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

[Daniel Mayer]

On Sunday 30 June 2002 07:33 am, Bryan wrote:
> [Paris] a rather extreme example, but yes, I wouldn't have a problem with
> [[[Paris]] being a disambiguation page] :) At least it makes Paris, 
> France's article title more standardized
> with the other city titles when the reader gets to it.

OK, go ahead and fix the hundreds of links to [[Paris]] so that they point to 
[[Paris, France]] (which is going to be the new home for this article under 
the new city naming convention) and the 10 or so that need to be redirected 
to one of the several other meanings of [[Paris]] and then maintain that 
disambiguation page by doing the same thing every so often as new 
contributors naturally link to THE Paris by simply linking to [[Paris]]. The 
whole concept of the disambiguation notice has failed -- people just don't 
"go back and fix the link" as requested. Therefore, maintenance shifts to the 
person creating these non-articles.

I would prefer however, that since simply saying Paris is almost any context 
almost always is unambiguously meant to mean [[Paris, France]], that 
[[Paris]] should be a redirect to [[Paris, France]] (giving the French city 
redirect priority over the use of the page [[Paris]]).  

> I think it's a bad idea to assume some kind of universal context when
> writing articles, because everyone has a slightly different idea of what
> the universal context is.

Well, I guess we should abandon all naming conventions then (which is where 
the universal context arises here). If there is no universal context, then 
there is no need to naturally disambiguate terms and wikipedia degenerates 
into a Jargon file with loads of naming conflicts, misdirected links and an 
inordinate amount of the use of tedious piping. 

--maveric149