Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation pages with links/Archive 02

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Contents

Query

Am I right in asuming that if you are fixing up the DAB Rage, for example, since the word rage (meaning angry etc) doesn't have its own article, you should remove any links that attempt to link to the angry meaning of rage? --Commander Keane 04:18, July 31, 2005 (UTC)

  • Probably better to make them link to anger, if it fits the context. -- BD2412 talk 04:39, July 31, 2005 (UTC)
  • and where it doesn't fit / isn't required by the context, I'd say yes remove the link. I think it's generally unnecessary to link a word like rage where its meaning is not the main point of the sentence and it isn't part of a list. You may find it's better to remove the link for the sake of clarity, or at least to avoid annoying people who dutifully follow the link only to find it's a blind alley so far as relevance to their article is concerned. ~ Veledan | Talk | c. 08:04, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

Mis-spellings in DAB's

Is it appropriate to have mispellings in DAB pages? What about the special case of Dike and Dyke, these page need to be linked, what is the best way? --Commander Keane 13:18, August 1, 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages) says to include them in the See also section. Josh Parris ✉ 00:57, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

Origin of names

In Johnson, for example, at the top of the article (it is a dab) there is explantion about the orign of the name "Johnson". I don't think this info complies with the Manual of style for a dab, but it could have a place somewhere else in Wikipedia, where should I put it? --Commander Keane 07:44, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

  • I agree it can't stay in the dab. Should Wikipedia contain surname etymologies? I can't find an official policy, but the only example I can find is Origin of the surname "Whitehead" and that's under vote to be removed to Wiktionary. Wiktionary, however, does list surnames and has brief derivations, so I'd guess you simply delete it from the dab and add the first sentence you've deleted to meaning (1) in the Wiktionary entry for Johnson. You wouldn't add the remaining sentences, but if you were feeling really energetic, each variant spelling would have its own entry referring to the common spelling :-) ~ Veledan | Talk | c. 21:55, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
    • A short etymology within a disambig is permissible (as it is one possible meaning to which the disambig might refer); however, anything more than a few lines should be broken out into its own article, if this will be more than a mere etymology. To be an article, a surname must have some social or historical siginificance beyond merely being someone's name. (See Smith (surname), Zhang). -- BD2412 talk 22:29, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
  • I'm working on the 'St. John.' page. According to the Family name etymology article, "Malone" means "Servant of St. John," but it doesn't seem to be any particular St. John. Should I remove the link, or leave it linked to the Disambiguation page and let the reader pick one?Vary 03:52, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
    Well I'm guessing the name evolved referring to a particular St. John. It would take some research to find out. So it's a matter of how hard you want to work to find the right disambiguation. You could leave it linking to the disambiguation page for now, and ask on the talk page, see if maybe someone who knows more pipes up.Whitejay251 04:26, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
    I've emailed a geneologist who's studying the name, and I'll put a link on the talk page, too. Thanks! Vary 04:54, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Can we get rid of the fixed disambiguation pages?

Can we get rid of the struck through links? We could either move them to a separate page of fixed disambiguation pages that we can check later, or we could just delete them. I would be willing to do this, if others agree. Oh, and if we do just move the pages, the we could move them back some time in the future, like in half a year or something...just so we wouldn't have to keep checking them. --Quadraxis 02:23, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

  • I quite enjoy seeing all the struckthrough links - it makes it clear that we're making progress. Agentsoo 09:39, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
  • Yeah, I like them too. For the same reason. –Shoaler (talk) 12:11, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
  • See Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages maintenance. It's your call as to whether you or not you delete completed links. Josh Parris # 12:36, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
  • How about just splitting it into to subheadings on the main Disambiguation w. links page? One for completed and one for active pages (as in, pages needing attention)?

