This WikiProject is a forum for gnomes who try to fix such bad bluelinks, to avoid duplication of effort and to share techniques. This is not the place to discuss things like specific
WP:Guidelines (WP:PG) or
WP:Requested moves (WP:RM) - the appropriate
WP:Talk pages (WP:TP) are thataway →
This is everyday gnoming. If there is a corresponding (disambiguation) page or a
WP:ONEOTHER-type hatnote, look at that. If there is no match there (and the search tool turns up nothing - it sometimes does), choose between unlinking,
WP:REDLINKing, and creating a new
WP:REDIRECT - and, if appropriate, add an entry to a DAB page or a {{
redirect}} hatnote to an article. If in doubt, ask at
Wikipedia Talk:Disambiguation (WT:DAB) or at
Wikipedia Talk:Disambiguation pages with links (WT:DPL).
Techniques for finding bad bluelinks
The human eyeball is the only sure resource. However, some search techniques have proved useful in getting the numbers to be looked at down to something manageable. You can help by adding others:
Uppercase versions of PTOPICs which are not proper nouns (e.g.
Bull). (Such searches often turn up violations of
MOS:CAPS; you can console yourself with the thought that even if you haven't corrected an error, you have improved the encyclopaedia.)
Lowercase versions of PTOPICs which are proper nouns (e.g.
slough, which may mean
slough (hydrology) rather than the town).
Links in quotes or italics (e.g. "
FizBuz" or FizBuz) without obvious need because the main article does not have them (e.g. The Crown, which may mean
The Crown (TV series)). Such links may turn out to be
WP:QUOTES or
WP:ITALICS violations; for the consolation, see above.
Variations on the above, where links to the main article should be in quotes or italics (e.g.
hamlet, which may mean
hamlet (place) rather than the play).
Advanced search techniques for (among other things) efficiently finding such links can be recorded and discussed in
WP:WikiProject Bluelink patrol/Workshop.
This section is broadly set up from oldest to newest, with the idea that new ideas get posted at the bottom, get looked at, and finally bubble up into Past or Ongoing. That scheme also applies within subsections: oldest first - newest last.
Past investigations
WP:WikiProject Bluelink patrol/Archive contains records of investigations carried out at any time, whether as part of this WikiProject or independently of it.
Ongoing investigations
Certain pages will continue to accumulate bad incoming links.
User:HostBot/Top 1000 report shows Wikipedia's most visited pages, some of which enjoy temporary popularity. Most entries are not relevant to this project but qualified titles may be worth checking if the base name leads to a different article. For example, if
The Crown (TV series) is popular then
The Crown may attract links intended for the series.
Certes (
talk) 14:40, 3 February 2021 (UTC)reply
Recently completed investigations
Items may be left here for others to check, or seek inspiration from, before moving to the
Archive.
Here is a list of qualified titles having the most incoming wikilinks. I've fixed some errors such as
Accolade →
Accolade (company). Those that remain are either close enough to ignore (
Swimming →
Swimming (sport) seems pedantic) or awkward to check. Comments or help welcome.
Certes (
talk) 17:05, 19 February 2021 (UTC)reply
@
GoingBatty: Sorry, that's an old list and I'd done all the easy wins on it. I've replaced it by
G works of art. I've already done Gramophone and Narky Blert fixed Gladiator recently but others near the top may be fruitful. I can generate lists H–Z and put them somewhere more accessible if they would be useful.
Certes (
talk) 10:43, 26 May 2021 (UTC)reply
@
Certes: If you want to generate additional lists (and decide on a way for us to document what we're doing so we don't step on each other), I'd do more work. Thanks!
GoingBatty (
talk) 20:41, 26 May 2021 (UTC)reply
Atlantic and
Atlantis. Atlantic won't be easy, but a search for recordings might turn up a few.
Narky Blert (
talk) 08:36, 1 February 2021 (UTC)reply
@
Narky Blert: I fixed about 36 70 articles. Atlantic should usually be Atlantic Monthly or The Atlantic. In citation templates, it can be The Atlantic or
Atlantic Records. For |label= or articles containing "Atlantic Records" or albums or discographies, it's usually Atlantic Records. (Also found a
Custard and a couple
Tommy Boy that I changed to record companies.)
