[WikiEN-l] Disambiguation policy

[Erik Moeller]

Please take a look at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_(disambiguation)

which has now become an index of all things that somehow contain "Forest"  
in their name, including DeForest Kelley (an actor) and Forrest Gump. It  
also contains dozens of links to places in the UK that we don't have  
articles about yet and that have "Forest" in their name.  
User:Pigsonthewing seems to insist on having these links on the page and  
keeps adding more.

This is problematic because "articles" like this become free-for-all  
linklists to add unstructured, useless information. It is also not the  
purpose of disambiguation pages to be a list or an index of all things  
with a certain text in it -- they are not search indices and are pretty  
useless as such. If I search for "Forest Glade" in the UK, I don't expect  
to find that page by visiting the "forest" disambiguation page. In fact,  
it might make finding things more difficult for hapless Google visitors  
who stumble upon such pages from search engines and find out that they  
point to nowhere.

The purpose of disambiguation pages is to list articles with the same  
title where I'd otherwise have no idea where to find them. And this is  
made much harder by these chaotic linklists, as the actual information  
that I want gets buried under a heap of "Oh, look, I found another name  
with 'forest' in it" style crap.

I believe we should set a clear policy that
- Disambiguation pages should link only to pages that actually exist -  
otherwise, if the subject is worth describing, it should get a brief  
description *on the disambig page*.
- Disambiguation pages should only link to pages where there is a  
*substantial risk of confusion* with the actual page title.

Currently, Wikipedia:Disambiguation makes no such recommendations.

On another note, I think that our articles on numbers, such as "one  
hundred one", have a similar problem in that they become free-for-alls to  
add completely useless information. For example, the article

http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_hundred_one

tells us that 101 is "a .com URL that redirects to the Disney .go.com  
website", and "in the title of the movie 101 Dalmatians, starring Glenn  
Close". This is complete rubbish. Anyone who cares about the movie knows  
where to find it. If we ever have a Wikitrivia site, that might be the  
kind of material worth adding to it, but it does not belong in an  
encyclopedia. In my opinion, all these number articles should be deleted  
except where there's something really informative about the actual number  
(such as the history of the number zero).

Regards,

Erik