On Thursday 04 July 2002 12:01 pm, you wrote:

What I meant by the disamiguation block idea was this:

have the article for Paris, the city in France on the page [[Paris]] with the block there. The idea was that the principal article on Paris is on the simple-name page, so at least a proportion of people following a [[paris]] link land immediately on what they want.

I don't see much point in putting a disamiguation block on [[Paris, France]] and making [[Paris]] a mere redirect.

Unfortunately, [[City, Nation]] is now the general naming convention for cities -- even for famous ones like Paris, France (of course, with US cities being at [[City, State]] due to internal conflicts). Ideally, [[Paris]] would be only a disambiguation page pointing to the various uses of the term. But since the most famous Paris has been and will continue to be mostly linked by someone typing [[Paris]], it is not yet possible to make [[Paris]] into a disambiguation page (as Bryan would like) -- at a bare minimum all the current links to [[Paris]] would have to be fixed to point to the correct articles first (but then it would be a maintenance issue to constantly recheck and fix links -- that's why I would prefer [[Paris]] to remain a redirect to [[Paris, France]]).

You simply can't have consistency in naming conventions and have blatant and obvious exceptions like the most famous Paris AND also be able to preserve past and future direct links UNLESS pages like [[Paris]] redirect to [[Paris, France]] and any disambiguation occurs at the target.

The disambiguation block is just to catch anybody who might have gotton lost by clicking on [[Paris]] intending to go to [[Paris, Texas]] or [[Paris (mythical figure)]] (Is this figure known by any other longer name than simply "Paris"? I hate having to use parentheticals.)

I don't think people will be confused by landing at [[Paris, France]] by clicking on [[Paris]] -- at the top of the page it already says "Redirected from [[Paris]]" or something like that. And since this bock will be minimal in size, I also don't think it would seem too out of place by people clicking through from a link to [[Paris, France]].

Hum, I just thought of something potentially cool: Have a software feature that deals with these types of disambiguation issues. This feature would work by amending a short disambiguation block to the top of [[Paris, France]] whenever some one got there by clicking on [[Paris]].

One way for a contributor to code this would be to add the text for the disambiguation block below the #REDIRECT [[Paris, France]] that is now at [[Paris]]. Then, the only time somebody will see the disambiguation block is when they clicked on [[Paris]]. Not sure if this would be worth the effort just to minimize some minor ugliness at [[Paris, France]] for those that click to that article directly. Coding crew -- what do you think?

But then we could just quickly say: "[[Paris]] redirects here. This article is about Paris, France....blah, blah, blah," and try to keep that to a single line at 800 x 600 for those with standard sized font's (least common denominator is, unfortunately, MS Windows defaults).

--maveric149