Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation pages with links/Archive 12

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Introducing the Monthly DAB Challenge

One of the great things about this project is the way it uses goals as an incentive. To expand upon that, I've created the Monthly DAB Challenge, a Toolserver project that keeps track of who fixes the most disambig links from the monthly top 250 list. My hope is to tap into the energy of those like myself who gain great pleasure from watching numbers go up; but even if this project doesn't increase the rate of dab-fixing, it will give much-deserved recognition to our contributors.

The details of how all this works are on the project page, so I won't rehash them here.

The "contest" for this month actually started April 13. After this, a new contest will be launched on the first of every month. Official winners will be posted for the entirety of the the first day of each month.

For the record, if I had started the contest on April 1, J04n would have a commanding lead right now, with about 1500 fixes (the man is hard core), followed by RussBot a few hundred behind.

I expect any bugs in my code to come apparent in this first run, so if you see problems, please let me know. Some incorrect attributions will be unavoidable, but I expect the results to be highly accurate.

I've been looking forward to launching this project for some time now. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first such project of its kind, and I'm pretty proud of it. Hopefully this is only the beginning of something big, something new for Wikipedia. We'll see. --JaGa^talk 02:55, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Nice work, Jason. Any chance you could make any of your source code publicly available?

I'm thinking that, as of May 1, I could change the "main" list that appears on WP:DPL to be the same 250 pages as you use for the DAB Challenge, and thereafter update it monthly. This would synchronize the efforts on the main list with your recordkeeping. Any comments? --R'n'B (call me Russ) 20:37, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

That would be great. What do you need to make this work? (BTW, I'm not going to be terribly responsive over the next couple of days - I've accepted a job in the UK and will be flying out tomorrow.) --JaGa^talk 01:33, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Should we switch to the July list, or keep working on the June one? The Dab Challenge page has stopped updating now that it's July, but JaGa has been busy (almost no edits in the last three weeks), so unless the page is programmed to roll over automatically, there won't be an update there. Dekimasuよ! 12:48, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

How does the counting work? Do I need to type something special as edit summary? --Stone (talk) 21:31, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

No, it's done automatically. Dekimasuよ! 01:37, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Who's Who

The Who's Who page is a problem. There is no appropriate page for many of the links. The dab page needs to be changed into a generic page describing what a Who's Who is and have it contain links to the main pages. I'll take a crack at it tonight but would appreciate any input. J04n(talk page) 23:49, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Amoeba → Amoeba (genus)

Amoeba used to have a page that started with:

“ Amoeba (sometimes amœba or ameba, plural amoebae) is a term used either to describe protists that move by crawling via pseudopods, or to refer to a genus that includes species that move by this mechanism. [1] ”

It has since been moved to Amoeba (genus) and the former usage (generic term for protists that move by crawling) has been stripped from the lead. I initially fixed the links now pointing to the disambiguation page at Amoeba by piping them to Amoeba (genus), but was mass reverted by the initiator of the page move. After a maddening conversation with them, I'm now washing my hands of this matter save for this minor edit to the dab page to try and alleviate our readers' confusion at inexplicably ending up at a dab page. –xeno ^talk 19:17, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

I have posed a question on Arcadian's Talk page. Perhaps the answer will help resolve issue. Or not. But I thought I'd give it a try.--ShelfSkewed Talk 19:48, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Particularly troublesome of his reverts are that the genus field Amoeba dubia and Amoeba proteus now point to a disambiguation rather than Amoeba (genus). But then again, I'm not the medical student. –xeno ^talk 19:53, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Those pages are a mess; please call on Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of life for help, as this kind of disambiguation job requires more than just examining the incoming links. --Una Smith (talk) 03:45, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Leaderboard

I was thinking of increasing the number of people listed on the leaderboard from 10 to 15 or 20. Of course, we could keep it as is because the project page has the full list. Suggestions? --JaGa^talk 17:07, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

I think the more folks that see their names on the page, the more they will contribute. J04n(talk page) 17:13, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Would it be possible to include fixes to pages not on the top 250? I am constantly fixing links, but none of the 6 dab pages I monitor are on the top 250 (anymore). twirligig_T to^the C 16:13, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

I would like to, but such an expansion would be a huge performance hit to the scripts I use to run the contest. --JaGa^talk 22:37, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Monks

I began working on dab piping articles that linked to monks. However, all the articles thus far have only needed to be directed to monk, not the other uses. Shouldn't we just make "monks" direct to "monk"? As a relative newbie, I'm asking for a. bit of advice on how to go about it first. Thanks! WordyGirl90 (talk) 15:52, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I would consider monk to be the "primary topic" of monks, so I say merge into monk (disambiguation) (most of the entries in monks are already there) and redirect to monk. I'm gonna wait for one more opinion before implementing this. ~EdGl ★ 16:03, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Sounds right to me. As a general rule, a plural should redirect to the singular, unless there is a significant divergence in usage. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 17:01, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Makes sense. I'll have a go at it. WordyGirl90 (talk) 18:19, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

After the dabbing is done, I would request a speedy delete of monks. --Una Smith (talk) 04:05, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

If some content there was merged into the other dab page, then it's not eligible. We need to retain history of merges under the GFDL. A simple redirect (what we have now) seems fine. Dekimasuよ! 04:10, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Fully protected pages

Judaization of Jerusalem is a fully protected page, as such only administrators can edit it. It links to 6 disambiguation pages:Fateh Islamic Jihad Israeli King Abdullah Palestinian and West Jerusalem. I am not an administrator so I can't edit, can any of you fix these? J04n(talk page) 12:47, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

 Done, but WP:RFA is over there ;) --Closedmouth (talk) 13:09, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

The same problem exists for Nativity of Jesus. It links to Assyrians, Balthasar which redirects to Balthazar, Caspar which redirects to Casper, King of the Jews, Melchior, Mosaic Law which redirects to Mosaic law, and Tom Wright. Thanks in advance. J04n(talk page) 10:09, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Introducing "The Daily Disambig"

"The Daily Disambig" is a new daily report that slurps up all the tasty data found on User:JaGa's toolserver reports, digests, disinfects, deoxygenates, and otherwise processes it, and then regurgitates it in new and potentially useful or interesting forms. This is very much a work in progress, so if you have any ideas for how to improve it, please let me know. Also, I am considering abandoning the more cumbersome weekly maintenance reports, as the information they contain is duplicative of, and less current than, the toolserver reports; any comments on this proposal are also welcome. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 14:51, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

I like it, it is nice to see changes over a small time period. It could certainly replace the weekly report. As time goes on I'm sure that I will think of things that i would like to see in it. J04n(talk page) 15:10, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Wow, this is some nice work! It's great to see how this project's tech steadily moves forward. --JaGa^talk 18:22, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

I like the new "7-day" changes tables, perhaps similar tables with what has changed so far in the current month? J04n(talk page) 14:07, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

I certainly like and still refer to the weekly statistics at WP:DPM to see how things are changing over time, but I never use the list itself anymore. I've been looking at WP:TDD every day too. I wonder if you would consider listing all of the new dab pages that are added for the day instead of just the ones with the most links. The Daily Disambig has made it clear that dab pages are being created at a really high rate, and we know that not all of them need to exist. I'd like to know what all the new ones are in order to make redirects where appropriate and nip things in the bud. Dekimasuよ! 13:32, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

OK, let me see what I can do with that. I also need to figure out how to archive the old statistics so that the tables don't grow infinitely long. Any thoughts about how many days' worth of numbers to display? --R'n'B (call me Russ) 13:38, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I'd say fourteen days, and after that give a snapshot of what the numbers were 30, 60, 90, 120, 360, and 720 days ago. That's a total of 20 lines, and will give a complete picture of how we are progressing over time. bd2412 T 22:06, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

As for the snapshot, how about just a table (or subpage) like the current one at WP:DPM that adds a line once a week? That would allow WP:DPM to be discontinued, while keeping the new data partially compatible with the old... to help draw that picture of how we are progressing (or actually, regressing). Dekimasuよ! 03:23, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

