quiddity wrote:
*If someone wanted to find the article on "Calhoun County", but the only thing they could remember about the place was it contained a city named "Springfield", then they'll have to make an extra click to go along with their extra mental jump.
So, Calhoun County and rhodopsin should not be wikilinked at those 2 dab pages (According to our current guideline). This is with the intention of making the dab pages efficacious to use for the majority of readers (in all their diverse forms).
It's not so much the case where somebody went looking for Calhoun County by searching for Springfield, but rather someone knows they want *some* city named Springfield, but isn't quite sure which. If we link the general geographic regions, they can quickly click through to the regions to narrow down which of the Springfields they wanted, which may be easier than clicking on each of the cities, whose articles (and location maps) are often way too narrow to provide high-level context for the user who doesn't really know which of them he meant.
Some of that could be improved by making each of the articles themselves provide higher-level orientation. For example, most of our articles on German cities place them as a dot on the map of *all of Germany*, rather than only on a map of the state they're in, letting the reader who knows "I know it's somewhere in western Germany" quickly figure out if they're even in the right part of the country. Our U.S. maps generally don't, although they've semi-recently been improved to at least show city locations within states instead of only within counties. But the non-American user who goes search for something like: I want a city named Foo, somewhere in the middle of the country, and doesn't know which U.S. states are in the middle of the country, might well want to click directly on wikilinked state names to narrow down the search before clicking on the articles themselves. Either that, or we could place cities on maps of the entire U.S. instead of only on maps of their states, but the U.S.'s geographical size makes these maps often not that useful for any other purpose (on the other hand, the maps on [[Moscow]] and [[Saint Petersburg]] provide examples of useful very-zoomed-out locations).
-Mark