User:Andrewa/advantages and disadvantages of ambiguous article titles

In that all pages belong to the whole project, any user may edit this one. But it's generally more helpful (and polite) to discuss the proposed change on its talk page first.

Advantages

1. Anybody who wants the article which is at the ambiguous name and doesn't know that the title is ambiguous may be saved a few keystrokes
   • At worst, they might have had to load a DAB and find the link to the article they want on it
     • If one or even several meanings are most common, these should be at the top of the DAB, particularly on the longer DABs
   • But even then there's some hope that they might be curious enough to try the unambiguous name first! It does after all describe more precisely what they want to find.
2. Less need to use piped links
   • Editors save keystrokes when linking by writing e.g. [[France]], instead of [[France (country)|France]], or [[France (country)|]] (the pipe trick)
   • Unpiped links lead to overall cleaner wikitext. Per WP:NOTBROKEN: Introducing unnecessary invisible text makes the article more difficult to read in page source form.

Disadvantages

1. Mislinkings are created without any warning and are more difficult to find once created
   • Linking from an article to a DAB creates an automated warning, so mislinkings to ambiguous names are mostly fixed by the creator if the destination is a DAB, but not if it's an article
   • Wikignomes fix mislinkings to DABs but have no way of detecting mislinkings to articles
2. Anybody who wants the article at the ambiguous name but knows that the title is ambiguous may not find the article they want at all
   • If they think that the ambiguous title mostly means something other than what they want, then they won't recognise the title we've given the article that they want
   • Even If a redirect exists from an unambiguous name that they would recognise, it may not appear on their search results and/or our dropdown box
     • And of course there's no guarantee that this redirect even exists, in general that only happens if the article has been moved from an unambiguous name
3. Anybody who wants an article at a disambiguated name and doesn't know that the title is ambiguous is hindered in several ways, again to the point that they may even not find the article they want at all
   • They may conclude when they land on an article on the wrong topic that we don't even cover the topic they seek
     • There may be a hatnote pointing to a DAB or even to the article they want, but there is no guarantee of this
   • At best, they load a wrong article with a hatnote
     • This may be much longer than the typical DAB
     • If the hatnote leads to a disambiguation page they then require a second additional mouse click
4. Unnecessary article moves are created, which waste time and break links, both WIkilinks and incoming external links
   • Current policy is to change the article at the base name whenever the primary topic changes, which creates particularly badly broken links

So why do it?

There appears to be no good reason. But under current policy, if an ambiguous name has a primary topic (as Wikipedia (mis)uses the term) then the article on the primary topic goes at the base name.

It's a bit counter-intuitive that this is a bad idea. The idea of Primary Topic is, it's the thing that the ambiguous term generally means. Isn't that an open and shut case? It's no wonder it has taken so long to challenge it.

But a bit of reflection tells a different story. The aim of the article title is to identify the content of the article, and ambiguous names don't do this at all well. Or as Larry Sanger said back in the first draft of the article naming policy:

Please, do not write or put an article on a page with an ambiguously-named title as though that title had no other meanings! [1]

See also

• User:Andrewa/Primary Topic RfC
• User:Andrewa/P T test cases