It's really interesting to see that dispite a major effort to disambiguate these pages all we are doing is treading water. J04n(talk page) 22:47, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I wouldn't say we are just treading water. You can't see long-term trends based on 8 or 10 days' data; there is a lot of noise in the data because users create/move disambig pages on an irregular basis. Look at the statistics on WP:DPM since the toolserver reports were introduced in February -- down from over 500,000 total links then (on a set that more-or-less corresponds to DPL-50) to about 435,000 now. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 13:37, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

If possible, you might also want to consider noting the replication lag at the time the new numbers come through. Yesterday it was about 21 hours, meaning that only 3 hours of data went into the new information (which also explains why it looked like many fewer dab pages were created and destroyed yesterday). Dekimasuよ! 03:23, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I don't have that information. I could get the replag at the time the TDD report is compiled, but that's not the same as the replag at the time the toolserver generated its data. Besides, it will even out over a period of days. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 13:37, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

All right. Sorry to make so many requests. Dekimasuよ! 16:26, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Don't apologize; I asked for suggestions! :) --R'n'B (call me Russ) 16:40, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Is there any way to parse out intentional links to disambig pages, like those put in hatnotes on similarly named pages, or in "see also" sections of similarly named disambig pages? Surely there are nearly as many of those as there are disambig pages themselves. bd2412 T 15:45, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Also, can we discount redirects to disambig pages to which nothing else is linked? For example, enlightened and enlightment redirect to enlightenment, but nothing links to either of them, so there's nothing there to fix. bd2412 T 05:04, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

That's true of many redirects, but in some cases, the redirects themselves can be pointed to better targets. Dekimasuよ! 06:16, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Language disambiguation question

I'm the process of disambiguating Uyghur, which could lead to a Central Asian ethnic group, their language, or their alphabets (the Uyghur language can be written in an old alphabet, an Arabic-like alphabet, and a Latin-alphabet). As you know, the initial sentence of an article often includes the term expressed in a foreign language/alphabet in parentheses). See for example, Tian Shan. Do you think I should just link to the Uyghur language article or to the article to the particular Uyghur alphabet which is being used in the article (which seems to be Arabic-like script in most cases). Thanks for your feedback. --JamesAM (talk) 02:34, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Auto archive

Any issues with setting up an archive bot for this page? I'm thinking a yearly archive and moving discussions about 30-45 days after the last comment. Vegaswikian (talk) 17:57, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Well, hopefully you saw what I said at Wikipedia talk:Requested moves about disliking bot archiving in general and also noted that I created a manual archive here yesterday. Since I'm willing to continue with manual archiving here in the future, I don't think it is necessary. As a human making that manual archive, I was able to make the conscious decision to leave at the top of the page the last time there were major changes around here. But there are other people here too and I'm sure they'll have their own perspectives to contribute to the discussion. Dekimasuよ! 18:29, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Unfair competition

Can someone look at Unfair competition? It is marked as a disambiguation page but I don't believe that it should. J04n(talk page) 01:06, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

• Definitely shouldn't. The listing there are just different forms of unfair competition (comparable to having an article on fruit that listed a half dozen kinds of fruit, but was called a disambig page). I'll fix it. bd2412 T 01:43, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

thanks J04n(talk page) 02:04, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Hah. I saw this on my watchlist, with the section heading, and at first I thought it must refer to this. --AndrewHowse (talk) 03:47, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

That's funny, I can see how it is misleading. J04n(talk page) 14:05, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Otheruses3 overload

I was looking at the Dąbrowa dab page because it has around 120 links and I was going to fix some of them... but it appears that every one of the ~90 entries on the dab page has an otheruses3 tag attached (see Dąbrowa, Gmina Trzydnik Duży for a representative example), making it hard to find the real links. Technically they are intentional links, but are they really necessary? If this sort of widespread usage becomes a precedent, it would really increase the number of links to a lot of other pages on places (say, Springfield) and common last names. Dekimasuよ! 13:55, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

I think it is an appropriate use of the tag and an appropriate link to a dab. I know that it is east to get caught up in wanting to disambiguate everything, but sometimes you have to let it go. The purpose of disambiguating, IMO, is so folks avoid unintentionally arriving at a dab, with the other3 tag they are intentionally arriving at the dab. The other issue is that removing the tags will certainly result in others undoing the edit, then you having to explain yourself, yadda yadda yadda. J04n(talk page) 14:12, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

First, those are probably not appropriate uses. A hatnote should not go on every article that uses the ambiguous term; articles should only be hatnoted if the article title is ambiguous, per WP:NAMB. While Dąbrowa by itself is ambiguous, the article titles Dąbrowa, Mogilno County and Dąbrowa, Gmina Stawiski and so on are not ambiguous. Second, even if the hatnotes were appropriate--and perhaps there is a reason to make an exception in this case; I don't know--the linking to the dab page should be done through a (disambiguation) redirect to signal that they are intentional, per WP:INTDABLINK. That is, all those hatnotes should point to Dąbrowa (disambiguation), which would redirect to Dąbrowa, solving the sorting issue for disambiguators.--ShelfSkewed Talk 14:34, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

The "(disambiguation)" part is certainly correct, but I wasn't going to go through and change all of them before we figured out if we wanted them there or not. Dekimasuよ! 14:42, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Gotcha. Did you notice that all (or nearly all--I didn't check every one) of the pages that have the hatnote were created, with hatnote in place, by a bot about a year and a half ago? Those hatnotes, that is to say, are not the product of some consensus, but of one editor. I say remove them all; the article titles are no more ambiguous than, say Springfield, Illinois, Springfield, Manitoba, Springfield, New Zealand, or all the other Springfields, none of which, as far as I can tell, are hatnoted.--ShelfSkewed Talk 15:00, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

(P.S. That's an "I understand" Gotcha above--not a zinger Gotcha. You knew that, right? --ShelfSkewed Talk 15:22, 10 June 2009 (UTC))

(EC-yes, no problem) I agree that there's no real ambiguity involved. So in that case, I suppose the most pertinent question to ask is whether anyone who happened to be visiting one page named "Dąbrowa, Foo" would have any other special reason to want to visit any other page named "Dąbrowa". If they're a granfalloon without any actual unifying characteristic, then the otheruses tags are probably as unnecessary as List of places named Peoria. Dekimasuよ! 15:25, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Gotcha to the both of you (interpret that gotcha however you like :) ). You convinced me of the inappropriateness, get rid of them. J04n(talk page) 15:29, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Okay. I do agree with your first comment, though. Sometimes I need to remind myself that the goal is not to eliminate all dablinks. I'm fully manual right now, so anyone using quick tools, feel free to help out. Dekimasuよ! 15:37, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure if anyone tried to notify me of this discussion, seeing as it was me (through my bot) that put these tags there, but I seem to have found it rather late. Anyway, the rationale for these links is based on the following hypothetical type of situation: user knows grandma lived in a village in Poland called Dąbrowa (or whatever - there are thousands of other names treated the same way), user sees a link to (or a search result for) a Polish village called Dąbrowa, user goes there, sees the article name is Dąbrowa, Foo (where Foo is some Polish administrative division which means nothing to user or probably even grandma), user ignores the Foo and just assumes it's the one. If there's a prominent hatnote informing of the existence of other Dąbrowas, user might not make that mistake. The difference with Springfield (I think) is that we assume English readers have some kind of orientation around the American states, and will know if they've gone to the wrong one.--Kotniski (talk) 17:09, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

I agree with Kotniski on this. Editors often make the case that "if a disambiguated page is found via search then the searcher isn't looking for any other use of the term" but that ignores those readers who find the page through browsing, random pages, following a series of links, or other random walk-like activities. I think that the hatnote should use the Dąbrowa (disambiguation) redirect, but otherwise I think it's harmless and at least marginally useful. --AndrewHowse (talk) 17:47, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

In fact, I propose an axiom:

Some readers will always land on a page in a way that a finite number of editors will not anticipate.

