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

[Daniel Mayer]

On Sunday 30 June 2002 07:33 am, you wrote:
> The question of what's the "most common usage" is a matter of opinion,
> however. Wikipedia is on the Internet, so naturally there's going to be a
> lot of computer-oriented people accessing it.

OK, then why were there over 50 links to [[virus]] intending to access an 
article on the viruses that attack living cells and only 7 that intended to 
access computer viruses? The "computer" here naturally disambiguates the term 
about viruses that attack computer systems but there is no natural way to 
disambiguate the other type of virus. Now each time somebody wants to link 
directly to that article about viruses that attack living cells, they have to 
write [[virus (biology)|virus]] which is needlessly tedious and can only tend 
to_discourage_contributions to those articles. 

We need to make linking to articles as easy as possible respecting 
<reasonable> ambiguities (50+/7 doesn't cut it). 

> I know that when I'm in a
> conversation specifically about computer security, I never say "computer
> worms" or "computer viruses"; I just say "worms" and "viruses," and the
> people I'm talking to know what I'm talking about. Likewise, when I'm
> talking about genetics and I mention "viruses", there's usually no
> ambiguity there either.

Exactly my point. You are talking about these thing in their native context 
-- not in the context of a hyperlinked encyclopedia. New contributors get 
this concept rather quickly when presented with examples. I don't think it 
would be wise to present too many needless examples of parenthetical 
disambiguation. As a matter of fact, I am beginning to see the use of 
parentheticals when they are not at all needed. For example, one contributor 
is making articles on punctuation marks. However, this person at first used 
this format: [[exclamation point (punctuation)]] -- as if there was something 
else named exclamation points that needed to be differentiated from. New 
contributors naturally begin to mimic what they see after their first few 
articles. 

> I recall briefly debating about whether the planet/Greek god pages should
> be disambiguated or whether the page should belong to the god with a "see
> also:" for the planet, and this was another case where I felt that it was
> far too opinion-dependant deciding whether the Greek god or the planet
> should have "precedence."

I don't have any major issue with the planet/god disambiguation thing -- this 
is a case where both things are only known as the same one word term AND 
priority really can't be assigned based on amount of usage because the god 
usage is much less, but still very significant compared to the planet usage. 
Cases like [[Paris]] are less ambiguous with only a small number of 
references to the mythical figure and an even smaller number of references to 
the other cities by the same name. So priority CAN be assigned. 

My whole spin on the parenthetical disambiguation thing, is that it should 
only be used in extreme cases where no alternate terms are used. I just HATE 
breaking links by directing users to non-articles and I also HATE needless 
tedium in creating links (and creating direct links isn't fixed piecemeal as 
visitors "drop in by accident" like it was intended -- these links are only 
made direct by a systematic campaign by a user or two who have the time and 
inclination). 

Spontaneous linking is one of the reasons why wikipedia has been a success -- 
we should do everything reasonable to preserve this by limiting the use of 
parenthetical disambiguation and by also limiting the creation of non-article 
list disambiguation pages. 

--maveric149