[WikiEN-l] Why voting *is* evil

[Matt Brown]

On 4/11/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/11/06, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The very fact that there is disagreement among sensible contributors
> > says that neither page should be primary.
>
> There, I disagree. If the sensible contributors are not representative
> of whatever they should be reperesentative of, then their disagreement
> isn't useful.

Really, the most NPOV solution for article naming is to NEVER allow an
article to occupy the primary name when there is any disambiguation
needed at all.  Placing one article above the others is bias.

However, it's impractical.  In many cases, where people link to
[[whatever]] or search for the term, it's incredibly highly likely
that they mean only one of the options.  In a sense, placing an
article, rather than a disambiguation page, at the primary topic is a
user-friendliness hack which challenges NPOV but is tolerated in the
'easy cases'.

It's my (current) belief that any disagreement that takes a name out
of the 'easy cases' category should mean that no article gets the
primary topic name.

Therefore, the question of whether those arguing are representative or
not (and of whom) is irrelevant - the fact that non-nutcases consider
it arguable at all puts it out of the 'easy cases' category.

> Hmmm...well I haven't had much experience determining such things for
> big important pages like these, but my experience with smaller ones
> has mostly been that one person makes a sensible argument, doesn't get
> much response, and just moves it. :)

True.  "Without strong disagreement" possibly works better.

> Perhaps what irks me is that there are 200 countries on the planet. 1
> of them definitely refers to Georgia, the state, without qualifiers.
> Some small number may also do so. Then there's probably a large number
> of people who would qualify the state, or explain the country. And to
> people who hadn't heard of either, no one is going to assume that "My
> Aunt was born in Georgia" would be a US state. And at the other end,
> there must be several dozen (not necessarily English-speaking) for
> whom Georgia is definitely a country and nothing else.

Georgia has only been independent for fifteen years; prior to that, in
the modern era, it was of the same status as the US state, as a
subdivision of a larger nation.  I suspect prior to 1991, people
neither from North America nor central/eastern Europe would have
struggled to locate either place, or decide which was meant.

Since then, Georgia's independence means that the nation has a little
more prominence, of course.

-Matt