[WikiEN-l] The American ego trumps all -- thank God, 'cause mine needs surrounded by other big heads

[Andrew Gray]

On 21/05/07, Zoney <zoney.ie at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 20/05/07, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, 19 May 2007, David Gerard wrote:
> > > Which is why [[Georgia]] is a disambig, not the country - because of a
> > > straw poll where, for the most part, Americans voted "disambig" and
> > > non-Americans voted "country".
> >
> > Georgia is a disambig and not a country because the state is larger than
> > the
> > country and many more people looking for information about Georgia want
> > the
> > state than want the country.
> >
> Most inward links to [[Cork]] were for the city in Ireland, yet people
> overruled the status quo and moved the city to a separate article having
> [[Cork]] as disambig (the city article had a disambig header).

Inbound links is a less relevant measure here, With Georgia/Georgia
you're at least comparing like for like - people will add a wikilink
most times they use a place, so you'd expect wikilink numbers to be a
rough proxy for usage.

[That said, a caveat - [[Georgia (country)]] is a more obvious
disambig than [[Georgia (U.S. state)]] - it could be (state) or (US)
or (USA) or (U.S.A.) or... etc - so you'd expect a slightly higher
proportion of links relating to the latter to just go to the disambig
and hope for the best. Probably lost in the noise, though]

However, with Cork, you're comparing at least three different things
(place, object, material), and whilst we invariably link to places
when mentioned in the text, we link to common objects far less...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk