Talk:Fragment

"Please asume good faith instead of reverting blindly. I said Fragment is unlikely to be the search term for that publication; I said nothing about the likelines of the book itself. Further more, readability goes over guideline, which is sated is that exact same guideline. Please read MOS:DAB more carefully. — Edokter • Talk • 00:23, 3 March 2008 (UTC)"

Thank you, but I did not revert blindly; I reverted after looking at your changes and seeing that a) they removed an entry which is, contrary to your justifications for hasty reverting, quite likely to be searched for, and b) violated a key purpose of disambiguation pages.

a) The full name of Binjamin Wilkomirski's book is Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood 1939-1948. I would think that it is obvious, however, that whenever you have a book whose title consists of a short, memorable word or phrase, followed by a colon, followed by a longer, harder-to-remember subtitle, many people will abbreviate it as just the word/phrase before the colon.  People who talk about Wilkomirski's book are going to call it Fragments far more often than they call it Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood 1939-1948, and some people who want more information on the book may not even know that it has a longer title.  Therefore, to say that it is not likely for a reader to come to the disambiguation page for Fragment/Fragments looking for Wilkomirski's book is to say that it is not likely that any reader will be looking for Wilkomirski's book.  This is not reasonable, however; the book won several awards and gathered a great deal of attention, and became even more noteworthy when it was revealed to be a fraud.

b) The MOS:DAB page does not say "readability goes over guideline". It says "These guidelines are intended for consistency, but usefulness to the reader is the principal goal. So ignore these guidelines if you have a good reason."  Note that the principal goal is "usefulness to the reader", not "readability".  Now, consider this fact:  in a perfect world, Wikipedia would not need disambiguation pages.  In a perfect world, it would be possible to give every single article a name that was both perfectly readable and perfectly unique.  It is because we do not live in that world that we need disambiguation pages, and the reader who comes to the disambiguation page Mercury needs to know which article is about the planet Mercury, which is about the element mercury, which is about the Greek god Mercury, et cetera.

Now, if the principal goal was "readability" rather than "usefulness to the reader", we would pipe every single one of those links, so that they looked like:


 * Mercury, the nearest planet to the Sun in the solar system
 * Mercury, the chemical element (also called quicksilver)
 * Mercury, a Greek god

How useful would that be? You can argue that it's more readable to hide all the identifiers -- but from the point of usefulness, it's absolutely wrong. A reader or editor who needs to know the actual title of the article which describes the Greek god Mercury should be able to go to the disambiguation page and see the correct article title there -- doing things your way would require that anyone who just wants to see the actual article titles would be required to go into the source to get them. This is in fact why the primary advice given by MOS:DAB about piping is not to do it. It is true that the page says that you may ignore any guidelines if you have a good reason. But nothing you have said indicates that you have a good reason; it instead indicates that you are mistakenly pursuing the wrong goal for a disambiguation page, pursuing 'readability' over utility when utility is the only reason a disambiguation page exists. Accordingly, I am reverting it back to the version that has clunky sentences but nevertheless shows the actual article titles. I expect that you will, if you are truly acting in good faith, not blindly revert that change unless you actually have and can present a good reason. -- 65.78.13.238 (talk) 04:22, 3 March 2008 (UTC)


 * The current version violated MOS:DAB even more; ie. only the article should be linked and nothing else. There is also way too much information here that belongs in the article itself. I'm going to clean it ut to so that only the essential information is here. The way it is now, there are too many links (especially the linguistics fragments). I will try not to pipe the links, provided it doesn't end up showing some information in duplicate. — Edokter  •  Talk  • 15:23, 3 March 2008 (UTC)


 * "The current version violated MOS:DAB even more; ie. only the article should be linked and nothing else." Aha, so guidelines are meant to be broken when it's you who wants to break them, but when it's not you, suddenly rules like "only the article should be linked and nothing else" are set in stone.  *sigh*  Hey, I've got a great idea -- why don't you put it back the way it was so that someone whose experience outweighs their attitude can clean it up? -- 65.78.13.238 (talk) 01:03, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Literary fragment
Two people have now expressed the opinion that there should not be an entry for "literary fragment". In the course of cleaning up some links that lead to this disambiguation page, I ran across the following on Middle-earth:


 * Tolkien encountered the term middangeard in an Old English fragment he studied in 1914:


 * éala éarendel engla beorhtast / ofer middangeard monnum sended.
 * Hail Earendel, brightest of angels / above the middle-earth sent unto men.

Could someone please clarify where the linked instance of "fragment" above should point? -- 65.78.13.238 (talk) 01:20, 5 March 2008 (UTC)


 * The problem was that "fragment" itself didn't link to anything, but the explanation linked to writing, poem and unfinished work. So those are your best bets. — Edokter  •  Talk  • 12:54, 5 March 2008 (UTC)