Talk:Olga

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[edit] Olga, Primorsky Krai

Disambiguation pages are not lists of every possible use of the word; they are navigation devices to direct readers the the correct pages on Wikipedia. No article exists for Olga, Primorsky Krai or Olga (urban-type settlement), and the town was not mentioned in the Primorsky Krai article, ergo it was not a "valid entry". See Manual of Style (disambiguation pages). --DeLarge 18:01, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

DeLarge, with such enthusiasm one would think that you would at least take a look at the backlinks of the red link in question. Geographical locations all qualify for articles of their own, and must be disambiguated from one another and from entities of other types when necessary (and it is necessary in this case because having this link is important to maintain integrity of a much, much larger project on Russian administrative divisions and settlements). Just because a link is red is not a reason to remove it from the disambiguation page. I would appreciate you restoring the link where it belongs. Thank you.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 18:14, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
If and when the article exists it should be listed here (although God forbid it be called "Olga (urban-type settlement)"), but not until then; that's not what dab pages are for. Someone types in "Olga" they get brought here because the search function can't specify which article he/she's looking for. The dab page lists the possible articles and the reader makes their choice. Even the link to Paul O'Grady which you reverted months ago had a mention of Olga (even if it was only the name of his dog). But there's no point providing a link to a page which doesn't exist (Olga, Primorsky Krai), or a link to a page which has no information on the subject or even mention of the settlement (Primorsky Krai). --DeLarge 18:24, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
DeLarge, it is quite disappointing that you did not even bother to check the link I provided. Let me repeat again (as per WP:MOSDAB#Redlinks): [l]inks to non-existent articles ("redlinks") may be included only when an editor is confident that an encyclopedia article could be written on the subject. As Olga is an urban-type settlement in Primorsky Krai, it is a geographic location, and, as such, it automatically qualifies as "a subject on which an encyclopedia article can be written". I, for one, am also quite confident that this article should be written, and so, I assure you, are the members of Russia taskforce. It is certainly not a high-priority article, but it will be written eventually.
Furthermore, the link should not be Olga, Primorsky Krai, because such title would imply that there is another settlement by this name elsewhere in Russia (which is not true). Hence, the disambiguator part should prompt the reader of the nature of the subject, which is urban-type settlement (an established term for this kind of settlement). There are literally hundreds of urban-type settlements in Russia, with all cases similar to Olga disambiguated this way. You are the first person I meet in over a year who complained about this.
Finally, in response to your argument that Olga should not be included because it is not mentioned in Primorsky Krai. The only reason it is not mentioned there is because the whole section on administrative divisions and settlements of that krai was outsourced to a separate list—administrative divisions of Primorsky Krai—because of the list's size. Surely, if you bothered to check the backlinks, you would see that.
Please kindly revert your removal. I am sorry if I sound irritated and unfriendly, but your reaction and actions are very uncharacteristic of those who "help fix disambiguation pages with links" (as per your usercat). My recommendation (with no offense intended) would be that you study WP:MOSDAB a bit more carefully before you engage in discussions such as this one.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 19:01, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
Let's go through this step by step:
  • As Olga is an urban-type settlement in Primorsky Krai, it is a geographic location, and, as such, it automatically qualifies as "a subject on which an encyclopedia article can be written". I, for one, am also quite confident that this article should be written, and so, I assure you, are the members of Russia taskforce.
    • Everything qualifies as a subject on which an encyclopedia article can be written. That clause isn't a get-out to allow every redlink on every dab page to stay. The fact that there are "hundreds" of settlements awaiting articles suggests that, in all honesty, it'll be a long, long time before anyone gets round to it. You've already had eleven months to make a start.
  • Furthermore, the link should not be Olga, Primorsky Krai, because such title would imply that there is another settlement by this name elsewhere in Russia (which is not true). Hence, the disambiguator part should prompt the reader of the nature of the subject, which is urban-type settlement (an established term for this kind of settlement). There are literally hundreds of urban-type settlements in Russia, with all cases similar to Olga disambiguated this way.
