Talk:Interim

Untitled
Per a request, the page "Interim" was moved to "Interim (album)", on the grounds that the great majority of people typing "Interim" are looking for a definition or following a link, not looking for an obscure album by a band I've never heard of. But there are many articles with the word "interim" linked. (Up 'til now I guess that those links would have taken the reader to the Fall album, probably to his surprise.) Rather than de-link all those links - after all, they wouldn't have been made links if the editor hadn't assumed that there was something useful to say about the word or concept "interim" - I created this article. But I don't have anything useful to say about the word "interim". But maybe you do? Herostratus 06:00, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

why?
This article has no links to it. It is a common English word. Why this article? Hmains 05:14, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Actually, I think you mean, it has no links in it; but it has many links to it (see What links here). The problem was that there are about 8 billion wikilinks here, all referring to the word interim; however, in this space, there was an album by a fairly non-notable band, so we had to move the article (see Interim (album)). -Patstuarttalk 15:36, 8 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I know, I was working on this. Sorry, I was looking at the talk page.  Am now looking the article links. My real question: why do we need an article on 'interim'?  It is just a word, not a person, place, thing or concept. The article can never be more than a word definition.  Wouldn't it be better just to delete all the links to this article and then delete the article as being more appropriate for Wiki dictionary, not WP Hmains 03:38, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, it might, but the person who created Interim (album) could just move it back under the justification that no disambiguation was needed. But we really don't want that to happen, for said reasons. -Patstuarttalk 05:47, 9 December 2006 (UTC)


 * So what do we do now. Make a disamg page of it so this won't happen?  I see my home dictionary has another meaning that could be used: 'Interim (cap) - any of the three provisional arrangments for the settlement of religious differences between Protestants and Catholics during the Reformation'.   Hmains 23:37, 9 December 2006 (UTC)


 * As best I can tell, we could simply change the content to #REDIRECTInterim and it would redir to Wiktionary.  But then would we need to put a  template there in case someone's looking for the album.   I don't know of any Wikipedia precedent to handle it this way.   Regardless, all the linking articles need to be fixed to link to Interim instead of here if a definition is what's desired.   The Protestant/Catholic Interim could certainly be a valid encyclopedia article if anyone wanted to write it.  Cheers, PhilipR 23:58, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a dictionary
WP:WINAD. Not sure if people aren't aware of it, don't understand it, don't like it, or what, but it is a policy. This should be WP:AFD but I'm too lazy to figure out the correct policy right this very moment.  I'm sincerely sorry for the people who erroneously linked to this article when they meant to link to Wiktionary, but WINAD is a pretty fundamental policy. Compounding their error by trying to give them something useful but unencyclopedic just postpones the necessary step of having them fix their broken articles. - PhilipR 23:11, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
 * From WP:IAR - where the rules get in the way of writing and effective encyclopedia, ignore them. That's the case here as much as anything I've seen. -Patstuarttalk 02:22, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

A dictionary entry, but with lots of examples!
Rigadoun's recent edit has the summary: "expand with lots of examples in an attempt to keep the page from being deleted". IMO this is only intended to cloud a very cut-and-dried issue. WP:WINAD doesn't provide an exception: "Wikipedia is indeed a dictionary as long as it's a really fancy dictionary with lots of examples." Just dressing up a dictionary entry with a lot of examples doesn't make it not a dictionary entry, so this seems like a lot of effort intended to dissuade the community from conforming to Wikipedia standards rather than an attempt to make an encyclopedia entry.

It does provide the basis for the dab page that I'm now convinced this page should become, so offload relevant material to the relevant articles. JMO. - PhilipR 17:56, 13 December 2006 (UTC)


 * The items that link to a specific page are more or less copied from there, so there isn't really anything to offload. I was just trying to provide some context for them. If a bullet-style disambiguation page is clearer, I have no problem with that. I apologize for my flippant edit summary but I do think this page should exist for the WP:IAR reason Patstuart gave above. Rigadoun (talk) 18:16, 13 December 2006 (UTC)


 * No worries, I tend to sound heavy-handed in my comments.  Is it fair to say the emerging consensus is to keep as a dab?   I've been sold on that approach.  - PhilipR 18:26, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

2007-02-7 Automated pywikipediabot message
--CopyToWiktionaryBot 03:50, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Page needs a rewrite
Per the deletion debate, this page really ought to be rewritten into a simple disambiguation page, I've added the disambig tag. --Xyzzyplugh 13:15, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Disam page
I removed the disam tag. This is basically a general description of interim not really a disam page. Plus almost every link to this page is covered on this page. --User:Woohookitty Diamming fool! 06:06, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Major expansion
Executive summary: I added a whole lot of entries to this page and made it long, because "interim" is pretty broad term to search on, we don't know what the reader wants, so let's give a lot of choices. Detailed reasoning below. Herostratus (talk) 21:08, 8 January 2022 (UTC) - So... Interim was a kind of chimera, it had regular text but was kind a list of links like a DAB page, so now it's a DAB page: this. But, what is a person looking for when they search on just "interim"? Some for the dictionary def, which we point to, but if not... who searches on just "interim" when they don't want the dicdef. A puzzler. A few are looking for the (very obscure) album or film Interim, but the rest...I suppose they're either of the mind "Uh, such-and-such "'Interim something something' government/agreement/whatever but I can't remember the name" or else just "Um, that temporary thing they made what was it called". Just guessing, but what else would it be? Alright. So, usually, we mostly only include links to thing that have the word in their title. The "Clown" DAB page will list "Bozo the Clown" but not "Emmet Kelly", I think. That's the usual paradigm anyway.

But... here we have a large number of articles, most have "interim" in their title but some don't, even tho they're about the same thing. "Interim government of Foo" and "Provisional government of Bar" might be conceptually similar, but named different. Because "interim" and "provisional" and also "transitional" and "caretaker" are kind of used interchangeably. Seems wrong to split the articles over what particular term the entity used for itself. (Also a not named "interim" have redirects from titles including "interim"). I think -- think -- some of the readers coming here are looking for something that has the quality of being interim even the article title doesn't use that term (because the entity itself didn't). A reader wants Caretaker Government of Myanmar (2021), doesn't remember the name, doesn't remember that was called "caretaker" even, and searches on "interim" (which it was)... no reason to leave her hanging because of semantics.

We also have articles with three levels of detail... "Interim government" as a concept, "Interim government of Australia" covering the laws and histories of all their interim governments, and "2007 Interim government of Australia" specifically. Plus there are a few sub-state governments. Comlicated! So... it makes for a long list, with like three sublevels, which generally we don't want the lists to get too long or involved. In this case, it's my personal opinion that, not knowing what a particular reader has in mind by searching on the rather broad term "interim", it best serves the reader to include everything she might reasonably be thinking of. YMMD and we can talk. Herostratus (talk) 21:08, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Broad-concept article?
Can it be that Interim is a WP:BCA? If yes, how to indicate this (or edit the page)? - Altenmann >talk 21:35, 7 July 2024 (UTC)