GoingBatty (
talk) 02:08, 16 February 2021 (UTC)reply
Saxon in progress. This looks like a nightmare, where the majority of inlinks may be wrong. In every other similar case I can think of (
English,
French,
German,
Italian, and so on), the adjective is a DAB page at the basename, not a redirect to an ethnic group. This may need cleanup followed by a
WP:RM.
Narky Blert (
talk) 22:27, 19 May 2021 (UTC)reply
Trove suggests {{
cite news}} templates for Australian news articles, but about 230 newspapers have wrong wikilinks. I am investigating the scope of the problem with a view to having them repaired automatically. Further details:
User:Certes/Trove. See also
#New investigation suggestions below.
Certes (
talk) 01:08, 19 August 2021 (UTC)reply
Places whose
WP:COMMONNAME differs from the local spelling (which should be anglicised per a little-known sentence in
MOS:ROMANISATION, and are often
WP:EASTEREGGs). I'm working on Milano, and have already turned up a basketball club (but not as of yet
Milano, Texas). Fortunately, there are no more than a dozen or so.
Narky Blert (
talk) 15:55, 18 October 2021 (UTC)reply
That should be all Trove mislinks, though I'll leave them here for now in case others find links to elsewhere.
Certes (
talk) 19:16, 23 December 2021 (UTC)reply
Grass,
Stone (+
Stones) – primary redirects with a large number of incoming links (respectively 4,000 and 550). This is convoluted, it may lead to some article rewriting and will likely also involve a few discussions. I'll be working on it in the coming months. – Uanfala (
talk) 22:11, 1 July 2022 (UTC)reply
If you have thought of a bluelink which might be worth looking at, or looking at again, or indeed are in the process of looking at, post it here as a bulleted list entry with brief comments (and sign). Please keep date order: oldest at the top. If you complete one of these investigations, please move it to the Archive, or to Recently completed investigations (just above).
Revolution. I fixed the links that should be to the album, novel, roller coaster, TV show, etc. There are others that should link to a specific revolution.
GoingBatty (
talk) 05:02, 30 January 2021 (UTC)reply
Following the same train of thought,
Port (it wouldn't be easy to separate the water from the wine).
Narky Blert (
talk) 17:02, 17 February 2021 (UTC)reply
@
Narky Blert: Bonus points for the pun! Fixed the
Port links where "wine" was nearby.
GoingBatty (
talk) 01:57, 18 February 2021 (UTC)reply
@
Narky Blert: Fixed a few more by searching for Wine insource:/\[\[port\]\]/ (upper and lower case).
GoingBatty (
talk) 23:06, 19 February 2021 (UTC)reply
Most of the 1300 links are from articles which mention US or America. Maybe skip this one as improvable in theory but not actually wrong?
Certes (
talk) 14:33, 11 March 2021 (UTC)reply
A quick initial search turned up a few links specific to Canada or USA, usually tied to the date (they're about 6 weeks apart). I'll have a more detailed look.
Narky Blert (
talk) 15:07, 11 March 2021 (UTC)reply
I'm looking at Army, which is slow but fruitful: 14 articles beginning with A fixed.
Certes (
talk) 15:57, 14 March 2021 (UTC)reply
I've looked at several hundred articles and changed a few dozen links, but this one is very slow going and I'm not sure how far we should take things. For example,
Dan Foster (DJ) mentions
Air Force. Can we safely conclude that this is the
United States Air Force? If so, is there any value in changing that link or would it be an
WP:Easter egg?
Certes (
talk) 12:14, 23 March 2021 (UTC)reply
I think that's a safe bet. The thing to watch out for is service up to 1947, when the
USAAF and the Naval and Marine air services were combined.
Narky Blert (
talk) 19:02, 23 March 2021 (UTC)reply
Still in progress. Roughly 160 Army, 60 Navy, 40 Air Force, 40 Marines done.
Certes (
talk) 22:52, 15 April 2021 (UTC)reply
@
GoingBatty: That's a relief, a preliminary look suggested anything but a simple problem. I may have a look for
dance + music -
dance music for historical stuff.
