User:Mattinbgn/Mandatory disambiguation

At present most Australian place names are disambiguated, regardless of their state of ambiguity. This blatantly contradicts both the wording and the spirit of Article titles, an official Wikipedia policy.

This state of affairs exists because of Naming conventions (geographic names) which states "All Australian town/city/suburb articles are at Town, State no matter what their status of ambiguity is" and further "Capital cities are excepted from this rule and preferentially made City " It is apparent that this guideline no longer enjoys wide support.

It seems fairly obvious to me that if was not currently in place, we would not start a policy of mandatory disambiguation now. So why does it persist? In the end, the most common reason given is a variation on "We have always done it this way" or "There is no reason to change" with little thought given to what is the actual rationale behind the policy. Further, when a more detailed response is given, the desired improvement can be achieved without the drastic action of mandating disambiguation of unique names.

A poor policy for many reasons
The current policy of mandatory disambiguation is a poor one, for several reasons. The policy is:
 * Arbitrary
 * Inaccurate
 * Non-concise
 * Inconsistent with the rest of the project

Disambiguation is a necessary evil and should be used as sparingly as possible, not used a tool to achieve other objectives other than uniquely identifying the subject.

Why only populated places?
As far as I can tell, the only topics where disambiguation is mandated, even when unnecessary, are Australian populated places and United States populated places. For some reason, Australian railway lines and railway stations are also universally disambiguated but this seems to be more convention than compulsion. The rest of the encyclopedia manages quite well only using disambiguation to address actual ambiguity.

Why Australian places require mandatory disambiguation and places elsewhere manage to cope is a mystery. It is even more of a mystery why all other topics in the encyclopedia&mdash;including the chemical elements, planets, films, paintings etc.&mdash;don't see a need for mandatory disambiguation but Australian populated places does.

Mandatory disambiguation for Australian place names only applies to populated places and not to other places or features such as mountains, lakes, rivers, bays, etc. Why populated places require mandatory disambiguation and these other places do not is also not very clear. Certainly all the same arguments proffered for mandatory disambiguation of towns equally apply here.

Why some exemptions and not others?
The guideline as currently written exempts the national capital and the capital cities of the states and territories. In practice, given the ambiguous status of Perth and Darwin, only Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Hobart currently use this exemption.

Why the capital cities are allowed to remain outside mandatory disambiguation is unclear. Why Darwin is allowed to be exempt from the guideline, while the larger Toowoomba is not, does not seem logical. The decision to exclude the capital cities from mandatory disambiguation has all the hallmarks of a realisation that unnecessary disambiguation in the case of Sydney and Melbourne looks quite silly and then the principal was applied on the basis of equity to the other state capitals.

One of the bigger mysteries around mandatory disambiguation is why genuinely ambiguous names such as Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane are allowed to remain at their common sense names through use of Disambiguation, while relatively well known places with unique names like Wagga Wagga and Toowoomba are obliged to be lumbered with a completely superfluous disambiguation term. I have not seen any justification anywhere for this seeming anomaly.

Surely if mandatory disambiguation is such a great idea it should apply to the capital cities and conversely if the capital cities can be exempted why shouldn't the same exemption apply more generally?

Mandatory disambiguation means more confusion
Enforcing mandatory disambiguation does mean that article names follow a consistent format. This is then extended to an argument that mandatory disambiguation means an end to confusion and makes it easier for editors. In reality, mandatory disambiguation adds to confusion

How having the article on a uniquely named place such as "Deniliquin" at Deniliquin, New South Wales rather than Deniliquin is supposed to eliminate confusion is a bit of a mystery. If a place name is unique, then adding a superfluous disambiguator at best makes it no more confusing but at the cost of a less concise name.

It could be argued that the mandatory use of disambiguation allows for editors to be able to find the article title for any Australian populated place regardless of its state of ambiguity. As such, mandatory disambiguation removes some uncertainty about the article name when adding a link to it in related articles.

This is true but the same goal can be achieved through the use of a consistent disambiguation strategy where disambiguation is required. In the case of Australian places, this would of course be the use of Town, State. If this is applied consistently then the issue disappears. Unique names are not a problem because they are unique and names requiring disambiguation would have a consistent and predictable form of disambiguation.

Where mandatory disambiguation really falls down is with editors who are unfamiliar with the idiosyncratic manner of naming articles on Australian places. This has two major impacts:


 * 1) Editors move articles back to the common sense, non-disambiguated name. This is then moved back by another, well-meaning, editor. Even after having the guideline explained, the initial editor is non-plussed by such a strange, non-intuitive and seemingly pointless policy. See Talk:Orroroo, South Australia for such an example.
 * 2) More commonly, editors extrapolate from the pointless disambiguation of unique populated place names and then pointlessly disambiguate the names of articles on lakes, mountains, rivers, bays and other geographical features.

Are article titles supposed to be used as metadata?
One justification given for mandatory disambiguation is that it allows the title to be used as a form of metadata. That is, the article title includes information about the subject that can then be used for other purposes. For example the disambiguator "Western Australia" in the article title Meekatharra, Western Australia allows readers to see immediately that the town is in Western Australia and more usefully, identifies the article as part of a set of articles on localities in Western Australia. This can make some maintenance tasks easier for editors but at the expense of a needlessly complex name.

This additional functionality, while somewhat desirable, is not the function of an article title. The function of an article title is simply to uniquely identify the topic, be recognisable to readers and to be brief and to the point.

There are at least three reasons to oppose such use of titles:


 * 1) The encyclopedia is written to be of benefit to readers. We could make plenty of changes to make articles easier to maintain but we should not do so at the expense of accuracy, except where unavoidable. For example, the title for the article Māori uses a macron. Given that my keyboard does not have a ā key it would be a lot easier for editors if we just called the article Maori but we don't because we are prepared to tolerate some inconvenience for the sake of accuracy.
 * 2) We need to weigh the advantage gained from mandatory disambiguation in these relatively infrequent events against the disadvantages that editors encounter every time they are required to use the longer than necessary title in a link or elsewhere. The inconvenience may be only be small for each single occasion but over time it adds up to a whopping imposition on our editors. On balance, I think mandatory disambiguation causes more harm and inconvenience than it purports to solve.
 * 3) Titles are not meant to be sort keys. If we require that sort of functionality, them some sort of formal metadata like Persondata would be more preferable than the bastardisation of article titles.

An interesting exercise in psychology
It is interesting to observe that many of the same editors who support mandatory and unnecessary disambiguation for Australian populated places are often the same people who oppose unnecessary disambiguation in other contexts, such as categories relating to Victoria (Australia) and the city of Perth, Western Australia. Surely if over-disambiguation is wrong, then it is wrong elsewhere.

I would suggest that if mandatory disambiguation didn't exist at present and the rest of the encyclopedia wanted to force Australia (and nowhere else) to adopt it, the Australian WikiProject would be united in outrage at such an imposition. However, since it is in place and many editors do not know any other system, mandatory disambiguation gets a pass from many editors that would otherwise oppose it vociferously.