This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | ← | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 | → | Archive 10 |
Consider these two ways of pointing to "other meanings" articles that are clearly minor to the main article:
Style A
Style B
In style A the alternate links are listed at the end of the introductory block, as part of the text. In style B they are listed between the title and the intro paragraph, as a side annotation.
Methinks that style A is better than style B. In both styles the alternate links break the flow of the article and are "noise" for readers who are intersted in the main sense. However, in style A the break occurs where there is already a break in any case (the table-of-contents); whereas in style B the break occurs between the title and the crucial first paragraph. Said another way, in style A the reader gets immediately the defining sentence, whereas in style B he/she is forced to read the alternate links first.
So, while style B seems to be the prevalent standard, I think that style A should be used whenever possible. What do you think?
(There is also a "style C" which places the alternate links at the end of the article. However that is definitely bad because the reader will not see those links unless he/she scrolls to the end of the article.)
All the best,
Jorge Stolfi 05:26, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
What should be done in the case where a single page describes multiple homonyms with very different meanings? I think disambiguation would be most appropriate, but moving either of the meanings to a new page would lose the authorship. Is there any ability to duplicate an entire page including history? Zuytdorp Survivor 23:56, 25 Apr 2004 (UTC)
The disambiguation policy addresses what to do in the case where a primary meaning exists, but there are other articles available that discuss secondary meanings: these are linked to at the top with a very brief description. However, there is another similar case where there is a secondary meaning that neither has nor deserves an article of its own, and yet cannot be described briefly enough to place at the top of a page without dominating the introduction. On the other hand, when such mini-articles are placed at the end of a page, it's quite unlikely that someone seeking them would ever come across them. There's no visual indication they should even think of scrolling to the bottom; in reality, the only people to see these would be people who read the article on the primary topic.
I decided the best thing to do in this case is to delimit the mini-article with the usual horizontal bars, but to place it immediately after the introduction and preceding the first major section. In this way it is visible but does not dominate. As a case in point I point out my recent edits to Fantasia. However, there is the conceivable problem with this approach that such meanings do not appear as parenthetical as they are intended to be, and following text may appear misleadingly to refer to it; perhaps italics would help.
What are your opinions?
Deco 06:01, 4 May 2004 (UTC)
For an example of what I mean, look at Discovery (album). It has something other than "disambiguation" in the parentheses, and it has the disambiguation message. I think its contents should be either on discovery or a new page called discovery (disambiguation). And while there may be rare cases when these pages have value, for the most part they're pointless. Mackerm 19:36, May 12, 2004 (UTC)
Should calls for fixing such links go to Wikipedia:Cleanup, Wikipedia:Pages needing attention or...?
I've come across two pages in need of assistance so far:
Of course, fixing this is non-trivial because it requires reading those pages to determine where the new link should go out of the context (or, in the case of Yugoslavia, should it be changed at all), so it may be useful to have a page listing those, they're not all likely to go away soon... -- Shallot 18:17, 13 May 2004 (UTC)
I've added a disambiguation page for John Hancock, with a disamb notice at the top of the default article (which discusses the person John Hancock). The disamb page includes the person, the company named John Hancock, and three buildings named John Hancock (e.g. John Hancock Tower).
I notice a lack of such disambiguation pages for people and wonder if they are a good idea? I can easily see a disamb page made for George Washington: GWU, GW Bridge, and even George, Washington.
KeithTyler 01:00, May 29, 2004 (UTC)
Version 1.3 of MediaWiki is here, and with it comes the category feature. Joy! How about in addition to adding the standard footer to disambiguation pages, we put them all in Category:Disambiguation as well? This would allow us to automatically generate what is currently maintained by hand over at Wikipedia:Links to disambiguating pages. In addition, categories can be nested so we could add [[Category:Multiple place name]], Category:Multiple personal name, etc. to Category:Disambiguation, to keep things organized like they are now. Bryan 15:35, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Sorry if this has been discussed before, but I couldn't find it (or rather didn't search for it that intently !). I was taken to the king page and found it to be a disambig page to my surprise. I was planning to redirect it to the main King article with a "King (disambiguation)" at the top that would have all the people, places and all other names to do with King. But the best redirect I can do is to monarch, and it would be inappropriate to have a link to king (disambiguation) at the monarch page. So how do I go about the main article disambiguation. Jay 19:15, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I'm in favour of #3. King has to be a "primary topic disambiguation". In English, "King" brings up the primary meaning of monarch, other usages are derived.
