Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation

Something that can be done is to use the links "Pages that link here" on the desambiguating pages listed and correct the links to go directly to the desired page, without passing through the desambiguating page. I did it for vulcan, for example.

In reference to Saturn, user:Maveric149 wrote: "moved god stuff even though I am not totally sure that having so many disambiguating pages is a great idea -- shouldn't the original use of the word have an actual article on its page?"

Unfortunately, the planets and moons are completely chock full of reused names for completely different things from their original meanings. The problem with picking one particular meaning as the "main" meaning that should be presented on the disambiguating page is that who's to say which one should be there? The mythical gods were the first uses of those names, sure, but on the other hand the planets are much more "relevant" to modern life. I would rather treat both meanings equally and avoid the debate. Bryan Derksen, Tuesday, April 2, 2002

I agree and I will stick to the convention -- However, I don't have to like it. -maveric149

Just curious; what was the original raionale (if any) behind labelling disambiguating pages as such, and linking them to the list? I don't see any point to it. -- Lee Daniel Crocker

I'll be damned if I know the original reason, but I interpreted it as being that one normally shouldn't be linking to such pages but rather directly to the one you want, and thus the note was to indicate that the link you just followed was incorrect. But I just made that up from thin air. --Brion VIBBER

That's vaguely plausible I suppose. But the current notes are really ugly. I'll offer this alternative to see what people think: how about a more detailed note, but in text that makes it clearly "meta", like this:

This is one of Wikipedia's disambiguating pages, meaning one that merely points to two or more specific articles about different subjects that happen to have the same name. If you arrived here by following a link, you may want to consider changing that link to point directly to one of the more specific pages listed here.

I believe the rationale is so that disambiguating pages don't show up on the orphans list, since they're not redirects but serve a similar purpose. Bryan Derksen

That would explain why they are listed here, but that doesn't explain why there's a note and backlink to here on each one of them. --LDC

Yeah, I don't know why that's in there. But the examples I saw had it, so I've been slavishly putting it into other disambiguation pages for no particular reason because I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. :) Bryan Derksen

I have noticed a tendency for people to create disambiguation pages without fixing all the links to them. No doubt this is because creating a disambiguation page is easy, while fixing a hundred links to it isn't. The result is that Wikipedia is left in a worse state than it was before the page was split. It would be good if people who don't want to fix links would refrain from splitting pages in the first place. --Zundark, Tuesday, April 9, 2002 (If anyone is in a link-fixing mood, set and analysis are two that badly need working on.)

Analysis is fixed (and in the process I saw lots of things I disliked about several otehr articles - ugh!). Now someone else please do set. -- Miguel

The current article metions Paris in the opening paragraph and goes on to talk about the ambiguity of the fact that "Paris" is a city in France and one in Texas. A better example needs to be placed in the article -- one would never make a disambiguation page out of Paris; all you would do is have a link at the bottom of the acticle linking to Paris, Texas. The article on the page Paris should only talk about the most famous Paris. I will give the example of Jupiter as a replacement for now -- but somebody needs to mention what I just stated above in the article (unless I missed it further down....) --maveric149

My bad. -- miguel

I very much think that where a disambiguating note is required for a topic with one overwhelmingly common use, and one or more less common use, that note should be right at the beginning of the article for the most common use. This lets the person looking for the obscure usage know immediately that he must go elsewhere without the need to scroll through a long article that may not even include his reference at the end. Where there are numerous minor usages then to keep the note short it can point to a new disambiguating page such as Paris (not France).

Another page that needs disambiguation is interval. -- Miguel

Yes, that one definitely needs splitting, if someone can first change all the links. The musical meaning can probably go in Musical interval. Someone tried Interval on the real line for the mathematical meaning, but I think we probably want it to be more general than that. --Zundark, Monday, April 15, 2002

I propose:

interval (music)
interval (mathematics)

Ed Poor

OK. But you shouldn't have split the page if you're not going to fix the links. (The links can be changed before splitting the page, since you can create the new pages as redirects and link to them. So there's no excuse for leaving things in the broken state they're currently in, even temporarily.) --Zundark, Tuesday, April 16, 2002

I gather you would prefer that repairs to articles should be done in an order such that they are in a broken state for a minimal amount of time. This sounds like a reasonable guideline. Ed Poor, Tuesday, April 16, 2002

I agree with those who question the wisdom of having disambiguation page notices; I have the same reaction to stub page notices. I don't much like meta-type comments like this. Articles are there for users, not developers. It's only getting to be more so, too, as Wikipedia increases in quality and depth. Those who care about potential problems with disambiguation pages and stub pages are greatly outnumbered by users, and are not greatly helped by the notices (I guess--I could be wrong). Generally, it's better to fix problems as we see them--alternatively, we can assume that the problems will be obvious enough to editors who encounter them that, if they want to fix the problems, they will. The notices aren't going to help much. (Can anyone report being helped greatly by them?) Individual problem cases, like the analysis page was (apparently), could be noted on the talk page.