Guide to Efficient Disambiguation

Having racked up a few thousand edits on this project and learnt a good few time-saving tricks along the way, I wondered whether it would be worth writing a brief guide to efficient disambiguation? I'm sure there are plenty of handy tips that the many other dedicated contributors to this project could add, too. How about it? Agentsoo 16:58, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

  • As a new Wikipedian (6 weeks) who's helping out with the housekeeping but still has plenty to learn, I'd love to read it. Are you going to start it Agentsoo? ~ Veledan | Talk | c. 17:13, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
The basis of my strategy is to do things simultaneously so as to minimise the time you spend waiting for the Wikipedia servers to respond. I've had a go at describing it below, and all improvements and corrections are welcome.
  • Nice start and I've added a small section between your two about piped links. Feel free to put it elsewhere or delete it if it's covered in something you were about to write anyway :-) ~ Veledan | Talk | c. 18:57, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
It's good. We definitely need something like this on the page. Bit wordy, though. The essential piece of information is that you need to use the "find" button; I can only imagine what an impossible task this project must be without it. As an aside, how do you flag the edit as minor with this technique? Flowerparty talk 20:29, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
    • You can set your edits to be minor by default. Under Preferences > Editing > Mark all edits minor by default ~ Veledan | Talk | c. 22:22, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
      • Ah, thought it must be something like that. That'll come in useful then, cheers. Flowerparty talk 22:40, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Note: the remainder of this section has been moved to Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/Guide.  BD2412 talk 05:38, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

Disambiguation to Disambiguation Links

What should we do when a dam page links to anothe dam page? For example, The Director links to Director, but there's no way to disambiguate which particular sort of director it should link to. Should we just leave them? It would be a bit annoying to jump from dam to dam, but what else can we do? Agentsoo 09:17, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

  • How about merging them? Make The Director a redirect to Director and add its two meanings to Director? I should think anyone looking for Osama bin Laden under that title (not likely, but possible) would go first to Director rather than The Director anyway, and until an article exists for it, I think The Director (movie) would live quite happily on the same dab. ~ Veledan | Talk | c. 09:44, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

Norman redirected to Normans and disambig page moved

I was working on Norman which had links to a person a romance language spoken in part of france, a city in Oklahoma and the people. I got through about 30-40 and then realised that, with the exception of some that needed to be changed from [[Norman]] invasion to [[Norman invasion]] they were all for Normans. Also about 10 of them people had written [[Norman]]s so that the correct page would display but link to the disambig page. I decided that raher than re-map all 450 links and then watch for the few a week which would most likley show up it would make more sense to move the disambiguation page to Norman (disambiguation) and redirected to Normans. I'm new to this project though so if thats wrong, could some one let me know so I don't repeat the error. Dalf | Talk 05:32, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

Vatican conspiracy theories

and other refs to an occult Vatican are the things I find hardest to disambiguate. Just who is Jack Chick accusing of plotting World Wars I and II? Is it the Holy See or the Roman Curia or the Vatican City who send immortal action heroes out in numerous (I find) comic books? Who is it that conspires in so many murders, and just which Vatican will be excommunicating star systems from essentially political protection in the year 3000? I begin to wonder if a new article, Vatican (urban legend) or even Vatican (fantasy) isn't needed, and that we should be dab'ing all those kind of things to it.. but I don't feel competent to write it, and if I did I'd have to go back and undo hundreds of disambiguations, and even then the writers of the articles that refer to it would change the link: they'd insist that they meant the real Vatican, not that urban legend article, that's only for stories that aren't true... etc Opinions anyone? ~ Veledan 23:08, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

In most cases, the articles dealing with urban legends and such use Vatican to refer to the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church, so the correct disambiguation would be to Holy See. However, some of them probably assert that the Holy See is not the actual leadership of the Church, so we might eventually need a Holy See (popular culture) article that would discuss the various conspiracy theories in a single place and could be used as a destination for the more problematic links. — Kirill Lokshin | Talk 23:52, August 13, 2005 (UTC)
In dab-ing these pages I have had the feeling that the list of options on the dab page is incomplete. There are a lot of historical references to the Vatican that really feel like they mean Roman Catholic Church, but in a sort of quasi political context that I am not sure really mean what is in the current article. Most of your urban legend stuff intersects with this too. There are also instances (and not just for Vatican) where I think that the reference itself is so ambiguous that linking to the dab page would not be inappropriate (or perhaps removing the link all together). Some specific examples that I had trouble dab-ing are Ratline (history) where I am not sure if the allegation of that the Holy See approved of and organized the activity described, or if some subset of people working in Vatican City were doing so. If its the second is Vatican City the correct link or some other article? In a conspiracy theory that only involves members of the church do we reference the church article? The Holy See? Roman Curia? Dalf | Talk 07:47, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
my reply got too long and specific to be on-topic here, so I've moved it back to Talk:Vatican! ~ Veledan | Talk | c. 12:23, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

Maintenance Collaboration of the Week

This page is the Maintenance Collaboration of the Week. The following comments are preserved from the nomination and voting process because they may be useful to contributors.