Anyway the reason for bringing up the scenario on this page was to clarify the implementation of #3. A user who types Monarch on his browser will feel lost and confused if he comes to a page that says "The word King can refer to a specific kind of monarch. For other uses of King, see King (disambiguation)." (All kings are monarchs, but all monarchs are not kings) In fact I've noticed some pages which have this scenario, and I had thought then that this is one scenario where the disambiguation policy has gone wrong.
Is there some way we can hide the "king disambiguation" statement on monarch if user goes to monarch directly, and shows the king disambiguation statement only when he goes to monarch via a redirect from King ? Maybe some tweak in the software can take care of this ? Jay 12:07, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Statement mentioned by Docu is I feel an imperfect yet the most logical one we can use. I wonder what would happen if I make "emperor" and a few other pages as primary topic disambiguation to "monarch". On the Monarch page, it would go this way, line after line :
This is not a real scenario, just fictional, but hope it makes us think of a cleaner solution. Jay 10:14, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)
In order to avoid constant reverts and re-reverts, could someone check which of the two recent versions of TNT is preferred? I've never seen any other disambig page with a numbered list before. -- Chuq 02:37, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Added a Wikimedia reference, because the disambiguation category is used in Wiktionary too. See http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Disambiguation.
The policy states that if a title can be disambiguated by lengthening with appropriate words, that should be preferred over adding a parenthesized term, as in Java programming language instead of Java (programming language). Does this still correspond to actual practice? I think people are actually doing the paren thing by default, at least that seems like what I see 90% of the time or more. My surmise is that the support for piping the paren version is encouraging it despite policy, plus one doesn't have ponder whether a multi-word term is plausible - just put the proper name outside the parens, disambiguator inside. Should the policy be revised to reflect reality? Stan 04:08, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
There are many pages containing a primary topic that have a disambig "see also" commentary on the header. Two styles of indicating this are abundant:
Style 1
Whatever is a bla bla bla... ...
and
Style 2
See whatever (disambiguation) for other meanings.
Whatever is a bla bla bla... ...
Even more,
Wikipedia:Disambiguation uses the second style, and the example page used in the article,
Rome, uses the first style. I think a decission should be made and a policy issued. My vote goes for the first style, it looks somewhat neater in my opinion.
xDCDx 14:59, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC)
To Joy: I don't want to sound rude, but if we don't fix policies for details like this, although both styles are perfectly understable by a casual reader, this causes Wikipedia to look unprofessional, and I don't think we want that. Our goal is to make Wikipedia the best we can. :)
It's a little of an offtopic but, in my opinion, the same must be followed for Title (movie) and Title (film). The current Wikipedia:Naming conventions (movies) page says the proper way is the first one, but there are (unfortunately) a good quantity of Title (film) pages.
xDCDx 00:59, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I sometimes worry about vandalism on disambiguation pages. I'm guessing people regularly watch disambig pages only if they were formerly an article which has since been moved to a disambiguated title -- that's how it works for me, anyway. We've probably all stumbled across dab pages with old vandalism. There could be hundreds of dab pages with old vandalism. Am I the only one worried about this? Does anybody habitually watch dab pages? Tuf-Kat 01:22, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)
I'd like to propose the addition of the following:
Chameleon 18:00, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)
"One can also disambiguate at the bottom of the article like this:"
Do you intend to disallow any page with a <hr> ? I'd object. It's often reasonable until there are articles, rather than a set of stubs. -- User:Docu
I'm starting to see this a lot: people put the "This page is about such-and-such, for other meanings see blargh" message on pages that are already disambiguated. For example, I just took it off of the top of Flip-flop (politics). IMO there's no point in having the message on any page except the parent article ( Flip-flop) since there's no possible way you could get to the politics one if you actually had another meaning of flip-flop in mind (nothing redirects to the politics one either). Just thought I'd solicit opinions before writing it into the policy here. DopefishJustin (・∀・) 22:16, Nov 2, 2004 (UTC)
Please read this very slowly and carefully:
I suggest that in all dis-ambiguation pages that (with the {{disambig}} template at the bottom of the article) are too long to reach the {{disambig}} template without scrolling down should have the (disambiguation) suffix in their article title. Sometimes there is one dominant meaning; sometimes more than one. If there is only one, such as London, then there should be a link to the dis-ambiguation page at the top, namely London (disambiguation). If there is more than one, such as Georgia, then the title with no suffix should re-direct; it will not change the titles of any articles it links to. Any comments?? 66.245.81.205 20:10, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)
