Talk:Natal, South Africa

Change of use

This article was tagged for a merger with the KwaZulu-Natal page in June; following the discussion there, and for the reasons given, the page here has been reduced to a disambiguation page. I trust everyone is OK with that. Moonraker12 (talk) 20:41, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

@Moonraker12: The discussion was brief, but the decision looks right. However, you may have overlooked WP:FIXDABLINKS. User:DPL bot today reports that this page has 246 bad incoming links which will need to be fixed. Narky Blert (talk) 11:16, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

I've fixed about half of the links, mainly to point to the Colony or the Province. (This split confirms the wisdom of disambiguating.) Most of the rest are about the geographical area Natal, especially in specifying the habitat of a species, and I'm reluctant to dilute them by pointing at the more generic KwaZulu-Natal. There are also several links about pre-1839 events in Natal for which none of the alternatives work. The old broad-concept article was ideal for these; any suggestions as to where to point them now? Certes (talk) 17:57, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

@Certes: Good work, down to 99 links. I agree with you about the species articles - animals and plants have a distressing habit of ignoring man-made borders. How about Natal (region), which I've just created as a redirect to Geography of South Africa#KwaZulu-Natal and added to the DAB page?

As for pre-1839 events, there are snippets in Natalia Republic#European settlement and setbacks and Colony of Natal#British settlement. There may be enough in there and in those other links-in for a stubby article called Natal (before 1839) or the like. Narky Blert (talk) 10:59, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

I'm thinking of changing the remaining links to point to two new destinations (working titles Early history of Natal and Natal (region); better suggestions welcome). Then at least each link points to the right topic. Both are redirects with possibilities. Certes (talk) 12:07, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

@Certes: I like both your suggested titles. Typing "Early history" into the search box brings up dozens of articles. There is precedent for the qualifier (region); e.g. Macedonia (region) and Palestine (region), other places with complicated political histories. Narky Blert (talk) 14:21, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

@Narky Blert:, @Certes:: My apologies to you both, a) for not joining in with fixing this (I've been away for a few days) and b) for not sorting out the links in the first place; With the page being virtually a dab page already, I hadn't appreciated that changing it into one would render all the incoming links as "errors". I suppose I also hoped that maybe the title could be resuscitated as a concept article, which would validate all the incoming links again, but I don't know enough about the subject to have done that. Anyway, thank you for clearing up my mess! Moonraker12 (talk) 16:48, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

@Moonraker12: - Another hard-to-find bit of the WP:MOS. Certes did all the hard work, so the thanks are due there. As you can see above, some discussion between DABlink fixers was needed to work out where to direct some of the incoming links. The page is now clean (I've just checked). From the number of incorrect links there were into it, I think that it should stay as a DAB page, In that way, future ones can be found and corrected. Narky Blert (talk) 17:07, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

@Moonraker12: No problem; the job needed doing. Thanks for starting us off in the right direction, and I was happy to help complete it. Certes (talk) 17:18, 14 September 2017 (UTC)