[WikiEN-l] Dab page notice

[Charles Matthews]

quiddity wrote

> 1 link per line is recommended because we're trying to find the
> article that the reader meant. Disambig pages are never an intended
> target (except via the hatnotes), but instead are signposts, pointing
> to actual articles, and usually with a wiktionary template.
> 
> Nobody expects the Spanish (disambiguation)! So we only highlight
> (link) the words that they might have meant.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish

OK, but it doesn't answer the point I made. There may well be a limited need to link out of dab pages to give access to terms not within a general reader's vocabulary.

And this all seems to be being applied to {{geodis}}, too. It seems to me to be perverse. Take [[Springfield]], under "Michigan" (there are three). The [[Springfield, Michigan]] entry is said to be in Calhoun County, but I'm not "allowed" to link [[Calhoun County]]? Put that on another continent, and you should be able to see that this is inconvenient: there are articles with maps to clarify rough and more precise locations, and you're saying it's better not to allow the reader access to them, when they're trying to pin down a place?

The formulation "trying to find the article that the reader meant" has the problem, that it narrows the purpose of a navigational page to exclude the case where the reader is not so well briefed.

Charles

-----------------------------------------
Email sent from www.virginmedia.com/email
Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software and scanned for spam