This category is getting awfully big and takes a very long time to load (it took me 3 tries to defeat the time-out bunny). Would it be a good idea to sub-categorise: for example create Category:Disambiguation (people)? -- Phil | Talk 12:04, Nov 16, 2004 (UTC)
I was actually thinking in terms of a similar situation to that of stubs; there seem to be two avenues of attack, one using a metastub, one using various cloned templates. YMMV as to the best way: either necessitates the changing of a shed-load of articles. NB at the moment there appears to be no such thing as an optional parameter to a template. -- Phil | Talk 13:12, Nov 16, 2004 (UTC)
Returning to this topic after the Mediawiki upgrade to version 1.4, the situation is much eased with the progressive display for categories. However I still think there is some mileage in my suggestion. Looking at the first tranche of 200 entries in Category:Disambiguation, there's a bunch of military topics ( 20th Division, 24th Division, 25th Division, etc). To take these as an example, I would suggest creating {{ military-disambig}} which would belong to Category:Disambiguation (military terms) which would obviously be a sub-category of Category:Disambiguation. Obviously there will be some pages which cover so much scope that they cannot immediately be categorised in this fashion, but if we bite off the easy ones first, we can look at the difficult ones later. -- Phil | Talk 11:40, Jan 14, 2005 (UTC)
I've added the the CategoryTOC template to the category. Does this and the progressive display adequately address the original concern? -- Rick Block 17:52, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
What is the general policy or advice on disambiguating homophones? Example I was looking at: Mercia, Murcia, and Mircea are three different things (a kingdom, a city, and a prince, respectively), spelled differently; however, they sound the same to an English-speaker's ear, and someone who isn't familiar with them may not know that the small spelling differences indicate completely unrelated subjects (especially since they're all historical topics, and may appear in variant spellings in older sources). Would it make sense to have top(or bottom)-of-page disambig links on these pages for these things? (A side note, of course, is that Mircea is already a disambig for two members of a dynasty, but that's a minor issue.) It seems odd to want to disambiguate things that are unrelated and spelled differently- I can hardly imagine wanting or needing to disambiguate hair, hare, and herr (or toxin, tocsin, and Taksin), after all- but something like this seems trickier. - FZ 17:36, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Just wanted to solicit some other opinions about something. The page William, up until recently has been a disambiguation page with a short explanation about the name itself [1]. This is similar for many other common names like John, James, Henry, Richard, Elizabeth. A user now wants William to be an article about the name with a link to William (disambiguation) at the top. Based on precedent, I was initially opposed, but am not so sure now--any other thoughts about whether this is a good thing? older≠ wiser 20:14, Dec 14, 2004 (UTC)
It seems logical to me to have articles about names in and of themselves, especially frequent ones like William and Ahmed. -- Iustinus 20:52, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I think putting the disambig template at the top of a page is a mistake, because it interrupts the user's search for information and is unnecessary. I can understand that someone might be motivated to put the template at the top when the page name doesn't include "(disambiguation)" (e.g., Mercury), but I think it would be much better to move the page OR to do nothing at all. -- Yath 03:54, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
older≠ wiser and I recently had a brief exchange about "extra" links to a disambig page, which reflects this paragraph from Wikipedia:Disambiguation:
I had picked a topic pretty much at random ( Florence) from User:Topbanana/Reports/A disambiguation link is suggested, added a disambig page, and edited pages linked to by the disambig page to include a dablink to the disambig page. The paragraph above pretty much says I should not have done this last part. I understand what this is saying (effectively, avoid unnecessary clutter), however I think it's based on the assumption that most users browse wikipedia using wikipedia links. I suspect this might be true once a user arrives at wikipedia, but how did they get here in the first place? My guess is that they've followed a google hit, which I think considerably changes the equation. For example, I've been adding disambiguation links and pages for place names in Japan, e.g. Ichinomiya, on the theory that someone arriving at, say, Ichinomiya, Chiba, from a google hit might actually be looking for the Japanese city with this name. How is Florence, Kansas any different? Unless you already know that Florence is a famous city in Italy, if you arrive at any other Florence article how would you know that you're not seeing the "main" Florence article? The whole point of an encyclopedia is to provide information the reader doesn't already know. Do not disambiguate if there is no risk of confusion begs the question of how an editor knows whether there's a risk of confusion. Does wikipedia have a more specific target audience than "English speaking users of the web"? If not, IMO adding disambig links is generally a good thing. Does a 1st grader necessarily know Florence, Kansas is probably not the Florence they're doing a report on? How about someone in Japan who speaks only a little English? Rather than attempting to discourage "extra" disambiguation, how about if we encourage useful disambiguation:
-- Rick Block 18:59, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Please read the paragraph above ("Extra" disambig considered useful).