--AndrewHowse (talk) 17:50, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

By that argument, you might reach the conclusion that every article should be hatnoted Wikipedia has other articles. I kid, of course. The thing is, there are already many search options to help random searchers and wanderers. The purpose of the disambiguation system--the combination of dab pages and hatnotes--on the other hand, is specifically to help those users who know what they are looking for, but need to know the location of the correct page, by directing them as quickly and as efficiently as possible to that page. We might try this: When an unambiguously titled article may still be a source of confusion, put a link to the dab page (using the (disambiguation) redirect if called for) in the See also section. But I'm still persuadable, though not yet persuaded, the other way; I'm just making the case for the current guideline.--ShelfSkewed Talk 21:42, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

A "See also" link would work too. --AndrewHowse (talk) 22:43, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

I would put "Dąbrowa (disambiguation)" in a See also section; that helps to rescue the reader who is looking for Dąbrowa, Bar and overlooks the fact that the article is about Dąbrowa, Foo. To me, a See also link is less intrusive than a hatnote. --Una Smith (talk) 21:39, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

That's true - but not necessarily a good thing, since if we do think there's a significant risk of confusion, then we want the notice to be intrusive, to ensure that it gets seen straight away. "See also" for me means other articles related to the topic of this article, not other articles you might be looking for under the title you found this one under. The latter always go at the top, and with good reason. --Kotniski (talk) 08:08, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Dąbrowa is the only page with an ambiguous title we're talking about here. The others are all at unambiguous titles. By the way, wouldn't a normal sentence in each article stating that Dąbrowa is a common name for places in Poland be more effective than a hatnote? Dekimasuよ! 16:40, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

That sentence would be tough to reference. Also, such approach won't work for names which are not common yet are not unique either.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 16:48, June 12, 2009 (UTC)

I've stopped halfway, since I thought there was a consensus before I went to sleep last night, but now it appears there isn't. I still think the otheruses tag is inappropriate because the title of the specific articles aren't ambiguous, but I'll let the discussion develop here before doing anything else. Sorry to cause inconsistency. Dekimasuよ! 00:44, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

It appears that there is an applicable guideline here after all, WP:NAMB. Perhaps this should be taken up again or the links should be moved to the bottom as suggested by Una Smith. Dekimasuよ! 10:10, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

I think NAMB is rather an oversimplification. It states "a reader will not have arrived [here] if they were looking for something else", but as we've shown above, that isn't necessarily true (they might have clicked on a piped link, for example). I think what's more important, if they've got to the wrong page, is whether they can see from the disambiguator that they're in the wrong place. That's probably true in the case of Tree (set theory), and I guess Springfield (some well-known US state), but probably not in the case of obscure and relatively recent Polish administrative divisions. --Kotniski (talk) 10:32, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

If that's the case, then maybe the discussion that needs to take place is whether to change WP:NAMB at Wikipedia talk:Hatnote. (I still think the definition you're using of "wrong place" needs refinement, since the links themselves need not be incorrect.) Dekimasuよ! 10:45, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Calf (disambiguation)

On Talk:Calf (disambiguation)#Requested move is a comment that the dab page really isn't a dab page. What do you think? --Una Smith (talk) 21:32, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

looks like a dab to me J04n(talk page) 01:13, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

To me too, but it might help if someone else said so. So please say so, here. --Una Smith (talk) 02:32, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I read the discussions on both pages and my head is spinning, it doesn't seem to me that there is any question about calf (disambiguation) being a dab, but in naming it. I would not be in favor of moving either page. J04n(talk page) 09:12, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I have now checked about half of the incoming links from articles to Calf, and 36 of them needed to be changed. When I began, there were 158, so only about 1-(36/(158/2)) or 54% of the links to Calf correctly link there. Also, Calf (disambiguation) has grown much longer. Now I really want to move Calf (disambiguation) to Calf, so no one else has to repeat my work disambiguating these existing links. --Una Smith (talk) 21:18, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Overwhelming disambiguations

Are there disambiguation pages where > 80% (say) of the inbound links - that are not in otheruses, etc - should all be redirected to the same target? Or are these well-monitored because of the reasonable ease with which they can be fixed? Cheers, - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 12:58, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I'm sure there are. Newborn dabs often fit that description because an editor wanders along to Foo, happens to be aware of another topic Foo (bar), and decides to move Foo to Foo (baz) and slaps a dab page at Foo. All the old, presumably appropriate, links to Foo are now a problem (in that sense) and ought to go to Foo (baz). What do you have in mind? --AndrewHowse (talk) 16:28, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Well, I didn't have much in mind to be honest; I was just playing around with ideas for Fronds for AWB, and that led me to think about "common" disambiguations. I guess this wouldn't be appropriate though, as you'd have to have a much more directed attack for it to be of any discernible use, so not to worry. Thanks anyway. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 16:33, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I have disambiguated maybe 20 or 30 newborn dabs (good term for them, AndrewHowse) and so far I have not encountered any quite that high. That's because usually Foo had been accumulating links intended for Foo (bar). --Una Smith (talk) 04:02, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Redirects with possibilites (newbie question)

I have looked at the archives but couldn't see a previous discussion of this (I could easily have missed it). I have just started contributing to the project by attempting fix links to "Conductor". In the case of a musical conductor, a redirect exists "Conductor (music)" pointing to the target article, "Conducting". This redirect is categorised as a "Redirect with possibilities". On the CAT:RWP page it states: "Important: Do not replace links to these redirects, with links directly to the target pages.". As I am fixing links to "Conductor", I am not going against this instruction, but wanted to know if I should be replacing links to "Conductor" with links to "Conductor (music)" or "Conducting". Hope this makes sense (and I'm not being dense). TheSmuel (talk) 14:35, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

I'd say you're doing the right thing. Although it may be a matter of judgment whether as to how much real "possibility" there is for a particular term. older ≠ wiser 14:56, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

I would link to Conductor (music). Let that redirect accumulate incoming links; someone eventually will come along and turn it into an article. I wish more editors were tolerant of redlinks and links to redirects. I am getting very bored fixing instances of [[calf]][[skin]] and [[calf]] [[skin]] that were created in the absence of an article about calfskin (before today it was a redirect to Calf). --Una Smith (talk) 21:09, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Current disambiguation collaborations (EP)

• EP has about 3000 links as of today. It was redirecting to a page on the European Parliament, but moving the disambiguation page to the plain title was probably correct; many links intend the musical usage. Should keep us busy for a while. Dekimasuよ! 10:35, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
  • Note: until a couple of weeks ago, EP was a long-standing redirect to Extended play, so the vast majority of links are likely to intend that usage. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 11:20, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
    • I suppose I should have asked first whether we're all in agreement that it should be a dab. Extended play is what I think of first when I see EP, but that's conceivably an American thing. Dekimasuよ! 11:43, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
      • Unless a European editor disagrees I think it's a no-brainer to put the redirect to extended play back. I seriously doubt anyone expects EP to take then to European Parliament. J04n(talk page) 14:27, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
        • It's been suggested otherwise in the past, per Talk:EP, although extended play won the argument that time. The page has been a redirect to the European Parliament at least twice before. Dekimasuよ! 14:49, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
  • I too immediately think of extended play but this is probably a Canadian thing. :) I think a strong argument can be made for European Parliament even though a vast majority of links probably refer to the music term. I think we should leave it a disambig rather than redirecting to either of them to avoid any sort of systemic bias. RedWolf (talk) 06:12, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
    • I think it should be a disambig - it's a two-letter acronym with dozens of possible meanings. Even if EP were to redirect to Extended play fort he time being, we're better off fixing the links now because who knows what will use those initials in the future! As for the current glut of links, a bot can fix the vast majority, if it's fed only those pages that are in an Album category. bd2412 T 16:36, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
    • (discussion moved from project page)

For what it's worth, I've now fixed all the EP links to point to Extended play (I found only one that needed to be pointed elsewhere). bd2412 T 02:08, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Great job! Dekimasuよ! 04:25, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Message

Can someone take a look at Message? I don't think it is a dab and would like a second opinion. J04n(talk page) 22:49, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

I agree. The dab page, as the hatnote says, is at Message (disambiguation). To clear things up a bit, not only would I remove the dab tag, I would also remove the Scottish section, which has to do with the food sense of the term (think "mess hall"; it comes from the same Latin root, but has a slightly different lineage).--ShelfSkewed Talk 23:08, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, done. J04n(talk page) 14:17, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Automated message to dab link adders?

