Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation pages with links/Archive 13

This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

I see that someone has moved Constantine to the "Done" section, noting that Constantine is not a disambiguation page. But that doesn't seem correct to me, so I wanted to consult with folks here about possibly moving it back up. The Constantine page seems like other personal name pages that I consider to be dab pages. The content is just a short paragraph about the etymology of the name. Then, the bulk of the article is a list of links to specific Constantines. I clicked on some of the "What links here" pages and they're not pages that just deal with the name Constantine. Rather they refer to specific Constantines (typically Constantine I, the Roman Emperor). So I think Constantine should be moved back up to the list and disambiguated, but maybe I've overlooked something. --JamesAM (talk) 18:14, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

It might make sense to split the name page off from a dab, but the way in which this was converted to a dab recently (by deleting the given name content and categories, and adding a disambiguation tag) was inappropriate. If we want to disambiguate this page, the given name, surname, and etymology portions should be split off into Constantine (name), leaving behind only the people who are known as simply "Constantine", a link to the new name page, and the current contents of the disambiguation page that already exists at Constantine (disambiguation). Dekimasuよ! 04:04, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

I went ahead and made this change myself; see Constantine and Constantine (name). Dekimasuよ! 06:40, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

I compared the August list with the new September list to find out what happened to dabs that were in the top 250 when the August list finally went up. The number of ambiguous links declined for 234/250 pages (94%), and rose for only 12/250 pages (5%). Not bad, considering that we didn't have as much time to work on this list and we were also in the process of handling big problems like

I like watching the number of pages in the DPL-100 category of TDD drop. I think it'll be baselined this year! (Or early next.) Another interesting indicator is from the contest list; the number of links to the 250th item has dropped steadily - this month it's 115 - and I look forward to it dropping below 100 very soon, maybe by November or December. --JaGa^talk 20:19, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

I am sure I can't be the only one to have come across this problem. Sometimes, on returning to a particular disambiguation page where I have previously reduced the number of links to zero (or close to zero), I find that the link count has crept back up again. (The latest example is Great Northern Railway which I reduced to a handful of links a few months ago only to find it had increased to 33 again).

I think many contibutors add square brackets around keywords and, provided it goes blue rather than red, simply submit it without further investigation (I admit I've done it myself). Would it be possible for, at the very least, a warning to be displayed that adding links to dab pages is not recommended, and do you really want to do this? 82.1.62.101 (talk) 20:13, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

If that could be done it would certainly save alot of peoples time. I dont know if its been discussed here before, seems like a good idea. BritishWatcher (talk) 23:19, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

I agree. If we could at least have a warning come up when someone links to, say, one of our top 1,000 disambig pages, that would be a huge help. bd2412 T 01:20, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Isn't there an editing tool that shows links to dab pages when in the preview mode? And I know there is at least one tool that shows all links to dabs on a given page. It is the nature of dab pages that they accumulate incoming links, and many of us periodically check and fix the incoming links to our favorite dab pages. --Una Smith (talk) 03:29, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

I imagine that the editors who make the most obvious disambig links (as in "Joe drives a Mercury", without giving thought to the possibility that Mercury has meanings other than the car) are the casual visiting type who don't get to the level of installing those tools. bd2412 T 04:16, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

These tools could be imposed on every editor, but at the price of annoying at least some of them. And would that help them to fix the problems? Patrolling dab pages seems reasonably effective. --Una Smith (talk) 04:35, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Editors making a quick change may not want to be bothered with, or know what to do about, existing dab links. I believe there is a bot that sends messages to editors who introduce a new dab link. I've never tried it because of course I don't do that. I've made a request to have the wikEd gadget highlight dabs in a different color. UncleDouggie (talk) 09:45, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

The wikEd change is a no-go because it's a general purpose tool that they don't want to customize just for the English WP, plus it would be a huge performance hit to request the link status data. A fixed list of dab pages is unworkable because we have 115K. Instead, I purpose that we add an option that would display dab links in purple in the regular article display and in previews, just like broken links are in red. UncleDouggie (talk) 20:17, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Link formatting has been a big issue in the past. There appears to be a script to let you format links anyway you want at User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js. I'm trying it out myself but I haven't gotten it to work yet. UncleDouggie (talk) 23:39, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

I've got it working great now, just had to get the right stuff in both my .js and .css files. You can use the standard version above with its rainbow of colors if you like. I decided it was too out of control, so I calmed things down in my settings and also added the names of the colors to the hex. Links to dab pages are shown with a yellow background. It looks really good, just like this. I'm using the beta interface, so my settings are at User:UncleDouggie/vector.js and User:UncleDouggie/vector.css. The same code can be run in the monobook skin files. The .js file also has my enhanced version of converting talk page comments to local time. UncleDouggie (talk) 02:37, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

I looked at the database schema to see how expensive making it native that dabs get a different link colour. It would be expensive, so it's just not going to happen. Josh Parris 03:44, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

I could imagine a bot going around and following every link to a dab page with {{

dn}}, but there would have to be rules about when it's appropriate to put that in and when it isn't. How is the bot going to be able to tell when an editor is intentionally linking to the dab page, or ignorantly linking to it? Josh Parris

03:44, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

We already try to distinguish these, by making intentional links to

Foo. --Una Smith (talk

) 18:30, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

I don't think we can ignore them based on this. We've had worse. Many of the those dab pages need serious work themselves to meet the guideline. UncleDouggie (talk) 21:46, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

I was thinking we could just treat them as intentional disambig links. Pipe them through the (disambiguation) redirect and be done with them at that. The pages are woefully short in identifying what the acronyms in question stand for anyway. bd2412 T 21:51, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

In cases where the acronym can only go to a dab, it can be delinked, the spelled out form already goes to the appropriate page. J04n(talk page) 22:23, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't think it's a dab, any other opinions? —Preceding unsigned comment added by J04n (talk • contribs)

In this case, I think it is basically a dab, since it deals with a lot of unrelated topics that simply share the word "interim". In that case, it should have 90% of its text cut out, though. For the time being, I'll mark it for dab cleanup and we can get a third opinion (probably from Boleyn). Dekimasuよ! 01:38, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

Due to a hosting change, there's a new URL to install

I have released a fix for the 'bad token' problem in 0.99. --NicoV (talk) 20:02, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

On the list as a many-linked disambig. Strikes me that this ought to be an article on the basic concept, with the current content moved to Ignorance (disambiguation). That would address many of the links as well. bd2412 T 16:03, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. There's already a proto-article in the dab anyways. I'll put it in place today when I get the time. --JaGa^talk 08:37, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Excellent work - thanks! bd2412 T 14:58, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

