Talk:AM

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WikiProject Disambiguation This page is part of WikiProject Disambiguation, an attempt to structure and organize all disambiguation pages on Wikipedia. If you wish to help, you can edit the page attached to this talk page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.

No one is going to link to am as a word expecting to go to a page defining the word, so I removed these entries:

As a word

Tedernst | Talk 16:33, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

what about people typing "am" in the browser bar expecting to find exactly some explanation of the often used "am" in german city names? Tobias Conradi (Talk) 17:06, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
Perhaps there should be an article called Am in German city names. If not, then the entry doesn't belong on this page. Tedernst | talk 20:17, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] wikilinks and dab style

MoS:DP explains the purpose of dab pages. The purpose is to allow people to choose between pages that might otherwise be confused. So I removed a bunch of wikilinks that are not necessary to choose between pages (I find the extra links makes the page much harder to use) and I was reverted. The edit summary explained that with is WIKIpedia. Could we discuss this, please? Tedernst | Talk 16:39, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

during your work maybe point to MoS:DP. 2nd there is nothing about not having it wikified. Maybe it should better be discussed at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)? Tobias Conradi (Talk) 16:47, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
The quote below is from MoS:DP#Individual entries, emphasis retained. —Michael Z. 2005-12-4 09:30 Z
"Unlike a regular article page, don't wikilink any other words in the line, unless they may be essential to help the reader determine which page they are looking for; these pages aren't for exploration, but only to help the user navigate to a specific place. . . ."
strong disagree with this theory. references should be easy to reach Tobias Conradi (Talk) 17:27, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
Tobias, you seem to be undoing the hard work of myself, Neonumbers, Mzajac, Tedernst, Susvolans of trying to get this page up to MoS:DP standard... Please discuss you rational for adding back wikilinks and irrational "sorting" of the disambig entries at Talk:AM. I gave a reasonable reason for my revert, labelling me a "destroyer" is not productive, nor in good faith. Thanks/wangi 17:30, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
you destroyed sorting and references. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 17:32, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
Can you explain the rational behind the sort you done? I cannot see reason behind "AM may refer to", "Am may refer to", "am may refer to" and "AM, a.m., am, Am may refer to" (all of the ones already done!)... wangi 17:36, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
FASTER access? You can help with better handling of "AM, a.m., am, Am may refer to" Tobias Conradi (Talk) 17:39, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
Tobias, your edits are against the recommendations at MoS:DP and against the consensus of the other editors (five+) of this article. I am not going to get into an edit war here, but I think it's pretty safe to say that your edits will be reverted by one of the other editors who have had their hardwork ignored. If you do not agree with the manual of style on disambiguation pages then the place to discuss it is Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages), not edits to this article. Thanks/wangi 17:46, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
"rv, eat your guideline" isn't in good faith or very constructive either. wangi 17:57, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
a bad guideline is a bad guideline. It contradicts cite sources. And please don't come with "hard work" ignored. I did not ignore it. I saw benefits and problems. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 18:07, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
Of course you're free to disagree with the guideline but the place to do that is Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages). The guideline has been built up by consensus, if you'd like to change it then build up consensus for a change. wangi 18:11, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
I've just removed a few of the excess wikilinks that can be accessed by clicking on the given link. This way a reader can still find what they are looking for (eg the ARR reporting mark article), it will just take one more click. The advantage of this is that it doesn't clog up the dab with wikilinks.--Commander Keane 18:33, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Tobias, in my opinion, you have two courses of action that are both in good faith.

  1. Give rationale about why this page is different from all other dab pages and thus should not rigidly rely on MoS:DP.
  2. Work to change MoS:DP by stating reasons it should change and building consensus over there (not on each dab page).

Personally I don't agree with you, but that's not the point. We can still work together, as long as we all agree on the groundrules. Tedernst | talk 20:17, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Tobias, this is getting very tiring. You are going against both guidelines and consensus. Please stop your edits. Thanks/wangi 18:01, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Sources

I cannot find nowhere in WP that Airmail is abreviated AM/am/a.m. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 17:41, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
It's common usage, see http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=am for example. wangi 17:46, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Review current status

Let's check this page's current status vs. the MoS:DP:

  • Leading line(s): Check. Nothing in MoS:DP on grouping, oddly --didn't there use to be?
  • Individual entries - bullets: Check.
  • Individual entries - link with the first word: Check.
  • Individual entries - no bolding or italics (with exceptions): Check.
  • Individual entries - Redlinks: Check.
  • Individual entries - at most one other wikilink: Check.
  • Individual entries - sentence fragments: Check.
  • Piping: Check.
  • Order of entries - most-used first, clarifiers, embedded, synonyms, larger articles: Sort of check.