Can we set up a bot that will pick out pages to which links to disambig pages have recently been added, find the edit in which that link was added, and send a talk page message to the person who added the link saying something to the effect of

You [(link to edit) recently added] the link "foo" to the article "bar". "Foo" is a disambiguation page; please review your edit to determine which article you intended to link to.

The bot could be instructed to ignore links in hatnotes and perhaps links in the "see also" sections of disambig pages, or other places where intentional links to disambig pages are likely to be put. bd2412 T 01:03, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

ICD-10 Chapter H

I can't figure out how to fix the pages inked to ICD-10 Chapter H. There is somekind of a template for the infobox and I'm a loss as to how to edit it. J04n(talk page) 15:34, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

It looks like R'n'B fixed the template earlier today diff. The change just hasn't propagated yet.--ShelfSkewed Talk 15:45, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Great, thanks to you both. J04n(talk page) 17:07, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Personal request.

I have, in my time, made more than a few dozen disambig pages (see User:BD2412/Contributions - Projects and tools#Disambiguation pages). Would it be possible for a report to be generated on the number of links to each of those pages? I'd rather like to clean them up, and to hit the most-linked first. bd2412 T 01:29, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Open up any page and in the right hand column there is a "toolbox", in it is a link "what links here" click that and you get everything that links to the page you are on. J04n(talk page) 01:37, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I am aware of that. We're talking dozens of searches, though - no way to do a sort of one-button search for everything linking to all the disambig pages in my list? bd2412 T 01:59, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

It might be possible to adapt the splendid work that User:JaGa has done; the daily update on the top 250 seems to be the same concept. Of course, that lives on the toolserver and I've no idea about rights and such. --AndrewHowse (talk) 02:45, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

More ways to crunch the data?

Here are some things I'd like to see:

1. A list of disambiguation pages containing links to other disambiguation pages (those are probably intentional, but we want to be sure).
2. A list of pages with links to disambig pages found ONLY in a hatnote (those are also probably intentional).
3. A list of all redirects to disambiguation pages (I've found some lately that are just blatantly wrong and easily fixable; a fixing a bad redirect can solve dozens of disambig links at a time).

Cheers! bd2412 T 16:50, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

• 1. looks pretty easy; I could probably run a report in a few hours using the next database dump that comes out.
  2. looks not too difficult, although a little more complicated because some text parsing has to be done to figure out which templates are "hatnotes" and what their parameters are.
  3. looks very easy in principle but potentially a very long report.
• --R'n'B (call me Russ) 17:20, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
  • That would be great - maybe there are some parameters that we could throw in to limit the size of the redirect report, like excluding redirects that differ only in capitalization or spacing (and therefore are not likely to be errant). This morning, North-Western Province, Zambia was a redirect to Northwestern Province, until I changed it to redirect to the correct article, Northwestern Province (Zambia). It's annoying to find things like that, and that's exactly the sort of thing I'd like a report to reveal. I suspect that fixing a few dozen blatantly bad redirects could cut our disambig linkage numbers by the thousands. bd2412 T 00:40, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Also, while we're on the subject, when was the last time we got an updated list of disambig links in templates and in categories? Might be useful to have such a list for portal space as well, since it is sometimes used like template space. bd2412 T 03:56, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Haha, I refreshed the categories list and added it as the collaboration without having read this. I thought about updating the one for the portal space, but it's kind of overwhelming (some portals have pages that list links to dabs they're involved with, etc.). As for the templates, we have the toolserver report that's updated daily. I use it directly all the time. Dekimasuよ! 04:42, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Ah, the toolserver templates link list is great, and thanks for refreshing the categories. I still think a portals list would be useful, but am more keen on the three that I listed above, particularly the redirects-to-disambigs, and the disambig links on disambig pages. bd2412 T 15:38, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Also useful would be an optional filter on WhatLinksHere so that it only shows article namespace pages. As per WP:DPL I'm fixing only pages in article namespace, and this would be much easier if the WhatLinksHere list didn't show all of the other (user, talk archive, etc) pages. Mitch Ames (talk) 10:04, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

There is a namespace filter on Whatlinkshere, next to where you insert the name of the page. Dekimasuよ! 10:17, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Come on now, where are those lists, my wiki-fu people! Regarding the hatnotes, I am interested in articles where the link occurs in one of the template hatnotes, as all hatnotes should be in a template - for convenience, I think we can limit those to {{for|, {{otheruses| (with various numbers), and {{redirect|. bd2412 T 17:22, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

As I said above, I'm waiting for the next database dump. There is one in progress, although it is running a lot slower than the last several ones did. Probably within the next week ... ? --R'n'B (call me Russ) 20:37, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Ohhh, ok, I will be patient then. bd2412 T 21:02, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

• At your leisure, you may now peruse Redirects to disambiguation pages and Disambiguation pages that link to disambiguation pages. I hope you have a lot of spare time on your hands, though! (On the redirects report, it occurs to me now that I should filter out "Foo (disambiguation) redirects to Foo"; I'll fix that the next time, if there is one.) --R'n'B (call me Russ) 17:18, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

• This clogs up the whatlinkshere pages quite a bit more than the dumps do, which is kind of ironic given the discussion a few sections below about delinking the dumps. I'd argue that giving them the incoming links has the somewhat negative effect of lending an air of legitimacy to otherwise bad redirects. Dekimasuよ! 13:35, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

• Thanks, I have no spare time but will nevertheless attack this vigorously; I plan to clear the lists as quickly as possible of "good" redirects so we can focus on fixing the bad. bd2412 T 14:10, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
• Dekimasu, I realize that we're making a lot of new links, but those are intended to be a very temporary one time thing - as soon as we can find and fix the bad redirects, we can wipe out these pages. bd2412 T 01:34, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

• Re the list of redirects to disambiguation pages, are you filtering out the redirects that have no incoming links from mainspace? --Una Smith (talk) 03:01, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

• No, a redirect with no incoming links could still be a bad or misguided redirect, and those should be deleted or fixed irrespective of whether they have incoming links. bd2412 T 03:29, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
• By the way, I've started a page for questionable redirects to disambig pages to be listed for review. It is called, of course, Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/Questionable redirects to disambiguation pages. Cheers! bd2412 T 08:05, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Automating some of the parsing

Can we have a bot go through the redirect lists and wipe out the ones that are clearly not a problem? I have noticed a number of common patterns that can safely be ignored:

• Difference in capitalization
• Substitution of a diacritic for the plain letter, and vice-versa
• Presence of (disambiguation) in the title
• Redirect only add or subtracts spaces, hyphens, or periods
• Substitution of a numeral for a spelled out number, or vice versa
• Substitution of an ampersand for an "and"
• Last-name-first (e.g. Adams, Henry redirecting to Henry Adams

We only need to parse out problem redirects (for example, why is it that 'Us redirected to Uz (now fixed), (Chrome (XM) redirected to Chrome (redirect now deleted), and (Fmr.) Father still redirects to Salesian School (no idea what to do with this one). bd2412 T 07:12, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

The diacritics should probably stick around and be evaluated by their respective WikiProjects, if possible. Lots of articles that fall under WP:WPJ, for example, have no diacritics where they should have diacritics, or diacritics where they should have no diacritics. It can be difficult to find and standardize all of them. With a list of redirects where I could just search for ā, ō, etc., it would be a lot easier to see what's in the wrong place. Dekimasuよ! 02:06, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

Oh - that's bad, then. My goal in getting these lists was to root out obviously wrong redirects (e.g. a hypothetical "John Smith (tailor, born 1785)" redirecting to "John Smith" when it should obviously redirect to the more specific article "John Smith (tailor, 1785-1853)". Redirects that differ only by a diacritic, such as Bedkow redirecting to Będków, may potentially have a better target but are not obviously wrong. I'm afraid I've already deleted 28 pages of these redirects, and have only saved those in the first category in the list of questionable redirects. I'd frankly rather not keep the diacritic-only redirects anyway, as there are thousands of them! bd2412 T 02:59, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, I suppose we've gotten this far without them. If I really need to take a look for some reason, we can always temporarily restore the pages. Dekimasuよ! 03:27, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

Note: I'm about a third of the way through with crunching redirects to sort out those which are problematic. Cheers! bd2412 T 00:24, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Half done. bd2412 T 22:55, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Set it aside for a bit, but now 2/3 done parsing. bd2412 T 00:16, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

Whatlinkshere troubles

Whatlinkshere appears to be somewhat broken at the moment, as you can't go either forward or back from the second page of links. I left a note at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) and tried to look for something in MediaWiki that would have broken things, but no luck so far. Anyone have any ideas? Dekimasuよ! 04:38, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Aryan (disambiguation)

Both Aryan and Aryans now redirect here, which accounts for virtually all incoming links. Seems awfully wrong to me. bd2412 T 16:05, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

This is the subject of a proposed page move: Talk:Aryan (disambiguation)#Proposed move. --Una Smith (talk) 16:10, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

(ec) Already discussion going on at Talk:Aryan (disambiguation). The page that used to be at Aryan was written over despite objections and should probably at least be saved from the scrap pile before something else is put over its history at the plain title. Dekimasuよ! 16:12, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Talk:Aryan (disambiguation)#Proposed move is still open. --Una Smith (talk) 22:31, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Proposal to blank old disambig dump pages.

