Talk:Furnace

Definition, lead, issues with particular meaning taking over entire space
According to both common use of the word in English, and to the definition on Encyclopædia Britannica and Oxford dictionaries (among many others; see here and here), a furnace is a structure in which heat is produced with the help of combustion. For a while, there has been a wrong attribution of the term on Wiki to just one very particular type of furnace, the strictly American English use of the word for devices used for heating purposes in buildings (air conditioning plus hot water); I have fixed that, renaming that article "Furnace (house heating)". This should have ended the discussion, but maybe the fact that there still is a redirect out there called "Furnace", which leads from Furnace to Furnace (house heating), might technically still be an issue. Is it? As you can easily see from the content of this DAB page, Wikipedia covers the entire breadth of this very common term, with just 2 articles on the house heating device (the general one, and one on water boilers), and over a dozen on industrial types (Industrial furnace, Metallurgical furnace, and their numerous subsets). A DAB, like any Wiki page, must have a lead that reflects its content. You don't wag a dog by its tail, meaning: if there is a mistake, a nonsense somewhere, you fix that mistake, rather than twist derived & correct items (like this DAB) to fit the wrong one. I bet there are X Wiki guidelines for that too, but I'm satisfied with common sense and decades of using good reference works of which Wiki tries to be one.

I have shied away from applying for that redirect (Furnace → Furnace (house heating)) to be removed, as such processes take more time and effort that I feel ready to invest in it. But now I think I have to. Please go there if you want to help/participate in it (I might not hit the right template, it might need a discussion, whatever). Thank you, Arminden (talk) 15:25, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
 * I think I've sorted that one out. Arminden (talk) 15:33, 21 December 2021 (UTC)


 * I think you're probably right about the move; at least personally, as a non–native English speaker, I definitely don't associate "furnace" with heaters/boilers but instead with the industrial kind. In any case, I've swapped Furnace and Furnace (disambiguation) so that the disambiguation page is now at the base title, per WP:MALPLACED. What's left to be done now is to disambiguate all the incoming links. If you want to help with that, User:Qwertyytrewqqwerty/DisamAssist is a very efficient tool to get it done. Lennart97 (talk) 10:10, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
 * thank you for agreeing, but why do you think I'm cautious about technically bold moves? Now that you went ahead and moved the DAB, there's a huge amount of manual fixing to be done, see the message I've received from Certes: "Several editors have fixed most of the links broken by the recent move of Furnace, but another 169 articles still need to be repaired. Please can you help? Thanks, Certes." Maybe you can help out too? To quote myself: "I have shied away from applying for that redirect (Furnace → Furnace (house heating)) to be removed, as such processes take more time and effort that I feel ready to invest in it"... Some stuff is better left to the technically super-skilled :), hi, can't a redirect (Furnace (disambiguation) → Furnace) be created post-factum? Wouldn't that solve the problem? Just asking. Today I'm too tired, I'll see if I can do any of it tomorrow, but please answer to my naive question first. Thanks! Arminden (talk) 19:20, 29 December 2021 (UTC)
 * The swap I performed was a mere technicality, WP:MALPLACED accurately explains it. The bold move, and the one that created the situation in which hundreds of links need to be fixed, was you redirecting Furnace to Furnace (disambiguation). Lennart97 (talk) 19:32, 29 December 2021 (UTC)
 * I'd already fixed some of the links, though they're not my responsibility, and will do more when time permits. Lennart is right that the important edit is the original move which diverted links to Furnace to the disambiguation page rather than to the article (whether directly or via a redirect).  Subequently swapping the MALPLACED pages made the situation less bad.  To be fair, most of the links I've fixed were about an industrial furnace or metallurgical furnace rather than a domestic heating boiler, so the move does seem justified, though it's normal to discuss a move first if the page is so widely linked.  Certes (talk) 20:30, 29 December 2021 (UTC)
 * my honest apologies. F***, I thought I had avoided trouble by not touching the bigger beast. I have no doubt that "furnace" is almost always about the industrial machinery and not the house boiler. But wait a minute. I made the move after finding at least one case where furnace was linked to the boiler page by obvious mistake, because most editors wouldn't think twice about it, and you Certes found the same pre-existing problem on several pages. So we already had lots of wrongly linked industrial furnaces, hooked to the house boiler. That means that whatever I did wrong was only wrong in part, and the nasty work of going through the articles one by one and checking what needs to be linked where, already needed to be done before my move. Not to disculpate myself, but logical mistakes usually snowball into larger systemic mistakes. I fixed the logical mistake, now I'll sift through the already extant avalanche debris, which is only to some degree of my doing, if at all. Also: if they all link here, why bother? Instead of linking to the wrong article (house boiler), now they link to the general, catch-all term, "furnace = structure in which heat is produced with the help of combustion" (as per lead;, hi, please don't remove the definition from the lead anymore! You see on how many levels it proves to be useful). But I won't be lazy and will do my share tomorrow. Cheers, Arminden (talk) 21:32, 29 December 2021 (UTC)
 * No need to apologize, you did nothing wrong. As you point out, many links are/were wrong anyway and it's actually a good thing that we can now sort them out more easily. Don't stress too much about fixing the links, we'll get it done together and there's no deadline. Lennart97 (talk) 21:41, 29 December 2021 (UTC)
 * This is a common problem. A similar thing just happened at Southern League (baseball), where we naively started diverting its links to Southern League (1964–2020) only to find that many of them were about some other southern league.  In that case we addressed the links before moving the page so, although many existing errors remain to be fixed, we haven't created any new ones.  Finding such errors suggests that the term may have no primary topic (PT) and the page move is correct, if slightly premature.  As for the dab lead, we only start with a definition if there is a PT.  That usually means that the disambiguation page is called something like "Foo (disambiguation)" and an article about the PT occupies the base name "Foo".  There are rare exceptions such as Large, where we don't have or want an article on the obvious PT of bigness.  I'm not sure that Furnace qualifies in that way; perhaps it needs a broad-concept article about heaters.  (We'd also need a dab to list Furnace (film) etc.)  Certes (talk) 21:53, 29 December 2021 (UTC)

