User:Hairy Dude/Hatnotes proposal

A hatnote is a notice at the top of an article, usually for one of the following purposes:
 * Disambiguation: several articles have the same name, and the hatnote refers readers to another article, or to a disambiguation page, in case this article wasn't the one he was looking for.
 * Resolving confusion: a pair of articles have completely distinct but easily confused names, such as Antimony and Antinomy. The hatnote refers the reader to the other article in case he got the wrong one by mistake.
 * Making equivocal redirects transparent. For example, a user who types "Boston" into his URL bar wanting to read about Boston, Lincolnshire, but it makes sense for that name to redirect to Boston, Massachusetts; a hatnote serves to refer readers to other things called Boston.

This page proposes a new set of hatnote templates to replace the currently existing set of confusing and often ad hoc and counterproductive templates, and a set of guidelines for using them.

The existing set of hatnote templates
There are a few broad categories of hatnote templates currently in existence.

Note: In the following,  means the name of the page the template is placed on, while "foo", "bar", "baz" etc. mean some text provided by the editor who adds it. Where "foo", "bar" etc. are repeated, the same text is substituted in the template.

Otheruses
These mostly say "For other uses, see X" where X is formulated in various ways:


 * 1) Otheruses says "For other uses, see (disambiguation)."
 * 2) *Used on page foo and links to the disambiguation page for that word / phrase.
 * 3) Otheruses1 says "This article is about foo; for other uses, see (disambiguation)."
 * 4) *Same as above, but describes which meaning of  is meant.
 * 5) Otheruses2 says "For other uses, see foo (disambiguation)."
 * 6) *Same as (1), but used on other pages than foo.
 * 7) Otheruses3 says "For other uses, see foo."
 * 8) *Same as above, but the disambiguation page doesn't have " (disambiguation)" at the end of its name.
 * 9) Otheruses4 says "This article is about foo. For bar, see baz."
 * 10) *Same as (2) but used on other pages than foo where the disambiguation page doesn't have " (disambiguation)" at the end of its name.
 * 11) Otheruses5 says "For other uses of foo, see bar (disambiguation)."
 * 12) *Used on any page to link to another term's disambiguation page, where that page uses another term.
 * 13) Otheruses6 says "For other uses of foo, see foo (disambiguation)."
 * 14) *Used on any page to link to another term's disambiguation page.
 * 15) Otheruses7 says "For other uses of foo, see bar."
 * 16) *Same as (6), where the disambiguation page doesn't have " (disambiguation)" at the end of its name.
 * 17) Otheruses8 says "This article is about foo; for bar, see baz (disambiguation)."
 * 18) *Like (5), but links to the disambiguation page instead.
 * 19) Otheruses-number says "This article is about the year. For other uses, see (disambiguation)."
 * 20) *Used for articles about (numbered) years where the year number is worthy of an article as a number or otherwise.
 * 21) Otherusespar is identical to (3).

Many other templates have broadly the same purpose ("for other uses of something, see somewhere"):


 * 1) About says "This article is about foo. For bar, see baz."
 * 2) *Same as (5) above, but links to nothing by default; allows multiple links.
 * 3) For says "For foo, see bar."
 * 4) *Used where there are just a pair of articles; avoids creating tiny disambiguation pages.
 * 5) For2 says "For foo, see bar."
 * 6) *Same as above, but allows multiple links.
 * 7) Funky says "For foo, please see bar."
 * 8) *Same as above but different wording (has been nominated for deletion).
 * 9) Otherhurricaneuses says "For other storms of the same name, see (disambiguation)."
 * 10) Otherhurricaneuses2 says "For other storms of the same name, see foo."
 * 11) Otherhurricaneuses3 says "This article is about the . For the, see the main article, baz. For other storms of the same name, see (disambiguation)."
 * 12) Otherpeople says "For other people named foo, see foo (disambiguation)."
 * 13) Otherpeople1 says "This article is about foo; for other people named, see (disambiguation)."
 * 14) Otherpeople2 says "For other people of the same name, see foo."
 * 15) Otherpersons says "For other persons with the name, see foo."
 * 16) Otherplaces says "For other places with the same name, see (disambiguation)."
 * 17) Otherplaces2 says "For other places with the same name, see foo (disambiguation)."
 * 18) PrefixAllPages provides a link to Special:Allpages, to search for all pages beginning with foo.
 * 19) This says "This article is about foo. For other uses, see bar."
 * 20) This article is about says "This article is about foo"
 * 21) Two other uses says "This article is about foo. For bar, see baz. For other uses, see (disambiguation)."

Redirect
These tell readers that have come to the page via a redirect what happened, and point them to other pages that might have had that name but for any of various reasons have a different one.


 * 1) Redirect says ""foo" redirects here. For other uses, see foo (disambiguation)."
 * 2) Redirect1 says ""foo" redirects here. For other uses, see foo."
 * 3) *This looks pointless on first glance, but it is more flexible than it looks. Both "other uses" and the link can be replaced with something else.
 * 4) Redirect2 says ""foo" and "bar" redirect here. For other uses, see foo (disambiguation)."
 * 5) Redirect3 says ""foo" redirects here. bar baz."
 * 6) Redirect4 says ""foo" and "bar" redirect here. For other uses, see foo (disambiguation) and bar (disambiguation."

So far as I can tell, all of these except the doubles are redundant to (2)... but (1) should be preferred, since links to disambiguation pages from article space should always be to foo (disambiguation).

Proposed guidelines for using hatnotes

 * 1) Use them only for the above enumerated purposes. Thus, we can remove the oft abused dablink as it no longer serves any useful purpose.
 * 2) Use disambiguation templates only where the article's title is ambiguous. Thus, London should contain a hatnote pointing at London (disambiguation), but Daredevil (Marvel Comics) already has a quite unambiguous title and so doesn't need a hatnote pointing to Daredevil (which is the disambiguation page).