Nominated 01:25, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
Support:
  1. Beland 01:25, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
  2. Missmarple 09:08, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
  3. Maurreen (talk) 17:09, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
  4. Quadraxis 22:26, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
  5. Sempron 10:36, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
  6. Eric Forste (Talk) 17:19, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
  7. Magicmonster 23:03, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
  8. Dalf | Talk 01:49, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
Comments:
  • This is the oldest project on Template:Active Wiki Fixup Projects. (Thus it's most in danger of being neglected; this list is also getting rather long, and it would be nice to finish up a project or two.) It currently has active participants, but there is a lot of work left to be done, and I'm sure new "bad links" have been piling up since the last update. This is also a type of cleanup work that is fairly easy to do - you just need to pick which of several possibilities the referring article meant to link to. (It's kind of a fun lesson in vocabulary and ambiguity.) -- Beland 01:25, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
  • I'm one of the (occasional) active participants. Frankly, I don't think making this a maintenance CoTW will help it much. As Beland stated, the list is getting long, new entries aren't getting added, and there's a lot to be done still. The project is going nowhere. What's worse is that this is likely something that will need to be done continuously in the future, even if this project ever completes. The way it's going now clearly promises trouble ahead for links to dab pages. In my opinion, this is what is needed for this project to complete, and to be repeated in the future:
    1. more frequent database dumps, so the list can be updated more often.
    2. a "whatlinkshere" tool that ignores User and Talk pages, which only clutter the picture for this project.
    3. a User:Humanbot style tool should be possible to write, and could make fixing these pages LOTS faster. However, the first 2 points above are required for this, as well as machine-parsable output of "whatlinkshere". -- Biot 00:33, August 5, 2005 (UTC)
  • I think we need to narrow it down a bit. I suggest picking 3 (or so) of the big ones to work on. How about: Persia, NBA, and Afghan? if they get fixed, we could add more! --Quadraxis 22:26, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
  • I think we'd get more participation if we let people pick a topic that interests them. -- Beland 00:20, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
    • Maybe, but i find that the number of links there overwhelms me. If we got together and picked a few to do this week/day/whatever, it might help. Maybe we should do that anyways? Just take a few of them and say they are this week's Disambiguation pages' collaboration. --Quadraxis 02:03, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
      • I know the feeling. "Too...many...choices!...Can't...pick!" Feel free to declare a "mini-collaboration" right on that page. Though it might be less work to just say, "Hey, let's all work on the one at the top of the list, since that's the worst offender, and if we're all working on the same one, it'll be more fun." -- Beland 01:13, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
        • OK, i think i will. --Quadraxis 18:58, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
      • I think it might be worthwhile to make a few lists to pick from, easy ones and harder ones. There are a number of them that may have lots of links but are really easy to determin what is intended. That way people can start easy and work their way up. Dalf | Talk 04:29, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
  • I've done some work on Greek, Chinese, and British, and lately I've been gnawing at Persia. --Eric Forste (Talk) 09:09, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
    • Excellent - Greek and British are on my list of usual suspects as well. I've also discovered that regularly fixing new disambigs is a good way to dig up articles that should be deleted, or need other attention (sub-sorting, categorization, etc.). -- BD2412 talk 00:36, August 14, 2005 (UTC)

Can't .... See..... Choices......

