[Wikipedia-l] Disambiguation pages

Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen at ualberta.ca
Sat Jun 29 08:57:27 UTC 2002


At 01:21 AM 6/29/02 -0700, you wrote:
>I am becoming increasingly concerned over seeing seeing greater and greater
>numbers of non-article disambiguation pages.
>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.

To play devil's advocate, I think a case can be made that disambiguation 
pages make spontaneous linking much easier. For example, a contributor 
working on an article about Klez or Ebola could link to [[virus]] without 
having to even realize that there _are_ two alternate uses for the term, 
let alone knowing what specific names they're under; the "virus" link will 
show up as valid, and anyone following it will presumably be able to figure 
out which type of virus was being referred to and move on to the full-scale 
article from there. In other words, disambiguation pages allow for overly 
simplified and ambiguous links to still be perfectly useful to the 
encyclopedia editor and user.

Changing all links to always bypass the disambiguation page is nice and 
convenient, but it's not absolutely necessary. If it were, then why have 
the disambiguation page at all?

BTW, I dislike artucles which have a full-length (usually multiple screen) 
article on one meaning of the article's title, and then at the bottom have 
a "see also: [[alternate meaning of title]]." It forces the reader to 
scroll down through the entire first article before seeing that there's a 
second one; a small disambiguation page with a simple bulleted list of 
articles is much nicer IMO even if it's not "absolutely necessary" because 
you can take it all in with a single glance.

The issue of whether parenthetical additions to the base title are used as 
part of the disambiguation process is a separate issue, though, and I 
certainly agree that parentheses are inelegant. A pity the software doesn't 
have a built in method of creating child articles explicitly associated 
with a root, a sort of "sub-article" thing perhaps... :)


--
"Let there be light." - Last words of Bomb #20, "Dark Star"




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