We have a lot of redirects from the name of a character to the disambig page for the media in which the character occurs. For example,

IMO, the character redirect should target an article that contains the best introduction or overview of the character. older ≠ wiser 12:00, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

In retrospect, I'd actually prefer if it went to the article for the earliest work introducing the character, unless the character was really minor there and was greatly expanded in a later work. Maybe I should say the first work where the character was substantially developed in the work. The overview of the character can always be improved in any given article. bd2412 T 14:53, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

In most cases, that'd be just fine. For some series of media, there are List of characters in Foo that might be a better target than any single work. older ≠ wiser 12:49, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that would be a better solution where such lists exist. I propose that we make this a rule, then - character names to redirect to the "list of characters" page if there is one, otherwise to the page for the earliest media in which the character was substantially developed. bd2412 T 13:28, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Formally proposed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Disambiguation#Proposed rule for redirects from character names to disambig pages. Cheers again! bd2412 T 23:16, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

(but please do contribute to the discussion there). bd2412 T 19:18, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

FYI, the consensus reached on the discussion linked above is that character names should redirect to the most likely search target (i.e. the most popular page), unless there is no agreement as to which would be most likely, in which case the default would be the page on the earliest work. bd2412 T 17:43, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

[Note: Discussion moved here from Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/September 2009]

This only has 2 links that need disambiguation. The rest are just hatnotes for the numerous towns called Nowa Wieś. So this issue will recur. —Preceding unsigned comment added by JamesAM (talk • contribs)

• These are still in direct violation of
  WP:NAMB needs to be altered significantly. Dekimasuよ!
• Since the expressed intent (per old discussions at
  WT:DPL) is to inform readers that there are a lot of places with this name, perhaps something along the lines of the split of Springfield (toponym) from Springfield is in order. Any of the links could then perform the same purpose without linking back to an unrelated navigational page. Dekimasuよ!
  • I made all those hatnotes redirect through Nowa Wieś (disambiguation) - why are they still showing up here? Must be some way to eliminate those hits from the list, as that is how we code obviously intentional disambig links. bd2412 T 17:16, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
  • How about this as a compromise, to avoid inappropriate linking of the dab? I'm still not comfortable with the idea of a hatnote for this, but I think there were previous objections to moving the disclaimer to the see also section. Dekimasuよ! 05:28, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
    • I really don't see what's wrong with the solution I've already implemented. Linking it through a "(disambiguation)" redirect to the disambig page makes it clear that it's not an erroneous disambig link, and takes the reader to the place we want them to go to find alternatives to ambiguous terms. bd2412 T 06:04, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

They're serving their intended purpose, so they're not erroneous to that extent, but it's a purpose that's deprecated by Wikipedia:Disambiguation#Usage guidelines and Wikipedia:Hatnote, and it would be good to avoid making it seem like such hatnotes are generally acceptable; we are supposed to keep self-references to a minimum, and if this is propagated, our list here will become unworkable. I'm not trying to say that you weren't being helpful, but I think there's still an issue to be solved here. Unfortunately, I'm not sure who Kotniski was replying to after I asked him to comment, but it seems like he will be happy with anything that makes it clear there are other places called Nowa Wieś (please correct me if I'm wrong). Dekimasuよ! 10:40, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, though I'd much prefer for that "anything" to be a hatnote (i.e. before the start of the article) rather than a See Also entry at the end of it (as was suggested once before). If there's a chance the reader might be in the wrong place, they need to be told straight away.--Kotniski (talk) 14:00, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

From the perspective of fixing disambig links, it will show up the same on our list of pages to be fixed no matter where on the target page the link exists. If it's made to an index instead of a disambig page, that's fine, but just taking it out of the hatnote will not solve the problem. bd2412 T 14:41, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Sounds a good solution to me. The reason I think these hatnotes are needed is that many people will arrive at these pages having clicked a link that just says "Nowa Wieś", and may not be aware (if they are not familiar with Polish place naming) that it very likely isn't the place of that name where their granny was born or whatever. (Or to put it another way - although the dab tags are theoretically enough to uniquely identify the place, for many of our readers (those who don't know the intricacies of today's Polish administrative divisions) those tags will be meaningless, and therefore not sufficient in practice to uniquely identify.)--Kotniski (talk) 06:33, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

• Just a heads-up, Zalesie is currently in position to make the list next month and appears to be a repeat of this issue. Any decisions about Nowa Wies should probably be applied to Zalesie at the same time. Ulric1313 (talk) 07:44, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
• Considering that Nowa Wieś only holds links to towns in Poland, shouldn't this be a set index article instead of a dab? --JaGa^talk 11:31, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

• I like JaGa's suggestion of an index article List of places in Poland that start with Nowa Wieś or something similar, the same could obviously be done with Zalesie, Springfield, or any other location that this becomes an issue for. Dekimasu's compromise would also work but would be less of a permanent solution, one drawback off the top of my head is that there could be no talk page. J04n(talk page) 13:51, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

• I went ahead and moved Nowa Wieś to List of places in Poland named Nowa Wieś and adjusted the hatnotes accordingly. --JaGa^talk 10:28, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
• Also, since JaGa moved Nowa Wieś, I went and did the same to Zalesie as a proactive move. Ulric1313 (talk) 18:16, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

• Beat me to it! Thanks, Ulric. --JaGa^talk 19:37, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Since there are going to be quite a few of these, I've created a

SIA|Poland|Zzroc}} --Kotniski (talk

) 10:03, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

• Nowy Staw is now on the radar so I've gone and duplicated what was done with Nowa Wieś & Zalesie. Made an error in the original move but all should be okay now.Ulric1313 (talk) 17:11, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Not sure how that one got onto the radar with only three places, but I've changed it a bit since Nowy Staw is a primary topic in this case (the article was always at that name until someone recently moved it to something weird).--Kotniski (talk) 17:58, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

I saw it in the Daily Disambig and decided to fix it. Didn't realize most pointed to one article. My bad, jumped the gun. Thanks for fixing things.Ulric1313 (talk) 18:34, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

No, no harm done, at least not by you; in fact it's lucky that you happened to chance on it and mention it here so that I ended up noticing the odd "move" that someone else had made (indeed it was probably that move - a cut-and-paste job without repairing any incoming links - that caused the page to get onto the list).--Kotniski (talk) 19:22, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

