On Saturday 29 June 2002 12:01 pm, you wrote:
Changing all links to always bypass the disambiguation page is nice and convenient, but it's not absolutely necessary. If it were, then why have the disambiguation page at all?
The reason is to catch any future honest mistakes for true disambiguation issues. Such as this conundrum: "Where might the article on [[Mars]] be in the in context of a hyperlinked encyclopedia? Now "planet" is not a part of its name in any context, so it would be silly to find it at [[planet Mars]]. Hum, how about I just type in [[Mars]], hit preview and see where it takes me."
The bingo! They find out that an article about the planet lives at [[Mars (planet)]].
This is different when alternate two word terms are actually a part of a title that <naturally> disambiguates a term. Such as <computer worm> -- here the addition of the word "computer" is totally valid and widely used. We can reasonably expect a person to think: "Hum, I'm witting here in an on-line, cross-linked encyclopedia. Where might an article about computer worms be.... How about [[computer worm]]. Yep there it is." Besides, there is a link to [[computer worm]] at [[worm]].
If you like, we can move this to the top in a short row stating: Other uses: [[computer worm]]. Then the obvious disambiguation you want is there and an actual article is at [[worm]] that is about creepy, crawly, slimy worms and we don't have to place that article at [[worm (biology)]] which can only be linked to through pipes.
In fact, it might be a good idea to have a very short row list like this in other places in order to prevent the subvertion of a the common use of a single word term for non-article disambiguation pages just because other terms also share the same single word within narrow contexts (but are also widely known by two or more word equivalent). I would suggest having this at a -1 font and be limited to a row with maybe a line separating it from the actual article. This shouldn't be any more obtrusive than having language links for articles AND also acts as a disambiguation page without turning it into a non-article list.
I could be very happy with this.
---maveric149