[Wikipedia-l] Paris and Disambiguation block

[Daniel Mayer]

On Thursday 04 July 2002 12:01 pm, you wrote:
> What I meant by the disamiguation block idea was this:
>
> have the article for Paris, the city in France on the page [[Paris]]
> with the block there.
> The idea was that the principal article on Paris is on the simple-name
> page, so at least a proportion of people following a [[paris]] link land
> immediately on what they want.
>
> I don't see much point in putting a disamiguation block on [[Paris,
> France]] and making [[Paris]] a mere redirect.

Unfortunately, [[City, Nation]] is now the general naming convention for 
cities -- even for famous ones like Paris, France (of course, with US cities 
being at [[City, State]] due to internal conflicts). Ideally, [[Paris]] would 
be only a disambiguation page pointing to the various uses of the term. But 
since the most famous Paris has been and will continue to be mostly linked by 
someone typing [[Paris]], it is not yet possible to make [[Paris]] into a 
disambiguation page (as Bryan would like) -- at a bare minimum all the 
current links to [[Paris]] would have to be fixed to point to the correct 
articles first (but then it would be a maintenance issue to constantly 
recheck and fix links -- that's why I would prefer [[Paris]] to remain a 
redirect to [[Paris, France]]). 

You simply can't have consistency in naming conventions and have blatant and 
obvious exceptions like the most famous Paris AND also be able to preserve 
past and future direct links UNLESS pages like [[Paris]] redirect to [[Paris, 
France]] and any disambiguation occurs at the target. 

The disambiguation block is just to catch anybody who might have gotton lost 
by clicking on [[Paris]] intending to go to [[Paris, Texas]] or [[Paris 
(mythical figure)]] (Is this figure known by any other longer name than 
simply "Paris"? I hate having to use parentheticals.) 

I don't think people will be confused by landing at [[Paris, France]] by 
clicking on [[Paris]] -- at the top of the page it already says "Redirected 
from [[Paris]]" or something like that. And since this bock will be minimal 
in size, I also don't think it would seem too out of place by people clicking 
through from a link to [[Paris, France]]. 

Hum, I just thought of something potentially cool: Have a software feature 
that deals with these types of disambiguation issues. This feature would work 
by amending a short disambiguation block to the top of [[Paris, France]] 
whenever some one got there by clicking on [[Paris]]. 

One way for a contributor to code this would be to add the text for the 
disambiguation block below the #REDIRECT [[Paris, France]] that is now at 
[[Paris]]. Then, the only time somebody will see the disambiguation block is 
when they clicked on [[Paris]]. Not sure if this would be worth the effort 
just to minimize some minor ugliness at [[Paris, France]] for those that 
click to that article directly. Coding crew -- what do you think? 

But then we could just quickly say: "[[Paris]] redirects here. This article 
is about Paris, France....blah, blah, blah," and try to keep that to a single 
line at 800 x 600 for those with standard sized font's (least common 
denominator is, unfortunately, MS Windows defaults).  

--maveric149