Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation pages with links/Archive 1

Editing user pages
Is it acceptable to edit user pages to fix links to disambiguation pages? I don't want to offend if this is a no-no Sannse 16:32 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)
 * yup, it's fine. -- Tarquin 17:06 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)


 * Thanks Tarquin. I'll carry on once things are moving again round here.  Sannse 17:43 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)

Prince
The Prince page is not really a disambiguation page, just a list of definitions of the various ways a prince can be a prince, along with a disambiguation block re: Prince Rogers Nelson and The Prince. However, since people are likely to keep linking to Prince when they mean Prince Rogers Nelson, I'm inclined to leave it on the Links_to_disambiguating_pages list so that links to it get listed here and reviewed every now and then.... what say others? Catherine 03:00 Mar 25, 2003 (UTC)

Vikipedio
How do I edit the Esperanto Wiki to redirect Comic? Skeetch 03:09, Oct 29, 2003 (UTC)


 * Hi. I'm not sure what it is you want to do:


 * The esparanto wikipedia is at http://eo.wikipedia.org/. If you want to edit a page there click on "Redaktu la pa&#285;on" on the left margin;
 * if you want to get to the "Komikso" page without being redirected to "Bildliteraturo" then this link should take you there (to get to a redirect page, click on the link next to "redirected from");
 * if you want to change the interwiki link on "comic", then edit the "comic" article and change Komikso to Bildliteraturo (or wherever you want the link to lead) ;
 * If I've completely confused you and not answered you question in any way .... let me know!


 * sannse 09:53, 29 Oct 2003 (UTC)


 * Thanks! The issue was Bildliteraturo linked to disambiguation page Comic . I editied eo:Bildliteraturo but kept seeing the original page. A cache issue apparently. My edit is there today.Skeetch

Vector and pitch
It may make more sense to remove Vector from the list of disambiguation pages. It contains pertinent discussion on the subject and there already exists a Vector (disambiguation) page. Skeetch 20:19, Nov 10, 2003 (UTC)
 * I agree that the discussion on Vector is relevant, but 1) Vector (disambiguation) redirects to Vector and 2) a quick sample suggests that most of the links should go directly to one of the detail pages. This is going to be a tough one. The proper goal may not be complete disambiguation but just a reduction of the volume. Rossami 22:50, 10 Nov 2003 (UTC)


 * vector seems to me considerably easier than pitch. I think the disambiguation page for pitch could use some clean up.  There are multiple meanings defined on a single target, multiple targets for a single meaning, and more than two thirds of the offered meanings don't include targets.  Worse, when looking at the linking pages, quite a few of them fit multple meanings of pitch.  Seems hopeless.  --ssd 04:46, 17 Mar 2004 (UTC)


 * I've just discovered that Vector (mathematics) is a redirect to Vector (spatial). Maybe we should replace this redirect with a subdisambiguator, which would take the first bullet point from the main Vector page.  Of course it will mean that links'll need to point to another disambiguation page, but at least it's a more specialised one.  What does everyone think? -- Smjg 14:07, 17 Mar 2004 (UTC)


 * I think most vectors in math are spatial vectors anyway. Even a 4-vector could be considered a spatial vector.   Matricies in this context are not vectors, only used to manipulate vectors.  It would be nice of the stuff under math were put in a more sane format, though. --ssd 04:41, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)


 * NONSENSE!! Many vectors are not in finite-dimensional spaces, and many are not in real spaces, and even if you were right, the article titled vector (spatial) is only about 3-dimensional real space. Michael Hardy 22:40, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

search and redirects?
How does the search work when there is a redirect to the disambiguation page? Will it count links in to both pages? Or do both pages have be listed separately on the Links to disambiguating pages page? Rossami 02:45, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)


 * Preferrably the latter. Only links to the 'end' page are counted, the redirecting page counts only once (for itself linking to it), but not more than that. Andre Engels 16:18, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Multiple place names
For the new list I have also included all pages linked from "Wikipedia:Multiple-place names A" and the other 25 letters. There are quite a few of those that are not really disambiguation pages though. Just remove those that are not from this list. Andre Engels 09:08, 13 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Function
Gah! Function was just converted into a disambiguation page. There's 549 links to it!! This'll be a job to convert. Granted, they did a really good job of constructing the disambiguation page, but I'm not sure page history was correctly copied, and I'm not convinced it should go here, rather than function (disambiguation) or something (which is a redirect). (Would this be less work to fix?) Any comments on this before I start working on fixing these? --ssd 04:41, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)


