On 10/26/07, Andrew Dunbar <hippytrail(a)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