quiddity wrote
1 link per line is recommended because we're trying to find the article that the reader meant. Disambig pages are never an intended target (except via the hatnotes), but instead are signposts, pointing to actual articles, and usually with a wiktionary template.
Nobody expects the Spanish (disambiguation)! So we only highlight (link) the words that they might have meant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish
OK, but it doesn't answer the point I made. There may well be a limited need to link out of dab pages to give access to terms not within a general reader's vocabulary.
And this all seems to be being applied to {{geodis}}, too. It seems to me to be perverse. Take [[Springfield]], under "Michigan" (there are three). The [[Springfield, Michigan]] entry is said to be in Calhoun County, but I'm not "allowed" to link [[Calhoun County]]? Put that on another continent, and you should be able to see that this is inconvenient: there are articles with maps to clarify rough and more precise locations, and you're saying it's better not to allow the reader access to them, when they're trying to pin down a place?
The formulation "trying to find the article that the reader meant" has the problem, that it narrows the purpose of a navigational page to exclude the case where the reader is not so well briefed.
Charles
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On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 10:49 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
OK, but it doesn't answer the point I made. There may well be a limited need to link out of dab pages to give access to terms not within a general reader's vocabulary.
And this all seems to be being applied to {{geodis}}, too. It seems to me to be perverse. Take [[Springfield]], under "Michigan" (there are three). The [[Springfield, Michigan]] entry is said to be in Calhoun County, but I'm not "allowed" to link [[Calhoun County]]? Put that on another continent, and you should be able to see that this is inconvenient: there are articles with maps to clarify rough and more precise locations, and you're saying it's better not to allow the reader access to them, when they're trying to pin down a place?
The formulation "trying to find the article that the reader meant" has the problem, that it narrows the purpose of a navigational page to exclude the case where the reader is not so well briefed.
The thing is, we can't guess or know what a reader might be looking for, so we try to aid them /based on the title they arrived at/.
*If they arrived at the page [[Boll]], they were probably looking for something called "Boll". *If they were looking for the thing discovered by a guy named Boll, or for the nationality of a specific guy named Boll, then they can find that via his article.
or
*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).
The MOS:DAB has a specific IAR reminder at the bottom though, so do what thy will. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(disambiguation_pages...
ohgodcoffeeneeded Quiddity
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
On 10/5/08, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
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.
The different treatment is alll about familiarity, a.k.a. systemic bias. Try asking a hundred Americans to name two states in Germany.
Twenty of them will say "Bavaria, uhhh..." and 71 of them will just say "Uhhh..."
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).
I agree entirely. We could use a nice how-to page for this. I know "how to make an SVG" but not how "how to efficiently make a lot of SVGs".
—C.W.
Charlotte Webb wrote:
On 10/5/08, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
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.
The different treatment is alll about familiarity, a.k.a. systemic bias. Try asking a hundred Americans to name two states in Germany.
To some extent, but some also seems to be due to the various sub-communities editing in each geographic area, which often is a single person who happened to generate all the maps, sometimes a long time ago. For example, I just now stumbled across [[Charleroi]], which gives me a location map -- not within Europe, or Belgium, or even Wallonia -- but within the province of Hainaut. Even as a fairly geographically literate American I could not locate that for you on a map. =]
-Mark
2008/10/6 Delirium delirium@hackish.org:
For example, I just now stumbled across [[Charleroi]], which gives me a location map -- not within Europe, or Belgium, or even Wallonia -- but within the province of Hainaut. Even as a fairly geographically literate American I could not locate that for you on a map. =]
Here's the very opposite approach:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Pedro,_Los_Angeles,_California
On 10/8/08, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
Here's the very opposite approach:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Pedro,_Los_Angeles,_California
Interesting but I'd rather it exploded downward rather than to the lleftward. As it is it takes up the whole upper half of the screen and significantly disrupts the lead section.
Suppose if we really wanted to save space we could set up some kind of standardized javascript to cycle through 3 or 4 locator maps in situ by clicking in the appropriate shaded area. Of course that would fail for readers who lack or purposely disable javascript.
And for all those kids in Sierra Leone reading the paperback edition :(
—C.W.