Narky Blert (
talk) 05:58, 25 May 2021 (UTC)reply
The main Trove errors, which I monitor, are
The Daily Telegraph and
The Sunday Times, both with or without The. Other perennials include
Evening Journal and
The Northern Miner. Could the tool(s) which add these produce a log of their work which could be checked and possibly even fixed automatically?
Certes (
talk) 11:05, 4 March 2021 (UTC)reply
User:Certes/Trove lists the main offenders with suggested replacements. I've had a go at fixing them all, but they will recur. I've also e-mailed the
NLA, who replied courteously but don't seem to have changed anything yet.
Certes (
talk) 16:23, 18 December 2022 (UTC)reply
Currently (but very slowly) trying to fix some of these: \[\[([hH]ip[- ]?[hH]op)\]\]->\[\[$1 music|$1\]\]. I'm trying to be careful with things that essentially say "influenced by hip hop" since that could mean either the culture or the genre.
eviolite(talk) 03:06, 5 May 2021 (UTC)reply
I'm working on new instances of
Hip hop and varieties, but there are many existing links to be fixed.
GoingBatty (
talk) 19:18, 5 May 2021 (UTC)reply
Tons of
parliamentary constituencies in many countries and subnational regions, e.g. provinces. These often share names with cities or regions within (e.g.
Chippenham and
Chippenham (UK Parliament constituency)). Also be careful with former districts. I'll try to cook up a spreadsheet sometime for various countries to make a list of them(this is probably infeasible and unhelpful since the constituency and city/region are related), but currently I'm going through searching through insource:/MP for \[\[[A-Za-z ]*\]\]/ which seems to be a decently common format.
20UF6(talk) 23:33, 2 May 2021 (UTC)reply
Nevada - I can't think of a good way to filter the links down to a manageable number.
Narky Blert (
talk) 08:13, 25 June 2021 (UTC)reply
Ministry of higher education was a dab until 2014. Some of the incoming links should go to one of the specific country articles rather than the BCA.
MB 16:04, 20 September 2021 (UTC)reply
I'm monitoring Cambridge (300 fixed so far including a few for
Cambridge, Ontario and
Cambridge, Maryland; about two new cases per month). As you say, there are too many to search rigorously and my heuristics will have missed some. What did you fix? It may suggest a search pattern for similar cases.
Certes (
talk) 23:42, 23 October 2021 (UTC)reply
I didn't make a note; the link was near something else (see Boston, above); "Massachusetts" may have been the giveaway.
Narky Blert (
talk) 02:15, 24 October 2021 (UTC)reply
Rutland, Vermont. These three
[2] are clearly not about the English county but contain few clues as to which
Rutland, Vermont they refer to.
Certes (
talk) 23:36, 23 October 2021 (UTC)reply
There's a dispiriting tendency in New England to have villages, towns and cities which are in near enough the same place which have the same name which are indistinguishable without checking local records; I just {{
dn}}, in the hope someone knows. See also
North Vancouver. I've had some success in modern cases by hitting Google Maps for the street address, or (for roads) by looking at other articles with the same link. In a very few cases, dates of incorporation can help. For places with the same name in different counties, sideways evidence like ZIP or dialling codes or names of roads or schools can help (it's useful to know that names of US Post Offices are unique); but some problems (notably birthplaces of ballplayers born late C19 or early C20, but even some late C20 and C21 deathplaces) are simply insoluble online. For problems which are truly insoluble (e.g. places in pre-modern England, or in prewar central Europe), I sometimes resort to a neutral "could be this/could be that" footnote.
Thanks. I don't feel good about dumping this on someone else but I'll deliberately link them to the dab and tag as dn.
Certes (
talk) 00:16, 25 October 2021 (UTC)reply
(My least pleasant experience, by some way, on WP was addressing three problems, one after one after the other, relating to places which are in modern Belarus. I managed to solve them all by multilingual/multialphabetic searching, even though all that survives of one is a memorial plaque laid flat in the middle of a field. It took me a good hour, and a subsequent break.)
Narky Blert (
talk) 03:11, 24 October 2021 (UTC)reply
Peter Pan refers to the character, so references to the play or adaptations should probably link to another article, such as
Peter and Wendy. There are
over 500 instances of ''[[Peter Pan]]'' to be changed.