I would like to delete everything but the headers from the following pages:

• Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/2005-10-20 dump
• Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/2005-12-13 dump
• Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/2006-03-26 dump
• Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/2006-05-18 dump
• Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/2006-07-17 dump
• Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/2006-09-06 dump
• Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/2006-11-30 dump
• Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/2007-02-06 dump
• Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/2007-04-02 dump
• Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/2007-05-27 dump
• Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/2007-07-16 dump
• Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/2007-08-02 dump
• Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/2007-10-18 dump
• Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/2008-03-12 dump
• Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/2008-07-14 dump

My rationale is that each of these pages is now just a link farm clogging up the "what links here" pages of the disambig links (and no-longer-disambig links on the page). Please note that editors do sometimes need to parse through more than just article links, and in any event I doubt anyone is paying any mind to these old dumps (and if they do want to look at an old version, that's a history click away). Any objections? bd2412 T 04:52, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Well, I can't say I like the idea. The data is useful for keeping track of which pages tend to accumulate links quickly, how we've done in the past, and things like that. Editors do sometimes need to go through more than just article links, but not really ever links in the Wikipedia space. As for the archiving on the main page here, I suppose it could be switched to permalinks, although that would bloat the box quite a bit. If you feel strongly about it, how about just going through and delinking the pages, but leaving the info itself alone? Dekimasuよ! 09:40, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

That is certainly a reasonable alternative. bd2412 T 17:10, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Aberdeen

Discussing page moves involving Aberdeen (see Talk:Aberdeen), I noticed that for over a year now Aberdeen (disambiguation) has been getting over 1,700 page views per month. The only incoming link from mainspace is from Aberdeen. It occurs to me that counting page views on "foo (disambiguation)" pages might help this project find misplaced dab pages that most urgently need fixing. --Una Smith (talk) 22:28, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

For comparison, some dab vs primary page view ratios for May 2009:

• 1.7% for Paris: 5202/301146
• 2.3% for London: 4594/200905
• 5.2% for Aberdeen: 1773/33952
• 6.8% for Jimmy Stewart: 617/9039

--Una Smith (talk) 02:26, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Getting 95% of people where they're going on the first click doesn't sound bad to me, if we're just talking about numbers. Dekimasuよ! 06:18, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

We don't know that 95% of people viewing Aberdeen got where they were going. We only know that 5% did not get where they were going, because they viewed Aberdeen (disambiguation). And that 5% is a minimum; the real number is larger. How many people read right past the hatnote, searched for a link in the article, and in the end did a Wikipedia search or a Google search? I know I often don't see the hatnote at first. On Wikipedia, the occupation of ambiguous page names by "primary topic" articles annoys me in part because it makes using the Wikipedia search tool so much more difficult. It is necessary to use the "search" button rather than the default "go" button, and using the "search" button produces rather undigested results. I would rather use a good dab page. --Una Smith (talk) 15:00, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Some people also probably happily read the article, which is the article they want, and then click the link to the dab page afterwards to find out more about related articles. London is 126Kb long, Paris 105, and Aberdeen only 72Kb, so people are less likely to have exhausted their attention span when they get to the end of it. The point only being that we can go back and forth like this all day; and yet (approximately) 95% of readers getting to the page they want is preferable to 95% having to search through a list to find what they want. Wikipedia is not etymological cladistics. Dekimasuよ! 15:38, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Where do you get "95% having to search through a list"? If the dab page occupies the ambiguous base name, then all the incoming links can be fixed so they go directly to the intended article. That leads to less than 5% having to search through a list. That is assuming most readers navigate via Google and other external search engines and Wikipedia links rather than via the Wikipedia search box. Unfortunately, we don't know how readers get to our pages. --Una Smith (talk) 16:12, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Seems a bit flawed to bring a second discussion here today when it's been going on quite productively at Talk:Aberdeen. Please, editors, consider treating this entry as merely a heads-up and keep the discussion in one place. – Kieran T ^(talk) 16:03, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

This is a meta-discussion, which belongs here. See also Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation#Primary topic uber alles. --Una Smith (talk) 16:12, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

I would have discussed this at Talk:Aberdeen if I had known there was an open discussion there. I didn't figure that out until I was looking through Aberdeen's whatlinkshere and saw that it had an incoming link from Wikipedia:Requested moves. Dekimasuよ! 23:47, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

New York City subway redirects

There are numerous instances of New York City subway stations redirecting to the disambig page for their street name. For example, 125th Street (New York City Subway station), 125th Street (New York City Subway), and 125th Street (New York Subway) all redirect to 125th Street. I understand that there are numerous subway stations on 125th Street in New York, but is this the best way to resolve that? After all, there are also numerous 125th Streets in other places. bd2412 T 04:24, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

If no one else sees this as a problem, I'll strike these from the list of problem redirects. Cheers! bd2412 T 23:27, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Redirects to 3D

Redirects to 3D include the following: Three-dimensional, Three dimensional, 3-dimensional, 3-Dimensional, Three dimension, Three dimensions, 3-dimension, 3 dimension, 3 dimensional, 3-dimensions, 3 dimensions, Three Dimensional, and Three dimensional (disambiguation). I propose that all except the last one be re-redirected to point to Three-dimensional space, since that is the meaning of "3D" that appears most consonant with the concept of being three-dimensional. bd2412 T 06:04, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Opposed, unless you can convince me that Three-dimensional space is the primary topic. --Una Smith (talk) 15:04, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

The primary topic of what? The only point he's making is that the other entries on the 3D dab page aren't referring to "3D" as a shortened version of "three dimensional". He's probably right, considering that the other links that use it this way (e.g. 3-D film) are not referred to as "the 3D". It isn't a stretch to say that "three dimensional" is not intended to link to 3D (album), The 3Ds, etc. Dekimasuよ! 15:44, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Is Three-dimensional space the primary topic of 3D? The problem is that space is 3D (to a first approximation) but not everything that is 3D is spatial. Space is a subset of 3D. --Una Smith (talk) 16:02, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Is "Three-dimensional" the primary topic of 3D? I'm solely discussing the redirects here, not the disambig title itself. bd2412 T 17:20, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

I understand that. If Three dimensional space is not the primary topic, then the redirects should go to the dab page, not to this topic. --Una Smith (talk) 18:04, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

In that case, I will say yes, three dimensional space is the primary topic of three dimensional, because even uses for, e.g., three dimensional films refer to films which portray objects in three dimensional space. bd2412 T 20:57, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Agree After looking at the links, agree with changing the redirects mentioned above as proposed by BD2412 —Preceding unsigned comment added by J04n (talk • contribs)

Thank you. That is good enough for me. --Una Smith (talk) 01:47, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Done. Cheers! bd2412 T 07:15, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

June stats

The small number of pages left over from the June toolserver report has made it easy to run a few checks on what happened to dabs that were in the top 250 on June 1. I found that the number of ambiguous links declined for 227/250 of the listings (91%). The number of ambiguous links rose for only 21/250 pages (8%), and for only two pages (Homogeneity and Urban) did the number of incoming links rise by more than ten (+12 and +11, respectively). Anyway, here are the others that increased over the last month; it's perhaps an indication that no one is watching them and that they're ripe for the picking, or just that they need your loving care: Consulting, Convergence, Sociopathy, Humanist, Form, Deformation, Equilibrium, Sage, Emission, Alpine, Convex, Civil law, Value, Antisocial, Islamic Jihad, Control, Intuition, Schism, and Chaldean. Dekimasuよ! 12:58, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

