Talk:Slave (disambiguation)

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Contents 1 Dab for lead entry Slave 2 Slave River etc

[edit] Dab for lead entry Slave

Hi, Grubber: After checking out your user page, I took the time to read through both of the relevant pages, Wikipedia:Disambiguation and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages). If this were an ordinary dab term, I would probably just defer to your expertise. But unless I missed something (entirely possible), the lead entry for this particular dab page doesn't seem to fit neatly into the guidelines. Do you know of any other dab pages where the "most-used meaning" doesn't even have a page (article) of its own, but only a redirect to a closely-related term?

While Slave does indeed redirect to Slavery, it is nonetheless a distinct word. It strikes me as very odd that the term that's being disambiguated doesn't even get a short description, but a closely-related term does get a very long description -- neither of which actually conforms to what the guidelines call for. Is this recommended somewhere that I'm just not aware of? Are there other dab pages that resemble this one in that respect?

I rewrote the entry in order to substitute a succinct, disambiguating definition of the word "slave" for the lengthy explanation of the term "slavery". Although I may not have formatted the entry ideally in terms of the general guidelines, it still seems to me that it makes more sense for the entry to refer to "an enslaved person", rather than going into a discussion of what "slavery" is. Is there a better way to do that so it would conform better to the guidelines?

One possibility is simply:

"Slave, an enslaved person"

The redirect takes the reader to the correct article, and according to the guidelines, redirects are permitted in some cases.

Or perhaps something along the lines of:

"Slave, a person whose labor is exploited through slavery"

Whatever we come up with, it really should be formatted as the Introductory line, since it's clearly the "most-used meaning", and then the other entries would follow "Also may refer to".

Let me know what you think of these suggestions. Or if you can improve on them, please lend a hand. But I really don't think it should be left as it reads now. Cgingold 14:07, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Here's my comments:

• For the original edit, the biggest issue was the piping. We try to avoid piping as much as possible. I think the best uses of piping are for anchors (Bed#Standard sizes becomes Queen size on queen).
• It would not be a good idea to link to Slave directly, since it's a redirect; there's a whole project dedicated to removing links to redirect pages, so it's not a good idea to willingly add one to their list :)
• "Slave, a person whose labor is exploited through slavery" is a great introductory line, and I think that's the perfect place for this. (I would not like to see that as a bullet, though, since we try to keep the bulleted links as the first word, so that it creates a nice line of links. Sometimes we have to make the link word go farther out in the sentence, but those entries would normally go to the bottom.)

It's strange that I get such pleasure out of DAB pages, but somehow I do :) Thanks for your work on this page, and if you have questions or want to challenge my styles, I'd love to hear from ya! - grubber 16:25, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Quick note... The introductory line should be a complete sentence, so that would need to be done too. - grubber 16:26, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Slave River etc

I don't think this disambig links well enough to Slave River, you need to follow the link to Slavey, which is most unlikely unless you know the pronunciation or some other hint, and then from there to Great Slave Lake, which is also not obvious. A direct link to Slave River is required IMO. Possibly a direct link to Great Slave Lake would be in order too. Not quite sure how best to do it. Andrewa 03:22, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Glad you brought this up -- I had Great Slave Lake in the back of my mind when I moved the entry for "slave" as an alternative spelling of Slavey to the top of the page recently (check the history if you're interested), though it didn't pass muster -- so I'm not really sure how to proceed, either. :) You might want to read through the two pages I mentioned in my earlier comments (above) and take a stab at it yourself. Oh, btw -- you might want to remove those secondary links in the line you worked on (per the DAB MOS - only the DAB term itself is supposed to have links). Cgingold 07:43, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Wow, thanks for the heads-up... Wikipedia:Disambiguation has changed a lot recently! But I don't think the secondary links violate the guideline... they are both to articles that someone might reasonably be expected to want, if for example they'd been on a tour of a nuclear facility and wanted to know more about hot cells. My experience as a guide on such tours (years ago) was that the phrase master slave was what stuck in people's minds. High activity handling cell doesn't seem to have the same ring. Andrewa 21:01, 30 December 2006 (UTC)