The second paragraph of the wikipedia:Disambiguation page currently says:
Per the above discussion I propose changing this to:
Please indicate Support or Oppose and sign your vote. - Rick Block 17:50, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
It's been nearly a month. By my count, I see 2 Support (including my implied support by suggesting this) and 6 Oppose, which sounds like consensus to not make this change. -- Rick Block 14:55, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
I come here, and discover to my surprise that there is absolutely no guidance for how to disambiguate, not even a notice to check the (sadly uncomprehensive) naming conventions page. I say this because I've been trying to figure out what to do when you have two individuals with the same first and surname. My contention is that if there are middle names which can be used to distinguish between the two, these should be used, even if the person is not commonly known by their middle name. Others disagree, and prefer parentheticals. I've raised this at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (common names) as well, because they say that middle names shouldn't be used unless they are commonly used, but make no notice of disambiguation at all. This seems to me to be a serious issue, on which we should have a clear policy. john k 17:10, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)
It seems that whenever you claim there will never be a page on something, someone will create it. There is now an article on fireplace poker. But any other example we could conjure would suffer the same fate. For this reason I've simply changed around this part of the article to acknowledge the article's existence but explain why it doesn't deserve a place in the main article. Deco 21:52, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | ← | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 | → | Archive 10 |
Consider these two ways of pointing to "other meanings" articles that are clearly minor to the main article:
Style A
Style B
In style A the alternate links are listed at the end of the introductory block, as part of the text. In style B they are listed between the title and the intro paragraph, as a side annotation.
Methinks that style A is better than style B. In both styles the alternate links break the flow of the article and are "noise" for readers who are intersted in the main sense. However, in style A the break occurs where there is already a break in any case (the table-of-contents); whereas in style B the break occurs between the title and the crucial first paragraph. Said another way, in style A the reader gets immediately the defining sentence, whereas in style B he/she is forced to read the alternate links first.
So, while style B seems to be the prevalent standard, I think that style A should be used whenever possible. What do you think?
(There is also a "style C" which places the alternate links at the end of the article. However that is definitely bad because the reader will not see those links unless he/she scrolls to the end of the article.)
All the best,
Jorge Stolfi 05:26, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
What should be done in the case where a single page describes multiple homonyms with very different meanings? I think disambiguation would be most appropriate, but moving either of the meanings to a new page would lose the authorship. Is there any ability to duplicate an entire page including history? Zuytdorp Survivor 23:56, 25 Apr 2004 (UTC)
The disambiguation policy addresses what to do in the case where a primary meaning exists, but there are other articles available that discuss secondary meanings: these are linked to at the top with a very brief description. However, there is another similar case where there is a secondary meaning that neither has nor deserves an article of its own, and yet cannot be described briefly enough to place at the top of a page without dominating the introduction. On the other hand, when such mini-articles are placed at the end of a page, it's quite unlikely that someone seeking them would ever come across them. There's no visual indication they should even think of scrolling to the bottom; in reality, the only people to see these would be people who read the article on the primary topic.
I decided the best thing to do in this case is to delimit the mini-article with the usual horizontal bars, but to place it immediately after the introduction and preceding the first major section. In this way it is visible but does not dominate. As a case in point I point out my recent edits to Fantasia. However, there is the conceivable problem with this approach that such meanings do not appear as parenthetical as they are intended to be, and following text may appear misleadingly to refer to it; perhaps italics would help.
