Talk:AP

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Reasons why this is no longer a disambiguation page

This was originally a disambiguation page with many links. It was flagged for clean-up and after some consideration I eventually decided to make this drastic change. I have explained my rationale below. Certainly if anyone disagrees with these changes, feel free to drop me a line on my user talk page.

[edit] About disambiguation pages

There are many words and acronyms in the English language that are used to describe more than one thing; for example "Go" could refer to the actual verb, the Chinese board game, the unrelated family board game, the 2001 Japanese film, the American gameshow, the 1970s supergroup, the song by Moby, etc., so when someone uses "go" as their search word in Wikipedia, there needs to be a way to direct them to the article on the particular "go" they are actually looking for.

Therefore, a disambiguation page titled AP should not be a list every person, place or thing with the initials "AP"; it should assist a Wikipedia user in finding an existing article whose topic is (or is often referred to with) just the word "ap" or the letters "AP".

Before adding a topic to a disambiguation page, one should be asking oneself:

  • If you were looking for this topic on Wikipedia, would you simply and only type "ap" or "AP" as your search word?
  • Are there people who might refer to your topic by only using the word/letters "ap" or "AP"?

Please see Wikipedia:Disambiguation and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages) for more info.

[edit] My edits

After going through the articles posted to this page, the only 2 articles which I felt warranted being on a dab page for "ap" or "AP" were Ap (water) and Associated Press.

Some might question why Associated Press deserves a spot on a dab page any more than say, Allied Press or Area postrema; I would point out a couple of things:

  • Many of the article links that I removed from this page did not even mention a reference to "AP" in the body of their respective articles; this adds further credence to the fact that the topic is not commonly referred to as "ap" or "AP"
  • At the time of my edits there were 52 wiki pages linked to AP (not including redirects or Wikipedia project pages.) Of those 52 pages, 14 of them meant to link to the actual dab page, and 31 were actually references to the Associated Press. The remaining 7 pages referred to topics which did not even have a link on the AP dab page.
  • I also moved some of the other links to List of acronyms and initialisms since they are better suited there

Given this only left links to Ap (water) and Associated Press I decided to redirect AP to the Associated Press and Ap to Ap (water) then added soft redirects to one another's pages.

If in the future someone has created an article on AP, A.P., A-P or other variations thereof, then a new dab page should be created at that time. If anyone requires assistance with this, I would be more than happy to help. Marchije (talk) 02:35, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

I came to this page when I was trying to find out what airline uses the code AP (Air One) and there are more entries that I think should be kept (Anno Persico for example), so I put the disamb back. I do agree with you that a lot of them could be deleted. Pax:Vobiscum (talk) 18:07, 9 June 2008 (UTC)