[Wikipedia-l] Middle Earth controversy

[Gareth Owen]

Michel Clasquin <clasqm at mweb.co.za> writes:

> You mean, just like [[Batman]]? The people working on Tolkien seem to be 
> the only ones in a huff and a hurry about this.

Well, thats different.

Primarily, because Batman is a *the* main character in the franchise, and the
name of that franchise.  If I use the proper noun "Batman", people know what
I'm talking about.  There is no ambiguity.  The question is not where do you
put [[Batman]], but where do you put [[Robin]].  Or [[Alfred]] (do you really
want the [[Alfred]] page to be an article about an English king with poor
culinary skills and and an article about Bruce Wayne's butler?  

A link to both? What would you call the latter?

Similarly, whilst [[Bilbo Baggins]] is unproblematic, [[The Ring]] should
probably be an article about Wagner's operatic cycle.  
Whereas [[Middle Earth/The Ring]] can tell us about its forging in Mount Doom,
its loss in Gladden Fields yadda, yadda, yadda.

The fact remains, that (modulo the auto-wikifying of GNU/Linux, which was a
bug not a feature), and when used for *disambiguation* rather than in any
hierarchical sense, SUBPAGES WORKED.

It continues to baffle me that some people seem to think 
[[Alfred (Batman)]] is in somehow sense different from [[Batman/Alfred]]
(rather than just more difficult to type).
-- 
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
 are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)