Having completed categories listed I agree as a good idea, but I was wondering if I could perhaps seperate finished from unfinished so my poor olde eyes can see exactly which ones are finished and which are not. Magicmonster 01:12, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

COTW and IRC

Is there a channel on the wikipedia IRC chat for people working on disambiguation to chat and ask questions in real time? I just get all set up and joined but did not see anything obvious in the channel listing. It might be a good idea to set up a room at least while its the COTW and link to instructions on the project page. I suspect it might prevent some bad disambiguation form happening. Dalf | Talk 07:51, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

Help disambiguating Period

I've come unstuck almost immediately with this one, and have withdrawn my hand till I get advice on how to proceed!

Most of the links to Period are linking to the technical meaning of an interval, a lapse of time. The opposite of frequency. This is the one meaning that is defined in the dab but has no article, probably because it's too general a meaning to have an article longer than a dictionary definition. Any anyway, it's the opposite of frequency and its definition in the dab links to that article. So it'll probably never have an article. I can't link them to frequency because that would cause either confusion, or me having to re-word every sentence it appeared in. Should I de-link? Create a stub that pretends to be an article, but which is really just a specialised dab, linking to frequency or other pages? Redirect to wiktionary? Help! ~ Veledan | Talk | c. 21:31, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

I am trying to imagine how frequency is the opposite of Period, to my thinking Period when used this way means an interval, while frequency means a number of intervals within a larger interval. Perhaps we can re-direct the time refrence to Interval (time)? If so we should probble create and redirect Period (time) to Interval (time). Dalf | Talk 21:59, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
Oh yuck. So poking around this one some more I have found some other problems. First the links that get here via the redirect at periodic don't seem to fit with any of the articles listed. wiktionary:periodic meaning:
  1. relative to a period or periods
  2. having repeated cycles
  3. ocurring at regular intervals
So I thought I woudl be clever and redirect [[periodic] to recurring only recurring is a redirect to Recurring character which feels oh so very wrong on many many levels. I think the best idea might actually be to add an article or wiktionary link for the periodic articles and do somethign about the recurring redirect too though I am not sure what just yet. Dalf | Talk 22:14, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
Frequency is the opposite of period in the sense that their units cancel each other out - a period or interval is expressed in a unit of time (e.g. seconds) while frequency is expressed in a unit of "per time" (e.g. Hertz = 1 per second = 1/second). Is it too confusing to dab and link directly to Interval (time)? Is that any less confusing that linking to Period (time) as a redirect to Interval (time)? In any case, I don't think linking ot frequency is a good idea, so that actually has the opposite meaning to period when used in this context.

--Tiffanicita 21:49, August 17, 2005 (UTC)

Well, I didn't read this before I dove right into "period," I'm afraid, but wherever I hit these issues, I either redirected to periodicity or Interval (time), depending on which seemed appropriate. If I wasn't certain, I included a note in the edit summary explaining the disambiguation, so that the folks working on those articles will (hopefully) take a closer look and redirect it somewhere more appropriate if I got it wrong. In any event, it's done! Only talk and user pages left. --Brian Olsen 07:42, August 30, 2005 (UTC)


I disagree. In this context when we say opposit we mean antonym which is not in any way associated with reciprocity, which is what we have here. Being inverse in dimension represents a diffrnt type of relationship than opposits. You cannot add periods and frequency together and have them cancle, It is a multiplicative relationship. More importantly I think, the type of relationship here is a good way of explainign the concept, because the real world implications of the relationship is somethign less abstract that people can associate with and understand. Sorry if my thinking here is hard to folow, but basically in normal language when people think of the word opposits they think in terms of addative or qualitative properties; North is the Opposite of south (both mesured in distance), Hot is the opposie of cold (both mesures of relative tempature). The problem is that Hertz is 1 SOMETHING per second, the seconds do cancel out but then you are still left with count of something, clock cycles or wavelengths or some such and whatever you ar left with is not the same sort of thign as either of the two thigns that you are claiming as opposites. If you combined 20 meters north with 20 meters south you are left with zero meters. Ok I am rambling now, basically I think the link to frequency is useful in understanding the concept. Dalf | Talk 05:21, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
Aye, I meant reciprocal, inversely proportional, y = 1/x. Opposite in the same sense that one third is the opposite of triple. If you double the period between two occurrences of an event, you halve the frequency of that event.
Dalf, the timestamp on your edit and the typos you've allowed to remain in your usually immaculate prose give a handy example of the other sense of opposite you were describing: the always-antagonistic relationship between time spent editing Wikipedia and time spent in sleep :-) ~ Veledan • Talk + new 19:39, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