 * What would we put at function in that case? If it were just a redirect to function (disambiguation) then the links would need fixing anyway, and there doesn't seem to be a primary topic to put at the main article name (and really the links would need checking and fixing anyway).  So I'm afraid this is one that probably needs to be done... 'course, those who made the page a disambig should rightly do the work ;) -- sannse (talk) 10:05, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)


 * I don't mind doing some of 'em. Spread the job, etc... Well, I've started anyway.  The "main" topic previously was (I think) function (mathematics), but looking at the links, there's quite a few things that were some other kind of function, so maybe the disambiguation page is best as the main page. --ssd 13:39, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)


 * I'm almost done doing this one with Robbot, but even with the robot it's a hell of a job. I have left some links in biological meanings, because I was unsure whether to disambiguate them to purpose or to add a separate page for it. - Andre Engels 10:26, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)


 * Ya, I left those too. I think some meanings of function don't exactly match purpose.  Perhaps another meaning is lurking there. ssd 14:04, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Cleaning up Hebrew
I'm slowly working on it. Feel free to join in!

By the way, does someone/something periodically run the automated update process? How often does this happen?


 * I would like to update it, but the problem is that the SQL search it requires takes longer than the 30 seconds that sysops are given for their queries. And that at the moment sysop SQL queries have been disabled completely. But to get to your question: No, it is not done periodically. The last updates have been (according to Page history)
 * 3-12-2002 by me
 * 8-2-2003 by Enchanter
 * 25-3-2003 by Sannse
 * 14-4-2003 by Sannse
 * 4-7-2003 by Sannse
 * 29-9-2003 by me
 * 11-10-2003 by me
 * 14-10-2003 by me
 * 20-10-2003 by me
 * 9-11-2003 by me
 * 13-12-2003 by me
 * 27-2-2004 by Sannse

- Andre Engels 10:37, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)


 * Hebrew is now done, and staying done. I check it twice a day (and there's usually a new link to fix every other time). -- BD2412 talk July 6, 2005 17:52 (UTC)
 * Perhaps you should check it once a day ;-) Flowerparty talk 13:10, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

What about talk links?
Should we remove links from the list only when ALL links are fixed (except redirects and appropriate links)? Should User:Talk and Talk: links be fixed as well? I removed Car and Current because the only remaining links are Talk, User or Redirect links. Is this appropriate? --Golbez 09:01, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * I usually fix Talk links if the conversation is not too recent and is not particularly controversial. Often the talk actually refers to the disambiguation page anyway, in which case I leave it (although I have "nowikied" in instead on occasion).  If I think the change is likely to cause upset then I leave alone - after all it's not that vital.


 * On User Talk pages I usually correct the links, but if I do I leave a message explaining what I've done. That's just to make sure people aren't confused by the "you have new messages" notice.


 * I fix User page links if I'm sure enough that I know where to link them. If I'm in any doubt I leave a message on the user's talk page to ask them to fix it.


 * In all cases I only ever change the link, never the text, using the pipe trick I've only ever had one mild complaint from working this way, which I think shows it works well.


 * Redirect pages can be treated the same as articles - if the link can be redirected to a specific page then do so, otherwise it should stay linked to the disambiguation page.


 * I remove a page from this list once I've done all the fixing I think appropriate, even if a few links remain.


 * That's all just how I work, but I hope it helps -- sannse (talk) 12:40, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * Sometimes the disabiguation page is clearly the best page. In these cases, you're suppose to redirect it to item (disambiguation) which is either the disambiguation page, or a link to the dab page.  However, sometimes the right one just isn't on the list.  In those cases, I suppose it is best to leave the link unfixed for someone in the future to figure out, perhaps when new disambiguations are added to the dab page.  ssd 13:53, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * That makes sense, saves someone else checking another time. -- sannse (talk) 21:09, 4 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * My policy is to change the link if it is about the subject of the page, but keep it if it is about the page itself. Sometimes the distinction is blurry, of course, but I'd say that "if you really want to discuss this, take your car and drive over to me" should be disambiguated, while "Just like car, I think this page should/should not be a disambiguation page" clearly should not. Still, disambiguation discussion pages is clearly less important than doing so with the encyclopedia itself. When all main namespace articles have been disambiguated, a page can be removed from this list, whether talk pages have been disambiguated 'as far as possible' or not, in my opinion. - Andre Engels 19:37, 4 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * I've been working through this list recently. I have been leaving Talk and User pages untouched. "French" is down to one because for the life of me I cant find the link to it on the Korcula page.- Go Flames Go - Drhaggis 05:05, 20 May 2004 (UTC)

deleting finished entries
I notice that a lot of the entries people finished left in with a comment "needs constant watching". Considering that this page isn't getting regenerated very often, perhaps it should be split into links needing disambiguation and disambiguation pages fixed but frequently needing rechecks, where stuff doesn't get deleted from the latter... --ssd 05:15, 20 May 2004 (UTC)


 * Sounds OK to me, I have a similar list on my user page - but it's very out of date and a public list would be more useful IMO. I suggest we only add the very commonly linked pages, otherwise it would simply end up as another list of all disambiguation pages. -- sannse (talk) 07:39, 24 May 2004 (UTC)

See Disambiguation pages maintenance. Josh Parris &#9993; 01:03, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

Updating now more difficult...
AIUI, now that we're on MediaWiki 1.3, the links table works differently, and so tho above code fragments won't work - so, presumably, you need to do a nested SELECT to work out the article_id for the page Links to disambiguating pages (?)...

