Talk:Channel system

Disambiguation page?

I'm here to discuss of the revert by Lithopsian (talk · contribs). The revert message was a link to WP:TWODABS. If I understand correctly, this consider the question of whether there is a primary topic or not. I believe there are no primary topic and thus a disambiguation page is legit here. Indeed, the first test is testing: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AWhatLinksHere&target=Channel+system&namespace= (and there are no page linking to Channel system). A request to https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?hl=fr&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=channel+system&btnG= show that Channel system is used in plenty of context, some which are neither channel system (computer science) nor abyssal channel. So this test is also unconclusive. I must admit that the ngram test https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=channel+system&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cchannel%20system%3B%2Cc0 seems useless to me; I can't find how it helps discovering a primary usage. I didn't check for news and trend, since the matter here is not newsworthy.

I must note however that my first disambiguation was not ideal. I was going to add the word «channel system» to the page communicating finite-state machine. However, I did realize while looking for source that some authors consider communicating finite-state system to be the same thing than channel system, while some authors find that there is some difference (they are essentially equivalent, but the formal definition differs). Thus I created a new page; which explain why the disambiguation did not make sens during the few hours in which it existed. Hence, nowaday, I argue that the disambiguation should be to channel system (computer science) and not to communicating finite-state machine.

Arthur MILCHIOR (talk) 19:52, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

The gist of WP:TWODABS is that there is rarely a case for disambiguation pages with only two links on them. They are counter-productive in that everyone interested in that title must first go to the dab page and choose where they wish to go after that (we're making them think!). Many people instinctively feel that when there are two possibilities, there must be a dab page for fairness/symmetry/completeness/etc., but this isn't the case. It is nearly always preferable to send everyone to one page or the other and then notify the unhappy ones (with a hatnote) to click through to the other page. Hopefully more people are happy than sad, but either way people on average get where they want to be quicker than using a dab page.

So it is mostly a case of picking a primary topic that will get the majority directly to their preferred article. At the moment, there is a fairly comprehensive article (Abyssal channel) that appears to be a likely target, and a stub (communicating finite-state machine) that would be seem to be a confusing target for anyone wanting "channel system". It may in fact be a perfectly good target, preferable even, but at the moment doesn't offer much info or even mention the term. There are pageview tools that can analyse how many visitors there are to different Wikipedia pages, but they may not be much use in this case, with the ambiguous term being quite tenuous for either target. The clincher at the moment is that there are multiple wikilinks to Channel system, all of them currently interested in getting to Abyssal channel. These would all have to be edited before it could even be considered changing this to a disambiguation page, or they would all suddenly have broken wikilinks in them. Lithopsian (talk) 20:53, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for the explanation. I guess I read the bad part of the page then. Note that I'm not arguing for communicating finite-state machine but for Channel system (computer science); which is not a stub. May I ask how you find the wikilinks to Channel system? I tried the link https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AWhatLinksHere&target=Channel+system&namespace= but it shows that the only link is on the current page; which is not rally informative.