"Timwi" timwi@gmx.net wrote in message news:d6793b$4lt$2@sea.gmane.org...
James D. Forrester wrote:
Interesting. I had assumed that Phil wanted to link to [[{{PAGENAMENOPARANTHESES}} (disambiguation)]], which could be mildly useful in primary topic disambiguation cases.
But the point is that the "primary topic" will not have parentheses by definition. (At least not parentheses that you want to get rid of.)
...which is my exact point. At the moment, the only way to show show other related articles is the {{otheruses}} template, which wants to point to a "... (disambiguation)" article.
If the reader is looking at the article on [[lilac (color)]] for example, it is likely that they might be interested in other articles of similar name, such as [[lilac]]. If you use {{otheruses}} however you get a link to [[lilac (color) (disambiguation)]]: there is no way to automate a link to [[lilac]] so you have to type it in manually. This means that there is little scope for making the appearance and behaviour of such complementary links uniform, as per the recent [[template standardisation]] project.
Now some people might like the fact that there is no uniformity in these things, on the grounds that they make the project look too mechanical, but the alternative often looks thoroughly unhelpful and ugly.