiser 20:56, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

With Tito, the said residual ambiguity we can measure at around ~30%, and the absolute numbers were around ~300 a month. I think describing this as "residual" implies that it's residue, that it's unimportant. This line of thinking may be appropriate in case of Tito because there is a clear primary topic by long-term significance in that case - a very serious historical topic that the encyclopedia is fine to nudge people towards, because that promotes some sort of important scholarly knowledge, something that is typical for encyclopedias to do.

In case of Mario, I don't quite think we are in the same position. We don't have a straightforwardly comparable relative measure of 'residual ambiguity', because we don't use a primary redirect here, but we see the absolute numbers around 600-700 a month. The presumed primary topic has long-term significance, but is still a topic in the realm of entertainment, it's probably not very serious or scholarly on the whole. As mentioned above, Google Books Ngrams indicate that the name Mario has appeared in books about twice as often or three times as often as Luigi and Tito since the 1960s. This napkin math seems to check out - 600-700 is more than twice as large as 300. So that's a decent hint that the relative measure might also be twice as large, which might then be ~60-70%.

Combined with overall readership numbers shown above, that is too much to be complacent about, in my opinion. We risk that too many readers look up Mario in the encyclopedia and say "Wait, the Super Mario character is here? What about all the other Marios?" --Joy (talk) 11:16, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

That's a fair bit of speculation, which I mostly don't agree with. older ≠ wiser 14:51, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

• Support for the idea of Mario (disambiguation) on the Mario place as a probable consensus. Meadist (talk) 17:57, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose. It is pretty clear that the character is far more popular than the given name, because the Super Mario franchise is the first thing that pops up when I searched "Mario" up on Google. All other people and fictional characters with the same name can just stay on the Mario (name) page. 1isall (talk/contribs) 18:54, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

  I'd like to note that I don't really care about what the result of this RM discussion will be, I just wanted to give my opinion, that's all. 1isall (talk/contribs) 11:52, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

• Support, Mario is a ridiculously common name in Latin languages. DAB should be at basename.--Ortizesp (talk) 19:24, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

• Strong support: I agree! To be consistent with Luigi. Nintendo didn't create the name Mario, the name has existed for hundreds of years, while the characters had only existed for about 44 years. The name Mario isn't even trademarked by Nintendo. Thomasfan1000 (talk) 15:47, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

Then I should inform you: According to Ja-Wikipedia, Mario is infact already their trademark–at least in Japan. They even post the link on the page to prove it. Also, Luigi is also their trademark–at least in Japan too. Awdqmb (talk) 04:57, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

•  See: New discussion at Talk:Luigi (character)/Archives/ 1#Requested move 4 July 2025 recommending a change to Luigi (Nintendo). --MYCETEAE 🍄‍🟫—talk 17:42, 4 July 2025 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose, I look forward to seeing Thor (given name) in an RM to be moved to Thor. A dab page for names should never be a WP:PRIMARYTOPIC for a name by itself where there's clearly something or someone our readers are seeking out more frequently. —Locke Cole • t • c 21:46, 6 July 2025 (UTC)

  We actually mentioned Thor in Talk:Frey (disambiguation)#Requested move 14 May 2025 :) --Joy (talk) 09:38, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

• Weak Support, Oppose to all requests on other forms like Nintendo or Mario (game series): I only support to make the disambiguation page more neutral. But meanwhile, we have no need to further define them–Mario is already the most regonizable fictional character named after this, so using Character to define the page is enough.

Awdqmb (talk) 06:03, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose. As others have stated, Mario is the primary topic. The disambiguation links at the top are sufficient for all other occurrences. --ThomasO1989 (talk) 23:34, 8 July 2025 (UTC)
• STRONG oppose based on long-term significance. We are not comparing the character to every WP:PTM who is named Mario; we are comparing it to the name itself. And the name isn't that significant. It's just a name. Red Slash 18:47, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

• Weak Support to the character being moved to Mario (character), Oppose to Mario (name) being moved to Mario. Mario may well be the most significant video game character, but his franchise is also extremely important. I'd also say that the name is much less significant than either the character or the franchise nowadays despite having more long-term significance. I don't think there really is a primary topic here, so I'd support Mario being made a disambiguation page with the character, the franchise and the name at the top. Computerfan0 (talk) 12:17, 16 July 2025 (UTC)