A typical year article is [[1973]]. But there is also [[1345]] which looks quite different, having running text and illustrations, rather than just bullet lists. This format is an innovation from December 2007. The revision history is for some reason found under [[1345 (summary)]].
Is any similar innovation going on in disambiguation pages and list articles?
Do you know any exceptional examples that are more beautiful or explain the topic better, than the standard format?
I know some list articles can be much improved by introducing a table that is column sortable (class="wikitable sortable"). This removes the need for separate "alphabetical list of ..." and "list of ... by size". One example is the Russian list of "cities in Sweden", which also uses a map to illustrate the list article, [[ru:Города Швеции]], http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B0_%D0%A8%D0%...
The columns are Russian name, Swedish name, population, foundation year, cathedral, county, and latitude. By clicking the box in the column headings, you can sort the list by name in either language, by population, by age, and north-to-south.
In one Swedish disambiguation page, I inserted two illustrations to explain why the word "foxtail" is also the name of a plant, [[sv:Rävrumpa]], http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A4vrumpa
(In English, equisetum arvense is known as [[Horsetail]], but that is a redirect and not a disambiguation page.)
On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 6:18 PM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Is any similar innovation going on in disambiguation pages and list articles?
For a few months now i have been thinking about writing an email with my thoughts about disambiguation, so i guess that now is the time.
I've been doing a lot of work improving interwiki links, mostly manually. There's a grave problem with adding interwiki links to disambig pages - very often a word that may be homonym in one language is not a homonym in another or has a completely different set of meanings. Examples of different kinds are abundant:
Simple cases would be: * [[Grossmann]] vs. [[Grossman]] - In English these are separate disambig pages, but in Hebrew they would be one. * [[Kirov]] - In English this would be the Soviet politician and a bunch of things names after him, but in Hebrew (קירוב) this would also be "approximation". * Due to the peculiarities of Hebrew spelling, דאון (pron. "daon") can be interwiki-linked to the various meanings of "down" and "daun" and also to [[Glider]] and [[Flying fish]].
Harder examples: * In general, any such link between languages which are written in different character sets are wild approximations. One extreme example, which is beyond my comprehension, is the Japanese [[バーンスタイン]] and [[ベルンシュタイン]], which seem to be different spellings of "Bernstein", but i can only guess. * all the variations of John, Johan, Juan, Ivan etc. - how to interwiki-link them? Different spelling are one problem, and cultural implications make it harder (think about saints, fair tale heroes, Catalan Joan vs. Spanish Juan, etc.) * In Russian, Коса (pron. "kosa") is a disambiguation between [[Queue (hairstyle)]], [[Scythe]], [[Spit (landform)]], [[Xhosa]], [[Braid theory]] and a few other things. Should it be linked in any way to the English "kosa" or "cosa"? Probably not, as it would be completely arbitrary. Should it be linked to the Ukrainian Коса? The spelling of Ukrainian is reasonably close to that of Russian and so are its word meanings and disambiguations ... but where does it stop?
The interim solution that was more or less agreed upon in the Hebrew Wikipedia is to mark disambig pages which are too specific to the Hebrew language with an invisible template that would tell the bots not to add interwiki links to it. The technical details of the implementation of this solution are still in flux, but you can see a preliminary list of such pages here: http://tinyurl.com/6h2wzb
Personally i would go further. Since most often disambiguation has little encyclopedic meaning and is essentially a feature of each language, i would put all disambig pages into a new separate namespace and prevent the adding of interwiki links to it.
The only disadvantage that i can think of is that there are a lot of links from the article space to disambig pages. This can be solved by making the "Disambiguation:" space the second option for searching; in pseudo-code it would be something like:
if (exists(article) or exists("Disambig:" + article)) { output(blue_link(article)); } else { output(red_link(article)); }
There are several other advantages:
* It will make the work of the scripts that prepare the lists for [[WP:DPL]] much easier. (There are similar projects in several other Wikipedias.) * A link to a disambig page can be made in a different color, and thus help the editors to fix it. * It will clearly separate between purely technical and homonymic disambiguations and those that have some encyclopedic meaning. The latter can go to the article space. ([[Cancer]] is a possible example.)
