Talk:Gut (anatomy)/Archive 1

Dab page
Given that we have an article on Human gastrointestinal tract a dab page is required here. I am not sure why said páge is being opposed, and especially with a claim of lack of consensus when two people have been working on th dab page and one person has reverted claiming his or her opinion makes for a lack of consensus. I am confused as to why anyone would oppose dabbing, which is to be used when there are alternative articles a particular term leads to. This is a classic example of where a dab page is needed. the fact that this redirect has been here a long time is completely irrelevant. So what proper argument is being used to justify the revrt of this dab page? ♫ RichardWeiss talk contribs 15:22, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Proposal
The proposal is to retain the dab page.
 * Support, for reasons expressed above. ♫ RichardWeiss talk contribs 15:22, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Support, at least temporarily until the links are disambiguated, and then we can consider longer-term solutions. I initiated a brief discussion on the issues here, and am prepared to elaborate on my rationale below. I made about 100 bold edits, which confirmed my instincts that disambiguaiton is needed, to several topics, for several reasons. Note that this dab page is to disambiguate links to the dictionary word gastrointestinal as well. – Wbm1058 (talk) 16:19, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Oppose, because this is not an ambiguous term per WP:DABCONCEPT, period. We do not have a disambiguation page for Heart, Lung, Brain, Nervous system, or other comparable body parts and systems, and for good reasons. Such pages quickly become magnets for incoming links, and because links with similar intent are fixed by different people, the same links will all end up going to different places. In short, this will create a mess. Furthermore, most of the links on the page when this was a disambiguation page were partial title matches, which are forbidden on disambiguation pages, and which will be removed. Gastrointestinal disease is not ambiguous to "Gastrointestinal tract". Gastrointestinal surgery is not ambiguous to "Gastrointestinal tract". If these were to be included, they would require that sources appear in the respective articles defining them as such. Otherwise, they fail WP:DABMENTION. Concepts are by definition not ambiguous to their own subtopics. Unless you can prove that the Human gastrointestinal tract is not a type of gastrointestinal tract, then you have no ambiguity to address, and I will take this to whatever level of review is required to avoid this ghastly and highly disruptive misapplication of the rules governing disambiguation. bd2412  T 16:50, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
 * But we have a full-blown article on the specific topic Brain, so we are not faced with the difficult decision over whether to redirect that title to Nervous system or Human brain, or hack up some sort of dab or broad-concept page to fill in a blatant gap in the encyclopedia's coverage of the topic. That's the fundamental problem here. Wbm1058 (talk) 16:25, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Then we are lacking a full-blown article on the specific topic, Gastrointestinal tract. If we pool our efforts, we can write a very good one in short order. bd2412  T 16:43, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Support, at least temporarily for as long as Wbm1058 wants to make use of automated tool to refine links to more specific targets. Not sure what to do long term, there's quite a mess. Along with gut (anatomy), there's digestive system redirecting to human digestive system. Should digestive system retarget digestion or gut (anatomy)? Plantdrew (talk) 19:20, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
 * How temporary should such a situation be? If a disambiguation page is maintained at this title for any length of time, it will create confusion, since editors will not know what the ultimate target of the title is going to be. In my opinion, it is better to make that ultimate determination now, rather than setting up a temporary situation to be changed to that destination in the future. However, if we are going to have a temporary situation, I would like for us to establish exactly how long it is going to be in place, so that editors know how quickly they must work to clean up the incoming links. I would say that if we are going to have a temporary disambiguation page, it should be here for no more than a month. bd2412  T 20:35, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Certainly no more than a month. Two weeks ought to be more than sufficient. Plantdrew (talk) 22:34, 20 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Support this page should at the very least be a disambiguation page. This page should at the very least have some text on it. The better option in my opinion would be that Gut (anatomy) (which already states "In zoology, the gut, also known as the alimentary canal or gastrointestinal tract or ") redirects here. However before that discussion we should at the very least stop continually blanking this page because of a discussion that took place now 2+ years ago between 4 users with apparently no alerting relevant WikiProjects such as Anatomy or Medicine or (now) Animal anatomy. We're now at 3 users who have edited against the earlier consensus of 4 users... Anyhow. Thank you for notifying WP:ANATOMY, PlantDrew. If I was notified about the revert 2 years ago we'd be at this discussion much earlier. --Tom (LT) (talk) 06:41, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
 * To add: the point of this discussion should be what improves the article most for readers, not about the crevasses and peaks associated with this article's WikiHistory. In my opinion, providing links to articles readers could be searching for when directed to this article (in my mind there are at least 4 - digestion, digestive tract, gut (anatomy) and Human gastrointestinal tract) would be of most benefit to users, who will not know all these articles exist. So I also agree with .--Tom (LT) (talk) 06:46, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Background