The "Order of entries" seems to be the toughest one to get consensus on, with the breakdown by groupings (lexical, in this case) coming second. Because this is a two-letter initialism, the entries are perforce disparate, and frequency of meaning is, as usual, very hard to establish or agree upon. Arguably, AM stands most often for "ante meridiem", in common usage. The remaining cases seem mostly to be unapplicable. Urhixidur 01:08, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Note that the Aeroméxico and Arkansas and Missouri Railroad entries both feature their "explanation" (i.e., "IATA airline designator" and "reporting mark") prominently: the first in the infobox, the second in the lead sentence. Not so with Armenia, hence the need to link country code. The fact that all three main country code systems (ISO 3166, FIPS 10-4 and NATO) use AM for Armenia makes a sentence specifying them superfluous, but it does seem a little odd when compared to similar disambigs where that is not the case, such as MN, which will list Monaco (FIPS 10-4, NATO) and Mongolia (ISO 3166). Urhixidur 01:19, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Regarding "at most one other wikilink", the MOS states "don't wikilink any other words in the line, unless they may be essential to help the reader", so I would restate this "avoid other wikilinks", keeping in mind that every rule may have exceptions. —Michael Z. 2005-12-5 15:34 Z

[edit] Lamest edit wars

This is a going candidate for being listed at Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars ever. Don't even bother arguing here that the MOS guidelines are no good here. Don't add novelties, like links to ISO codes which are not called AM, don't complicate the page by turning it into four separate lists, don't invent new sorting orders. Don't add sub-lists, don't link to redirects. Go to WP:DAB and MOS:DP and change them, then come back. This page should fit the convention—period.

Don't spend a lot of energy fighting convention for a disambiguation page. Keep in mind that [|nothing links there] (except user, talk, and utility pages). Spend your time adding disambiguation links to other pages or writing articles.

And for goodness' sake don't start using the edit line to bicker over a silly disambiguation page. Please go work on the encyclopedia. —Michael Z. 2005-12-5 15:14 Z

I'm removing the division of this list into four lists. When a reader follows a link to this page, he may not have any way of knowing whether the correct version of the abbreviation is AM, Am, am, A.M., a.m. or something else. He may end up searching through four lists instead of one. Without a clear advantage to splitting this up, it's better to keep it simple as one alphabetized list. —Michael Z. 2005-12-5 15:28 Z

In my opinion the split up way was easier to read - and that's all that matters. It's odd to speak of a "lame" edit war - and then refueling the war by wiping out serveral edits to make way for your single list, surely common sense would have told you to discuss it on the talk page first. Lastly, take a look at this comment at the Talk:MoS (dabs). The behaviour concerns many of us.--Commander Keane 16:12, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
Regarding the edit war, I formatted this page according to the MOS recommendation, just three days ago. Since then two or three dozen edits were made adding features that are not recommended, or specifically prohibited. I just finished the cleanup to make this page conform.
I'm sorry, but I disagree with you about four lists, differentiated only by a confusing array of capitalization and punctuation forms. Instead of just going down the list and finding his link, the reader has to first evaluate the difference between of all four lists. These categories are not clear-cut enough to be useful, since many of these terms could be formatted and misformatted in different ways on a page which links here.
Don't think of it in the neat categories that we hold in our head after organizing this list. Think of it in terms of the procedure a reader has to follow when this page unexpectedly appears after clicking a link, and he's only interested in one of the links. To the reader, AM is just "eh em"; don't make him have to stop and decide whether AM, Am, am, .am, A.M., a.m. or some other configuration is significant. —Michael Z. 2005-12-5 16:47 Z

Susvolans, regarding nesting .am under Armenia, please consider this from the reader's point of view. The reader has probably clicked on something like "the top-level domain .am" to get here, and may not know that it is associated with Armenia. Why not let him easily find .am at the top of the list, instead of having to figure out the connection to Armenia? This list should not be indexed by the encyclopedic category of the information, but by the type of link that the reader came here by. —Michael Z. 2005-12-5 17:00 Z

Readers visting this page are probably looking for AM radio or 12-hour clock, the order of the list should reflect this. The MoS doesn't guide us on whether to have a long list (and it shouldn't). If you feel strongly about having the single list, then I'm happy to keep that form.--Commander Keane 17:28, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
Regarding a putative .am link, it goes directly to the Armenia ccTLD page, so pointing out that ".am" is related to the AM country code and am language codes is a freebie.
Urhixidur 18:11, 5 December 2005 (UTC)