Any other thoughts are welcome.
2008/8/16 Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@gmail.com:
Personally i would go further. Since most often disambiguation has little encyclopedic meaning and is essentially a feature of each language, i would put all disambig pages into a new separate namespace and prevent the adding of interwiki links to it.
I'd say a "no interwiki please" template rather than a separate namespace - but yes, disambigs aren't "encyclopedic content" as such, they're conveniences to people typing in something obvious into the search box or whatever. And on en:wp at least, articles at a generic title tend to turn into disambigs, particularly on names (e.g. I did this to [[Andrew Morton]]). So I think keeping them in the main article space is likely most appropriate.
- d.
Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 6:18 PM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Is any similar innovation going on in disambiguation pages and list articles?
For a few months now i have been thinking about writing an email with my thoughts about disambiguation, so i guess that now is the time.
I've been doing a lot of work improving interwiki links, mostly manually. There's a grave problem with adding interwiki links to disambig pages - very often a word that may be homonym in one language is not a homonym in another or has a completely different set of meanings. Examples of different kinds are abundant:
Simple cases would be:
- [[Grossmann]] vs. [[Grossman]] - In English these are separate
disambig pages, but in Hebrew they would be one.
- [[Kirov]] - In English this would be the Soviet politician and a
bunch of things names after him, but in Hebrew (קירוב) this would also be "approximation".
- Due to the peculiarities of Hebrew spelling, דאון (pron. "daon") can
be interwiki-linked to the various meanings of "down" and "daun" and also to [[Glider]] and [[Flying fish]].
Disambiguation pages are a harder case, but it think it could be applied to the whole interwiki linking.
- A link to a disambig page can be made in a different color, and thus
help the editors to fix it.
I think there's a bug for it, just waiting for a patch with no efficiency problems.
- It will clearly separate between purely technical and homonymic
disambiguations and those that have some encyclopedic meaning. The latter can go to the article space. ([[Cancer]] is a possible example.)
How do you differenciate between types of disambiguations? :S
On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 2:33 AM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
For a few months now i have been thinking about writing an email with my thoughts about disambiguation, so i guess that now is the time.
I've been doing a lot of work improving interwiki links, mostly manually. There's a grave problem with adding interwiki links to disambig pages - very often a word that may be homonym in one language is not a homonym in another or has a completely different set of meanings. Examples of different kinds are abundant:
Simple cases would be: ...
- Due to the peculiarities of Hebrew spelling, דאון (pron. "daon") can
be interwiki-linked to the various meanings of "down" and "daun" and also to [[Glider]] and [[Flying fish]].
Disambiguation pages are a harder case, but it think it could be applied to the whole interwiki linking.
For the most part interwiki, linking between encyclopedic articles, categories, portals and policy pages is immensely useful. There are problems with them, which i am trying to solve in interwiki projects. They are currently active in a couple of smaller wikis - eo, oc and ru. I am also ready to roll them out in nn, fr and es soon. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WPIW/HE .
I haven't set one up yet in en.wiki, as it presents certain technical limitations, but i will do it one day.
Disambig pages are indeed a special case. These pages are too language-specific.
- A link to a disambig page can be made in a different color, and thus
help the editors to fix it.
I think there's a bug for it, just waiting for a patch with no efficiency problems.
- It will clearly separate between purely technical and homonymic
disambiguations and those that have some encyclopedic meaning. The latter can go to the article space. ([[Cancer]] is a possible example.)
How do you differenciate between types of disambiguations? :S
Discussion, as in any other case. The [[Cancer]] example comes from a he.wiki user who supported my proposal about separate namespace but thought that ambiguity of Cancer is relevant to many languages. From my experience, such cases are a minority.
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