GoingBatty (
talk) 01:47, 22 February 2022 (UTC)reply
Mandan has over 700 links. Haven't checked whether there are links intended for the other
Mandans.
MB 04:12, 25 November 2021 (UTC)reply
Just the one fixed: turned red, in one of those articles we love so much where an editor wikilinks a huge list of tiny villages in the hope that none of them shares its name with anything notable.
Certes (
talk) 19:12, 20 February 2022 (UTC)reply
Paradise Valley, Arizona is an independent municipality (town) in Arizona bordering the city of Phoenix, in which there is
urban village called
Paradise Valley, Phoenix. I just fixed one link to the town which should have been to the village. As these are easily confused, there may be others.
MB 04:28, 30 March 2022 (UTC)reply
It's worth noting Arts Council, National Service and Privy Council and similar cases but there are lots of them: see
Ministry of higher education above.
Certes (
talk) 10:59, 16 December 2022 (UTC)reply
Military Times - target of this redirect just changed, some could be meant for prior target.
Done, though the ships have confused histories.
Certes (
talk) 10:33, 16 December 2022 (UTC)reply
Desmos was an article on tree genus. Now it is a redirect to a calculator, which correctly looks to be PT. Links to genus need to be changed.
MB 01:46, 16 August 2022 (UTC)reply
Done: 7
Desmos (genus), 1 unlinked (a
society so secret it has no article). If the calculator really is the PT, its article should move to the base name.
Certes (
talk) 12:32, 16 August 2022 (UTC)reply
Thanks. The editor that changed the redirect thought so, and I looked at pageviews which show the calculator gets overwhelmingly more views than the genus. If you agree, or at least don't disagree, I'll just boldly move it.
MB 14:59, 16 August 2022 (UTC)reply
Equatorial: there are 126 articles that use the lazy link [[equator]]ial[3], and from a quick look it seems that in many cases something else is meant instead. I'm not going to have the time for this, so please help yourself. The dab page at
Equatorial may be incomplete. –
Uanfala (
talk) 12:42, 22 November 2022 (UTC)reply
I'd hold off on this one until the RfD on Founding Fathers (uc F) closes, in case both redirects are retargeted to the U.S. article.
Certes (
talk) 18:51, 15 December 2022 (UTC)reply
Suresh - given name page with a bunch of links. Some of them are due to a recent move request where the links weren't cleaned up after and can be fixed using AWB, but some of them are longstanding, and need someone to work out which person they are referring to.
* Pppery *it has begun... 20:21, 6 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Abd al-Rahman and its redirects seem to have a lot of links that should be going to specific people. More generally there seems to be no process for fixing links to set indices/given name pages, so there's probably a lot of mislinks to them lurking.
* Pppery *it has begun... 02:28, 8 March 2024 (UTC)reply
I had a trawl through our hundred or so most-linked surname pages in 2020 and fixed links intended for individuals (or other topics. The winner was
Leopold Zunz, with 125 articles linking his name to
Zunz. I added the worst offenders to
a list of pages whose new incoming links I monitor daily. However, there will still be plenty of such links that neither I nor anyone else has noticed.
Certes (
talk) 21:25, 8 March 2024 (UTC)reply
I think I only checked direct links, not those via redirects.
Certes (
talk) 11:19, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply
More similar names with many mislinks (often) through redirects. Some of these are due to
Template:Bir Bikrom, which could do with a once-over to check all the links in it go to the right person.
I moved a bunch of partially disambiguated titles to fully disambiguated ones revealing a bunch of links which I could not easily determine which person they referred to, and there were a lot of longstanding ones as well.
* Pppery *it has begun... 20:50, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Bir Bikrom is one of many templates which seem to have been created by putting square brackets round each item in a list without checking the destination of the resulting links.
Taher is probably
Abu Taher rather than the Algerian city, but only a subject expert would know. The cited source for recipients is not in English (and has a bad web certificate). Sometimes we may just have to unlink, and consider deleting the worst templates which end up with few or no blue links.