Blue bonnet strangeness

I don't know if this is the correct place to recommend a disambiguation, but

  • "Blue bonnet" redirects to the bird
  • "Blue bonnetS" redirects to "Peacekeeping"? blue helmets?
  • "bluebonnets" the Texas state flower

--Kim Nevelsteen 19:43, 16 August 2005 (UTC) (I am too new to know how to create a disamb page)

  • A disambig page is created like any other article - list the terms and their respective meanings, and put a {{disambig}} tag on the bottom. Follow the basic style from other disambig pages in terms of wording and formatting. Cheers! -- BD2412 talk 20:04, August 16, 2005 (UTC)


Will this ever end?

I sometimes wonder if we can ever complete this project. We really need some kind of tool to catch the new dam links as they come in. I can't imagine it would be that difficult to write, would it? At the moment, we seem to have so much to do that, by the time we finish it, the new dump will come along with a whole lot more links to dam pages. A more permanent solution would be very useful. Soo 00:24, 17 August 2005 (UTC)

PS Even assuming that all our link counts are correct (they often underestimate) and all the ones that are done really are done (ones that were 'done' a long time ago often grow back), we still have over 17 thousands pages to fix. That's a hell of a lot of work and would make the time spent writing some kind of assisting tool well worth it. Soo 00:36, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
Done below 12 thousand now, just ten days later. I feel optimistic again! Soo 18:37, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
4 days later, and it's down to 8744. I'm sure the numbers aren't that accurate but surely that's progress. Soo 18:01, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
  • What sort of output do you imagine for it Soo? A simple bot that counted the 'what links here?' for each problem page regularly, and updated this page with the totals? Or do you mean building on an assisted user interface like solve disambiguation.py (the dab equivalent of Humanbot)? I've tried that but I didn't like not being able to look over the whole article, even though you can repeatedly double the amount of context visible until you have the whole article in a text window if you wish. I kept switching from the text window and bringing up the same article in my browser, which kind of defeats the speed advantage (tho once you've done it and finished reading, it's still nice to be able to switch back to the text window and only have to press 2 keys to actually perform the disambiguation). I've been wondering whether it's convenient menu-option disambiguation could be adapted to an interface that showed the whole page in its normal context. ~ Veledan • Talk + new 08:55, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
I think a modification to mediawiki to put up a warning when a person likes to a DAB page, with an easy way for them to look at the DAB page in question withouth going away from or saving their edit (maybe a link that will open up a tab or a new window) woudl be worthwhile. I think including a How to disambiguate section on the talk page of any DAB that is not totally obvious is a good plan as well. An assisted editing interface would be more difficult than Humanbot and a bit dangerious. The bot could never make theactual DAB choice though making it an easy slection with ability to modify the text displayed (defaulting to not changing whatever is displayed in the article) would be a nice start. So long whatever articles got DABed with it had to be set up in advance it would prevent people from going really fast and doing a bunch of them wrong. Dalf | Talk 19:43, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
I think most people agree that solve_disambiguation.py is well-intended but extremely awkward to use. However, it does take care of what I find to be the most time-consuming part, i.e. locating the link within the page. I agree that some kind of warning should come up when you create a link to a DAB page, although not in a new window. Maybe something like the Edit Conflict window, with a "save anyway" button if the link to the dam page is deliberate. This wouldn't solve every problem (e.g NBA, which is not itself a dam page), but it would greatly reduce it. It would probably have to be a setting which users can disable if they want, too. At the moment this sounds like a clumsy solution to a tough problem, so better ideas are welcome. Soo 23:25, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
I was thinking somethign like Warning: You have created a link to {{{1}}} which is a disambiguation page and may not point to the article you intend. You may want to visit the page and select a more specific article fomr the list provided. Where "visit the page" is a link that perhaps targets a new tab or window (Though I suppose that might violae some sort of wikipedia standard). Dalf | Talk 00:34, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
I think there are other features which open in a new window, so that sounds a perfectly good solution to me. Can we propose it to the MediaWiki lot? I would code it myself but PHP is one of my programming blindspots. Soo 19:34, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

Rush

Okay, in trying to fix the links to Rush I'm baffled by the links in Grand Theft Auto III soundtrack. The reference there is obviously not to Rush (band). (I've played the game, too.) I can't find ANY information on the apparent rap/hip-hop artist "Rush" except that it might be Russell Simmons. http://www.allmusic.com lists "Rush" in the rap genre, but has absolutely no information.