• Someone has changed Nowa Wies back to a disambiguation page from an SIA. Before I did anything thought should get consensus. Ulric1313 (talk) 09:36, 21 February 2010 (UTC)
  • Crud, I thought this was resolved. Well, we have several options, and something has to be done, otherwise every Nowa Wies article will be pointing at this dab again. We could revert JHunterJ's changes, or move it to a List of ... article, or remove all those hatnotes. Or something else? If we think SIA won't stand the test of time I'd vote for a List of ... article, because I think the hatnotes serve a useful purpose. --JaGa^talk 12:29, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Does anyone know why JHJ changed it? Perhaps he was simply unaware of this previous discussion?--Kotniski (talk) 12:39, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

It's just one aspect of ongoing confusion over the purpose of SIAs and whether/how they are to be distinguished from garden variety disambiguation pages. older ≠ wiser 15:01, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

• I've put in a move request to put it back to the List article. I don't see why a single user's decision should trump the consensus reached here. --JaGa^talk 13:44, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
• It looks to me like an ordinary common standard multi-link disambig page. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 16:27, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

Should ECB (disambiguation) be moved to ECB? --AndrewHowse (talk) 16:43, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, done. bd2412 T 21:17, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Heads up on this one. It's currently listed at over 300 but that's the tip of the iceberg since more have been added since the update ran. Infoboxes are being added to French commune articles and instead of

• I informed the editor that is adding the infoboxes of the problem, hopfuly he can set his bot to fix them. J04n(talk page) 18:03, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

There is a bit of a content dispute on

Cruciate ligament ought not be a disambig. All meanings are for ligaments in the knee; many disambig links are unfixable because even the news reports do not specify which of an athlete's cruciate ligaments was thought to be injured (and some articles specify that a person had an injury to the "cruciate ligaments" of a particular knee. bd2412 T 22:20, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

I could go either way: make it a straight dab, or make it an article that explains why they are "cruciate" (it has nothing to do with torture; they cross). Pass it by

WP:MED? --Una Smith (talk

) 22:54, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

The fact that they are unfixable (which they are) is no reason to make the the page not a dab. The only solution that I see is merging Anterior cruciate ligament & Medial collateral ligament Posterior cruciate ligament but the folks that edit the anatomy pages may not agree that they should be merged. J04n(talk page) 23:15, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Judging by the dab'ed articles themselves, the one that is frequently getting injured is the anterior, but many news reports on injured athletes maddeningly omit that specification. If we could find some source supporting this contention, we could default all these injury reports in articles on athletes to the anterior article. On the other hand, what is it that is really being disambiguated here? It's not as though there's movie titled The Cruciate Ligament, or a band, or a car. If someone asked you what a cruciate ligament was, and you answered that it's a ligament found in the knee, you'd be right every time. I compare this to toe. We have one article on toes in general, and another on the big toe with its special role. bd2412 T 23:54, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

bd, I'm not sure what you are suggesting by that last comment; merging Anterior cruciate ligament & Posterior cruciate ligament or creating a third page for cruciate ligament (knee) (or some other name)? A better example for your point is Meniscus (anatomy), as there are also pages for Medial meniscus and Lateral meniscus. J04n(talk page) 00:02, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

There is a different primary topic for meniscus; there is none for cruciate ligament. I propose that the entry be a short article on the general topic (i.e. everything that can be said about every cruciate ligament, no matter the animal and position), while maintaining the more specific articles on the individual ligaments. bd2412 T 01:11, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

You're right, I agree. J04n(talk page) 01:18, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

Done. bd2412 T 01:39, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

• I just want to point out that bd2412 and Una Smith did a fantastic job with Cruciate ligament, kudos to you both. J04n(talk page) 09:48, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

The dab

I compared the September list with the new October list and found that the number of ambiguous links declined for 247/250 pages (99%), and rose for only 3/250 pages (1%). East Hampton, New York was merged into East Hampton and thus ended up at +18 for the month. The other two pages that increased were Equilibrium and Dynamics.

Per data at

I'd like to increase the size of the list. If people OK it here, I'll set it at whatever size is decided upon. It's an easy change for me; I don't know how tough it would be on R&B. Of course, if I did change the size, we wouldn't see the changes until November's Challenge begins. --JaGa^talk 11:27, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Sounds fine, assuming it isn't an undue burden for R&B why not go to 300? J04n(talk page) 23:45, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

I was toying with even more, like 500. Looking at

TDD

and the archives, we see in May when we started the monthly lists, the top 250 had 62,860 links. As of October 1, the top 500 had 54,915 links. And that number is shrinking rapidly. I'd say we could handle it. And, I must admit, I like 500 because it's a Big Round Number.

On the other hand, there's much to be said for not expanding the list too much. At the end of last month, it was very difficult to find "doable" dabs, but that also forced people to do some great work on the difficult ones. So I'm OK with whatever is decided. --JaGa^talk 18:47, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

I'd be cool with expanding the list. We doing well getting through them, and I think we'd expand participation because they'll be more targets to attract people to the project. --JamesAM (talk) 04:54, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

If you want to expand the list, that's fine with me; it's not a big deal to change my scripts, as long as I get some notice in advance of November 1. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 16:23, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

This looks a bit questionable to me. I'll take it to

I wrote an article about the typeface Lexicon (Lexicon (typeface)), but I noticed that there are several articles about something called 'Lexicon' (obviously). Currently it autmotically links to the term without additions, and it only shows the disambiguation page in the article. Maybe you should just go to the disambiguation page instead? Or am I mistaken? Typehigh (talk) 00:17, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

Any reason there are two seperate disambiguation pages for what, I suspect, are mostly the same subject base in terms of intended article direction? Ulric1313 (talk) 06:40, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

They have redundant information, will merge. J04n(talk page) 12:06, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

OK, I've got R'n'B's blessing to expand the monthly list. How big shall we make it? The discussion above ranged from 300 to 500. Votes? --JaGa^talk 19:12, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

• 500 --JaGa^talk 19:12, 12 October 2009 (UTC)
• 500 -what the heck J04n(talk page) 00:22, 13 October 2009 (UTC)
• 500 Johnny Au _{(talk/contributions)} 01:59, 13 October 2009 (UTC)
• 500 - As noted previously, the current Top 500 has a link count which isn't much higher than what the Top 250 had on June 1, 2009. So expanding to 500 is reasonable. --JamesAM (talk) 04:52, 14 October 2009 (UTC)
• 500. We'll get more fun stuff to attack. bd2412 T 04:59, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Done I've modified my script to create a 500-article list, starting in November. --JaGa^talk 11:50, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