What are your opinions?
Deco 06:01, 4 May 2004 (UTC)
For an example of what I mean, look at Discovery (album). It has something other than "disambiguation" in the parentheses, and it has the disambiguation message. I think its contents should be either on discovery or a new page called discovery (disambiguation). And while there may be rare cases when these pages have value, for the most part they're pointless. Mackerm 19:36, May 12, 2004 (UTC)
Should calls for fixing such links go to Wikipedia:Cleanup, Wikipedia:Pages needing attention or...?
I've come across two pages in need of assistance so far:
Of course, fixing this is non-trivial because it requires reading those pages to determine where the new link should go out of the context (or, in the case of Yugoslavia, should it be changed at all), so it may be useful to have a page listing those, they're not all likely to go away soon... -- Shallot 18:17, 13 May 2004 (UTC)
I've added a disambiguation page for John Hancock, with a disamb notice at the top of the default article (which discusses the person John Hancock). The disamb page includes the person, the company named John Hancock, and three buildings named John Hancock (e.g. John Hancock Tower).
I notice a lack of such disambiguation pages for people and wonder if they are a good idea? I can easily see a disamb page made for George Washington: GWU, GW Bridge, and even George, Washington.
KeithTyler 01:00, May 29, 2004 (UTC)
Version 1.3 of MediaWiki is here, and with it comes the category feature. Joy! How about in addition to adding the standard footer to disambiguation pages, we put them all in Category:Disambiguation as well? This would allow us to automatically generate what is currently maintained by hand over at Wikipedia:Links to disambiguating pages. In addition, categories can be nested so we could add [[Category:Multiple place name]], Category:Multiple personal name, etc. to Category:Disambiguation, to keep things organized like they are now. Bryan 15:35, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Sorry if this has been discussed before, but I couldn't find it (or rather didn't search for it that intently !). I was taken to the king page and found it to be a disambig page to my surprise. I was planning to redirect it to the main King article with a "King (disambiguation)" at the top that would have all the people, places and all other names to do with King. But the best redirect I can do is to monarch, and it would be inappropriate to have a link to king (disambiguation) at the monarch page. So how do I go about the main article disambiguation. Jay 19:15, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I'm in favour of #3. King has to be a "primary topic disambiguation". In English, "King" brings up the primary meaning of monarch, other usages are derived.
Anyway the reason for bringing up the scenario on this page was to clarify the implementation of #3. A user who types Monarch on his browser will feel lost and confused if he comes to a page that says "The word King can refer to a specific kind of monarch. For other uses of King, see King (disambiguation)." (All kings are monarchs, but all monarchs are not kings) In fact I've noticed some pages which have this scenario, and I had thought then that this is one scenario where the disambiguation policy has gone wrong.
Is there some way we can hide the "king disambiguation" statement on monarch if user goes to monarch directly, and shows the king disambiguation statement only when he goes to monarch via a redirect from King ? Maybe some tweak in the software can take care of this ? Jay 12:07, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Statement mentioned by Docu is I feel an imperfect yet the most logical one we can use. I wonder what would happen if I make "emperor" and a few other pages as primary topic disambiguation to "monarch". On the Monarch page, it would go this way, line after line :
This is not a real scenario, just fictional, but hope it makes us think of a cleaner solution. Jay 10:14, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)
In order to avoid constant reverts and re-reverts, could someone check which of the two recent versions of TNT is preferred? I've never seen any other disambig page with a numbered list before. -- Chuq 02:37, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Added a Wikimedia reference, because the disambiguation category is used in Wiktionary too. See http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Disambiguation.
The policy states that if a title can be disambiguated by lengthening with appropriate words, that should be preferred over adding a parenthesized term, as in Java programming language instead of Java (programming language). Does this still correspond to actual practice? I think people are actually doing the paren thing by default, at least that seems like what I see 90% of the time or more. My surmise is that the support for piping the paren version is encouraging it despite policy, plus one doesn't have ponder whether a multi-word term is plausible - just put the proper name outside the parens, disambiguator inside. Should the policy be revised to reflect reality? Stan 04:08, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
There are many pages containing a primary topic that have a disambig "see also" commentary on the header. Two styles of indicating this are abundant:
Style 1
Whatever is a bla bla bla... ...
and
Style 2
See whatever (disambiguation) for other meanings.
