[WikiEN-l] Annoying hatnotes

Carcharoth carcharothwp at googlemail.com
Wed Aug 19 14:36:54 UTC 2009


Does anyone else get annoyed by certain hatlinks?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankton

When I go to look something up on plankton (a core encyclopedic
article if ever there was one), do I really want to have to read:

"For the SpongeBob character, see List of characters in SpongeBob
SquarePants#Plankton"?

Only added recently:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plankton&diff=308556264&oldid=308375271

To me, this is an example of misplacing information. If some character
is named *after* plankton, then that should be a footnote in the
plankton article, if even that. If there really is a chance that
people will search for "plankton" in an attempt to find out about the
SB character, then the hatnote should be neutral and direct people to
a disambiguation page ("for other things named plankton, see here").
And I don't care if that disambiguation page only has two entries.
That is an acceptable trade-off to having a spongebob squarepants
character name jarring people's reading experience by being placed at
the top of an unrelated article.

Carcharoth



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