Anybody have a clue?

Al 15:18, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

American redirect

It has been suggested that American be redirected to United States, and the contents of American be moved to American (disambiguation). A lot of "American" wikilinks currently should be directed to "United States", so this change would result saving a lot of work. --Commander Keane 07:35, August 20, 2005 (UTC)

  • In light of the enormous number of links to "American" (over 5,000) and the fact that the vast majority of them clearly are intended to point to United States, redirecting "American" to United States, with a {{redirect|American}} tag atop that page (see NBA for an example) makes eminent sense. Bear in mind, this issue has been hashed out before (see Talk:Use of the word American for the discussion), but I believe the result of that discussion simply does not work for Wikipedia, given the constantly growing army of links to "American". -- BD2412 talk 07:43, August 20, 2005 (UTC)
    • I'd be all for it. Soo 08:31, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
      • Does this mean, once the change is made, all of the links we were going to fix up by going to "What links here" for American will now all be mixed up with "What links here" for United States? --Commander Keane 10:34, August 20, 2005 (UTC)
      • No, you can run the "What links here" tool on a redirect page and it will only show the pages linking to that particular redirect. Soo 11:13, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
  • Since the actual meaning and correct use of American is divisive to a large number of people, I feel it is better to keep American and America as dab pages. This is especially true until WP decides whether to pipe the name of the country to link to a nationality or use articles such as Irish people. -Acjelen 14:19, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
  • If it helps make lihnks go to where they should do then I don't see a reason not to do so. —Celestianpower háblame 20:05, 29 June 2006 (UTC) 19:15, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
    • I think the reason the make American a redirect to United States is that, for etenity, editors are going to wikilink "American", thinking that it goes to "United States". How are we going to get on top of other, genuine, dab's with links when American is bogging us down? --Commander Keane 13:42, August 24, 2005 (UTC)
      • I've decided not to worry about it. There are other disambigs that are more important to address, i.e., those where the person seeking information in Wikipedia has no idea what the linked term is actually supposed to point to. If I say "Aerosmith is an American rock band, everyone knows what I mean by "American," and the user who is taken to the current disambiguation page will know to go from there to United States for more info. If I say, one of Aerosmith's best concerts was in Springfield, users following the link will be at a loss to figure out which Springfield it was. If I say they recently recorded a Greek song, users will want to know if the song was actually in Greek, or originated in Greece, or merely sounded Greek. I therefore vote that we procrastinate on addressing the thorny "American" issue, and work on the thousands of uncontroversial disambiguations that remain. -- BD2412 talk 14:02, 24 August 2005 (UTC)
  • The problem with leaving nationality links alone is that it encourages undisambiguated links to other nationalities where there are serious ambiguities. Links to genuinely unambiguous nationalities such as Australian and Pakistani encourage this too. A flurry of link disambiguation or bypassing, preferably with links to this page from the edit summaries and possibly using bots, is the answer. (sorr, forgot to sign. Susvolans ⇔ 15:44, 25 August 2005 (UTC))

America

Moved from the article page. Soo 14:51, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

All of the links I've fixed so far should go to United States of America. We might consider automatically redirecting 'American' there. Franzeska 05:59, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Automation

What sort of tools exist for automating this process? — Pekinensis 16:04, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

As far as I know, none. The above guide to efficient manual damming is about all we have. Soo 16:50, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
Have a look at solve disambiguation.py but first you will want to look at the Wikipedia bot policy.
Thank you. — Pekinensis 02:10, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Tatar vs. Tatars

