User:The Midnite Wolf/Hatnote Minimalism

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

This page in a nutshell: Hatnotes should always have the fewest number of links needed to allow for proper navigation.

Hatnote Minimalism is a philosophy of editing that states every article should have the minimal number of hatnotes. As hatnotes are the first thing that a user will see, before even the lead of the article, they should be written carefully and only link to subjects that one could reasonably mistake with the title.

Why this is needed

I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. The current state of hatnotes on Wikipedia is atrocious. See also templates on the tops of pages and extraneous links everywhere! It's chaos!

If I had to guess why that is, I'd say it's because the official page on the subject is long and presents users with a laundry list of examples to memorize. Unlike dates and numbers, hatnotes only exist on Wikipedia, so the guidelines around them may seem daunting and unintuitive at first. Now if you're like me and you enjoy memorizing long, seemingly arbitrary lists then this isn't a problem. However, most people have better things to do, so this essay is an attempt at condensing that list into a single easy-to-remember principle: Keep hatnotes to a minimum.

The purpose of hatnotes

Hatnotes exist to help navigation. [expand]

Examples

History of Palestine

The page History of Palestine used to begin with the following:

If you wanted to read about the history of the region of Palestine on Wikipedia, you first had to look through seven different links and decide if you actually wanted to read one of those articles instead! Let's break this down piece by piece:

"This page is about the history of Palestine." This is completely unhelpful. I already know the page is about the history of Palestine, it's in the title! In order to understand that the page is about the region and not the state, I have to click on the link and see that it takes me to Palestine (region), then navigate back to the original page.

"For the subject with a Jewish focus, see History of the Jews and Judaism in the Land of Israel." This is more understandable, but still doesn't need to be at the top of the page. Ideally, the page would have a subsection titled something along the lines of "Jews and Judaism in Palestine" with the {{Main}} template at the top linking to History of the Jews and Judaism in the Land of Israel. In that case, if someone were to go to the page History of Palestine looking for the subject with a Jewish focus, then they would see that section in the table of contents and quickly be delighted to find an entire separate article on the subject. As it stands, that section currently doesn't exist on the page, so the link belongs in the "See also" section. If this seems counterintuitive, then just imagine if more pages began with links to what should be subsections. For example, imagine the article for Napoleon began with the following:

If someone were to go to the page for Napoleon looking for information about his penis, then the hatnote would helpful. However, the vast majority of visitors to the page are probably looking for other information. Anyone curious about the emperor's appendage can look through the article and find the other page on their own.

"For the modern states in the area, see History of Israel (1948–present)..." This may also seem okay at first, but still needs to go. Someone looking for a history of the modern state of Israel wouldn't type "History of Palestine" into the search bar. They would instead search "History of Israel", arrive at the page with that title, scroll down to the "State of Israel" section, and then click on the {{Main}} template linking to History of Israel (1948–present). This entire process would take less than a minute, and is a perfect example of how navigation on Wikipedia is supposed to work. Good on this person.

"...and History of the State of Palestine." This is helpful! We could easily imagine someone searching "History of Palestine" hoping to find information on the state of Palestine, rather than the region. In this case, they would see the hatnote and be brought to the correct page.

"See also..." This shouldn't be there for reasons already discussed. Ideally, all three of the following would be linked somewhere on the page, possibly in the "see also" section at the bottom. It's here worth quoting verbatim from WP:RELATED: "...do not use the {{see also}} or {{main}} templates on top of a page, as they are meant only for sections". Anyone looking for specific time periods, a timeline of the region, or a timeline of the name Palestine can search for that directly.

After all this, let's take look at what's at the top of the page now:

This is much better. It makes clear what the article covers, then links to an ambiguous page in a way that's minimally distracting. Note that the phrase "the region" is not linked the way it would be if it appeared in the article prose (i.e. "...history of the region"). This would be distracting. If someone wants to read about the region in general then it should already be linked in the lead.

Acoustic guitar

The page Acoustic guitar used to begin with following:

It should already be clear now that the first link isn't needed. Someone looking for information on steel-string acoustic guitars would go to the "Types" section and be brought to the correct article from there (though ideally there would be a larger section on steel-strings with the {{Main}} template at the top). The three following links are helpful (one could reasonably search "Acoustic guitar" hoping to find information on the magazine), but belong together on a disambiguation page. Furthermore, the first sentence isn't needed. Not even the most dedicated Preston Reed fan would be surprised that the page "Acoustic guitar" is about the instrument and not the album.

Here's what the hatnote looks like now:

Simple. Not distracting. You get the point by now.

Some articles need a lot of hatnotes

Sometimes an article opening with a cascade of hatnotes is unavoidable. Take the article S, which begins with the following:

This is unsightly and distracting, but sadly there's not really a workaround. Someone who understands coding better than I do could create a template that generates the following:

But this would maybe make it more difficult to navigate in its own way. For an argument for revamping the entire hatnote system, see User:Popcornfud/The problem with disambiguation hatnotes.

Addendum

Thus far, this essay has only focused on hatnotes that point readers to either ambiguous or similar pages. That is because these comprise the vast majority of hatnotes on Wikipedia. However, there are other kinds of hatnotes, most of which clarify conventions for non-English names. For example, the top of the article for Yoko Ono reads:

Similarly, at the top of the article for Pedro Sánchez:

These are both fine, as they clarify necessary information. Without these, a native Japanese speaker may be confused why "Ono Yoko" is referred to backwards and a monolingual English may believe Sánchez is a middle name.