A broad-concept article might make sense. For now I think it makes sense to start with a definion as we essentially do have a primary meaning. The page needs some restructuring, though. Maybe we don't need to list all specific subtypes of furnaces. I'm thinking of something like this: A furnace is a structure in which heat is produced with the help of combustion. It may specifically refer to: Furnace may also refer to: [all other meanings]
 * Furnace (house heating): a furnace (American English), or a heater/boiler (British English), used to generate heat for buildings
 * Industrial furnace, a device used in industrial applications
 * Metallurgical furnace, a device used to heat metal and metal ore

Would that make sense? Lennart97 (talk) 11:22, 30 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, that makes sense. We may need to list other appliances, but some meanings such as Basic oxygen furnace could be dismissed as subtopics of industrial or metallurgical furnace.  Do we need to include Boiler?  Do Americans call the whole boiler assembly a "furnace", or is a domestic or industrial furnace (already listed) simply a component of or complement to a boiler? Certes (talk) 11:48, 30 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Not too sure about the furnace/boiler distinction, either. All subtypes of the metallurgical furnace are prominently listed at Metallurgical furnace which is itself something of a broad concept article, so we could omit those. Isn't a metallurgical furnace itself a kind of industrial furnace, by the way? Also, the jetstream furnace seems to be a type of boiler, not an industrial furnace. Lennart97 (talk) 13:20, 31 December 2021 (UTC)


 * I think that's all the links disambiguated. I added Glass melting furnace to the dab but only discovered it after disambiguating many glassmaking links to the more generic Industrial furnace.  I've also used that as the least bad target for the furnace in a ship's steam engine; perhaps that could be improved too. Certes (talk) 00:28, 31 December 2021 (UTC)