The disambiguation page Tatar currently has a lot of links to it. I worked on it for a while and found that of the first 20 links 18 of them were to Tatars of which people had actually displayed the text Tatars while linking to Tatar. The other two links were mostly wikified incorrectly Crimean [[Tatar]]s changed to [[Crimean Tatars]]. My inclination is to move the disambiguaiton page to Tatar (disambiguation) (currently a redirect) and redirect Tatar to Tatars. However, it looks like Tatars use to live at Tatar and was moved intentionally. I left a note similar to this on Talk: Tatars a few days ago but have not got any response. Should I go ahead and re-arrange the articles as described aboe then check through the links for any that should be changed? Dalf | Talk 21:30, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

I'd check through first, then move. But the general plan sounds good. Soo 23:27, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
Well theres only about a hundred or so left anyway, I had actually thought about correcting them anyway then redirecting as above. But, then I decided that having the links redirect probbly was not that big a resource spender anyway. I'll go thourhg them tonight then redirect. Dalf | Talk 00:29, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
Ok in passing through the articles leaving any instances that shoudl refer to Tatars I ended up with:
  • 6 instances that should have been Tatar language (5 in first sentences of articles followed by the spelling in that language, though most such uses in the articles I looked at were correctly linked).
  • 5 more instances of Crimean Tatars, 3 of which had Crimean Tatar(s) displayed but were linked to the DAB. There were a few cases that were really hard to DAB when it was not clear if Tatars or Crimean Tatars was intended. I think this difficulty might be the reasoning behind why the pages are set up like they currently are. Still we are talking about a small % of links. There are many instances of the term that clearly refers to both groups collectivly, and I have a feeling that the decision to make the term a DAB page had no small amount of national pride involved in it (a much smaller scale version of Use of the word American).
So with the other links that I corrected before that leaves us about 9% of the links going to the DAB page that do not mean Tatars. GIven this I am not sure if moving the page and changing it to a redirect is the best option. There is still the fact that around half of all the uses of Tatars the editors have intentionally linked to the version with no 's' thinking it to be the correct page. Also almost all of the links that do not go to Tatars are cases that I would class as editor error and not actual ambiguity. So which way do you think we shoudl do it? (FWIW if we decided that moving thigns around is a bad idea then DABing the page shoudl be very simple as all the links that are left there are need to be Tatar since I already did the others.) Dalf | Talk 21:27, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
As Soo pointed out to me its been a while waiting on this and no one has objected so I am going to go ahead and make this change. Dalf | Talk 21:00, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

Please try to avoid tunnel vision

Concentrating on one word at a time is a necessity, but when you come across an article with multiple similar links (e.g. a Scandinavian history article containing [[Danish]], [[Norwegian]], and [[Swedish]]), the right thing to do is to fix all of them rather than just the one you're working on. Otherwise, the article history gets filled up with multiple edits by different people but with identical summaries, which is inefficient and looks silly.

  • Multiple edits in the history looks "silly"? I don't think it is such a problem, the edit history is invisble to the casual reader, and the methods I use to maximise my effiency (highlighting in Firefox etc) for dab's with links enhances tunnel vision, and I don't think it can be avoided. I try my best though. --Commander Keane 10:17, August 26, 2005 (UTC)

Afghan collaboration

  • If someone is "An Afghan writer", does Afghan redirect to Afghanistan or Afghan people? --Commander Keane 08:51, August 29, 2005 (UTC) moved here from main project page by Russ Blau (talk) 16:09, August 29, 2005 (UTC)
    • In my opinion, if they were writing in the 20th or 21st century, I would redirect to Afghanistan. Before the mid-18th century, when there was no Afghan state as such, I would redirect to Afghan people. The period from 1746 to 1919 is ambiguous, and you'd probably have to look at the individual's biography in more detail to resolve it. --Russ Blau (talk) 16:09, August 29, 2005 (UTC)
      • My general practice is to redirect nationality disambig links in articles about people to the "Foo people" article, if one exists. An Afghan writer is still one of the Afghan people, even if he travels abroad. Cheers! -- BD2412 talk 03:14, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
    • By that approach, Ernest Hemingway becomes an "[[English people|English]] author."  :-) I'm not saying you're wrong, just that you need to consider the context and not apply any rule inflexibly. Russ Blau (talk) 11:44, August 30, 2005 (UTC)
      • It could also refer to the language he was writing in. I find this is more often the case with poets. It can sometimes be hard to resolve either way. I tend to redirect to the country as a last resort, since it's probably not perfect but at least sometimes seems to follow the "path of least surprise" when someone clicks on the link. --Soo 16:45, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

