[WikiEN-l] Annoying hatnotes

[Tony Sidaway]

On 8/22/09, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 7:47 PM, Tony >
> But you've used a two-item disambiguation *hatnote*, whereas what
> others (including me) would do is create a three-item disambiguation
> page and link that from the top of the two items in question (but not,
> obviously, for Vienna).

Ah, in part that's a question about when to go for primary topic
disambiguation.  I happen to favor such disambiguation strongly, but
again this is something that gets worked out in the course of editing.
 I would say that primary topic disambiguation is probably correct in
the case of Vienne (if they wanted the river they'd go for River
Vienne, if they wanted Vienna they'd go for Vienna).  The multiple
hatnotes are one way of handling the disambiguation but at some point
you may want to create a "Vienne (disambiguation)" page and have a
single-item hatnote.

Far worse than hatnotes, I'd say, are the ever-more-garish templates
we now use for matters such as tagging for NPOV, cleanup, and so on.
In my opinion we were better off when such templates produced a single
line of italics akin to a hatnote.  These pastel-colored boxes we've
been struggling with for the past four or five years are horrible.