Talk:Abigail Williams

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 (non-admin closure) Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 19:35, 2 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

• Abigail Williams → Abigail Williams (Salem witch trials)
• Abigail Williams (disambiguation) → Abigail Williams

– There are six entries listed upon the Abigail Williams (disambiguation) page, with little indication that the pre-teen child witness/accuser in the 1692 Salem witch trials has retained such historical prominence as to dwarf the combined notability of the remaining five entries. The article was created in July 2003 as Abigail Williams (Salem witch trials) and remained as such until the barely-attended Talk:Abigail Williams/Archive 1#Requested move 5 January 2018 when, with only a single vote cast, it was moved to Abigail Williams. Nearly seven years later, it may be appropriate to determine if the 1692 child, who is frequently conflated with the same-named 17-year-old reimagined key character in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, still has consensus for WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. A redirect — Abby Williams — flows to Murders of Abigail Williams and Liberty German, rather than to Abigail Williams (disambiguation). — Roman Spinner (talk • contribs) 18:36, 23 October 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. Raladic (talk) 19:55, 31 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

• Support per nom, no PRIMARY.--Ortizesp (talk) 19:36, 23 October 2024 (UTC)Reply
• Question the January 2018 move discussion noted that the witch-trial Abigail Williams had drawn "87.6% of all non-disambiguation pageviews last year". Has the distribution of page views across the various pages of "Abigail Williams" changed? Dmoore5556 (talk) 20:46, 23 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

  Only slightly. Year to date it is at 83.75%.[1] - Station1 (talk) 02:07, 25 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

  Thank you. Now that we have that info; does anyone assert that is not WP:PRIMARYTOPIC? Dmoore5556 (talk) 04:29, 25 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

• Oppose per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. There is only one other article that could take the title, Abigail Williams (band), which takes its name from Abigail Williams and gets around 15% of the views of the person. No objection to redirecting Abby Williams to the dab page, but it gets virtually no hits anyway. Station1 (talk) 02:12, 25 October 2024 (UTC)Reply
• Comment. It may be noted that in the sixth paragraph of the article delineating Abigail Williams (band), the text notes, "Because bands from these countries were immersed in the mythology of their respective countries, Abigail Williams looked into American history. Arthur Miller's The Crucible brought Abigail Williams, one of the original and foremost accusers in the Salem witch trials of 1692, to their attention."

Thus, it appears that if there is a primary Abigail Williams, it would not be the 11-or-12-year-old relatively minor witness / accuser in the 1692 trials, but the character Abigail Williams (The Crucible), a reimagined / invented 17-year-old sociopathic key accuser in the Arthur Miller play.

In fact, it would seem that prior to the 1953 premiere of The Crucible, the 1692 child named Abigail Williams had been little noticed in a historical context other than brief mentions of her name in regard to the Salem trials. The central part assigned to the same-named young adult character, that was invented by Arthur Miller for The Crucible, made the name notorious, with the notoriety increasing over the 70 years since the premiere. —Roman Spinner (talk • contribs) 16:20, 27 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

• Oppose per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. I found the above interesting, but I'm not comfortable with speculating about why users may be looking to learn about a historical figure. Alexander Hamilton also comes to mind. Dmoore5556 (talk) 04:14, 28 October 2024 (UTC)Reply
• Comment. In retrospect, it may have been more appropriate to nominate this page as Abigail Williams → Abigail Williams (The Crucible), rather than as the current nomination — Abigail Williams → Abigail Williams (Salem witch trials) — although that was the main title header that existed for 14-and-a-half years, from 2003 to 2018 and attracted very little interest upon its 2018 successful nomination for WP:PRIMARYTOPIC.

The lengthy and detailed Wikipedia entry for Salem witch trials mentions, in passing, the 11-or-12-year-old child named Abigail Williams two to three times, along with a group of other girls ranging in age from 12 to 20 who were the accusers in the trials — Ann Putnam, Mary Walcott, Betty Parris, Elizabeth Booth, Mercy Lewis, 18-year-old Mary Warren (Salem witch trials) and 17-year-old Elizabeth Hubbard (Salem witch trials).

Although, analogous to Abigail Williams (Salem witch trials), the last two of the above names also required parenthetical qualifiers, only Abigail Williams was nominated for primary topic and thus removal of the qualifier despite the fact that the child named Abigail Williams was not nearly as prominent as the other two who were young adults and played key roles as accusers.

Ultimately, it was Arthur Miller who eliminated the 17-year-old Elizabeth Hubbard (Salem witch trials) as a character in The Crucible and transferred her age and important role in the trials to the child Abigail Williams (Salem witch trials). As shown above, a google search for "Abigail Williams" focuses on either The Crucible character or the same-named victim of a 2017 double murder. —Roman Spinner (talk • contribs) 21:41, 29 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

• Comment the only "as shown above" I see is a Google search for "abigail williams sociopath the crucible", for which the results are pretty unsurprising. A Google search for "abigail williams real-life person" yields equally unsurprising results. A neutral Google search for "abigail williams" delivers pretty mixed results, although DuckDuckGo serves up the murder victim at higher priority. Dmoore5556 (talk) 22:41, 29 October 2024 (UTC)Reply
• Oppose. Clear primary topic by long-term significance. -- Necrothesp (talk) 16:08, 31 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Note: WikiProject Women's History, WikiProject Biography, and WikiProject Massachusetts/Salem Witch Trials Task Force have been notified of this discussion. Raladic (talk) 19:55, 31 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

• Oppose per Primary Topic. Dmoore5556 makes a good point, too. I initially found the nom's case compelling but then I read the responses and did my own search. Abigail Williams leads in Pageviews by a huge margin[2]. Per WikiNav[3] most people arrive at the article via search engines or Salem witch trials and the most common destinations from this article are others on the same topic. Abigail Williams (band) is a distant second in page views. A little over 1/3 of readers arrive at the article via search engines and about 6.6% arrive from Abigail Williams. It might be interesting to speculate over beers about why this Abigail Williams is the most popular but it is clear that she is the primary topic.--MYCETEAE 🍄‍🟫—talk 00:37, 1 November 2024 (UTC)Reply