Certes (
talk) 23:08, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply
This WikiProject is a forum for gnomes who try to fix such bad bluelinks, to avoid duplication of effort and to share techniques. This is not the place to discuss things like specific
WP:Guidelines (WP:PG) or
WP:Requested moves (WP:RM) - the appropriate
WP:Talk pages (WP:TP) are thataway →
This is everyday gnoming. If there is a corresponding (disambiguation) page or a
WP:ONEOTHER-type hatnote, look at that. If there is no match there (and the search tool turns up nothing - it sometimes does), choose between unlinking,
WP:REDLINKing, and creating a new
WP:REDIRECT - and, if appropriate, add an entry to a DAB page or a {{
redirect}} hatnote to an article. If in doubt, ask at
Wikipedia Talk:Disambiguation (WT:DAB) or at
Wikipedia Talk:Disambiguation pages with links (WT:DPL).
Techniques for finding bad bluelinks
The human eyeball is the only sure resource. However, some search techniques have proved useful in getting the numbers to be looked at down to something manageable. You can help by adding others:
Uppercase versions of PTOPICs which are not proper nouns (e.g.
Bull). (Such searches often turn up violations of
MOS:CAPS; you can console yourself with the thought that even if you haven't corrected an error, you have improved the encyclopaedia.)
Lowercase versions of PTOPICs which are proper nouns (e.g.
slough, which may mean
slough (hydrology) rather than the town).
Links in quotes or italics (e.g. "
FizBuz" or FizBuz) without obvious need because the main article does not have them (e.g. The Crown, which may mean
The Crown (TV series)). Such links may turn out to be
WP:QUOTES or
WP:ITALICS violations; for the consolation, see above.
Variations on the above, where links to the main article should be in quotes or italics (e.g.
hamlet, which may mean
hamlet (place) rather than the play).
Advanced search techniques for (among other things) efficiently finding such links can be recorded and discussed in
WP:WikiProject Bluelink patrol/Workshop.
This section is broadly set up from oldest to newest, with the idea that new ideas get posted at the bottom, get looked at, and finally bubble up into Past or Ongoing. That scheme also applies within subsections: oldest first - newest last.
Past investigations
WP:WikiProject Bluelink patrol/Archive contains records of investigations carried out at any time, whether as part of this WikiProject or independently of it.
Ongoing investigations
Certain pages will continue to accumulate bad incoming links.
User:HostBot/Top 1000 report shows Wikipedia's most visited pages, some of which enjoy temporary popularity. Most entries are not relevant to this project but qualified titles may be worth checking if the base name leads to a different article. For example, if
The Crown (TV series) is popular then
The Crown may attract links intended for the series.
Certes (
talk) 14:40, 3 February 2021 (UTC)reply
Recently completed investigations
Items may be left here for others to check, or seek inspiration from, before moving to the
Archive.
Here is a list of qualified titles having the most incoming wikilinks. I've fixed some errors such as
Accolade →
Accolade (company). Those that remain are either close enough to ignore (
Swimming →
Swimming (sport) seems pedantic) or awkward to check. Comments or help welcome.
Certes (
talk) 17:05, 19 February 2021 (UTC)reply
@
GoingBatty: Sorry, that's an old list and I'd done all the easy wins on it. I've replaced it by
G works of art. I've already done Gramophone and Narky Blert fixed Gladiator recently but others near the top may be fruitful. I can generate lists H–Z and put them somewhere more accessible if they would be useful.
Certes (
talk) 10:43, 26 May 2021 (UTC)reply
@
Certes: If you want to generate additional lists (and decide on a way for us to document what we're doing so we don't step on each other), I'd do more work. Thanks!
GoingBatty (
talk) 20:41, 26 May 2021 (UTC)reply
Atlantic and
Atlantis. Atlantic won't be easy, but a search for recordings might turn up a few.
Narky Blert (
talk) 08:36, 1 February 2021 (UTC)reply
@
Narky Blert: I fixed about 36 70 articles. Atlantic should usually be Atlantic Monthly or The Atlantic. In citation templates, it can be The Atlantic or
Atlantic Records. For |label= or articles containing "Atlantic Records" or albums or discographies, it's usually Atlantic Records. (Also found a
Custard and a couple
Tommy Boy that I changed to record companies.)