Whatever is a bla bla bla... ...
Even more,
Wikipedia:Disambiguation uses the second style, and the example page used in the article,
Rome, uses the first style. I think a decission should be made and a policy issued. My vote goes for the first style, it looks somewhat neater in my opinion.
xDCDx 14:59, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC)
To Joy: I don't want to sound rude, but if we don't fix policies for details like this, although both styles are perfectly understable by a casual reader, this causes Wikipedia to look unprofessional, and I don't think we want that. Our goal is to make Wikipedia the best we can. :)
It's a little of an offtopic but, in my opinion, the same must be followed for Title (movie) and Title (film). The current Wikipedia:Naming conventions (movies) page says the proper way is the first one, but there are (unfortunately) a good quantity of Title (film) pages.
xDCDx 00:59, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I sometimes worry about vandalism on disambiguation pages. I'm guessing people regularly watch disambig pages only if they were formerly an article which has since been moved to a disambiguated title -- that's how it works for me, anyway. We've probably all stumbled across dab pages with old vandalism. There could be hundreds of dab pages with old vandalism. Am I the only one worried about this? Does anybody habitually watch dab pages? Tuf-Kat 01:22, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)
I'd like to propose the addition of the following:
Chameleon 18:00, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)
"One can also disambiguate at the bottom of the article like this:"
Do you intend to disallow any page with a <hr> ? I'd object. It's often reasonable until there are articles, rather than a set of stubs. -- User:Docu
I'm starting to see this a lot: people put the "This page is about such-and-such, for other meanings see blargh" message on pages that are already disambiguated. For example, I just took it off of the top of Flip-flop (politics). IMO there's no point in having the message on any page except the parent article ( Flip-flop) since there's no possible way you could get to the politics one if you actually had another meaning of flip-flop in mind (nothing redirects to the politics one either). Just thought I'd solicit opinions before writing it into the policy here. DopefishJustin (・∀・) 22:16, Nov 2, 2004 (UTC)
Please read this very slowly and carefully:
I suggest that in all dis-ambiguation pages that (with the {{disambig}} template at the bottom of the article) are too long to reach the {{disambig}} template without scrolling down should have the (disambiguation) suffix in their article title. Sometimes there is one dominant meaning; sometimes more than one. If there is only one, such as London, then there should be a link to the dis-ambiguation page at the top, namely London (disambiguation). If there is more than one, such as Georgia, then the title with no suffix should re-direct; it will not change the titles of any articles it links to. Any comments?? 66.245.81.205 20:10, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)
This category is getting awfully big and takes a very long time to load (it took me 3 tries to defeat the time-out bunny). Would it be a good idea to sub-categorise: for example create Category:Disambiguation (people)? -- Phil | Talk 12:04, Nov 16, 2004 (UTC)
I was actually thinking in terms of a similar situation to that of stubs; there seem to be two avenues of attack, one using a metastub, one using various cloned templates. YMMV as to the best way: either necessitates the changing of a shed-load of articles. NB at the moment there appears to be no such thing as an optional parameter to a template. -- Phil | Talk 13:12, Nov 16, 2004 (UTC)
Returning to this topic after the Mediawiki upgrade to version 1.4, the situation is much eased with the progressive display for categories. However I still think there is some mileage in my suggestion. Looking at the first tranche of 200 entries in Category:Disambiguation, there's a bunch of military topics ( 20th Division, 24th Division, 25th Division, etc). To take these as an example, I would suggest creating {{ military-disambig}} which would belong to Category:Disambiguation (military terms) which would obviously be a sub-category of Category:Disambiguation. Obviously there will be some pages which cover so much scope that they cannot immediately be categorised in this fashion, but if we bite off the easy ones first, we can look at the difficult ones later. -- Phil | Talk 11:40, Jan 14, 2005 (UTC)
I've added the the CategoryTOC template to the category. Does this and the progressive display adequately address the original concern? -- Rick Block 17:52, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