This will necessarily be shorter than usual (you might have noticed I haven't been around much lately), but I went through the October list as usual. Links to 245 of the 250 dab pages listed decreased. Church of God had the same number of links at the end of the month. The pages that increased in links, all by 1 or 2, were Minnow, Imaging, Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and Athenaeum. The number of active pages had stabilized at about 250 by the end of the month; here's hoping that the number of pages with over 100 incoming links will be down to 100 by the end of November! Dekimasuよ! 00:10, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Somebody has moved the former governor of Colorado to

Bill Owens (Colorado governor) would seem to fit the bill. --Una Smith (talk

) 21:24, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

(e/c) Bill Owens (Colorado politician)? He did more than serve as governor, but from the article it looks like all his political offices were in/for Colorado. --Floquenbeam (talk) 21:27, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

• Agree with Floquenbeam, Bill Owens (Colorado politician). J04n(talk page) 22:13, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks all. --AndrewHowse (talk) 23:56, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I have finished paring down the initial run of redirects to disambiguation pages to a list of about 5,000 questionable redirects, about a third of which (so far) are divided into subpages based on the type of problem presented. This is going to take a while to get through, so please have at it! bd2412 T 03:13, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

It looks like there is both a set index and disambiguation assigned to this article. All, or most, of the links appear to be redirect pages. Can someone take a look at this? Ulric1313 (talk) 20:05, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

I noticed that this has been made a disambiguation page again. Since this has neen a point of contention, I thought I should mention it. Ulric1313 (talk) 20:05, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm new to the project - saw a

Welcome and thanks for the help (the ads work!). Don't worry if you made a mistake someone will let you know. J04n(talk page) 20:34, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I mostly just want to make sure I pared the links down to the target level. I didn't change the links on any user or talk pages, just articles and portals. --SquidSK ^(1MC•log) 20:37, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Welcome! I took a random look some of your fixes. The ones I saw looked okay with one exception. You changed the heretic link for Bessie Schonberg to link to Heretic (play). If you read the context of the article, though, you'll find it's actually referring to a 1929 ballet (which doesn't have an article yet). Sometimes the disambiguation page won't list all the possibilities (and sometimes there's not an article in existence yet). It's cool to see so many new productive contributors this month. Thanks! --JamesAM (talk) 20:47, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

And yes, you're correct. The article should be fixed. User pages and Talk pages should be left alone. --JamesAM (talk) 20:50, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for double-checking me, James - that was one of the few

heretic links that should not have pointed to heresy. I think I just got on a roll! --SquidSK ^(1MC•log)

20:59, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

It looks like once again Wikipedia's internal database indexing is not working well. I am finding many articles on the list of incoming links to Wallingford that now do not link there. --Una Smith (talk) 02:00, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Could be. The job queue is jumping between 12K and 13K. Based on past numbers this should take a few minutes to process. Vegaswikian (talk) 02:49, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I believe that Una Smith's problem was due to the link to Wallingford actually being in Template:Oxfordshire, Template:River Thames or Template:South Oxfordshire. These templates are amended, but individual pages is another matter. I'm working through some, but may not finish today - other commitments. Basically, I'm inserting "Wallingford, Oxfordshire|" into the existing link if it's clear to me that the town is the intended target. Some were not so intended; I've come across some that were better pointed at Wallingford Bridge, Wallingford Castle, Wallingford railway station, etc. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:09, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

The link indexing was not reflecting changes to those templates, tens of minutes after the changes. A few months ago I showed that it was outright broken and a bug report did result. This time, it appears to be a simple delay, as the problem links I found in the list are now gone from it. --Una Smith (talk) 15:26, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I've dabbed about 100 (+/- 5%) articles, it's now my bath time. Back later, all squeaky clean. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:06, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I've dabbed some too; now under 100 remain. Many incoming links were of the form "

Wallingford, Berkshire, and Wallingford Grammar School. --Una Smith (talk

) 16:42, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks all for your help. Given the above, the dab page in this case really did need to be moved. Vegaswikian (talk) 19:02, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

 Done I've just done the last few in article space, and some in Talk: (the remaining two in (Article) and six in Talk: should point at Wallingford as a dab page). This leaves User: 14, User talk: 16, Wikipedia: 8, Wikipedia talk: 1 (this page!). I don't want to dab those in User: or User talk:, I have seen past criticism of such practices. Those in Wikipedia: are probably bot-generated. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:52, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Yo, don't change a disambiguation page link to a red link. Not helpful! In addition, if a page for the specific link doesn't exist then don't shoehorn a link into an inappropriate page. This is also not helpful. Disambiguation pages serve a purpose and shouldn't be treated as pariah pages. If they are the best place to leave a link pointing to then leave the link there! Overzealous "disambiguation" actually makes the link more ambiguaous and opaque to a casual reader. Use some common sense folks, please. Pyrope 19:24, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I didn't think that I had. Examples, please --Redrose64 (talk) 19:31, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Examples? --Una Smith (talk) 19:33, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Plenty of the recent changes to the

electricity pylon. Please check Wafry's contributions. I realise that these were done in good faith, but the majority of them are unhelpful, at best, and some are downright incorrect. The point I was making was a general one, though. The supporting documentation for this project sets more store on the removal of disambiguation page links than it does on getting the actual links correct. Quality not quantity of work folks. Pyrope

20:13, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Hi Pyrope, thanks for bringing this to our attention. As you noted, Wafry's contributions were in good faith so let's just focus on the fix. Could you help us? I can't say I know enough about pylons to fix the links myself; could you give us some guidance? For example, how do the electricity pylon links need to be corrected? --JaGa^talk 20:48, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Redlinks are not in themselves problematic. In fact, they are very constructive; a nonexistent article with many incoming links will be a high priority for creation. --Una Smith (talk) 21:05, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I kind of fall between two stools here. I agree that many identical redlinks suggests the need for an article; however, when dealing with the previous section, I dabbed from "Honour of [[Wallingford]]" to "[[Honour (land)|Honour]] of [[Wallingford, Oxfordshire|Wallingford]]" and not to "[[Honour of Wallingford]]" (ie from "Honour of

Honour of Wallingford" and not to "Honour of Wallingford"), mainly to avoid redlinks. --Redrose64 (talk

) 21:27, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

This kind of situation comes up a lot with species, and the usual solution is to make a link to the species name, and make the species name a redirect to the genus. Similarly, the solution to

Honour (land). --Una Smith (talk

) 00:24, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

The redirect was short lived (version); now it is an article with a bunch of incoming links. --Una Smith (talk) 04:16, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