James F. (talk) 19:45, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

Yugoslavia
What does Yugoslavia 243 do here? It is not a dab page. Mikkalai 03:40, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Script
I have done some work on "script", but there is still a problem. There is no article for a comic book script or a theater script. What sould I do with these? Should I remove the wikilinks? Should I create wikilinks to non-existing articles and hope they get written by someone else? JoaoRicardo 01:10, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Punk
I have been working on punk now for a reasonable amount of time now, but it seems that i keep running into quite a few of the same links as before. DOes anyone know the reason why?? Jaberwocky6669 03:24, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC)

Suggested improvements
(Moved from article)


 * Do not include User and Talk namespaces in the count (links to IRC were 90% User: or Talk:). SeventyThree 02:44, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * Should already be done. The script selects namespace=0 articles only.  However the "what links here" page is less discriminatory. Rich Farmbrough 11:30, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * Have a "Whatlinkshere" link next to each dab page link. Alphax &tau;&epsilon;&chi; 07:01, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Is there some way that a watchlist could indicate when a disambig is linked to? I've put fair labor into cleaning up links to a few of the disambigs below, and I check them every few days to fix any new links made to them - but it would be much more convenient if I could be alerted to new links without having to check each page. -- BD2412 talk 03:22, 2005 May 30 (UTC)
 * If there was a way to get a "Whatlinkshere" list for a page in a machine-readable format, it would be very doably to write a tool similar to User:Humanbot for this project. That would really speed up this project. Alas, there's no way to get that list, that I can find :-( Biot 19:12, Jun 3, 2005 (UTC)

6/22/2005, I have begun disambig of Vietnamese.
I have to stay awake to wait for someone who will be showing up around 2 AM, so I figured I'd keep myself occupied with something productive. With any luck I should be finished tomorrow morning.

I have completed disambiguation of Vietnamese
albeit slightly behind schedule. Yay! CAPS LOCK 07:16, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Working on Disney, Template problem
I was working on the disney disambiguation page, and found that there was a template sitting on 200 pages or so that linked to the page. So I tracked down the template and changed the link to "The walt disney company".

I thought 'problem solved', and it should have been. However, many of these pages, including Captain Loyal Hawk, are still listed as linking to the disambiguation page, even though visiting the page itself shows no links to the disambiguation page. What am I missing?--Measure July 6, 2005 17:44 (UTC)
 * That's just a bug of Wikipedia - when the template gets changed, you need to make a blank save (i.e. click edit, then click save without making any changes) to get the page to reset the template. -- BD2412 talk July 6, 2005 17:50 (UTC)
 * Ok I'm confused. I've been working on Director and there are several templates related to television shows.  I've gone in and corrected the template.  I then view a page that uses the template that I've never viewed and it has the correct link, but still shows up on the "what links here".  What am I missing?Barkeep49 16:41, 23 July 2005 (UTC)
 * The articles just don't know that the template has been reset. -- BD2412 talk 19:01, July 23, 2005 (UTC)
 * So in other words fixing the template only fixes future problems? Grr... I thought I had saved myself a lot of work as I have to admit I'm rather daunted by the 350 links on Director.Barkeep49 19:58, 23 July 2005 (UTC)
 * The problem is fixed. What links here reporting false positives is just a cosmetic issue. Bo Lindbergh 21:16, July 23, 2005 (UTC)
 * Let me rephrase my above comment in that light: doing a blank save gets rid of the false positive. The page doesn't actually change, it just thinks it has. -- BD2412 talk 00:30, August 14, 2005 (UTC)

Musical Tempo
What is the proper way to do these musical tempo disambig links? For instance: These are listed together in many different symphony pages as the names of movements. However, the disambig pages for these all lead to Tempo. It would seem odd to give a list of links of these movement names, and have them all link to the same Tempo page. In order to maintain unique links in case these links are differentiated in the future for whatever reason, should I link them to Allegro_(Tempo), Largo_(Tempo), etc, and then set up those pages as redirects to Tempo? Or should I just not worry about it, and link them all directly? - Marvin01 | talk  8 July 2005 18:49 (UTC)
 * Allegro
 * Largo
 * Presto
 * If anybody cares, I went ahead and did the former (since several terms that did not have disambig pages did this already). If anyone wants to help with tempo terms, you can get the redirects I added from the tempo section on Italian_musical_terms - Marvin01 | talk  8 July 2005 20:05 (UTC)

