Keegan Paul<kgnpaul(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 1:05 PM,
<WJhonson(a)aol.com> wrote:
> I don't however see the
> whole mountainish molehill if there is only one link at the top.
From what I'm understanding and agree with, the
molehill is not the issue
over disambig pages. The initial issue is that someone looking up plankton
would have seen a "See also Spongebob" link. The perception by people
looking up plankton will be to already question the validity of the
editorial content if Spongebob is the first thing they see. Correct me if
I'm wrong about this being the initial issue, Carcharoth.
Right. Its not about the number of clicks, or even the presence of
alternative linkages - its about the odd and irritating addition of
links to trivial topics at the top of substantive articles (hence the
term "trivial disambiguation" or "trivial otheruses links").
From the wiki point of view, presenting information
upfront is quite
common sense, and this is why in the past we often had four-item
disambiguations at the top of articles - people kept exploiting this
"presentation of information" concept to push for making their own
interests prominent in non-trivial articles.
From the encyclopedic point of view, its necessary to
make at least a
basic qualitative distinction between trivial and substantive
articles, so that while there may be a link to Ubermensch on Superman,
there won't be one to the latter on the former. (Dunno how it's set up
now).
Taking things one step further (as I like to do), it might make sense
to deprecate even the usage of cross-topic otheruses hatnotes among
substantive articles. Does it make sense to mention a history topic on
the top of a biology article?
Anyway, the current beef I have with {{otheruses}} tags is that they
don't format well, when doubled (tripled or more) up - something
solved if we could get rid of the carriage returns and whitespace
between them.
-Stevertigo