Daniel Mayer wrote:
The policy
should remain that first level of
disambiguation answers the question "what?"
rather than "when?". The 1932 movie "Scarface"
was based on the 1930 novel of the same name
by Armitage Trail. It is not safe to assume
that just because you have [[Scarface (1930)]]
and [[Scarface (1932)]] the earlier one must be the
book.
I wasn't talking about having a (YEAR) convention for
novels (that would have to be discussed separately).
The issue here is that there are two movies with the
name; Sacarface -- thus we would have [[Scarface
(1932)]] and [[Scarface (1983)]]. If there is only one
novel by that name then that would be at either
[[Scarface (novel)]] or just [[Scarface]] (with a
disambiguation block on top -- my preference). If
there were only one movie by the name Scarface and
only one novel by that name, then to disambiguate the
movie from the novel we would have [[Scarface
(movie)]].
There are at least six distinct books three movies with the one word
title "Scarface" including the 1983 one by Paul Monette that relates to
the Oliver Stone screenplay for the movie from the same year. I don't
know if they are all novels. But the attitude of dealing with books or
novels later puts a far too narrow focus on the present issue. How can
we ignore the books? Another problem with the simple [Movie (year)]
format is that it may have the effect that a year-alone disambiguator
implies that the main word refers to a movie. Do we really want to
reserve such an important disambiguation tool to apply to movies alone?
The whole point here is to have the minimum amount of
disambiguation information in order to distinguish one
thing from another (thus the word "movie" is not
needed to differentiate between the two movies with
the same name).
"Minimum amount" is a good thing but not always the best. If the most
effective disambiguation is a little longer that needn't be a big
problem. A little redundancy can be very helpful. We need a little
farsightedness here. The shorter the movie title the greater the
likelihood that there a disambiguation problem lurking in the background.
In fact one contributor has titled many movie articles
in this very format without even knowing there was a
movie naming convention (so many, that if the current
convention is kept and if it is to be effective, then
all those pages will have to be moved to the
unnecessary (YEAR movie) format that will never be
linked without pipes).
That's not a problem
With the (YEAR) convention there is also less to type
since the word "movie" would not be used (as in (YEAR
movie) -- of course, (movie) would still be used when
needed to differentiate one movie from something else
that shares its name).
I think that many Wikipedians are long winded enough that typing one
more word should not be an excessive demand.
In short, when two or more things have the same name
/and/ they are the same type of thing, then it is
perfectly reasonable to differentiate them based on a
temporal aspect.
Disambiguation can be an art. Considering the disambiguation of movies
in isolotion from everything else can become a problem at a later stage.
We need to look at the process (as distinct from format) of
disambiguation as a whole. I would make the specific proposal that "the
first level of disambiguation should answer the question 'what?'".