[Wikipedia-l] Disambiguation pages

[Daniel Mayer]

I am becoming increasingly concerned over seeing seeing greater and greater 
numbers of non-article disambiguation pages. The concept of having 
disambiguation pages was started for perfectly valid reasons -- for roughly 
well-known cities that have the same name, monarchs with the same names, or 
for other things where precedence over which term should be at a 
non-disambiguated title cannot be determined (such as Mercury).  

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia but it is also a wiki - so we must name articles 
to (hopefully naturally) differentiate terms that would otherwise have the 
same name AND encourage spontaneous linking. Full disambiguation should ONLY 
be used as a last resort (such as with Mercury - planet Mercury doesn't cut 
it in the same way as [[biological virus]] because "planet" is not part of 
the planet's name - but makes for a useful redirect). If we don't encourage 
spontaneous linking wherever possible, the project will eventually be lost 
because contributors will increasingly find it tedious to use pipes all the 
time when linking to articles. Alleviating unnecessary tedium is why I killed 
the subpages in the Star Wars and Star Trek articles - contributions to those 
articles have since significantly increased now that pipes don't have to be 
used to link every term.

All I am saying, is that full disambiguation which turns a page named 
[[example]] into a non-article list with a disambiguation notice and links to 
[[example (discipline 1)]], [[example (discipline 2)]], [[example (discipline 
3)]] should only be used as a last resort when valid non-parenthetical 
alternatives are not used at all and there is a <reasonable> ambiguity issue. 

--maveric149