July 20 update

Although there are still ten days left for the July toolserver report, I ran the same sort of link check I tried out for last month's report. So far this month, the number of links has declined for 213/250 of the listings (85%) and has risen for 28/250 of the listings (11%). Once again, only two pages have gone up by more than ten links; they are Development (+11) and Public Service (+13). I'll run a full check on the June problem pages and do an update on this month's results again around August 1. Dekimasuよ! 04:57, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Arm (disambiguation)/version 2

Arm (disambiguation)/version 2 redirects to Arm (disambiguation) - obviously a useless redirect, but it has a substantial edit history, apparently having been a sounding board for a dispute over the content of the disambig page. I'm thinking of moving it to project space as a subpage of this project (or maybe just of Wikipedia:Disambiguation and labeling it an archive. bd2412 T 01:02, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

A cheap fix for this kind of problem, where you just want to save the history, is to think of a new valid redirect and move the history there; in this case, something like Arms (disambiguation) might be a good choice, or you could move it over the history of ARM (disambiguation) which doesn't have a substantial edit history. It's sloppy, but it gets the job done. Dekimasuよ! 04:19, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Done, sort of. I made the move, then realized that Arms is its own disambig page, so I turned it there and left a note on the talk page. bd2412 T 07:16, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Waikato (disambiguation)

Recent discussion on Talk:Waikato (region/district) has identified a large muddle involving incoming links to Waikato (region/district) and Waikato. It is premature to fix incoming links, but the disambiguation page would benefit from additional work. Does anyone here know the North Island of New Zealand? --Una Smith (talk) 05:26, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Daily Disambig problem

The Daily Disambig may not be updated for the next several days. I have had a problem with the service that hosts the bot, and I am out of town for a few days and can't do much about it. Hopefully it should be back by Monday at the latest. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 17:23, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the note. Dekimasuよ! 00:51, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Typology

Some articles link to the Typology disambiguation page because one of the definitions, typology in psychology, has no article associated with it. I think it would be better to leave these links alone, with the hope that an article on the topic will be written. Links to disambiguation pages aren't necessarily bad, and judgment should be used before they're removed. Unless someone objects, I'm planning to undo these overzealous changes. ThreeOfCups (talk) 02:51, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

I think that creating the redlink typology in psychology will increase the chances of achieving the goal of having the article written more so than leaving as is. This way when it is written everything will be appropriately linked. J04n(talk page) 03:02, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

The standard title would probably be Typology (psychology). Dekimasuよ! 05:09, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Correction: The typology links relating to psychology should be linked to Personality type, which is one of the links on the disambiguation page. Better to link to the disambiguation page, where the reader can find the correct article, than to remove the link altogether. I've fixed the ones that I'm aware of. But like physicians, Wikipedia editors should subscribe to the philosophy, "first, do no harm." ThreeOfCups (talk) 03:24, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Creating a redlink isn't the same as removing a link, though. They are considered to be beneficial (perhaps moreso among older users?). You can always mark a redirect as Template:R with possibilities, too, although those don't tend to end up getting written. Dekimasuよ! 05:09, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

That's a fine argument, but in this case, red links were not created; the links to the disambiguation page were simply removed. I added them back, this time directing to the correct article. If people lack the knowledge or the willingness to figure out which article the link should go to, they should simply leave the link alone. Like a red link, a link to a disambiguation page serves a useful purpose. Perhaps the person following the link will be knowledgeable enough to know which article to chose.ThreeOfCups (talk) 23:47, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Cow (disambiguation)

This edit deleted from Cow (disambiguation) a long list of plant common names (cow vetch, cow lily, etc) and other articles. It may be related to an ongoing debate over whether to move the disambiguation page to Cow (now a redirect). Experienced eyes would be appreciated. --Una Smith (talk) 19:52, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Have to say, I agree with that edit. Just because a plant has "cow" as part of its name does not mean that it is known as "cow" or that anyone looking for the plant would look up the word, cow. bd2412 T 20:25, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

By BD2412's apparent reasoning, someone looking for "cow" would not be looking for "cattle" nor for "dairy cow"; and there should be no disambiguation page, just a hatnote on the article where Cow redirects, that mentions Cow (Cow & Chicken). --Una Smith (talk) 21:36, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Your analogy is inapt. One might refer to the single of cattle as a "cow", as they might to a dairy cow. I doubt anyone will point to one of those plants and say, "look, a cow". bd2412 T 01:07, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Agree with BD, no one looking for one of those plants would simply type "cow", the page is unnecessarily long without the edit. I also must comment that one should not ask for opinions and then disparage an editor that gives an opinion other than the one he is looking for. J04n(talk page) 21:54, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

I disagree; someone trying to find the name of a plant with the word "cow" in might very well look up the word "cow" if they can't remember the full name. Maybe there should be a separate disambiguation page for plants containing the word "cow." The fact that a page is too long is no reason to remove useful information. This might make a good "list" article.ThreeOfCups (talk) 23:54, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

For what it's worth, we have a long history of deleting list articles that consist of "things starting with foo" or "things containing the word foo", as well as removing partial matches from dab pages. They're against the current guidelines. People over at WT:DAB or the WikiProject might have a better memory than me, but two that I can remember are at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Outer and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of people named John. The most recent summarization of the guideline is at WT:DAB#Partial title matches - should they really be excluded?. If you want to change the guidelines, that would be the place to discuss it rather than here. Dekimasuよ! 01:26, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

I'm not suggesting a vague curiosity like a list of people named John. I'm suggesting something much more specific: a navigation list of plants containing "cow" in the vernacular name. The list could include information on why common plant names include the word "cow." Do the plants tend to attract or repel cattle? Are they used to treat bovine illness? While I agree that the Cow (disambiguation) page is no place for this list, I'd hate to see this useful information lost. And I don't think a guideline change is required—just a little creativity.

I'm not actually advocating that this is what should be done. I'm simply trying to find a middle ground between including it on the disambiguation page and deleting it altogether. ThreeOfCups (talk) 02:49, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Here's another possibility, perhaps a better one: add to the List of plants by common name. ThreeOfCups (talk) 02:58, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Normally I just create a redirect and put it in Category:Plant common names, but in this case I put the load on the disambiguation page. One name, "cow slip" aka "cowslip" already has its own disambiguation page, with two plants on it. I moved them out, to Cowslip (vernacular name). Does that work for you? --Una Smith (talk) 03:01, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Virtualization

Perhaps this should be an index, or an article of its own. All the page really does is list different specific applications of virtualization in computing - and this happens to be one of our top targets of disambig links, with many hits that are hard to "fix" because many refer to the general topic rather than one of those specific applications. bd2412 T 02:29, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

While they're definitely all related to computing, I think there's usually at least a meaningful distinction to be made between Platform virtualization and Desktop virtualization and that which of the two is being discussed can generally be determined from the context. Dekimasuよ! 03:30, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Okay, then I propose we make this title an article on platform virtualization (since "virtually" all the links appear to be for that concept, at least to my admittedly untrained eye) and move the disambig to Virtualization (disambiguation). bd2412 T 03:54, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

I don't know overall. Computers aren't my specialty, although I do have some experience with platform virtualization software for Macs. I've only been fixing them when I'm sure, but I found two or three that meant Desktop virtualization yesterday. Dekimasuよ! 04:03, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Don't move the dab page! Platform virtualization is an overview article and already there are 6 (?) more specific articles. All the articles on that dab page are related in that they concern some variant of virtualization, but that is not a reason to throw them all at one article. Instead, it is a reason to leave the dab page alone and ask contributors to those related articles to help disambiguate the incoming links to the dab page. --Una Smith (talk) 04:13, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

I tend to agree that the links to Virtualization could be meaningfully fixed by more knowledgeable people. However, that doesn't really seem to be the case among the "more specific" articles linked from Platform virtualization, which are all short and seem to have a limited perspective. Those should perhaps be merged back into the main article, which still wouldn't be very long. Dekimasuよ! 04:40, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