    • Please read Wikipedia:Naming conventions (places), especially where it says "[f]or place names, the use of simple parenthetical terms such as "(district)", "(province)", "(town)", or "(village)", instead of administrive divisions, is deprecated (not recommended)." Instead, it recommends <ShortName>, <HigherDivision>, or <ShortName> (HigherDivision) for disambiguation. Maybe your taskforce needs to re-evaluate how compatible its conventions are with WP as a whole?
  • Surely, if you bothered to check the backlinks, you would see that.
    • This is the one that really gets me. You expect me, or anyone else, to go trawling through backlinks looking for the right article? Get real. Provide the link yourself -- the dab page is a navigation aid, not a game of hide-and-seek. If you'd written "Olga, one of the administrative divisions of Primorsky Krai" all this back-and-forth would have been unnecessary, since I'd have found the page with one click of the mouse. --DeLarge 22:53, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
Good morning there! Thank you for putting your comments in a list format—that's the way I prefer to deal with arguments myself. Before I do that, however, please accept my sincere apologies for my attitude, tone of response, and unpleasant assumptions I did yesterday. Yesterday was a very difficult day for me (off-wiki), but that gave me no right to blow off the handle and assume the attitude I did. Hopefully we'll have a more pleasant conversation from this point onward.
That said, I still disagree on each and every point you made above. Let me go through them (again) one-by-one.
  1. As you said, everything qualifies as a subject on which an encyclopedia article can be written (well, more or less). It should be noted that not everything would need to be disambiguated though. Perhaps this little overview will help you understand the sheer scope of what is involved in the project on Russian administrative divisions and settlements: in Russia, there are over 1,000 cities/towns, almost 2,000 urban-type settlements, almost 2,000 districts, and the rural settlements number in tens of thousands. Don't forget city districts, rural councils (selsoviets), and the new municipal reform that introduced (and keeps introducing) new municipal units<a little inside joke> that, as a Citibank representative would undoubtedly say, "multiply like the rabbits"</joke>. The number of editors actively working on all this? Read my lips—three. Don't get me wrong, there are more people than that pitching in here and there on occasion, but the "core" team is three people. That alone, by the way, should answer your concern about me having "eleven months" to make a start. We are barely finished with the cities/towns (and even those are mostly basic stubs), so please excuse us for not taking care of the urban-type settlement of Olga with population of four thousand people. See, it was not a priority. Anyway, with this much material to cover and with so few people actually covering it, it would be impossible to control the workflow efficiently without sticking to a well-defined system. I myself did most of the work on pre-disambiguating all cities/towns/urban-type settlements and districts, so when an interested editor comes in and wants to right an article on, say, Oktyabrsky or Zheleznodorozhny, s/he would know what the title is supposed to be. The side benefit of such pre-disambiguation is that when someone reads a piece of news in a newspaper about something happening in "Kirovsky, Russia", that someone would discover a disambiguation page Kirovsky that would tell him/her of need to have more location information than just "Russia". The downside of pre-disambiguation? Apparently, some people think that red links should be banned from dab pages altogether. Please forgive my irony. I hope you see that without such pre-disambiguation, that same person might just get a redirect to Kirovsky District, Primorsky Krai and be left in a state of complete confusion. It is thus so much easier to do the pre-disambiguation once and then use that naming scheme than to perpetually do the cleanup of the mess that would emerge otherwise (been there, done that—don't want to do it again). Now, that pre-disambiguation was done quite a while ago (I started it in 2004 and was mostly finished by the end of 2005). Unsurprisingly enough, the disambiguation policies and guidelines changed during that time and since then. Which brings me to the next point:
  2. We now have a network of disambiguation pages dealing with the Russian locations, and those pages may not always comply with existing disambiguation practices (although I am pleasantly surprised that for the most part they hold up pretty well). Problem is, three people can only do so much. If we go back and start tweaking the dab pages to make them fully comply with existing guidelines, it'll take us another year, during which time the guidelines are bound to change again. In a year, we'll be stuck with a set of disambiguation pages that still are out of compliance and with no actual productive work done. Here is an example that's very similar to this: this summer, another editor voiced his concern that all Russian districts were disambiguated—for example, Teuchezhsky District of Adygea would always be linked as Teuchezhsky District, Republic of Adygea despite the fact that no other district by this name exists anywhere in the world. Is that a valid concern? Absolutely! Did I accept several moves of his at that time? No, I did not; I reverted them all. Why? Because at that time I was in the process disambiguating all Russian districts. Having all the districts with division location qualifiers made that work so much easier and more efficient. As a trade-in, I offered that editor to personally rename all uniquely named districts after there is no longer a need for redundancy. It's been three months now since I started doing that, and I am only half way through. Still, a promise is a promise, and, besides, his point was very valid as far as existing policies and guidelines go. Do you see the analogy? What I mean is that I will, without being asked, make sure that all disambiguation pages and articles dealing with Russian divisions and settlements comply with the guidelines 100%, but only after the majority of the work is done. Hopefully we'll have more people by the time it happens. All I am asking from you and people like you to please let us do our work and not make us jump through pointless hoops just so some minor things (such as "Olga (urban-type settlement)" vs. "Olga, Primorsky Krai") could be brought to compliance at the expense of our team's (already very limited) efficiency. Also note that the very same clause you quoted at me above (WP:PLACES#Parenthetical terms (deprecated)) is deprecated, not prohibited. Mind you, it is not completely got rid of for a good reason—because it's impossible to fix all occurences disambiguated this way at once. Such fixing should be done with great care above all. Also, note the section just below that one (WP:PLACES#Maintain consistency within each country)—if I am proud of anything, it's that all Russian locations are named consistently, and that any inconsistencies introduced by unaware editors are taken care of very quickly and efficiently. The pre-disambiguation work I have done (and the fact that Russian locations account for 3,000 entries in my 3,500 entries-long watchlist) really helps that.
  3. Finally, to address your last point ([y]ou expect me, or anyone else, to go trawling through backlinks looking for the right article?). I do not expect an editor passing by and making a side comment about an inconsistency s/he noted to check the backlinks. But I do fully expect a person like you (who has a userbox specifically stating that you help with disambiguation work) to do that. As a matter of fact, that's the first thing I expect you to do, especially before you do something as major as removing a link from the page. The second thing is to check google hits. If you skimp on one or both of these points then I am sorry, but you leave me very unimpressed with the quality of your "help". One really doesn't need a lot of skill to remove a red link—the very least one must do is to check that link's validity. Regarding your other comment—I could not have originally written "Olga, one of the administrative divisions of Primorsky Krai". First, it's not an administrative division, but a settlement. Second, such wordage is against the disambiguation guidelines, which prescribe to either write just the name of the article or to follow the name of the article with the country link. Since the link is red, its formatting is covered by WP:MOSDAB#Redlinks, which prescribes to include at least one other blue link on the same line, but does not specify what kind of link it should be. Technically, it should be "Russia"; I wrote "Primorsky Krai, Russia", which, of course, is more specific. You, on the other hand, somehow have a strong belief that this blue link must lead to a page that mentions the disambiguated entry (to quote you: "[n]o article exists for Olga, Primorsky Krai... and the town was not mentioned in the Primorsky Krai article"; "[e]ven the link to Paul O'Grady which you reverted months ago had a mention of Olga"). Why do you keep saying that? There is absolutely nothing in WP:MOSDAB supporting this statement of yours, except when dealing with URL anchor notation, which is not the case here. I agree that it makes sense in many cases, but it is still neither a policy nor a guideline and, as such, is subject to exceptions when exceptions are logical.
I hope you see my point. I also made a stub for Olga (this discussion is really getting out of hand), so I restored its dab entry. I'll leave the fun part of dealing with Olga Bay, Russia (and figuring out why I didn't just call it "Olga Bay") to you. And here is a good rule to help you in your future work. Best,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 16:09, 12 December 2006 (UTC)