Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation/Archive 3

This is an archive of past discussions on Wikipedia:Disambiguation. 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.

In response, to Toby, above: a page like Virginia shouldn't be a disambiguation page unless a large percentage of Wikipedia readers and contributors feel that putting Virginia (the US state) at that location is counterintuitive. If it became obvious that a large number of contributors were linking to the current Virginia article because "Virginia" was also the name of a famous ancient Babylonian city, then that would be a pretty good indicator that the existing situation was not ideal. The point here is that what's obvious to Wikipedians should be the determining factor in naming an article, not the preferred terminology of the Irish or the Babylonians. And the proliferation of bad links is both and indication and a result of a non-intuitive situation.

In the case of Munster, people are accidentally hitching their articles about the German city to an article on an Irish province. And it's only going to continue in the future. Maybe those people should be linking to Münster (though I don't think accent codes should be part of an article title), or maybe to Munster, Germany. The problem is, the Wikipedia naming conventions say it's ok to link to Munich or Cologne, so people don't expect a totally screwy result when they link to Munster. Worse yet, when I click on "What Links Here" for Munster, I don't necessarily know at a glance which articles need to have their links fixed to point somewhere else. When I click on "What Links Here" for a disambiguation page, I know right off the bat that every single link needs to be fixed. Now imagine that 1000 pages link to a given article. Are we supposed to go through every single one on a regular basis?

I'll also elaborate on what I said above: in a perfect encyclopedia (as Wikipedia will one day become), there should be no disambiguation pages or blocks. Users will enter a term in the search box and pick the correct meaning from there. This means that disambiguation text is really a sort of a relic of the development process, one that we're eventually going to have to sweep up. Keeping disambiguation on separate pages will make this sweeping-up process simple, as we need just identify a disambiguation page and have the software point out all 5000 pages that incorrectly link to it. Putting disambiguation junk on article pages means that some human being is eventually going to have to clean this gunk off by hand and identify which links are incorrect. Over a few years that could be hundreds of thousands of hours of unnecessary work, just so that we can avoid a few parentheses! — Dachshund—Preceding undated comment added 19:31, 20 September 2002

I really only disagree with the last paragraph: The key fallacy here is the assumption that Wikipedia will one day be perfect. It won't; it will never be perfect, and it will never be finished. People will be working on Wikipedia up until the fall of civilisation! (or the creation of something better that makes it obsolete, much as Wikipedia will make EB obsolete over the next century). As such, we'll always have people making spontaneous links to ambiguous titles, and so we'll always need disambiguation. Now, this doesn't mean that we can't handle disambiguation in the future with more software tricks. But we have only text now, and we'll have to transfer that into the software by hand later in any case. We shouldn't limit ourselves now by what we hope the software might do in the nebulous future. -- Toby 12:37 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

Here's an idea: Force all articles to have a parenthetical disambiguation in the title (for example, "Munster (cheese)"). The page reached if someone simply typed, "Munster", would be auto-generated by the software. If there were only one sense for Munster (say "Munster (cheese)"), the page "Munster" would be an automatic redirect. If there were more than one sense (say "Munster (cheese)" and "Munster (Irish province)"), there would be an auto-generated disambiguation page with text like:

There is more than one article about Munster.
Which sense of the word do you mean?
* Cheese
* Irish Province

Ajwitte 00:40 Mar 19, 2003 (UTC)