I'm okay with leaving Virtualization as a disambig, but I definitely agree with Dekimasu's comment on merging all the short specific pieces into Platform virtualization, which would substantially cut down the confusion of what link to disambiguate to. bd2412 T 05:07, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Those other articles are stubs, I agree, and of course anyone is put merge tags on them and see what other editors think. I think merging those stubs into Platform virtualization in order to make disambiguating incoming links easier amounts to sweeping a dab mess under a carpet. --Una Smith (talk) 05:19, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

I wasn't proposing that they be merged into Platform virtualization in order to make disambiguating links easier, but rather because they don't seem to be very useful as articles as they are currently written. Most of the links talking about "virtualization" appear to be referring to general "platform virtualization" rather than a specific type of it anyway, so I don't think the merge would make disambiguation any easier. And it's certainly an open question whether or not the individual articles could instead be improved so that they would be useful on their own. Dekimasuよ! 08:32, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

My rule of thumb on this is that if you have a lot of short articles that fall under a single broader heading, merge them together and then break them out again if their coverage within that broader heading grows large enough to constitute a non-stub article. bd2412 T 16:11, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, yes, unless you think that the merge itself would hinder their development. Dekimasuよ! 16:14, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

If there's something worth writing about, someone will write it. Being separate articles hasn't particularly helped their development. bd2412 T 01:05, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

I'm the one who's been knocking out the majority of the virtualization disambigs as I have expertise in the subject. It just takes a lot of time. I'll get there eventually. In cases when the term is just used as part of prose (~20% of cases), I've been removing the link per the guidelines that we shouldn't have dictionary links. The issue of merging the stubs into platform virtualization is completely separate from the disambig issue. If we decide to do the merge, which I think is a good idea, each ref to virtualization should still go to a specific redirect page. This will allow us to later split out one of the subjects as well as redirect to the proper section in platform virtualization for now. Here is the discussion justifying the creation of the stubs in the first place:

This page is thus probably more of a sub-article to virtualization than a legitimate stand-alone term. However it is used in enough places that at least it needs a link target!

The original authors were just trying to fix a ton of red links. They should have been created as redirects to sections in platform virtualization, but we can still fix that. UncleDouggie (talk) 07:05, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

All incoming links have been fixed. UncleDouggie (talk) 00:26, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Time for some pats on the back

		The Wikilink Barnstar
		Today we broke through the psychological boundary of 100,000 ambiguous links from active articles (articles with more than 100 such links). That makes this our first day under 100K since at least March 2008. It also represents a drop of more than 50% since the first WP:DPM update using the toolserver report in February, and a drop of more than one in three since WP:TDD came up on June 1. And since June 1, we've gone from 73 pages of 200 or more ambiguous links to just 6. So to everyone who's helped out over the last few months, have a barnstar on me. Dekimasuよ! 10:06, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Public school

I have a strategy for dealing with the Public school link flood: I am running a script now to identify the categories that contain large numbers of articles linking to this dab page. I suspect that in many cases all of the articles in the category will go to the same target: for example, any article in a category such as Category:Schools in Oklahoma would obviously mean to link to Public school (government funded) rather than Public school (UK). Mass-editing articles that meet this criteria should get rid of many easy cases and leave a more reasonable set of articles to deal with manually. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 14:00, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Good plan. I'll try and bat clean-up on that when I get back from the bar exam, next Friday. bd2412 T 15:23, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Here are a couple of tips for anyone working on this:

1. Many school articles use {{Infobox school}} which has a parameter fundingtype. If fundingtype = Public, the infobox automatically links to the disambiguation page. However, you can safely change this to fundingtype = [[Public school (government funded)|Public]] (or another link) without breaking the display.
2. For some reason, there seem to be a fair number of articles about American public colleges that use the above link, but these really should be changed to fundingtype = [[Public university|Public]]. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 07:55, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

• I think I've gotten most of the low-hanging fruit that can be gotten using the category technique. That got rid of over 50% of the incoming links, but there are still a lot (3,533 at the moment) that we will probably have to slog through manually. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 15:40, 26 July 2009 (UTC)
  • Since the schools infobox is specifying funding type, and only the Public school (government funded) schools should indicate public as the funding type, wouldn't it be better to just fix the infobox to automate this outcome? bd2412 T 00:22, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
    • A lot of the links aren't listed under "funding type" but just under "school type", and public is sometimes being used under the funding parameter to indicate tuition-based funding. At any rate, they are fairly easy to fix and there are less than 1500 left. Dekimasuよ! 03:53, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
      • And then there were none (except the intentional links). Great job! bd2412 T 00:21, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Baltic

Anyone feel like dealing with the links to Baltic? Basically I think Baltic should redirect to Baltic Sea, since it's clearly a primary use (there's the Baltic States as well, but that name isn't generally shortened to just Baltic, whereas the Sea is). So the majority of links (those that are intended to point to Baltic Sea) could be left alone.--Kotniski (talk) 07:44, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Toolserver down

If it stays down, what do we want to do about starting an August dump? As it stands, does anyone have data more recent thahttp://www.facebook.com/n last week's WP:DPM update? I've been throwing them into AppleWorks spreadsheets to check numbers sometimes, but it never occurred to me to save those lists. Dekimasuよ! 04:01, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

It's not like we don't have plenty to work with still from the July dump. I wouldn't worry about it for at least a few more days. bd2412 T 04:09, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

It's not actually down, it's reloading the database. If the reload is completed pretty much any time before 23:59 UTC tonight, we can recover seamlessly; if not, we can recover a little less seamlessly tomorrow. :-) R'n'B (call me Russ) 12:44, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

The dab challenge leaderboard has apparently chosen the links it wants to use for August, although it is calling it the list from the beginning of July. It appears to me to be approximately the list from July 31 (the system is still reporting the replication lag at over 4 days). The missing page appears to be Arica (129 links), which was since turned into a redirect. Should we throw up the new list using these? I've put them in a text-only file at User:Dekimasu/Temporary 8-2009 DPL in case this is our only chance at original link counts. I'd agree with BD2412 that we could just continue working on the old list, but for the past few days it hasn't appeared that anyone is inclined to do that. Dekimasuよ! 08:34, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

I say put up the new list. J04n(talk page) 09:27, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Working on it now... up in a little while. Dekimasuよ! 10:22, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

My bot would have done it within a few hours anyway.... --R'n'B (call me Russ) 10:44, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure exactly how the bot works, but I did notice that the data I had was older and matched that from the dab challenge, since it was synched before today's update. I've overwritten it so they match again, but I understand that it technically doesn't matter. Hopefully my OCD tendencies do more good than harm around here. Dekimasuよ! 11:51, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Anyway, perhaps I was hasty, but I hope you won't be offended. Dekimasuよ! 12:47, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

No big deal. My bot takes the first 250 pages from the first available report (on jason's Toolserver page) of the month. I don't really understand how he generates the DAB Challenge list; there always seem to be a few small discrepancies between that and the main list, even on the first day of the month. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 12:53, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

July DAB Challenge results

The ongoing problems with the toolserver has caused the results of July's contest to be lost. Could we get some unofficial guesstimates of where it was when it went down? I need to populate the HOF table - the missing HOF data is causing the current challenge to think it's still July. I know Woohookitty won, and Jo4n was in second, but I don't remember who got third and fourth, and what anyone's totals were. --JaGa^talk 09:26, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Numbers 3 and 4 were RussBot and Stone, and Fratrep was very close. Did you see my edit to User:JaGa/Short leaderboard where I took down the June numbers and reverted back to the last July ones here? That was up for about three days before the numbers came back up. May as well use those link totals... they're from 8pm on July 31, Wikipedia time. Dekimasuよ! 08:05, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Bless you, Dekimasu. I've fixed the HOF table using that data. --JaGa^talk 19:18, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Bravi!

moved from WT:Disambiguation pages with links/The Daily Disambig

I ran across the accompanying project (WP) sub-page by chance (inspecting a What links here!), tho i was already aware of the intensification of the underlying effort. Have you thot abt announcing it at WT:Disambiguation? Maybe even at the higher-traffic WT:MOSDAB in the form

