On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 10:49 AM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)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_page…
ohgodcoffeeneeded
Quiddity