I checked the first five of Wafry's changes (Mendes to 1980 in music and they checked out okay, so those don't need to be redone. I may check more later, but I'm not familiar with the subjects to really do it justice. And I don't appreciate the blanket condemnation that participants of the project lack common sense for the mistakes of one editor who is new to the project. Blanket condemnations don't show any regard for the differences in what various editors do. Blanket condemnations just breed animosity. --JamesAM (talk) 22:45, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I found myself in this same conundrum while working on

51 (number) is not a dab page, but probably should be. Any takers? --Una Smith (talk) 21:02, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

You could say the same about 50 (number) through 59 (number) inclusive. Why is 51 different? --Redrose64 (talk) 21:06, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

That one came to my attention. --Una Smith (talk) 21:29, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Note that there exists 50 (disambiguation) as well as 50 (number). It would be easier for the casual reader, I think, if the structure were consistent across various numbers of similar magnitude. There might well be an upper limit here too; 1237 might not need the same level of attention. --AndrewHowse (talk) 21:39, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Convert all number articles to dabs? I'd say 51 (number) deserves its own article; we could create 51 (disambiguation) I suppose, but personally I'm fine with these articles as is. --JaGa^talk 21:43, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

If you don't like

WP:BOLD to apply. Better to get consensus somewhere about whether these pages should have a different format or not. --Floquenbeam (talk

) 21:45, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Do any of these number pages exemplify the target we might want to aim for? 50 (disambiguation) and 50 (number) are not good examples: 50 (number) is full of dab-type clutter and 50 (disambiguation) reveals that 50 is occupied by a year. Gaak. --Una Smith (talk) 22:19, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Content about the number as a number should be on a n (number) page. Content listing pages that might be known as number should go on a disambiguation page. older ≠ wiser 23:03, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Note that these articles are the domain of WikiProject Numbers, and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Numbers would therefore be a good place to discuss them. --Zundark (talk) 22:44, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

The base pages (

51 AD (a redirect to 51) and making 51 a dab page? Wouldn't that be most likely to collect new dab content where it belongs? --Una Smith (talk

) 23:15, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I didn't realise that you were considering changing the year articles. Using raw numbers for years AD is one of the oldest naming conventions on Wikipedia, and there are probably a number of templates that rely on it. See also Wikipedia:Naming conventions (numbers and dates). --Zundark (talk) 09:19, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

I think the existing system is good and shouldn't be changed. Disambiguation pages are largely a means to an end. There not really for content, but for direct people to the right content article they want to go to. In contrast, the "x (number)" articles are an end in themselves. They exist to satisfy the content-seeking needs of people who want to read about the mathematical, numerological, and cultural significance of a particular number. So turning them into disambiguation pages would frustrate the purposes of the "(number)" pages. --JamesAM (talk) 03:46, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

From an organizational POV, I agree. I'm fine with

AD/CE tarpit. The real problem I see is that 51 (number) has become a magnets for all sorts of "in popular culture" junk, for example the sports figures who have the Jersey No. 51, which episode of the Simpsons was Episode 51, etc, etc ad nauseum. It is acting as a secondary fancruft disambiguation page. I don't think we need a reorganization, so much as a cleaning out. Prune 51 (number) back to being about the number 51, move any legit dab-related stuff to 51 (disambiguation), and throw out the rest. But it would be an uphill battle to counter the people who think that "there are 51 steps on the back staircase of the Louvre" is a reasonable thing to put in an encyclopedia article. Few people have the will to fight 30 such battles for each page, so you end up with what we have now. --Floquenbeam (talk

) 15:24, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Floquenbeam has it right, I think. --AndrewHowse (talk) 17:12, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Hi all, I need you kind help. I was beginning to disambiguate quota... first article is Institut Le Rosey. Quota is used as the wiktionary meaning not as the wikipedian meaning. Should I remove link or what? TY --Luckyz (talk) 14:42, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

• You have two options, delink or link to Wiktionaty, [[wikt:quota|]] will do it. If I feel that it is resonable to assume that a reader will be unfamiliar with the word I'll go to Wiktionary, if it seems obvious I 'll just delink. Judgement call for each case. J04n(talk page) 15:03, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
• Ditto what J04n said. Use your best judgement.--ShelfSkewed Talk 15:08, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. I prefer, in this case, to delink. --Luckyz (talk) 15:43, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

This page says:

Ideally, article namespace pages should not link to disambiguation pages, with rare exceptions in which the ambiguity of a term is being discussed

There are many thousands of cases of articles that say

This is about innies in omphalology. For other senses of the word, see innies (disambiguation).

That is not rare at all.

Another obvious exception is when the name of a disambiguation page is a singular noun, and the plural redirects to the disambiguation page. Or when a commonplace misspelling redirects to the disambiguation page. I don't even see those mentioned among the mentioned exceptions, but I know those exist. Michael Hardy (talk) 04:33, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

The statement you quote is, I'm sure, intended to refer to links within the article content itself, so, yes, perhaps it should be amended to, "apart from disambiguating hatnotes, article namespace pages should not link to disambiguation pages...."

The other "exceptions" you mention don't seem to me to be exceptions at all; they are ambiguous links that should be disambiguated and/or corrected to link to the intended article.--ShelfSkewed Talk 04:53, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Ah, JamesAM's comments below made me see that I misunderstood the earlier comment: Redirects exist in article space, of course, and, as JamesAM points out, they don't need to be fixed. But again, redirects to not constitute article content, which is what the original statement is referring to.--ShelfSkewed Talk 05:45, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't understand your comment that "they are ambiguous links that should be disambiguated and/or corrected to link to the intended article". An example is residuals redirecting to residual, which is a disambiguation page. That's an obvious case where something should link to a disambiguation page. Are you saying it should be changed to link to some "intended article" other than the residual disambiguation page? Michael Hardy (talk) 14:07, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Rare is a relative term. For the pages that make the list here, hatnotes tend to be a very small fraction of the links. The only exception of the hundreds of disambiguation I've been dealing with on this WikiProject is Nowa Wies (and perhaps one other I can't recall). But I'm not sure what this has to do with the purpose of a Talk page, which is discussing improvements to the page. Is "rare" confusing to people? I don't think anything on the page gives editors the misguided impression that they should "fix" hatnotes and redirects that ought to go the disambiguation page. If there are instances of people making those mistakes that can be cited here, then we should clarify the language. But if it's just an academic quibble about how uncommon it should be to merit the word "rare", then the language should be left as is. --JamesAM (talk) 05:16, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Concerning hatnotes like the model (This is about innies in omphalology. For other senses of the word, see innies (disambiguation).), it should be mentioned that in many cases innies (disambiguation) is not a dab page but a redirect to a dab page. The redirect is used to "isolate" legitimate links, so that all links to the dab page (which occupies the ambiguous base name) are links to be corrected. --Una Smith (talk) 16:35, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

I've been working on

In advance, I'd like to say I don't like the form of {{dn|linkname}}, because links in templates make it really hard to find them, and templates are too "advanced" for casual editors to understand (and thus fix the broken dab link).