I'd propose nearly always making disambiguating pages whenever there is an ambiguity to resolve. Yes, even in the case of Paris (notwithstanding Parisians and the Greek hero!). It would provide a consistent way of beginning articles and a more consistent policy about how to deal with multiple meanings. So it handily solves two problems at once. (1) We wouldn't have to worry about people concluding that we don't have an article about Paris, Texas because they don't know that they should scroll to the bottom of Paris to find a link to it. (2) And then there's never any question whether a disambiguation page is necessary (whether there's "one dominant" sense or several others). We just say one always is.

I agree (of course) that broken links (well, sort-of broken) are a problem (so that, if a page links to Paris and someone wants to see the Paris article they have to go through a disambiguation page to arrive at Paris, France. But I really don't think they're a huge problem. Moreover, I'd argue that insofar as they're a problem, the problem is a natural, to-be-expected, unavoidable byproduct of our having adopted a new, more accurate system of disambiguation (viz., parentheses) instead of using the old subpage system. In other words, the new system allows us to give pages more precise titles, but in order actually to give them more precise titles, we, well, change the titles. Since linking to a page involves linking to its title, changing titles entails "breaking" links. So we should expect that links are going to be "broken" as part of the process of adopting a more precise method of naming pages, because we actually have to rename quite a few pages. It's part of the process. It'll all get fixed eventually!

Of course, the very best solution (in my opinion, of course) would be a renaming function that renames all links, or better yet, allows someone to choose how to rename a list of links (so that, e.g., some go to analysis (mathematics and some go to analysis (philosophy), etc.. That'd be great. --Larry Sanger

What about creating a sort of "family" of links, as it now happens for the user: and user:talk pages, to be recalled the same way at the bottom and on the right (or wherever else)? We still could easily find Paris the town and the links to the other senses in the same page (and reciprocally) - usually disambiguating pages don't contain more than 4 or 5 links. Would it be possible? --Gianfranco

In theory, you are correct Larry -- but this could quickly lead to madness, especially for people's names. And as the project grows this will become worse and worse. There are only so many combinations for people's names and we will end up having [Paul Simon (musician)], [Paul Simon (politician)] and the inevitable [Paul Simon (obscure historical figure)]. This when the overwhelming majority of English speakers know of only the musician. Therefore this person is the one that is going to be linked to within wikipedia by far the most. One of the founding principles of wiki wiki is easy linking -- It just may be me, but I don't think having to write [[Thomas Jefferson (politician)|Thomas Jefferson]], [[Paul Simon (musician)|Paul Simon]], or [[Albert Einstein (physicist)]] is effort-free. BTW would we disambiguate Albert Einstein as (physicist) or (scientist)?

This type of disambiguation would make the 'pedia more difficult to use and would make many names far more ambiguous than they really are (who is really going to confuse the real Einstein from the character in the TV series Alien Nation?). More obscure usages can be parenthetically disambiguated but parenthetical disambguation of all terms that share the same name should only be used as a last resort. --maveric149, Friday, May 17, 2002

Is the word "film" now an anachronism? And if so, should we disambiguate movie titles with (movie) instead of (film)? Somebody wrote a naming convention which states that (movie) should be used -- but hardly anybody follows that convention. Is this something we should enforce? Was there any discussion about this particular convention? --maveric149, Friday, May 17, 2002

I don't know what the 'official' policy is... when I went to make a disabiguating link I automatically put in 'movie' but I've seen that many already-made links refer to 'film'. I'd think 'movie' was a more modern reference and probably more familiar to users.~KJ

Hi Mav -- out of curiousity, why does it matter whether it's "movie" or "film"? Personally, I'd vote for "film" every time, but it's just as easy to have both and redirect one to another with content. Oh -- my rationale for "film"? Most of the Americans I know use both terms(often as a way of implying quality); Brits, Aussies, and Kiwis I know mostly (and the Brits almost exclusively) say "film". Cheers! J Hofmann Kemp

Will the term "film" survive -- maybe only time will tell: Just wanted to know what everyone else thought so that we can abide by a common naming convention (which explicity states that "movie" should be used, even though I am not aware of a discussion on this taking place). I also wanted to gauge people's feelings about the fact that within several years the term "film" will probably become an anachronism since movies will be released in digital format (although most theater owners will continue to order copies placed on "film" for projection for some time afterwards -- digital projectors ain't cheap).

