At 02:33 PM 6/30/02 -0700, you wrote:
On Sunday 30 June 2002 07:33 am, Bryan wrote:
[Paris] a rather extreme example, but yes, I
wouldn't have a problem with
[[[Paris]] being a disambiguation page] :) At least it makes Paris,
France's article title more standardized
with the other city titles when the reader gets to it.
OK, go ahead and fix the hundreds of links to [[Paris]] so that they point to
[[Paris, France]]
I said I wouldn't have a problem with it, not that I was interested in the
work required to actually do it myself. There are plenty of other things
that are more important to do first IMO. :)
I'm a big supporter of disambiguation pages, I like what they add to the
structure of Wikipedia and don't have a problem with "non-article" pages as
long as they have a useful function. But for the most part, I have largely
just been going around and finding existing disambiguation pages and adding
the proper notices and format to them, and sometimes fixing some of their
links. Perhaps someday the wikipedia software will have tools specifically
tailored to disambiguation, a separate namespace maybe? Or a new type of
redirect syntax that allows for multiple possibilities? That way, the
non-articleness of disambiguation pages wouldn't be as much of an issue.
I think
it's a bad idea to assume some kind of universal context when
writing articles, because everyone has a slightly different idea of what
the universal context is.
Well, I guess we should abandon all naming conventions then (which is where
the universal context arises here). If there is no universal context, then
there is no need to naturally disambiguate terms and wikipedia degenerates
into a Jargon file with loads of naming conflicts, misdirected links and an
inordinate amount of the use of tedious piping.
Now you're just being silly. Good naming conventions are exactly the thing
that helps Wikipedia become a coherent resource _despite_ the fact that
every editor approaches it with a slightly different context; they're the
way we make it clear that an article is about _that_ particular Paris, or
_this_ particular god without having to assume a common context. Naming
conventions mean you don't have to guess a context for an article, it's
explicitly provided in the title.
Redirects and disambiguation pages exist as a way to take links which don't
conform to unambiguous conventions and make them useful anyway; they are
there specifically to _remove_ misdirected links and tedious piping. You
can just link to [[Blah]] and not worry about the reader winding up in the
wrong place. Ideally you'd link to [[Blah (god)|Blah]] or whatever instead,
but with a disambiguation page in place a little sloppiness or laziness
isn't going to hurt anything.
--
"Let there be light." - Last words of Bomb #20, "Dark Star"