GoingBatty (
talk) 02:08, 16 February 2021 (UTC)reply
Saxon in progress. This looks like a nightmare, where the majority of inlinks may be wrong. In every other similar case I can think of (
English,
French,
German,
Italian, and so on), the adjective is a DAB page at the basename, not a redirect to an ethnic group. This may need cleanup followed by a
WP:RM.
Narky Blert (
talk) 22:27, 19 May 2021 (UTC)reply
Trove suggests {{
cite news}} templates for Australian news articles, but about 230 newspapers have wrong wikilinks. I am investigating the scope of the problem with a view to having them repaired automatically. Further details:
User:Certes/Trove. See also
#New investigation suggestions below.
Certes (
talk) 01:08, 19 August 2021 (UTC)reply
Places whose
WP:COMMONNAME differs from the local spelling (which should be anglicised per a little-known sentence in
MOS:ROMANISATION, and are often
WP:EASTEREGGs). I'm working on Milano, and have already turned up a basketball club (but not as of yet
Milano, Texas). Fortunately, there are no more than a dozen or so.
Narky Blert (
talk) 15:55, 18 October 2021 (UTC)reply
That should be all Trove mislinks, though I'll leave them here for now in case others find links to elsewhere.
Certes (
talk) 19:16, 23 December 2021 (UTC)reply
Grass,
Stone (+
Stones) – primary redirects with a large number of incoming links (respectively 4,000 and 550). This is convoluted, it may lead to some article rewriting and will likely also involve a few discussions. I'll be working on it in the coming months. – Uanfala (
talk) 22:11, 1 July 2022 (UTC)reply
If you have thought of a bluelink which might be worth looking at, or looking at again, or indeed are in the process of looking at, post it here as a bulleted list entry with brief comments (and sign). Please keep date order: oldest at the top. If you complete one of these investigations, please move it to the Archive, or to Recently completed investigations (just above).
Revolution. I fixed the links that should be to the album, novel, roller coaster, TV show, etc. There are others that should link to a specific revolution.
GoingBatty (
talk) 05:02, 30 January 2021 (UTC)reply
Following the same train of thought,
Port (it wouldn't be easy to separate the water from the wine).
Narky Blert (
talk) 17:02, 17 February 2021 (UTC)reply
@
Narky Blert: Bonus points for the pun! Fixed the
Port links where "wine" was nearby.
GoingBatty (
talk) 01:57, 18 February 2021 (UTC)reply
@
Narky Blert: Fixed a few more by searching for Wine insource:/\[\[port\]\]/ (upper and lower case).
GoingBatty (
talk) 23:06, 19 February 2021 (UTC)reply
Most of the 1300 links are from articles which mention US or America. Maybe skip this one as improvable in theory but not actually wrong?
Certes (
talk) 14:33, 11 March 2021 (UTC)reply
A quick initial search turned up a few links specific to Canada or USA, usually tied to the date (they're about 6 weeks apart). I'll have a more detailed look.
Narky Blert (
talk) 15:07, 11 March 2021 (UTC)reply
I'm looking at Army, which is slow but fruitful: 14 articles beginning with A fixed.
Certes (
talk) 15:57, 14 March 2021 (UTC)reply
I've looked at several hundred articles and changed a few dozen links, but this one is very slow going and I'm not sure how far we should take things. For example,
Dan Foster (DJ) mentions
Air Force. Can we safely conclude that this is the
United States Air Force? If so, is there any value in changing that link or would it be an
WP:Easter egg?
Certes (
talk) 12:14, 23 March 2021 (UTC)reply
I think that's a safe bet. The thing to watch out for is service up to 1947, when the
USAAF and the Naval and Marine air services were combined.
Narky Blert (
talk) 19:02, 23 March 2021 (UTC)reply
Still in progress. Roughly 160 Army, 60 Navy, 40 Air Force, 40 Marines done.
Certes (
talk) 22:52, 15 April 2021 (UTC)reply
@
GoingBatty: That's a relief, a preliminary look suggested anything but a simple problem. I may have a look for
dance + music -
dance music for historical stuff.
