I am becoming increasingly concerned over seeing seeing greater and greater numbers of non-article disambiguation pages. The concept of having disambiguation pages was started for perfectly valid reasons -- for roughly well-known cities that have the same name, monarchs with the same names, or for other things where precedence over which term should be at a non-disambiguated title cannot be determined (such as Mercury).
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia but it is also a wiki - so we must name articles to (hopefully naturally) differentiate terms that would otherwise have the same name AND encourage spontaneous linking. Full disambiguation should ONLY be used as a last resort (such as with Mercury - planet Mercury doesn't cut it in the same way as [[biological virus]] because "planet" is not part of the planet's name - but makes for a useful redirect). If we don't encourage spontaneous linking wherever possible, the project will eventually be lost because contributors will increasingly find it tedious to use pipes all the time when linking to articles. Alleviating unnecessary tedium is why I killed the subpages in the Star Wars and Star Trek articles - contributions to those articles have since significantly increased now that pipes don't have to be used to link every term.
All I am saying, is that full disambiguation which turns a page named [[example]] into a non-article list with a disambiguation notice and links to [[example (discipline 1)]], [[example (discipline 2)]], [[example (discipline 3)]] should only be used as a last resort when valid non-parenthetical alternatives are not used at all and there is a <reasonable> ambiguity issue.
--maveric149
At 01:21 AM 6/29/02 -0700, you wrote:
I am becoming increasingly concerned over seeing seeing greater and greater numbers of non-article disambiguation pages. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia but it is also a wiki - so we must name articles to (hopefully naturally) differentiate terms that would otherwise have the same name AND encourage spontaneous linking.
To play devil's advocate, I think a case can be made that disambiguation pages make spontaneous linking much easier. For example, a contributor working on an article about Klez or Ebola could link to [[virus]] without having to even realize that there _are_ two alternate uses for the term, let alone knowing what specific names they're under; the "virus" link will show up as valid, and anyone following it will presumably be able to figure out which type of virus was being referred to and move on to the full-scale article from there. In other words, disambiguation pages allow for overly simplified and ambiguous links to still be perfectly useful to the encyclopedia editor and user.
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?
BTW, I dislike artucles which have a full-length (usually multiple screen) article on one meaning of the article's title, and then at the bottom have a "see also: [[alternate meaning of title]]." It forces the reader to scroll down through the entire first article before seeing that there's a second one; a small disambiguation page with a simple bulleted list of articles is much nicer IMO even if it's not "absolutely necessary" because you can take it all in with a single glance.
The issue of whether parenthetical additions to the base title are used as part of the disambiguation process is a separate issue, though, and I certainly agree that parentheses are inelegant. A pity the software doesn't have a built in method of creating child articles explicitly associated with a root, a sort of "sub-article" thing perhaps... :)
-- "Let there be light." - Last words of Bomb #20, "Dark Star"
Bryan Derksen wrote:
To play devil's advocate, I think a case can be made that disambiguation pages make spontaneous linking much easier. For example, a contributor working on an article about Klez or Ebola could link to [[virus]] without having to even realize that there _are_ two alternate uses for the term, let alone knowing what specific names they're under; the "virus" link will show up as valid, and anyone following it will presumably be able to figure out which type of virus was being referred to and move on to the full-scale article from there.
Here's a cute idea.
Suppose the virus page is a pure disambiguation page. It links to [[biological virus]] and [[computer virus]]. Suppose further that there is a true/false flag in the database which can be turned on to indicate that this is a disambiguation page.
Whenever someone saves a page with a link to [[virus]], the system notices that [[virus]] is a pure disambiguation page, because someone set that flag. Then the author is given a chance to select which of the pages that is really intended: [[virus]], [[biological virus]], [[computer virus]].
If someone really wants to link to the disamb. page, then they can. Else, they are given alternatives.
The text of the article would not be changed, just the link. [[virus|biological virus]] for example.
--Jimbo
As a relative newbie that entered Wikipedia during the full flower of disambiguation pages, I'd like to give my response to the discussion so far.
I think it's clear that some ambiguous pages, most obviously [[Paris]] but also for that matter [[Virus]], should be primarily about the most common sense of the term, while other pages such as [[Venus]] should only disambiguate. However, the difference between these examples is not vital and can safely be decided on a case by case basis.
What's important to me is that Bryan Derksen is right, and we should make sure that he continues to be right: If a writer makes a spontaneous link to an ambiguous name, then readers can get to the right page after one more link. Is it ideal that the link read "[[Mercury (planet)|Mercury]]" rather than just "[[Mercury]]"? Yes. Is it necessary? No. I can easily imagine a writer in the heat of a computer article typing "[[worm]]" without thinking if that makes global sense, but if they do, then this causes only minimal damage. The encyclopaedia is still readable, even easily so, as long as the article [[Worm]] begins something like
"''This article is about worms, the animals. There is also a Wikipedia article about [[computer worm]]s.'' " "---- " "A '''worm''' is any of numerous relatively small elongated soft-bodied etc.
(Currently, the computer bit is at the bottom, which I too don't like. But I think that it's important to keep the top stuff *short* -- get people to the right page, and then start the article.)
As a reader, disambiguation pages have worked for me. As a writer, I try to link directly but I know that I make mistakes; I hope that disambiguation pages are there to catch them.
-- Toby Bartels toby@math.ucr.edu
PS:
You know what would make writing unambiguous links easier? I'd like to say "[[Mercury (planet)|Mercury]]" without repeating "Mercury". Would it work to have a feature such that, say, "[[Mercury]](planet)" (with no space) produces that effect?
While we're on the subject:
Someone seems to be a little too focused on small towns in the United States. I came across the disambiguation page for "Eureka" a couple of days ago. It had what seems to be boilerplate of "is the name of some places in the United States," then a list of two, one with an article, the other not.
No mention of Archimedes, what "eureka" means, or why towns might be named that.
I added same (brief, with link to Archimedes), but it has me wondering whether umpteen pages that note that there are two or more US towns named X, none of which you've heard of or we've written about, and nothing else are useful even as disambiguation.
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