Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation/Archive 2

Disambiguate or redirect? I am wondering what to do about a particular acronym. I know that an acronym like ISO doesn't need disambiguation, because it is rarely used to refer to anything other than the international standards body. But what about the acronym IDM? The initials IDM are used by many corporations, most notably a German motorcycle manufacturer. They are also used in electronic music literature to refer to the genre Intelligent dance music. These references appear often enough that it is reasonable to assume that sooner or later, someone will try to search for or link to IDM in Wikipedia. So in a situation like this, if I create an IDM page, should it redirect to the music page, or try to disambiguate it? If I disambiguated, I'm not sure what I would say about the non-musical IDM, other than that it's the name of many corporations. Is that good enough for a disambiguation page? --mjb —Preceding undated comment added 19:10, 7 September 2002
 * It should be. You have done your duty by recognizing that the abbreviation (It's not an acronym, but an initialism.) is ambiguous, and setting it up that way with links to those various meanings.  Our articles are almost always under the full name of what the abbreviations stand for.  Your own expertise appears to be in music and dance; let somebody else write the articles on the German companies. Eclecticology —Preceding undated comment added 22:42, 7 September 2002
 * Thanks; I've created the page. --mjb —Preceding undated comment added 18:57, 8 September 2002

I've been away from Wiki for a while, and in the interim it appears that this whole disambiguation policy has been settled on (or, at least, that's the sense I'm getting from a few of the people I've bumped into on this.)

I think we're making a mess here. In the process of disambiguating, we're creating thousand of pages with disambiguation junk all on them (see New York for a mild example.) At some point we're going to have to accept the fact that in Wiki, as in dead-tree encyclopedias, topics with multiple meanings require topical classification-- even if the primary "meaning" appears obvious to us. At that point, we'll be forced to clean all of the crap off of these pages, which is a lot of work that's going to have to be done by hand.

Disambiguation pages may seem ugly, but they lead to nice, clean articles. The worst thing you can say about a disambiguation page is that it forces people to make their links more specific. So what-- that's easy enough to do. In fact, links that lead to disambiguation pages could easily be catalogged by the software if the problem gets bad enough. Disambiguation that's embedded in the text of an article has to be manually scrubbed out.

Also, there's this funny notion of "natural" disambiguators vs. natural names. For instance, Munster currently points to an article on the Irish province of Munster. Is this intuitive? I guess it is if you're from Ireland. The argument put forth for this solution is that other Munsters (Munster cheese, Munster, Germany, Munster Indiana) all have natural disambiguators, whereas Munster is somehow the natural name, since it's not usually called "Munster province" by the natives. It strikes me that this would be the perfect place for a disambiguation page, but I appear to be wrong. If we're going to go with the idea of a "primary meaning", shouldn't we at very least require that the primary meaning really be intuitively for the vast majority of readers and contributors?

&mdash; Dachshund —Preceding undated comment added 00:13, 11 September 2002

At first blush, the Munster articles seem to me to simply be handled wrongly. IMO, Munster should be a disambiguation page. I'd take it up on the relevant talk pages (a notice on each talk page, and discussion at Munster (disambiguation), I guess) and change it if you think that people won't disagree. You may get some trouble, because the Wikipedia:Naming conventions for city names violate the usual disambiguation rules (albeit less than they did before), but I'd put the Irish province at Munster (Ireland). &mdash; Toby 08:06 Sep 20, 2002 (UTC)

Eh hem. Munster is a disambiguation page. It is also an article. What is wrong with that? Why should that page be wasted as a full disambiguation page? Provinces are large and important geographic bodies, there is no reason why they shouldn't be at non-disambiguatied titles. Munster cheese is a two word title is not simply known as Munster. The city in Germany is still going to be at its comma title and still will be findable by looking up Munster. --mav —Preceding undated comment added 08:22, 20 September 2002


