[WikiEN-l] Annoying hatnotes

[Carcharoth]

On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 10:37 PM, Tony Sidaway<tonysidaway at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Yes. And this should probably go on-wiki when we get down to nuts and
bolts like this.

>  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).

It's more a case of people linking "Vienne" from other articles or
projects. There are several reasons why they might end up here looking
for a "Vienne" mentioned in English sources, and be gratified to be
pointed to "Vienne (disambiguation)" to learn they needed to go to
Vienna, or to the river. People *searching* will type in either
"Vienne" or "river Vienne", but those linking might only link to
"Vienne". The best way to confirm this is to look at what currently
links to "Vienne".

Well, that would be the normal way to disambiguate, but the
infuriating thing is that this page is linked from seven templates,
several of which are massive geographical lists, so when you are
looking down the list of links to "Vienne", it is difficult to know
which are links from transcluded navbox templates, and which are links
from article text.

Templates are here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AWhatLinksHere&target=Vienne&namespace=10

Full list of links here here (somewhere between 500 and 1000):

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Vienne&namespace=0&limit=500

If you were trying to find out which of those links were pointing to
Vienne the department, Vienne the city, Vienne (Vienna) or Vienne the
river, where would you start? This is an example of where massive
template over-proliferation is making it almost impossible to
disambiguate links. I'm really rather annoyed here, and hope there is
a technical fix somewhere for this.

> 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.

Which is what I was talking about all along at the start of the thread.

> 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.

Didn't the colours get standardised recently after some massive
discussion and several polls?

No jokes about arguments over the colour of the bike shed.

Carcharoth