What say you? Josh Parris 06:51, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Do incoming links to set index articles merit link repair similar to incoming links to dab pages at base names? This question concerns Poppy, a magnet for links and content that should go elsewhere. Poppy gets a lot of page views, and this is an incentive to keep something other than a dab page at that page name. See discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Plants#Poppy. --Una Smith (talk) 16:13, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

As a general matter, I think we should aspire to have every link on Wikipedia take readers to the article most relevant to the context in which the link appears, so that would be a "yes" in principle. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 21:49, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

In principle, yes. So, should we treat SIAs as a kind of dab? And include them on dab lists? At the other extreme, should we disambiguate incoming links to articles occupying ambiguous base names: articles such as London and Paris? --Una Smith (talk) 22:17, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Well, let's not get carried away. :-) Saying that all those links should be fixed is not the same as saying they should be part of this project; it's a question of priorities and resources. We don't have enough people to fix all the links to pure disambiguation pages, so I don't see any benefit to trying to expand the scope of the project even more. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 10:48, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

I don't like set index articles as currently formulated; too many are essentially dab pages with stray content that could be worked into articles. The stray content attracts incoming links that interfere with the dab function. To me, a good set index article should contain an actual index; incoming links would be dab-able. I am considering applying the idea to Poppy; please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Plants#Poppy. --Una Smith (talk) 18:41, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

The subpage Poppy/draft is an index; would anyone like to try fixing the incoming links to Poppy, using the index like a dab page? Just like many dab pages, the index is far from complete. This is in the nature of a small experiment; can you use the index to help you disambiguate links, and is the logic of the index clear enough that you can expand it as needed? --Una Smith (talk) 15:24, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Poppy started out with 444 incoming links; now there are about 70. Has Poppy/draft been useful? --Una Smith (talk) 00:34, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Correction: a couple hundred incoming links remain. It seems Wikipedia's internal indexing was broken again today, for a time. --Una Smith (talk) 03:20, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Is there something extra that has to be done to make dab fixes for template boxes register? Several pages have high link counts due to template boxes at the bottom of pages. There are some that I've fixed yet still show up in the link counts. For instance, the template boses about Seas has been fixed so that

Periodically there is a lag in updating the database internal indexing. Rarely, the updating stops altogether. Are those links still showing up now? --Una Smith (talk) 21:39, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

(ec) All you need do is wait; but it can take a while. The main factor is the number of articles transcluding the templates which have been amended; but also whether the template is itself transcluded by another template. You don't actually say which template has the Seas/Sea change, so I can't check on transclusions; but {{Daniel Handler}} doesn't have many. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:44, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Okay. I figured it might be a wait, but then at least one of them went through (Mark Hudson in the Aerosmith template) - so I thought another editor did something that I missed. The template for seas is Template:List of seas. --JamesAM (talk) 22:10, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

You can always do a null edit as a sanity check. Go to a page that transcludes your template; click "edit this page"; make no changes and add no edit summary; save. The null edit won't show up in the article's history (or your edit history), but the article will be completely re-rendered. --JaGa^talk 22:13, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

If the wait is more than a few hours, a Wikimedia bug report may in order. --Una Smith (talk) 22:19, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

I agree: {{List of seas}} has under 150 transclusions (none of which are templates), which is not a terribly large number compared to (say) {{cite book}}. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:31, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

This has been an ongoing problem. Sometimes the template updates show up in seconds and at other times it takes days and a second edit to the template. The job queue is very problematic. Yes, if the problem is still there, we probably need another problem report.

WP:CFD closers see this all of the time when we have to update a template to change categories. Vegaswikian (talk

) 22:36, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

The problem is persisting. We had a similar problem back in January, discussed here. --Una Smith (talk) 21:09, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

The problem with links to Poppy finally went away. --Una Smith (talk) 05:13, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Only one last one on the list which is Ashcombe.

I don't know whether they are talking about

Thanks! Tsange ^►talk 15:39, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

That requires knowledge of the building, or research outside of Wikipedia. So tag the link in

dn}} and perhaps explain the tag on Talk:Ashcombe. Then your job is done. --Una Smith (talk

) 16:44, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks very much! Tsange ^►talk 19:14, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm forming a proposal for a bot. The intention of this bot is to immediately bring to the page author's attention that the article is linking somewhere other than they thought it would be linking.

The bot would inspect all new main-space articles except for redirects and dab-pages. Redirects are valid to point at dab pages, as are other dab pages. Any new page that has any links to disambiguation pages will have {{

Is this a bad idea? Why? Josh Parris 06:49, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

• Sounds useful to me.
  talk
  ) 08:58, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

• Sounds good to me. But remember to allow links to disambiguation pages that are titled "Whatever (disambiguation)", whether or not they are redirects. If feasible, you could also {{
  dn}} links to redirects that target disambiguation pages if the redirect isn't titled "Whatever (disambiguation)". Cheers! --- JHunterJ (talk
  ) 13:51, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

(smacks head) of course! I'm glad I've come here to check for glaring errors. Thanks! Josh Parris 00:19, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

• Sounds good to me. I've always thought we need to tackle disambig links at the source, but never quite knew how. This would get new article creators to clean up a problem they're usually unaware of. --JaGa^talk 17:10, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

• Neat idea, assuming the servers can support it easily, which seems likely as new articles are only a small proportion of all edits. Would it be practicable to extend this to edits which insert a new dab page link into an existing article? Does anyone have a rough idea how many links to dab pages arise from new articles compared to the number that arise from edits to existing articles? Could there be a simple but effective way to prevent intentional dablinks from being flagged, preferably before the bot gets there if the author is reasonably well informed? Overriding would be essential if the proposal were extended to amendments. — Richardguk (talk) 19:21, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

I suppose that I could demand that if you want to link to a dab page from a non-dab page, it has to be to Pagename (disambiguation)... Josh Parris 00:18, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