What is the general policy or advice on disambiguating homophones? Example I was looking at: Mercia, Murcia, and Mircea are three different things (a kingdom, a city, and a prince, respectively), spelled differently; however, they sound the same to an English-speaker's ear, and someone who isn't familiar with them may not know that the small spelling differences indicate completely unrelated subjects (especially since they're all historical topics, and may appear in variant spellings in older sources). Would it make sense to have top(or bottom)-of-page disambig links on these pages for these things? (A side note, of course, is that Mircea is already a disambig for two members of a dynasty, but that's a minor issue.) It seems odd to want to disambiguate things that are unrelated and spelled differently- I can hardly imagine wanting or needing to disambiguate hair, hare, and herr (or toxin, tocsin, and Taksin), after all- but something like this seems trickier. - FZ 17:36, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Just wanted to solicit some other opinions about something. The page William, up until recently has been a disambiguation page with a short explanation about the name itself [1]. This is similar for many other common names like John, James, Henry, Richard, Elizabeth. A user now wants William to be an article about the name with a link to William (disambiguation) at the top. Based on precedent, I was initially opposed, but am not so sure now--any other thoughts about whether this is a good thing? older≠ wiser 20:14, Dec 14, 2004 (UTC)
It seems logical to me to have articles about names in and of themselves, especially frequent ones like William and Ahmed. -- Iustinus 20:52, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I think putting the disambig template at the top of a page is a mistake, because it interrupts the user's search for information and is unnecessary. I can understand that someone might be motivated to put the template at the top when the page name doesn't include "(disambiguation)" (e.g., Mercury), but I think it would be much better to move the page OR to do nothing at all. -- Yath 03:54, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
older≠ wiser and I recently had a brief exchange about "extra" links to a disambig page, which reflects this paragraph from Wikipedia:Disambiguation:
I had picked a topic pretty much at random ( Florence) from User:Topbanana/Reports/A disambiguation link is suggested, added a disambig page, and edited pages linked to by the disambig page to include a dablink to the disambig page. The paragraph above pretty much says I should not have done this last part. I understand what this is saying (effectively, avoid unnecessary clutter), however I think it's based on the assumption that most users browse wikipedia using wikipedia links. I suspect this might be true once a user arrives at wikipedia, but how did they get here in the first place? My guess is that they've followed a google hit, which I think considerably changes the equation. For example, I've been adding disambiguation links and pages for place names in Japan, e.g. Ichinomiya, on the theory that someone arriving at, say, Ichinomiya, Chiba, from a google hit might actually be looking for the Japanese city with this name. How is Florence, Kansas any different? Unless you already know that Florence is a famous city in Italy, if you arrive at any other Florence article how would you know that you're not seeing the "main" Florence article? The whole point of an encyclopedia is to provide information the reader doesn't already know. Do not disambiguate if there is no risk of confusion begs the question of how an editor knows whether there's a risk of confusion. Does wikipedia have a more specific target audience than "English speaking users of the web"? If not, IMO adding disambig links is generally a good thing. Does a 1st grader necessarily know Florence, Kansas is probably not the Florence they're doing a report on? How about someone in Japan who speaks only a little English? Rather than attempting to discourage "extra" disambiguation, how about if we encourage useful disambiguation:
-- Rick Block 18:59, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Please read the paragraph above ("Extra" disambig considered useful).
The second paragraph of the wikipedia:Disambiguation page currently says:
Per the above discussion I propose changing this to:
Please indicate Support or Oppose and sign your vote. - Rick Block 17:50, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
It's been nearly a month. By my count, I see 2 Support (including my implied support by suggesting this) and 6 Oppose, which sounds like consensus to not make this change. -- Rick Block 14:55, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
I come here, and discover to my surprise that there is absolutely no guidance for how to disambiguate, not even a notice to check the (sadly uncomprehensive) naming conventions page. I say this because I've been trying to figure out what to do when you have two individuals with the same first and surname. My contention is that if there are middle names which can be used to distinguish between the two, these should be used, even if the person is not commonly known by their middle name. Others disagree, and prefer parentheticals. I've raised this at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (common names) as well, because they say that middle names shouldn't be used unless they are commonly used, but make no notice of disambiguation at all. This seems to me to be a serious issue, on which we should have a clear policy. john k 17:10, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)
It seems that whenever you claim there will never be a page on something, someone will create it. There is now an article on fireplace poker. But any other example we could conjure would suffer the same fate. For this reason I've simply changed around this part of the article to acknowledge the article's existence but explain why it doesn't deserve a place in the main article. Deco 21:52, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)