Template talk:PrefixAllPages

Usage notes
The PrefixAllPages template is meant to provide a link to the Special:Allpages main article index for those cases where the title of an article is commonly the first part of other article titles. The creation of the template was prompted by looking at NYPD and N.Y.P.D. and trying to decide whether an NYPD (disambiguation) would be useful to work through things like NYPD Blue, etc. It occurred to me that this common use of a disambiguation page is not really necessary if there were a way to launch into the existing indices from a word stem. In the case of NYPD, there are 6 other articles that follow NYPD and which have "NYPD" as their first substring (see ). I did not use the automatic page name filling syntax because, in the case of "NYPD" the template should appear on New York City Police Department and not NYPD. It is likely that the wording and implementation could be improved (including perhaps the title of the template), but I think this fills a previously unaddressed gap in functionality and should reduce some load on disambiguation pages going forward. Courtland 04:12, 7 September 2005 (UTC) (signed as creator ... or instigator, depending on your point of view)

Lukewarm about the idea
It's kind of neat that you can do this, but I'm not sure it really works.

One cosmetic (but significant) problem is that the list is sorted in a strange way -- the entries seem to be laid out row by row, not column by column. It took me a while to reconcile the statement there are 6 other articles that follow NYPD and which have "NYPD" as their first substring with the listing -- I only saw two, NYPD Commissioner and NYPD Transportation Bureau. I also suspect most readers would find the list confusing -- only the first few entries on the page are relevant, the rest are just noise.

Another problem is that I think it is the rare exception when sorting by article title will correctly pick up all the dab candidates. For example, I just worked on Beast. It's got (if I counted right) 12 entries, only 4 of which start with the string "beast". --RoySmith 12:06, 7 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Agreed on all counts so I'll clarify. This isn't meant to replace disambiguation, but to augment it; without it, we would need a disamibugation page strictly for navigational assistance for the articles that begin with the string "NYPD ", in my opinion; there is only one alternative meaning to "NYPD" itself, and that is the television program N.Y.P.D..  Second, I think the cost-benefit of taking advantage of an existing indexing method in Wikipedia is good compared to the potential "huh?!" factor on people first looking at the All Pages output. Courtland 12:17, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
 * With respect to Beast, the All Pages lookup shows some additional items that should be included on the dab page (those in the form "Beast (clarifier)", for instance) as well as a several items that would only bloat the size of the dab page without providing a lot navigational assistance (such as Beast Wars), as well as clues to expansion of other dab pages (such as the Beast of Burden dab page). This gets me to thinking about different types of navigational assistance ... I'll write something up elsewhere on this later today. Courtland 12:26, 7 September 2005 (UTC)