On Sunday 30 June 2002 07:33 am, you wrote:

The question of what's the "most common usage" is a matter of opinion, however. Wikipedia is on the Internet, so naturally there's going to be a lot of computer-oriented people accessing it.

OK, then why were there over 50 links to [[virus]] intending to access an article on the viruses that attack living cells and only 7 that intended to access computer viruses? The "computer" here naturally disambiguates the term about viruses that attack computer systems but there is no natural way to disambiguate the other type of virus. Now each time somebody wants to link directly to that article about viruses that attack living cells, they have to write [[virus (biology)|virus]] which is needlessly tedious and can only tend to_discourage_contributions to those articles.

We need to make linking to articles as easy as possible respecting <reasonable> ambiguities (50+/7 doesn't cut it).

I know that when I'm in a conversation specifically about computer security, I never say "computer worms" or "computer viruses"; I just say "worms" and "viruses," and the people I'm talking to know what I'm talking about. Likewise, when I'm talking about genetics and I mention "viruses", there's usually no ambiguity there either.

Exactly my point. You are talking about these thing in their native context -- not in the context of a hyperlinked encyclopedia. New contributors get this concept rather quickly when presented with examples. I don't think it would be wise to present too many needless examples of parenthetical disambiguation. As a matter of fact, I am beginning to see the use of parentheticals when they are not at all needed. For example, one contributor is making articles on punctuation marks. However, this person at first used this format: [[exclamation point (punctuation)]] -- as if there was something else named exclamation points that needed to be differentiated from. New contributors naturally begin to mimic what they see after their first few articles.

I recall briefly debating about whether the planet/Greek god pages should be disambiguated or whether the page should belong to the god with a "see also:" for the planet, and this was another case where I felt that it was far too opinion-dependant deciding whether the Greek god or the planet should have "precedence."

I don't have any major issue with the planet/god disambiguation thing -- this is a case where both things are only known as the same one word term AND priority really can't be assigned based on amount of usage because the god usage is much less, but still very significant compared to the planet usage. Cases like [[Paris]] are less ambiguous with only a small number of references to the mythical figure and an even smaller number of references to the other cities by the same name. So priority CAN be assigned.

My whole spin on the parenthetical disambiguation thing, is that it should only be used in extreme cases where no alternate terms are used. I just HATE breaking links by directing users to non-articles and I also HATE needless tedium in creating links (and creating direct links isn't fixed piecemeal as visitors "drop in by accident" like it was intended -- these links are only made direct by a systematic campaign by a user or two who have the time and inclination).

Spontaneous linking is one of the reasons why wikipedia has been a success -- we should do everything reasonable to preserve this by limiting the use of parenthetical disambiguation and by also limiting the creation of non-article list disambiguation pages.

--maveric149