Talk:Karate Kid (disambiguation)

De-disambiguation

I think the solution to this page is to make The Karate Kid an article on the franchise generally, in the same way that Star Wars addresses the franchise with different pages for the individual films. bd2412 T 21:28, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

• I would be opposed to that at this point. I think the drawbacks outweigh the advantages. I see the advantage to your solution being that readers immediately go to a page with content rather than just a dab page. But there are several disadvantages. I don't think The Karate Kid franchise generally is the top intended target. Based on the fixes I did, the 1984 film seems to be the most frequent intended target. So readers trying to get to that page still have to get through an initial page. And since a dab page is so brief, folks trying to get to the 1984 film page from the franchise pages would probably actually get to their destination a little slower as they hunted for the link than if we maintained a dab page. In addition, not all of the dab pages topics fall under the franchise. The comic book character is unrelated to the movie franchise and actually older. So the franchise page would still need a hatnote to the comic character at the very least, if not a hatnote link to a "(disambiguation)" page. I guess opinions may vary about the threshold for a hatnote versus a dab page. But in my opinion, I think there ought to be a really, really big imbalance between notability/reader traffic to go with the hatnote route for an ambiguous term. I don't think that threshold is reached with Karate Kid. Also, I don't think a franchise article would solve the ambiguity problem so much as it would obscure it. It reduces the number of dab links, but I don't think it tackles the actual problem the Wikiproject is trying to address. When a dab page shows up on the list, it marshals the efforts of editors to fix the misdirected links. Going to a franchise article in lieu of the dab pages makes the existence of the misdirected links less noticeable. That makes it less likely they'll get fixed. If an article states that Karate Kid grossed X dollars or Karate Kid met Superman in issue X, then a link to the franchise article is wrong. Keeping the dab page makes it much more likely those errors will be fixed. --JamesAM (talk) 16:24, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
  • That is a reasonable argument. However, if the 1984 film is the most likely target, and it discusses the other media in the franchise (at The Karate Kid (1984 film)#Legacy), then I can't see why the 1984 film should not be the primary meaning. bd2412 T 18:41, 19 November 2011 (UTC)