Talk:Red Alert

Disambiguation

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This is my first attempt at a disambiguation page. I hope I did it right... Kevyn 22:03, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

It looks great. Acegikmo1 22:05, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Just reordered the links, though I'm sure if someone really wants Star Trek to be top of the list they'll change it back. I think the current order makes more sense, even if it's not in order of popularity... —The preceding

Well, I don't see any obvious "sort key" that we should choose here, so any ordering is about the same to me as any other ordering. I suppose you could use the

Google test, but in that case, Star Trek

might well win. ;-)

Atlant 16:23, 1 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In an edit dated 12 May 2010,

The deleted information was:

A red alert is the highest level of threat in many official warning systems, and originated with systems to indicate emergencies on board military ships. It refers to the use of flashing red lights to indicate danger. One reason for the use of the colour red is that the human eye can more easily adapt to darkness from red light than from any other colour, so there is an advantage to using red in the event that all lights are extinguished as a result of the emergency.

Plus a corresponding citation:

http://www.astronomycast.com/astronomy/observing-astronomy/ep-85-detectors/

Which refers to the following segment from the cited podcast transcript:

Pamela: This is the same reason that brake lights on the backs of cars are red. It's the same reason that under war conditions ships go to red alert and everything goes to red, and you can dark adapt so if something bad happens and all the lights go out, you can still see.

Fraser: I didn't know that. That's where red alert comes from.

Pamela: Right, that's where red alert comes from. It's a way of working to protect your night vision; protect your low light vision. Once you get that low light vision all set up and you're ready to go, the human eye has an amazing dynamic range.

Now, I believe that this information is unquestionably suitable for Wikipedia, and that any reader looking up "red alert" deserves be able to find information about the origin and history of the term. What is debatable is where that information should go, and as I see it there are three options:

• Reinstate the information in the present article, overruling
  MOS:DAB
  in this case.
• Change red alert (with lower-case a) so that it no longer redirects to Red Alert (with upper-case A) and place information about the history of red alerts in general in the former article. Mark that article as a stub and link to it from the present article.
• Place the information in some other existing article, and link to it from the present article.

Personally, I advocate the second solution above. The first solution was until recently the status quo, and the third solution could easily lead to the information being difficult to find, or deleted without anyone noticing. 125.168.127.32 (talk) 16:30, 24 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]