[WikiEN-l] Trivial hatnotes or two-article disambiguations

[Jonas Rand]

> Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:45:29 -0000
> From: "Zahd" <owl at spaz.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Trivial hatnotes or two-article disambiguations
> To: <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID: <twig.1217479529.73923 at spaz.org>
>
> RFC: I'm having a little throw with someone named David over the usage of
> hatnotes and whether or not to disambiguate. On the [[sola scriptura]]
> article, there's a hatnote which points "for the [[Neal Morse]] album
> [[Sola Scriptura (album)]]." I removed this hatnote in favor of a standard
> otheruses disambig. The principle here is that the article's substance is
> more *substantial than the tangential, and relatively speaking, trivial,
> hatnote on top.
>
> David thinks this is some kind of specious subjectivity - that noone can
> state whether articles are more or less trivial than others - and in any
> case two-article disambiguations are just wrong. I hope others here feel
> differently.
>
> -Zahd

Triviality is subjective. I do not see celebrity gossip as important. People 
with nothing to do but absorb that stuff probably do care about what happens 
to famous rockstars.

The same is with articles. Unless we can agree upon a standard (i.e., the 
longest article should link to the disambig), this should not happen. I 
think that if two or more subjects are named the same thing, the name (w/o 
parentheses) should redirect to a disambiguation page.

For example:
[[Foo]] should be a redirect to [[Foo (disambiguation)]]. That page should 
be a disambiguation page that would link to three articles:

* [[Foo (terminology)]]
* [[Foo (magazine)]]
* [[Foo (song)]]

This discussion should take place in a setting such as the village pump, 
on-wiki. It would be more convenient, if we want to have a consensus 
discussion for a standard proposal. However, for technical reasons, I cannot 
edit Wikipedia (blocked) .

Thoughts?

Jonas