[Wikipedia-l] RE: Disambiguation pages (parenthetical)

Daniel Mayer maveric149 at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 29 21:13:21 UTC 2002


On Saturday 29 June 2002 12:01 pm,  Bryan Derksen wrote:
> Candy worms, sure, but I can easily imagine writing an article about
> something computery and referring simply to "worms" within it because the
> "computer" context is already clear to the reader of the article. Why make
> the editor check every link to be sure that it doesn't lead to some
> completely irrelevant article that just happens to have a name in common
> with what you really wanted?

Why would [[computer worm]] be anything else? Why wouldn't [[worm]] be about 
the most common usage? This is why we have naming conventions that aim to 
naturally disambiguate terms from each other using the least complex naming 
scheme. 

The context here is a hypertext, cross-linked encyclopedia -- not some 
limited jargon file on computers. Using the word "worm" by itself is jargon 
when you mean "computer worm" (which <is> the term used in news reporting and 
anywhere else where context must be established by the term itself -- such as 
in a hyperlinked encyclopedia). 

If we can't assume at least some intelligence from our contributors to 
naturally disambiguate terms then we might as well turn [[Paris]] into a 
non-article disambiguation page to catch those pitiful souls who expect to 
link to an article on Paris, Texas by typing [[Paris]] -- just because the 
article they were writing in was in the context of Texas history. 

There are higher level contexts we are dealing with here.    

--maveric149



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