RFC: I'm having a little throw with someone named David over the usage of hatnotes and whether or not to disambiguate. On the [[sola scriptura]] article, there's a hatnote which points "for the [[Neal Morse]] album [[Sola Scriptura (album)]]." I removed this hatnote in favor of a standard otheruses disambig. The principle here is that the article's substance is more *substantial than the tangential, and relatively speaking, trivial, hatnote on top.
David thinks this is some kind of specious subjectivity - that noone can state whether articles are more or less trivial than others - and in any case two-article disambiguations are just wrong. I hope others here feel differently.
-Zahd
Zahd wrote:
RFC: I'm having a little throw with someone named David over the usage of hatnotes and whether or not to disambiguate. On the [[sola scriptura]] article, there's a hatnote which points "for the [[Neal Morse]] album [[Sola Scriptura (album)]]." I removed this hatnote in favor of a standard otheruses disambig. The principle here is that the article's substance is more *substantial than the tangential, and relatively speaking, trivial, hatnote on top.
There is another principle, which is that you shouldn't change stuff around without gain of functionality, just because you reckon your theory about it trumps someone else's.
The point of hatnotes is to give readers navigational help, in a lightweight way. This may be one of the last stands against "of course the MoS must cover everything". There are more useful discussions.
In fact using hatnotes to comment implicitly on relative seriousness of content probably violates some Deep Magic.
Charles
On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 9:45 PM, Zahd owl@spaz.org wrote:
RFC: I'm having a little throw with someone named David over the usage of hatnotes and whether or not to disambiguate. On the [[sola scriptura]] article, there's a hatnote which points "for the [[Neal Morse]] album [[Sola Scriptura (album)]]." I removed this hatnote in favor of a standard otheruses disambig. The principle here is that the article's substance is more *substantial than the tangential, and relatively speaking, trivial, hatnote on top.
David thinks this is some kind of specious subjectivity - that noone can state whether articles are more or less trivial than others - and in any case two-article disambiguations are just wrong. I hope others here feel differently.
-Zahd
1) Hatnotes: for use in disambiguating pages when there are only two options. Why make people click more than once? If there are other things out there in the world called Sola scriptura, then a disambig page is fine. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother.
2) Trivial article: of course the article on the root concept is more "important". However, readers may well be looking for the article on the album. Disambiguation is all about improving usability for readers. See point 1 above.
3) Don't edit war about stupid stuff [i.e., things where the outcome no matter who wins is more or less the same -- the reader clicks through to the page about the album regardless].
yours, phoebe
2008/7/31 Zahd owl@spaz.org:
David thinks this is some kind of specious subjectivity - that noone can state whether articles are more or less trivial than others - and in any case two-article disambiguations are just wrong. I hope others here feel differently.
You may like to know that this was discussed almost two years ago:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-September/053224.html (and subsequent messages)
The two cases where I've deliberately created a "redundant disambiguation" like this (ie, only two entries) were for [[Squirrel]] and [[Beirut]] - in both cases, the main goal was to get rid of a rather silly hatnote.
([[Squirrel]] originally had a hatnote talking about Scientology jargon; [[Beirut]] asked you if you were meaning to read about 'beer pong', whatever that is... I mean, really.)
In both cases, mind you, I justified it against this sort of objection by then going and scrounging up some other possible uses of the word to put on the disambig page, so there was three or four entries.