• I think it is a great idea ... except that links to dabs more often occur in older, longer articles. New ones tend to be under-linked. The links accumulate over time. How about the bot goes around tagging links added in recent edits? --Una Smith (talk) 21:31, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

As Richardguk notes, new pages are less of a burden that all recent changes. Yes, links to dabs are introduced mostly through subsequent editing, but I want to start small. I'm sure that there will be teething problems, and once these are ironed out I'll look at progressing to wider coverage. Josh Parris 11:48, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

Starting small is wise. One aspect of targeting new pages I like: it would give new page patrol editors something more constructive to do than plaster new pages with problem tags. But I see some downsides. This bot may contribute to the plastering, which already is rather too aversive. Also, we may send inexperienced editors to look at disambiguation pages that need cleanup or expansion. The result may not be an improvement. So how about starting small from the other end? How about we make a tag that we can add ourselves to a disambiguation page, that triggers the bot to tag {{

dn}} on the incoming links to the page? That would allow for some supervision of the resulting link repairs. --Una Smith (talk

) 15:53, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

My interpretation of what you are suggesting is that you're suggesting a "clean, quality dab page" tag which labels the dab page as currently having no inbound links, which is not in need of clean-up because it's fully compliant with

dn

}} (excluding incoming redirects and direct links to dab pages with (disambiguation) in the title). I don't quite understand what you mean by supervision of the resulting link repairs; do you mean that once we've fixed something, it will stay fixed (human foibles excluded)?

One of the reasons I wanted to start with new pages is they are at is a single point in time where the history is fully known - none the ambiguous links have ever been tagged {{

dn

}}, and thus the tags have never been removed. I haven't figured out how to prevent a Recent Changes bot edit-warring over dn tags where the link to the dab page is intentional. I suppose that I could demand that if you want to link to a dab page from a non-dab page, it has to be to Pagename (disambiguation), but that doesn't seem very neighbourly. Also, with my current design checking a page is relatively expensive - the whole page has to be loaded, and each link has to be checked to see if it's a redirect to a dab page (dab pages are easily enumerated - I have the full list of 168476); while I'm kicking around ideas to tune things, I don't want to go in with a proposal that I don't yet know how to make run fast enough. Mind you, having said that, the list of "clean, quality" dab pages ought to start small and grow slowly, so building up a local cache of those redirects ought to be efficient enough. I've still got that problem with edit waring; any suggestions on how to prevent edit waring would be most welcome.

On balance, I like your suggestion. It would certainly change the nature of the disambiguation project from an on-going black war to one where editors are made aware of when they've make a sub-optimal link. One of my hopes with a NPP dab robot was that new editors would be introduced to disambiguation pages early in their career and reduce the likelihood of them creating ambiguous links in the future. Despite your implication, I don't think that the dab pages we have are in all that bad a shape. Once a page is marked as a "clean orphan dab", someone would have to take responsibility to making sure they stay that way (Wikiproject Disambiguation perhaps?) Josh Parris 23:34, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

I had something a little different in mind... Take for example the result of a

dn}} means and make an appropriate fix? How many will just unlink the text, or remove the tag? Do they welcome its help, or do they complain? --Una Smith (talk

) 23:47, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

Clicking on the tag takes you to a page about how to disambiguate that's a mixed up mess of instructions. Someone might clean that up and make it so an editor could follow it for a start. There's an editor who usually disambiguates my new articles, before I get around to them, or if I do them incorrectly. She (I think) might be a good person to ask. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 04:47, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

• I like the idea, too. In most cases, a page author should have a pretty good idea of what a link is intended on a page they created. So it's a better allocation of editor-hours to try to get some editors to cure dab links at the time of creation. They'll often be able to do it quicker that disambiguation project folks (who oftentimes have to spend time researching stuff because the links we're fixing may be outside our own fields of knowledge/expertise. I don't know anything about bots. Would it work on templates be under the bot's purview? --JamesAM (talk) 14:26, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

  Yes, the editor knows where the link should properly connect, but dabs on wikipedia can chase editors away. Some are long lists of poorly sorted unrelated items, like various spellings, odd usages that are part of the word, very unhelpful junk, with one or two main uses hidden deeply. I used to look through the dabs to find what I needed, but their usefulness keeps going downhill-if I hit a long dab, I just google instead. Article editors may do this also, avoid the long dabs which are the ones that most need disambiguated correctly in an article for the use of the reader. But, if they're not, then you've tagged an article, not helping the reader, and not helping the editor. The tag needs to connect to a category where users who can stand reading wikipedia dab pages can help out. Otherwise it's just clutter, imo. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 19:25, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Discussion is underway at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/WildBot Josh Parris 08:36, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Discussion there has led to a rewrite of Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation/Fixing links, and additional discussion on that page's talk page. --Una Smith (talk) 23:55, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

After an extensive discussion, the proposal now reads:

The bot will place a message on the talk page of any new namespace 0, 6, 10 or 14 article with ambiguous links.

(the namespaces are: 0 (mainspace), 6 (file), 10 (template) and 14 (category)). Current proposed message template:

Links from this article which need disambiguation (check | fix): Channel 70, Channel 71, Channel 72, Channel 73, Channel 74, Channel 75, Channel 76, Channel 77, Channel 78, Channel 79, Channel 80, Channel 81, Channel 82, Channel 83, Gothic, Hebron massacre, Hebron massacres, Skating, Term, Witta, Wittan For help fixing these links, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation/Fixing a page. Added by Report a problem

If you have any opinion to voice, the discussion is nearing completion at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/WildBot Josh Parris 08:04, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

It appears that this proposal is going to fail. If you have any opinion to voice, the discussion is at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/WildBot Josh Parris 22:46, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Whenever we don't know what to disambiguate a link to, we're meant to use the {{

It has had a total makeover. --Una Smith (talk) 23:57, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

Some eyeballs on the new page explaining how to disambiguate all the links on a page (as opposed to all the links leading to a page) Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation/Fixing a page would be appreciated. Josh Parris 08:08, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Actually, the Giron in

Canton of Bellegarde-sur-Valserine appear to be the same one as the canton is located in Ain as per the infobox.Ulric1313 (talk

) 05:43, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

I think Ulric1313 is correct: just one Giron in France. --Una Smith (talk) 15:38, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

There are also several items at the dab page

Giron, France (assuming there is just one), make Giron a dab page, with a "See also" at the bottom for the Girón dab page. --Floquenbeam (talk

) 16:55, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

I have asked about

Giron, France on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject France. --Una Smith (talk

