Talk:Smut

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[edit] Vandalism

Cleared up vandalism PvtBaldrick 00:35, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Trimming

I have trimmed according to my understanding of Wikipedia:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages). Comments are welcome. — Pekinensis 15:32, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

I disagree with your trim. The Manual of Style (sounds like it should be the main textbook at a fashion school, doesn't it?) gives examples in it's Order of Entries and Longer Lists sections showing that a short explanation of each item is entirely appropriate.--Icarus 18:52, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

I agree that a short explanation is often appropriate. For example, Chinese spinach could mean any of (at least) three Chinese leaf vegetables, so I included a Chinese name and a brief botanical description for each. I would like to add photos, but we don't have one for Basella alba yet, and it looked ugly. By contrast, I didn't see the need for short explanations on this page, because the target pages occupy such different domains, and the article titles themselves seem to disambiguate very clearly.

Is your disagreement with the criterion in general, or do you feel that these particular short explanations are necessary to distinguish the target articles?

You also reverted changes not covered by your comment above:

• I moved Jan Smuts to a see-also section because his name is spelled differently. (In fact, it seems so unlikely to me that someone would try to link to that article by using only his surname, misspelled to become a mildly insulting word, that I wouldn't mind seeing that link disappear from this page entirely, but that is a different issue.)

• I removed the qualification that the meaning of obscenity is a slang usage, because I wasn't sure it was true (it wasn't marked as such by the two dictionaries I checked), and because this sort of dictionary information seems irrelevant to the job of quickly guiding the reader to the page he or she desires.

Thanks — Pekinensis 19:42, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

The Manual of Style examples are also about topics that are different enough that they wouldn't need extra explanations. Using their "Thingamajig" explanation, it's obvious that if you're looking for the article about the isotope of chlorine, you want the chemistry one and not the biology or Peruvian one. And in the John Smith example, you don't need to know that the composer wrote the theme for Seinfeld just to disambiguate, but it is included anyway to give the reader a little more context.

I agree that Jan Smuts' article may belong in a separate section. No wording I thought of at the time seemed right, but perhaps there is one that could work. "See Also" doesn't seem like a perfect fit, but it might be better than nothing.

As for "smut" as a term for "obscenity", it might work to have a section like the "Tail" example in the Manual of Style. The dictionary I used doesn't mark it as slang either, so maybe "synonym" is a better word. --Icarus 04:25, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Playboy

Why is Playboy on the Smut disambiguation page? The magazine may be considered "smut" by some, but has no place on the disambiguation page.

I wondered that too. Since you didn't sign your post, I'll go ahead and post it to the Playboy article talk section. Maybe someone there knoes why. --KSnortum 23:17, 18 January 2006 (UTC)