Narky Blert (
talk) 05:58, 25 May 2021 (UTC)reply
The main Trove errors, which I monitor, are
The Daily Telegraph and
The Sunday Times, both with or without The. Other perennials include
Evening Journal and
The Northern Miner. Could the tool(s) which add these produce a log of their work which could be checked and possibly even fixed automatically?
Certes (
talk) 11:05, 4 March 2021 (UTC)reply
User:Certes/Trove lists the main offenders with suggested replacements. I've had a go at fixing them all, but they will recur. I've also e-mailed the
NLA, who replied courteously but don't seem to have changed anything yet.
Certes (
talk) 16:23, 18 December 2022 (UTC)reply
Currently (but very slowly) trying to fix some of these: \[\[([hH]ip[- ]?[hH]op)\]\]->\[\[$1 music|$1\]\]. I'm trying to be careful with things that essentially say "influenced by hip hop" since that could mean either the culture or the genre.
eviolite(talk) 03:06, 5 May 2021 (UTC)reply
I'm working on new instances of
Hip hop and varieties, but there are many existing links to be fixed.
GoingBatty (
talk) 19:18, 5 May 2021 (UTC)reply
Tons of
parliamentary constituencies in many countries and subnational regions, e.g. provinces. These often share names with cities or regions within (e.g.
Chippenham and
Chippenham (UK Parliament constituency)). Also be careful with former districts. I'll try to cook up a spreadsheet sometime for various countries to make a list of them(this is probably infeasible and unhelpful since the constituency and city/region are related), but currently I'm going through searching through insource:/MP for \[\[[A-Za-z ]*\]\]/ which seems to be a decently common format.
20UF6(talk) 23:33, 2 May 2021 (UTC)reply
Nevada - I can't think of a good way to filter the links down to a manageable number.
Narky Blert (
talk) 08:13, 25 June 2021 (UTC)reply
Ministry of higher education was a dab until 2014. Some of the incoming links should go to one of the specific country articles rather than the BCA.
MB 16:04, 20 September 2021 (UTC)reply
I'm monitoring Cambridge (300 fixed so far including a few for
Cambridge, Ontario and
Cambridge, Maryland; about two new cases per month). As you say, there are too many to search rigorously and my heuristics will have missed some. What did you fix? It may suggest a search pattern for similar cases.
Certes (
talk) 23:42, 23 October 2021 (UTC)reply
I didn't make a note; the link was near something else (see Boston, above); "Massachusetts" may have been the giveaway.
Narky Blert (
talk) 02:15, 24 October 2021 (UTC)reply
Rutland, Vermont. These three
[2] are clearly not about the English county but contain few clues as to which
Rutland, Vermont they refer to.
Certes (
talk) 23:36, 23 October 2021 (UTC)reply
There's a dispiriting tendency in New England to have villages, towns and cities which are in near enough the same place which have the same name which are indistinguishable without checking local records; I just {{
dn}}, in the hope someone knows. See also
North Vancouver. I've had some success in modern cases by hitting Google Maps for the street address, or (for roads) by looking at other articles with the same link. In a very few cases, dates of incorporation can help. For places with the same name in different counties, sideways evidence like ZIP or dialling codes or names of roads or schools can help (it's useful to know that names of US Post Offices are unique); but some problems (notably birthplaces of ballplayers born late C19 or early C20, but even some late C20 and C21 deathplaces) are simply insoluble online. For problems which are truly insoluble (e.g. places in pre-modern England, or in prewar central Europe), I sometimes resort to a neutral "could be this/could be that" footnote.
Thanks. I don't feel good about dumping this on someone else but I'll deliberately link them to the dab and tag as dn.
Certes (
talk) 00:16, 25 October 2021 (UTC)reply
(My least pleasant experience, by some way, on WP was addressing three problems, one after one after the other, relating to places which are in modern Belarus. I managed to solve them all by multilingual/multialphabetic searching, even though all that survives of one is a memorial plaque laid flat in the middle of a field. It took me a good hour, and a subsequent break.)
Narky Blert (
talk) 03:11, 24 October 2021 (UTC)reply
Peter Pan refers to the character, so references to the play or adaptations should probably link to another article, such as
Peter and Wendy. There are
over 500 instances of ''[[Peter Pan]]'' to be changed.
