(Axel Boldt axelboldt@yahoo.com):
--- Lee Daniel Crocker lee@piclab.com wrote:
(Axel Boldt axelboldt@yahoo.com):
Yes, that's a real problem; when linking to something, you can never be sure whether the target is a disambiguation page or not.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. Seriously, accidental discovery of vaguely related things is one of the fun parts of Wiki surfing, and part of the value of the medium. Let's not go overboard and "fix" things that are useful just because they seem unplanned.
Well, if a link to a disambiguation page is planned, then that's fine I suppose, but often the author is unaware of it and the link may then become imprecise and unhelpful. For example, in the eighteenth century there were three mathematicians named "Johann Bernoulli". Also, lots of technical terms have various definitions depending on context, and while experts can usually tell which one is meant, those people are not our main audience.
I have to repeat that "unplanned" or "unintentional" aren't bad. "Wrong" is of course bad, but that's a minority case. There was a time when a link on the "Jesus" page that was supposed to go to the apostle Bartholomew actually went to Bart Simpson--that was bad. Funny, but bad. But the majority of cases, people will just put a link around something like "Mercury" without knowing that it will go to a page that shows links to 4 or 5 different subjects, one of which will be intended and the rest accidental--but that's a /good/ thing. If someone is researching the god or the element and just happens to run across articles on the space program, that's part of the Wiki experience, so long as he can /also/ find what he's actually looking for without much trouble.