The question I have, is whether this detail is even important -- will people continue to call movies "film" even after production, distribution and projection are all digital (might be too early to tell...)? I also would prefer to use the term "film", but as you stated, in the States that term is usually reserved for higher quality stuff and the term "movie" is more of a catch-all general term which might be better in this case. Just trying to come up with the least ambiguous disambiguation set-up that is consistant and has some reasoning behind it. I don't think this is like the American/British spelling issue where the only option is to go with the first spelling/set-up and provide redirects for the other spellings/set-ups -- these types of compromises should be options of last-resort (I don't think we are at the "last resort" stage with this though). I also don't want to have to go back through all the (film) articles and changing them over to (movie) in a few years if use of the word "film" goes out of usage. Star Wars Episode II is the first filmless "film" so I quess only time will tell. Would like to know if the Brits, Aussies or Kiwis would drop use of the term if it becomes anachronistic and also if the term "movie" is a good alternative. --maveric149

umm... I just had a lengthy debate with members of my family over whether we use the term 'film' or 'movie'. My mother came down on the side of film, my father voted for movie and my brother said it depends on whether you're talking about them in general or specific (he's always been a bit of a nitpicker!) I think movie has a more general use nowadays, in Australia anyway. Even SBS has the 'Movie' Show, not the 'Film' Show... ~KJ

The more I think about it, the less and less I like the term "film" -- at least in the context of disambiguation. "Film" has several widely known and used meanings in English; a thin coating or layer, a thin sheet of plastic, photographic celluloid, motion picture and the making of a motion picture. Movie only has one meaning in English = motion picture. This term therefore is the least ambiguous of the two and combined with its already widespread usage and the fact that the term "film" will soon be outdated, I change my vote for "movie" instead of "film". --maveric149

A couple months ago I tried to change a lot of film articles to movie articles, but that effort soon went down in flames. Maybe I was just premature about it. Somebody changed it all back, and I'm not particularly inclined to go through that exercise again. For disambiguating pages it probably doesn't make much difference since the disambiguating is almost exclusively done from something completely different. I'll continue to use "movie" as preferable, but won't make work for myself when somebody else uses "film".

Occasionally, when there is more than one movie of the same name, the production year can be a second level disambiguation. A Roman numeral (used by IMDb) or even the director's surname could be used when a third level disambiguation is needed. Eclecticology, Sunday, May 19, 2002

This is exaclty the reason why I wanted to have some discussion on this -- so that if I or somebody else started changing things one way or the other then there is documentation to back-up the reasoning. Also needed to work out the reasoning myself in order to make sure that the most correct disambiguation is used. Which so far seems to be (movie). --maveric149

There has already been some discussion which is now at talk:film Eclecticology

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

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

Thanks; I've created the page. --mjb

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?

— Dachshund

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). — 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

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

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. — Toby 10:35 Sep 20, 2002 (UTC)

Virginia shouldn't be a disambiguation page unless a large percentage of Wikipedia readers and contributors feel that putting Virginia (the US state) at that location is counterintuitive. If it became obvious that a large number of contributors were linking to the current Virginia article because "Virginia" was also the name of an ancient Babylonian city, then that would be a pretty good indicator that the existing situation was not ideal. The point here is that what's obvious to Wikipedians should be the determining factor in naming an article, not the preferred terminology of the Irish or the Babylonians.

In the case of Munster, people are accidentally hitching their articles about the German city to an article on an Irish province. And it's only going to continue in the future. Maybe those people should be linking to Münster (though I don't think accent codes should be part of an article title), or maybe to Munster, Germany. The problem is, the Wikipedia naming conventions say it's ok to link to Munich or Cologne, so should I expect a totally screwy result when I link to Munster? Worse yet, when I click on "What Links Here" for Munster, I don't know at a glance which articles need to have their links fixed to point somewhere else. When I click on "What Links Here" for a disambiguation page, I know right off the bat that every single link needs to be fixed. Now imagine that 1000 pages link to a given article. Are we supposed to go through every single one on a regular basis?

I'll also elaborate on what I said above: in a perfect encyclopedia (as Wikipedia will one day become), there should be no disambiguation pages or blocks. Users will enter a term in the search box and pick the correct meaning from there. This means that disambiguation text is really a sort of a relic of the development process, one that we're eventually going to have to sweep up. Keeping disambiguation on separate pages will make this sweeping-up process simple, as we need just identify a disambiguation page and have the software point out all 5000 pages that incorrectly link to it. Putting disambiguation junk on article pages means that some human being is eventually going to have to clean this gunk off by hand and identify which links are incorrect. Over a few years that could be hundreds of thousands of hours of unnecessary work, just so that we can avoid a few parentheses. — Dachshund

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?

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

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

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

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

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