Some readers of this page may be interested in WT:Disambiguation#Introducing The Daily Disambig.

since one hopes a significant number who seldom venture to WT:MOSDAB will have some interest.
--Jerzy•t 06:56, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

July stats

I didn't get a chance to do this while we were list-less, but I went through and compared the July list with the August list to find out what happened to dabs that were in the top 250 on July 1. The number of ambiguous links declined for 242/250 pages (97%), and rose for only 6/250 pages (2%). That's considerably better than the numbers that were already good in June. The only page that went up by more than ten links was Immunity, which went from 133 links when at Immunity (legal) to 185 links after a merge to the plain title. The others that rose were Connection, Convex (for the second consecutive month), Kamboja, Vedic (a recurring problem page), and Dynamics. Dekimasuよ! 10:18, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Strong work everyone, pats on the back all around. J04n(talk page) 23:55, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Roman Catholic Diocese of Santarém, Brazil

Can any of you figure out how Roman Catholic Diocese of Santarém, Brazil links to the disambiguation page Santarém? For the life of me I can't figure this thing out. Thanks J04n(talk page) 10:42, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Dunno, but I'm putting it in a sandbox and fiddling with it to try and find out... Carcharoth (talk) 21:21, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Bingo! Removing the wikisource template did the trick. Hopefully someone can fix things for you from there. Carcharoth (talk) 21:24, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Did this and this. Will now wait to get told what I did wrong there! :-) Carcharoth (talk) 21:30, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, unfortunately still showing as linking to the dab. It might take a while for you change to kick in though. Will check again later. J04n(talk page) 21:38, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Oh. Doh! I only changed it to point to Santarém instead of Santarem. My point is that the link to "Santarém" is coming from the wikisource template, which outputs a link to Santarém, when you want it to output a link to Santarém, Brazil. Have a look at the template coding in {{Wikisource1913CatholicEnc}}. I think it is this bit here that ends up making "what links here" think there is a link: [[wikisource:Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)/{{{1|{{PAGENAME}}}}}|{{{2|{{{1|{{PAGENAME}}}}}}}}]]. But I can't be sure as I've never understood templates fully. All I do know is that there are two parameters in that template, so looking at other examples might tell us how to use it properly. I've now done this and this, which is probably even more of a kludgey workaround than before. But I think it did what you wanted, but the side-effect is that Roman Catholic Diocese of Santarém, Brazil now links to itself... Carcharoth (talk) 22:57, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

The preceding was a bit confusing, so I'll say here what I think is happening. The default parameter (or the one labeled '1') in the template {{Wikisource1913CatholicEnc}} is output as a "link" both to the wikisource page at '1' and this link also shows up in "what links here". So if the 'Wikisource1913CatholicEnc' parameter used in an article is the same as the title of a disambiguation page, then you will get a link showing up in "what links here". Ultimately, you will need to get someone to either redesign that template, or explain why such 'shadow' links are good. Carcharoth (talk) 23:02, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your time and effort J04n(talk page) 23:59, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Vienne and links from templates impeding disambiguations

Would anyone here be able to help and advise on the following? If the WikiProject talk page is better for this, or the guideline talk page, just say so and I'll go there instead.

• (1) I recently created Vienne (disambiguation) after realising that there were quite a few things called Vienne or referring to Vienne. If someone could look at that disambiguation page and tidy it up, that would be great, as I can never remember the right way to format these pages. I tend to go overboard on disambiguation pages - if anyone does remove stuff, could you make sure people looking for that information can still get to it in other ways if they type "Vienne" and get to the disambiguation page from the hatnote at the top of the Vienne article?
• (2) I had intended to check the "what links here" for Vienne (about 700-800 links) and disambiguate as needed, but I found that many of the links were due to Vienne being linked from seven navbox templates that are widely transcluded. Is there a way to filter out the navbox template links so that links from article text can be disambiguated? I'm not going to click through hundreds of links to find out that only 5 or so are from article text.
• (3) I'm now not sure what is the primary topic for Vienne. If it helps, the French Wikipedia page at 'Vienne' is a disambiguation page (it is the interwiki on the en-wiki page I created).
• (4) The French wiktionary page at fr:wikt:Vienne is very nice. Is there a standard way to link from disambiguation pages to wiktionary pages in other languages in such cases?

I think that was all the questions I had. Thanks in advance, and hope someone has some answers! Carcharoth (talk) 03:28, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Anyone? Should I ask these questions somewhere else? I think at least question 2 is on-topic here. Carcharoth (talk) 22:38, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Do you want to move Vienne (disambiguation) to Vienne? Disambiguating incoming links to Vienne would be mostly a waste of time, unless the dab page were first moved there. See WP:RM. There is not necessarily any primary topic. When links are due to templates, the first step is to fix the templates. Then wait. Currently, I think you need wait only a few hours. Don't link to a foreign language Wiktionary page from Wikipedia. --Una Smith (talk) 22:44, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Warbler...a dab or not a dab...that is the question

I don't think Warbler is a dab, would appreciate a second opinion, if it is it will be impossible to disambiguate. J04n(talk page) 23:10, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

It can be made into a proper dab page, and probably should. Like Robin, Warbler is a vernacular name given to several unrelated groups of birds. Disambiguation certainly is possible, except in some cases where usage is literary not encyclopedic, and in those cases the link should be made to wiktionary not a Wikipedia article. --Una Smith (talk) 14:43, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Hmmm...warbler without an adjective I thought generally referred to Sylviidae alone (??) However, I think they are more commonly technically known as Old World WArblers, so maybe a dab is best...? Casliber (talk · contribs) 15:03, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

In America, "warbler" without an adjective means Parulidae (and Peucedramidae, maybe), so I think a dab is needed. The real problem will be keeping track of which families the Old World birds known as warblers are in, as Sylviidae gets split up six ways from Sunday. —JerryFriedman (Talk) 16:22, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

There are thousands of species of warblers, but Warbler has only 107 incoming links, many of which probably can be changed to Old World warbler, New World warbler, Australian warbler, etc. --Una Smith (talk) 16:36, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

There may need to be a dab page with the birds, "USS Warbler (MSC-206)", and the surname Warbler from "The Class (TV series)". There may also need to be an article on warblers - the page in question can be the primary page about warblers. Snowman (talk) 21:18, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Actually "thousands of species of warblers" is a bit of an exaggeration. There might be a few hundred worldwide, but it's not a whole lot more than that! MeegsC | Talk 21:35, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Sylviidae sensu lato has about 300 species, Parulidae has 116 or so, and the other groups together contribute probably less than 100. So I agree it is not thousands of species; it is 500 or so. By the way, Wikipedia has 330 articles with "Warbler" in the page name. Perhaps a new category is in order: Category:Birds called warblers? --Una Smith (talk) 21:51, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Dab pages with page views

It occurs to me a list of the 10 or 100 disambiguation pages with the most page views per week or per month would help us to target disambiguation messes involving a putative primary topic article. For example, Worm (disambiguation), which has 94 incoming links, gets about 110 page views per day, probably because Worms redirects to it. Durham (disambiguation), which has 5 incoming links, gets about 20 page views per day, probably from Durham. Paris (disambiguation) gets about 180 pages views per day; London (disambiguation) gets about 130... --Una Smith (talk) 04:13, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

You would need to compare with the page views of the primary topic article. Also, remember that for some disambiguations there is no primary topic, just several topics all with lots of page views. Mercury is a good example. Carcharoth (talk) 08:13, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

I want to focus on disambiguation pages paired with a primary topic article, to spot the pairs where page views of the dab page are a large fraction of page views of the paired article. Those are the pairs where moving the dab page to the ambiguous base name should have the greatest benefit to readers. --Una Smith (talk) 21:59, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

To take your worm example, do you mean "Worm" would become the dab page? How many daily hits does worm get? Carcharoth (talk) 22:41, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

It appears the disambiguation mess involves incoming links to Worms, so perhaps it is Worms that should be a dab page. I have not looked at Worm, which gets about 1200 hits per day.[2] I would say incoming links to Worms are in greater need of disambiguating than the other examples I mentioned above. --Una Smith (talk) 22:52, 26 August 2009 (UTC)