On 10/26/07, Andrew Dunbar hippytrail@gmail.com wrote:
Make two pages that only differ by capitalisation, accents, spacing, hyphenation, apostrophes etc. You will see that both pages have a "See also" link at the top. Add more variations and you will see they all become interlinked... It's a wiki - you can edit it. And it's a test wiki so don't worry about creating meaningless pages - that's just what it's for (-:
Ok, I see now. Cool!
However, I think this is only a half solution without disambiguation text. If we have some magic disambiguating text for each page, then the following things can be done automatically:
- Did you mean/see also/"For X, see Y" at the top of pages. - Dynamically constructed disambiguation pages (though not quite as beautiful as present for big ones, because we wouldn't have a way of grouping thematically) - Better search results - Possibly better disambiguating on save, as I described earlier. - Possibly other great new ideas.
The idea occurs that if we could massively improve search, we might not need hand-maintained disambiguation pages at all. Or at least, only for special cases.
I'm seriously liking the idea of disambiguating at page-save time. Links that point somewhere ambiguous should not be shown blue: maybe they should have a wiggly underline or something.
Ideally, also we would not have pages where the title is ambiguous but it's a real page (eg, [[Nice]]). Any link to [[Nice]] is inherently ambiguous: did the person really intend to link to the French city, or did they actually mean [[Nice (programming language)]]?
This is really a powerful solution: if every link is guaranteed to point to the right place, then we basically don't need redirects. Instead, we just need search hints. And if they're just hints, they can overlap, as I originally described. But the big bonus is that the different query entry points ("Go" button, link, typing URL) all behave the same: attempt to look up the page, if not, search using hints.
The question is, is "no ambiguous links" achievable? Some issues I foresee: - Obviously it will take a while to find and remove all the ambiguous links (and to train people) - Currently we consider it acceptable to deliberately link to a redirect, eg for a subject which is currently part of another article, but which should one day be split off. We would need a way to indicate this desire. - We would need a way to indicate that a link is a deliberate link to [[Nice]], rather than any of the homonyms. Any ideas for syntax?
That done, the three major changes would be: - All links to redirects would be replaced by the target (some bots do this already) - Links to pages that are invalid simple link targets (ie, dab pages and [[Nice]] pages) would be shown as "in need of attention" - At save time, a reminder that there exist pages to be dabbed.
Steve