Template talk:Compass direction

Point?

The ordinal directions' pages are usually disambiguation pages, with no substantive information. For that reason, there's no point in linking directly to them, and links to them are disambiguated to point to articles. When a link to one of them refers to the ordinal direction, I disambuguate the link to Ordinal direction, which redirects to Cardinal direction, which covers the ordinal directions as well. I don't see much point in having a template where four of the links need to point to Ordinal direction. To put it differently, there's not much point in having a template for easier navigation when half the links don't have anything substantive to navigate to. For now, I'm disambiguating links in the template to point to Ordinal direction. --Tkynerd 15:44, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

I have chosen, for the time being, not to revert User:Tobias Conradi's edits made earlier today. However, I expect to see an explanation of exactly how this change makes this template (and the pages it's used on) more useful for the reader. Absent that justification, I will revert Tobias's changes soon. See also Wikipedia:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages) and WP:DPL. Linking to dab pages is a problem, contrary to Tobias's edit summary. --Tkynerd 02:04, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

A week has gone by and no justification, so I've reverted Tobias's edits per the above. --Tkynerd 19:15, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm adding more detail about why I don't want links to the directional pages from this template. I regularly disambiguate links to Northwest to point to the correct article. There are currently four articles that legitimately link to Northwest (in mainspace, that is). If this template links directly to Northwest, every article that uses it will also link there -- "legitimately" -- and I'll have to keep track of all of them as well, after doing the analysis to figure out why the damned page links to Northwest when there's no link to that page in the article's wikitext. Grrrr. No. The same principle applies for the other ordinal directions as well, although I don't regularly disambiguate links to them. --Tkynerd 16:05, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I hadn't read the discussion before I made my change. I can appreciate it makes life easier for editors to leave things as they are, but for readers it is just frustrating and apparently pointless. If we can't have NW, NE, SW, SE linking to distinct pages, then logically the only alternative is to remove them from the template altogether! --Dr Greg 11:31, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

See the last two sentences of my first post in this thread above. As those comments make clear, I myself find this template pointless in itself, so I'm not particularly sympathetic to any attempt to keep it usable. The compass rose at Cardinal direction (the article to which Ordinal directions redirects) does a better job of concisely conveying the compass directions. --Tkynerd 21:17, 22 April 2007 (UTC)