 * The problem here seems to be what to do if the most common meaning of a word has a natural disambiguator, while another, less obvious, doesn't or - as in the Munster case - all meanings are not the most common, but one doesn't have a natural disambiguator. The two policies of "use natural disambiguator" and "disambiguate if no meaning is most common" seem to clash here. The best solution to me here would be to yield to the "disambiguate if no meaning is most common" policy, especially since the disambiguators of the German city and the town in Indiana are rather artificial. I think it's better that readers find a quick overview of all meanings (which are equally uncommon) rather than having to click on another link. This is acceptable for names which have a clear most common meaning, but not for the others. Jeronimo —Preceding undated comment added 08:36, 20 September 2002

I don't understand why mav says that Munster is a disambiguation page. It's a normal article, with (barely) a disambiguation block at its top. Munster (disambiguation), in contrast, is a disambiguation page. (For something that is both an article and a disambiguation page, I think that Corn comes closer in spirit.) I agree with Jeronimo as far as it goes, but I'm also prepared to shed my Americacentrism and learn that Munster (Ireland) really should have preference. (I don't disagree with the practice of disambiguation blocks, after all, and helped pioneer their current form.) After all, I wouldn't want Virginia turned into a disambiguation page, so maybe Munster shouldn't be either; it just strikes me, parochial as I am, that it should. &mdash; Toby 10:35 Sep 20, 2002 (UTC)

Will someone explain why there are a bunch of notices like this
 * This is a disambiguation page; that is, one that just points to other pages that might otherwise have the same name. If you followed a link here, you might want to go back and fix that link to point to the appropriate specific page.

plastered all over the disambiguation pages? What's the point? Doesn't it just clutter up what could otherwise be a nice clean page? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.24.55.241 (talk) 03:25, 12 September 2002 (UTC)

The notices are there to encourage people to do the clean-up. It goes with the Wiki idea that everyone is a contributor. Vicki Rosenzweig —Preceding undated comment added 03:39, 12 September 2002
 * It's also useful in case some next-generation of Wiki software includes a mechanism for flagging disambiguation pages so that their links can be fixed. This way there's some obvious text that can be used to identify the already extant disambiguation pages. Dachshund —Preceding undated comment added 19:31, 20 September 2002

I don't see why we ever have pages called "X (disambiguation)". That's hard to understand for users and redundant besides, isn't it? If "X" is ambiguous, then "X" should be the name of the disambiguation page.

On the "Munster" thing, for the record, I always think of the Irish province (the others, by the way, are Leinster, Connacht, and the embattled Ulster).

If you do wind up using parentheses to specify the province of Munster, I'd suggest it would be better placed at Munster (Irish province).

See http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=Munster. --Larry Sanger —Preceding undated comment added 15:44, 20 September 2002

As I've just stated elsewhere the "X (disambiguation)" format can be useful, but should be used sparingly. It made sense for Paris where the use to mean the French city is clearly overwhelming, but in very few of the other circumstances where it has been recently applied. If 100 people had been surveyed for the Family Feud about what they thought Munster to be, I doubt that the Irish usage would have been the clear winner. Eclecticology —Preceding undated comment added 16:52, 20 September 2002

Where did you argue that? I'm unconvinced. I tend to think Paris should be a disambiguation page, pointing to Paris (Greek hero), Paris, France, and various other Parises. Re Family Feud, that's an American show; this is an international 'pedia. --Larry Sanger —Preceding undated comment added 17:28, 20 September 2002

P.S. I vaguely recall that word "disambiguation" came to Wikipedia from me, and I know and use that word because it's used a fair bit in philosophy (and linguistics and AI). It's very familiar to the Wikipedia regulars now, but a lot of people balked at it at first. To our users, it's still going to look weird. That's another reason not to send people to "X (disambiguation)". It's also a good reason to avoid those disambiguation page notices (this is just my opinion, so don't get your panties in a bunch). We've got to remember that Wikipedia is written not in order for us to codify our knowledge efficiently, but in order for other people to find out what is generally known about various topics. We've got to keep them and their convenience in mind. --LMS —Preceding undated comment added 17:36, 20 September 2002