[WikiEN-l] Expandable dablinks

[Bill Konrad]

"Steve Bennett" wrote:
> On 2/9/07, Rich Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
>> What you've done is great. However, I did discover an issue (you may
>> already be aware of this)...If the transcluded disambig page has
>> sections, then those sections show up in the TOC of the transcluding
>> page.
>>
>> No obvious solution comes to mind, short of eliminating sections from
>> disambig pages.
>
> I think it's fairly clear that we could not immediately take every
> disambig page and just declare it suitable for transclusion at the top
> of the relevant pages. Most will need minor reformatting, even if it's
> just sticking <noinclude> around certain bits of text like section
> headings and what-not.

I'm not sure I see the advantages here. Sure it is kind of cool in a bit of
a geeky way, but you still have to click a link to see the disambiguation
information. Is it a significant advantage to have it show up as a drop-down
thingie rather than as a separate page? I don't see it. And it would appear
to make both adding the disambiguation note at the top of pages and possibly
the actual structure of the disambiguation pages more complex and fraught
with potential for error.

Until the method is relatively idiot-proof [1], and there are clear
advantages beyond a little bit of "gee whiz, ain't that neat", I'm
skeptical.

[1] I realize that since *anyone* can edit wikipedia, idiot-proof is at best
a sliding scale

bkonrad