Hints n' Tips

While going through the disambiguation collaborations, I have found that many of the disambiguation pages don't have everything that it could link to, example: Byzantine seems to occasionally link to the Greek Orthodox Church, which isn't on the disambig page. We could have a section for each major disambig, so that if we have to reopen a previously finished disambig, we have help and don't have to rediscover things like Byzantine emperors. Magicmonster 02:32, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

This is a good idea. For instance I've used on occasion [[Byzantine music|Byzantine]] (not on disambig page) in adition to your two examples. Also, there were cases where it would have been nice to use Byzantine law and Byzantine culture if they had existed. I just wanted to mention this in case they show up in the future. Whitejay251 05:01, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

Specific lists

The Specific lists section seems to be just like Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages maintenance. Should we move the contents there instead? --Commander Keane 11:31, August 31, 2005 (UTC)

  • Good idea. The "Specific lists" section probably should be replaced with something like:

==Additional pages needing monitoring==
''See'' [[Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages maintenance]] for lists of disambiguation pages needing to be monitored for new links.

If no one objects, I'll make the change in a day or two. --Russ Blau (talk) 14:56, August 31, 2005 (UTC)

Byzantine collaboration

Moved from Mainpage:

Afghan is done—thanks to everyone who helped! I hesitate to suggest Persia for the next collaboration; I tried it once and found it extremely tricky. How about Byzantine? --Russ Blau (talk) 17:53, August 29, 2005 (UTC)

I vote for Byzantine as well, doing Persia could flirt dangerously with having a collaboration that has no motivation into it. Magicmonster 00:09, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

Persia is a sticky issue; it will need at least one person with a significant degree of expertise in the area who is also willing to put a lot of time into the project. So I agree that Byzantine is a much better choice. --Soo 15:09, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

I've been working on Byzantine for the last couple of days. Byzantine was until recntly a redirect to Byzantine Empire and then changed to disambig, so most will be [[Byzatine Empire|Byzantine]] (of course, there's again the issue of where an adjective such as "Byzantine" describing a person should point). Whitejay251 15:58, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

Goodness, this one is going faster than anticipated.... Already down to under 200 Magicmonster 02:13, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

Completion

Finished this morning. The following four are a bit mysterious to me:

Of course in all these cases we can use the hammer of [[Byzantine Empire|Byzantine]].

Database dump

Wouldn't it be nice to have a new database dump? A lot of the estimates for number of pages that need fixing are very wrong now. Is there someone we can pester? Soo 15:48, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Namespace selection in "What links here"

Since we only need to fix up links in the Main namespace, wouldn't it be useful to be able to view only the Main namespace in the "What links here" page. What we need is the namespace slector that is available in "Special:Contributions". How do we go about getting that. I'm not too familar with the bugzilla method, if that's what needs to be done. --Commander Keane 07:59, September 5, 2005 (UTC)

I seem to remember this being selected before. It would really make life a lot easier, and would be very straightforward to write for anyone that knows PHP. Anyone want to volunteer? Soo 11:07, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
I was thinking that you can put in a feature request, since the code must exist for "Special:Contributions". I imagine you can request it at Wikipedia:Feature request or bugzilla, just thought a more expereinced editor may know the most effective way. --Commander Keane 11:21, September 5, 2005 (UTC)
After a question at the Village pump, it seems that the namespace feature is too much work for the server. --Commander Keane 01:25, September 13, 2005 (UTC)

Persian and Turk

The "What links here" for Persian and Turk are rather difficult. Perhaps for frequently linked to dab's we could have a section on the dab's talk (eg entitled "What link here") with tips for discerning the appropriate destination of the various incoming links. I'm sure this would help for Persian and Turk, and all the other dab's with links also. --Commander Keane 03:03, September 8, 2005 (UTC)

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