 * 13:10, 16 September 2009 moved page Gastrointestinal tract to Human gastrointestinal tract over redirect (per move request; see talk page for discussion)
 * An article on Gut (anatomy) was started on 23 March 2010, several months after the above move
 * I suppose the reason for the difference in titling these articles (gastrointestinal tract for humans vs. gut for animals) relates to the difference in the focus of each article (gastrointestinal disease, gastrointestinal surgery and gastroenterology vs. uses by humans).
 * On 17 December 2010, retargeted Gastrointestinal tract to Digestion (Better redirect)
 * On 30 March 2011, reverted that change
 * On 8 July 2013, Gastrointestinal tract was retargeted from Human gastrointestinal tract to Digestion, per Redirects for discussion/Log/2013 June 28. Rationales in support:
 * it should not be the human article, since other animals have GI tracts WP:Systematic bias
 * I concur; keep Gastrointestinal tract as an article with summaries and links to more specific articles.
 * Retarget to Digestion to have a more comprehensive view of the GI tract.
 * On 27 December 2013, reverted to the target Human gastrointestinal tract (correcting redirect)
 * On 26 August 2014, I reverted back to the target Digestion (against consensus. See the edit summary for the prior revision.)
 * Q. Why did the December 2013 edit, which was against the prior consensus, go unreverted for eight months?
 * A. Apparently because nobody noticed it until I did, while patrolling the newly created Category:Articles with redirect hatnotes needing review for hatnotes which were inconsistent with the actual redirects
 * I just finished the initial task of clearing that category of over 240 items, which I started on August 5, on August 26. I believe I saved this item for near the last because of uncertainty and the need to research it.
 * The issue was that Digestion was claiming in its hatnote that Gastrointestinal tract redirected there, when actually it was redirecting to Human gastrointestinal tract. It was not immediately obvious to me what the "correct answer" was.
 * On 26 March 2015, again attempted to retarget to Human gastrointestinal tract
 * On 10 April 2015, I again reverted to the prior consensus. This time it only took a couple of weeks to revert, as I now regularly patrol Category:Articles with redirect hatnotes needing review.
 * So when on 8 December 2015, disambiguated rather than try changing the primary topic yet again, I was happy to go along with him. Only after that did I discover the fork on animals titled Gut (anatomy), which only reinforced my conviction about the need to disambiguate.
 * Seeing opportunities for more specific links to gastrointestinal surgery and Human digestive system further reinforced my conviction.


 * — Wbm1058 (talk) 17:14, 10 December 2015 (UTC), updated 20:40, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

There are currently: I know this will be a lot of work, but I'm volunteering for it. I'd like to implement before fixing links, because WP:POPUPS configured to highlight and fix the links makes the task go faster. Though WP:AWB may be feasible for this, too. Wbm1058 (talk) 19:13, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
 * 626 pages linking to Gastrointestinal tract
 * 295 pages linking to Gastrointestinal
 * 98 page watchers of this redirect, but only two who visited recent edits. Don't all speak up at once!


 * Sidenote-there are at least another couple dozen cases where there are separate articles for a human organ and the organ in non-human animals. See WikiProject_Anatomy/Popular_pages and search for "human". Plantdrew (talk) 19:20, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Addit. Thanks for volunteering for this, . I think we should hold off from fixing links at least until we work out what to do with this page. Once that's more concrete, we can see where the links go. As you point out, there's a couple of articles that duplicate material that need to be looked at --Tom (LT) (talk) 06:51, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks guys. Just a note, for full disclosure, I fixed another 29 pages while waiting for a consensus to form here. The rationale for these is WP:SPECIFICLINK. As far as I'm aware, none of my edits to fix this have been reverted yet (I've not yet received an alert that any of these edits have been undone). But I'm still on hold. Good point about other organs, such as Tooth and Human tooth.
 * Also as an aside, note that I created a redirect for Gastrointestinal ailment. There is also a redirect for Gastrointestinal disorder. I don't think there's an explanation anywhere of how the line is drawn between "ailments" and "disorders" and full-blown "disease". I had a related discussion with back in June about the difference between GER and GERD. Wbm1058 (talk) 16:01, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Disease, illness, infection, ailment, and disorder are usually all used interchangeably. A disease technically requires symptoms (STD), will a infection can have symptoms but may not (STI), thus why STI is prefered over STD but often used interchangeably.
 * Now GER is a process that is often normal. Only when it reaches a certain degree does it become GERD. Same thing with depression and major depressive disorder. Depression is part of the human condition and many times is a normal response to the world around you. Only when it reaches a certain degree does it become a mental illness. ::::Anyway my understanding. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 16:22, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Status
I fixed nearly another hundred links to Gastrointestinal to link to a more specific topic, and added a bunch of new redirects, based on what I found:
 * Gastrointestinal problem
 * Gastrointestinal illness
 * Gastrointestinal condition
 * Gastrointestinal medication
 * Gastrointestinal complaint
 * Gastrointestinal ulcer
 * Gastrointestinal epithelium
 * Gastrointestinal symptom
 * Gastrointestinal disturbance
 * Gastrointestinal discomfort
 * Gastrointestinal issues

– I noticed a sub on Gastrointestinal distress was created July 2014. I don't know whether some of these should redirect to that, or it should be merged to Gastrointestinal disease. – I'm unclear on the distinction, if any, between gastrointestinal disorder and Functional gastrointestinal disorder. The number of pages linking to Gastrointestinal is down from ~295 to ~195. I'm focusing on this one first because gastrointestinal is an adjective, and as we don't generally title articles with those, we shouldn't generally be linking to adjectives. As shown above, these are partial title matches, and we should link to the noun described by the adjective. – Wbm1058 (talk) 02:52, 24 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your work Wbm1058, this is very useful so that we can discuss this without feeling like Atlas. I've boldly redirected Gastrointestinal distress to Gastrointestinal disease because it should point to whereever Gastrointestinal symptom does. Functional gastrointestinal disorders are a group of disorders that cause a lot of morbidity for which we have criteria to diagnose but an incomplete understanding of a definitive cause. --Tom (LT) (talk) 23:11, 25 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Having done what I could semi-automate with AWB, now I'm back to using POPUPS. To show why this can't be more automated, here is the history of my last five edits – all five were disambiguated to different targets! Wbm1058 (talk) 00:04, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Move proposed
I've proposed a move of Gut (anatomy) to this article (currently a redirect). I've pinged users involved in the discussion above. Please contribute to the discussion here: Talk:Gut_(anatomy). --Tom (LT) (talk) 07:25, 27 December 2015 (UTC)