GoingBatty (
talk) 01:47, 22 February 2022 (UTC)reply
Mandan has over 700 links. Haven't checked whether there are links intended for the other
Mandans.
MB 04:12, 25 November 2021 (UTC)reply
Just the one fixed: turned red, in one of those articles we love so much where an editor wikilinks a huge list of tiny villages in the hope that none of them shares its name with anything notable.
Certes (
talk) 19:12, 20 February 2022 (UTC)reply
Paradise Valley, Arizona is an independent municipality (town) in Arizona bordering the city of Phoenix, in which there is
urban village called
Paradise Valley, Phoenix. I just fixed one link to the town which should have been to the village. As these are easily confused, there may be others.
MB 04:28, 30 March 2022 (UTC)reply
It's worth noting Arts Council, National Service and Privy Council and similar cases but there are lots of them: see
Ministry of higher education above.
Certes (
talk) 10:59, 16 December 2022 (UTC)reply
Military Times - target of this redirect just changed, some could be meant for prior target.
Done, though the ships have confused histories.
Certes (
talk) 10:33, 16 December 2022 (UTC)reply
Desmos was an article on tree genus. Now it is a redirect to a calculator, which correctly looks to be PT. Links to genus need to be changed.
MB 01:46, 16 August 2022 (UTC)reply
Done: 7
Desmos (genus), 1 unlinked (a
society so secret it has no article). If the calculator really is the PT, its article should move to the base name.
Certes (
talk) 12:32, 16 August 2022 (UTC)reply
Thanks. The editor that changed the redirect thought so, and I looked at pageviews which show the calculator gets overwhelmingly more views than the genus. If you agree, or at least don't disagree, I'll just boldly move it.
MB 14:59, 16 August 2022 (UTC)reply
Equatorial: there are 126 articles that use the lazy link [[equator]]ial[3], and from a quick look it seems that in many cases something else is meant instead. I'm not going to have the time for this, so please help yourself. The dab page at
Equatorial may be incomplete. –
Uanfala (
talk) 12:42, 22 November 2022 (UTC)reply
I'd hold off on this one until the RfD on Founding Fathers (uc F) closes, in case both redirects are retargeted to the U.S. article.
Certes (
talk) 18:51, 15 December 2022 (UTC)reply
Suresh - given name page with a bunch of links. Some of them are due to a recent move request where the links weren't cleaned up after and can be fixed using AWB, but some of them are longstanding, and need someone to work out which person they are referring to.
* Pppery *it has begun... 20:21, 6 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Abd al-Rahman and its redirects seem to have a lot of links that should be going to specific people. More generally there seems to be no process for fixing links to set indices/given name pages, so there's probably a lot of mislinks to them lurking.
* Pppery *it has begun... 02:28, 8 March 2024 (UTC)reply
I had a trawl through our hundred or so most-linked surname pages in 2020 and fixed links intended for individuals (or other topics. The winner was
Leopold Zunz, with 125 articles linking his name to
Zunz. I added the worst offenders to
a list of pages whose new incoming links I monitor daily. However, there will still be plenty of such links that neither I nor anyone else has noticed.
Certes (
talk) 21:25, 8 March 2024 (UTC)reply
I think I only checked direct links, not those via redirects.
Certes (
talk) 11:19, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply
More similar names with many mislinks (often) through redirects. Some of these are due to
Template:Bir Bikrom, which could do with a once-over to check all the links in it go to the right person.
I moved a bunch of partially disambiguated titles to fully disambiguated ones revealing a bunch of links which I could not easily determine which person they referred to, and there were a lot of longstanding ones as well.
* Pppery *it has begun... 20:50, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Bir Bikrom is one of many templates which seem to have been created by putting square brackets round each item in a list without checking the destination of the resulting links.
Taher is probably
Abu Taher rather than the Algerian city, but only a subject expert would know. The cited source for recipients is not in English (and has a bad web certificate). Sometimes we may just have to unlink, and consider deleting the worst templates which end up with few or no blue links.
Certes (
talk) 23:08, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply