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