Please slow down
It is more important to have links disambiguated right than have them disambiguated fast. I just checked ten links on a word I was disambiguating slowly and which a disambiguator had raced past me on. One was probably the wrong dab, one almost certainly a suboptimal dab, one I had left ambiguous intentionally because the web leaves it unclear whether a general or specific sense is meant. Four of them ignored errors in the same sentence, and most left clumsy prose.

I don't think this dabber was in any way to blame; but do remember that a link, once dabbed, may never be looked at again. Septentrionalis 02:17, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

If you want a headache...
Try disentangling nationalities from ethnicities in Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union, preferably not one word at a time. Bo Lindbergh 03:02, July 23, 2005 (UTC)

Remove links?
Is there ever a time when it is better to remove the link entirely? I started to disambiguate "south" and one of the first links referred to the southern part of the state the article was about, call it "south Nebraska." Since, naturally, there is no article which covers south Nebraska, the link is useless. Or so it seems to me. –Shoaler (talk) 16:14, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
 * In my experience, there is often a case for removing links. For example, an article may link to Japan and Japanese. The only appropriate link for the latter might be Japan, in which case there's no point creating a duplicate link; just unlink "Japanese". You just have to hope that no one restores the link latter. Agentsoo 14:22, 5 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I agree I'd probably have removed that one. Equally, if I see a sentence like this I usually get the pruning scissors out and remove the links that seem least relevant to whatever context it appears in. And I rarely feel guilty about chopping links to cardinal numbers (e.g. ...one of the three bishops defrocked after...) in non-numeric contexts. I'll sometimes leave in links like your South that don't disambig sensibly if the article doesn't have many links, but I can't think of a way to formulate a rule that isn't entirely subjective: my usual criterion is, would I be interested or irritated after following this link if I were browsing the article?. ~ Veledan | Talk | c . 16:35, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
 * I just disambig'd my reply after realising I'd added another 8 links to dab pages to the pile *blush*. And here's another example: in an article, I'd probably have removed the 3 links I've had to redirect to Wiktionary rather than their dab pages for the same reason you removed South ~ Veledan | Talk | c . 16:48, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

User lists to user categories transition
Most other versions of Wikipedia (other than English) have implemented a system of categories that users can add themselves to on their user page - the English wikipedia up until now has had a very tangled and minimal system of categories for this and has mostly used a series of lists on the Wikipedians page. For example, the Alphabetical list of Wikipedians, which has spawned many errors in the past and grown almost the point of not being manageable. This entire system should be replaced by categories, such as Category:Wikipedians and its subcategories such as Category:Wikipedians by location and its subcategories such as Category:Wikipedians in the United States (which would be the replacement for Wikipedians/United States. Anybody who would like to lend a hand in converting these pages should refer to the changes that are slowly being made to Wikipedians and the different emerging, afformentioned categories to find a starting place. Whenever a page in Wikipedia:Wikipedians is replaced, all links to that page should also be replaced with a link to the newly created category. Also, a hierarchy should be maintained among the categories (for example, Category:Wikipedians in Acadia had been tagged in the Category:Canadian Wikipedians category which is then tagged in the Category:Wikipedians by location category which is, in turn, tagged in the master Category:Wikipedians category.--thereverendeg 17:53, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

A project page has been added for this - User categorisation --thereverendeg 00:54, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

Disambiguation in M*A*S*H template
M*A*S*H Whatlinkshere indicates quite a few links to the disambiguation page. However, it appears this is due to a bad link in the template used to show a M*A*S*H character. The problem is the template assumes a character is generic for both the film and the TV show. Should I just leave the disambiguation intact as the template's context is technically ambiguous itself? Example:


 * One possibility. Unlink the reference in the top, and add separate links under the words "Film" and "Television" towards the bottom.  Then you have links to both, and the user can jump to each as desired.  Workable? TexasAndroid 20:11, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
 * Perfect! -- Nuggetboy 20:45, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Vatican monster hunters from the Holy See
I'm working through Vatican now... the distinction between the Vatican (state) and the Holy See can be subtle, but never more so than when you have to decide just which one was responsible for sending immortal monster hunter Van Helsing after Dracula in the popular movie...? ~ Veledan | Talk | c . 15:12, 30 July 2005 (UTC)