) 17:40, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Is anyone here using solve_disambiguation.py? I cannot find instructions about what I need to do to get permission (do I need permission?) to use this bot, as distinct from permission for the bot to be used. There is a difference, isn't there? --Una Smith (talk) 22:31, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

My understanding is: In it's default configuration it operates at a throttled rate; it also gives an explicit warning that you're not operating with a bot flag. But, because it's a manually assisted bot rather than an automatic one, you don't require authorization to use the tool. This is explicitly stated at Wikipedia:Bot policy#Assisted editing guidelines. Josh Parris 00:16, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. --Una Smith (talk) 00:56, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

I've got a bot that places a note on the talk page of an article with links to disambiguation pages, like so:

Links from this article which need disambiguation (check | fix): Channel 70, Channel 71, Channel 72, Channel 73, Channel 74, Channel 75, Channel 76, Channel 77, Channel 78, Channel 79, Channel 80, Channel 81, Channel 82, Channel 83, Gothic, Hebron massacre, Hebron massacres, Skating, Term, Witta, Wittan For help fixing these links, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation/Fixing a page. Added by Report a problem

As links are fixed it removes them from the box, and once they're all fixed it removes the box from the talk page.

Should a bot place a note on the talk page of all pages with {{

Fixing links to Cocoa, I found in Viva Piñata (TV series) this: Cecil Cocoadile: A dull-sounding [[Cocoa]][[crocodile|dile]]. What to do with it, and its friends? Unlink? --Una Smith (talk) 03:04, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Cocoadile? Unlink the lot. No article, no Google define:, many ghits... unlink. Not a term, or at best a neolism. Plus, the links are "surprise links" which is never good. Josh Parris 04:41, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Where is the description of our practice of making intentional links to a dab redirect, ie to Link (disambiguation) rather than Link? --Una Smith (talk) 14:54, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Found it:

WP:INTDABLINK. --Una Smith (talk

) 14:59, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

For a long time now I have been mulling over some ideas about disambiguation pages, set index articles, disambiguation, and the idea of a "primary topic". Now I have made a start on expressing those ideas: Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation#Primary topic not necessarily an article. --Una Smith (talk) 17:53, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Any idea what's going on here with this? It says there are 504 links in the Daily Disambig and 512 when you check realtime, but when you look for said links, none are really showing up to work on. Ulric1313 (talk) 18:15, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

It looks like the article

Revolver (The Beatles album) and then moved back again. Although I don't see that the (album) page was ever redirected to Revolver (disambiguation), the number of incoming article-space links for Revolver (album) is...512. I'm still not sure why they would show up as links to the dab page, but it's got to be more than a coincidence.--ShelfSkewed Talk

19:35, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Follow up: Found your missing links, there in the page log: The (album) article had to be deleted to reverse the move, so there was an intervening edit, presumably redirecting it to the dab page. So all those links to (album) will show up as links to the dab page until the main server catches up.--ShelfSkewed Talk 20:41, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

The link counts that are the basis for the Daily Disambig are generated on the Toolserver at 08:30 UTC every day. In this case, the move and re-move of Revolver (album) took place many hours before that, but it's possible that the Toolserver was suffering from replication lag at the time. It should be back to normal tomorrow. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 22:26, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

DAB Challenge leaderboard has not updated in days.  Randall Bart   Talk  20:23, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Have you contacted Jason about this? --R'n'B (call me Russ) 20:56, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

I've let him know, since it isn't just the leaderboard that is having issues. The list of articles isn't updating either. Apparently the scripts might be broken. Ulric1313 (talk) 06:04, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

Toolserver, where these things live, is suffering the effects of an upgrade. Josh Parris 08:19, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

I've put in a JIRA request to have someone at the Toolserver (River) look at the problem - the SQL procedures everything is based upon are missing. I've hope it'll be recovered. --JaGa^talk 01:17, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

Well, the Toolserver people have all but ignored my pleas for help. A couple of tables crucial to the contest have been inexplicably deleted, and without them I'd say the January contest has been ruined. I'm terribly sorry about all this, but it looks like we'll just have to wait until a new set of monthly articles are generated for the February contest. --JaGa^talk 09:39, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

I got the list down to five. Can anybody help finish it off? I'm not sure "sublimation" is being used correctly in some of the remaining articles, but not familiar enough with the topics to make a correction and didn't want to just update the link.
This is my first attempt at fixing one of these.
CraXyXarC (talk) 06:20, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

WildBot has made well over 3000 edits since being started on the 18th. This graph shows every day, many editors new to the disambiguation process are learning how to repair dab links. Thanks to the support from this group, this group's workload should be slightly reduced, and as WildBot's scope increases, the effect will climb. Josh Parris 20:32, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

You deserve a lot of thanks for creating the bot. I think we'll make a lot of headway as the ambiguous links from new pages are reduced. Plus, hopefully it will encourage more editors to be cognizant of creating link are unambiguous. --JamesAM (talk) 23:20, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

There's a discussion at Help talk:Disambiguation as to the contents of the link from the bottom of every dab page. The participants invite broader discussion. Josh Parris 20:32, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Anyone have an idea on why the replication lag is running up to 12 hours right now?

The lag is throwing things out of whack.

Ulric1313 (talk) 06:39, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

What happened? All of a sudden a lot of the fixes aren't being listed. Did the Toolserver lose them or what? Ulric1313 (talk) 06:41, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

It looks like it's traveling backward in time - getting rid of recent fixes and keeping the earliest ones. --JamesAM (talk) 15:00, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

I checked the database, and the data is still there (unlike last month's fiasco). For some reason the join isn't picking everything up any more. I'll investigate. --JaGa^talk 20:51, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

OK, I've got it updating every two hours for now. A query that used to be super-fast is now super-slow after the Toolserver changes. I've retooled it as a quick fix, and will try to figure out how to rewrite it to get back to the hourly updates we had before. Good news is, nothing has been lost. (Or at least, I don't think so. Could anyone let me know if they think data is missing?) --JaGa^talk 09:00, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

I could be wrong, but the numbers don't seem to have gone up for a while (today anyway) even though the links to number fixed next to people's names have the most recent ones fixed. --BelovedFreak 19:44, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Right you are, on both counts. Thanks much for bringing this to my attention. The tallies are indeed updating (so the links next to people's names are accurate) but the script that updates the leaderboard in Wikipedia is failing its logon! When it rains it pours. I've updated the leaderboard manually, and asked around whether anyone else is having this problem. --JaGa^talk 22:29, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Is the login failure caused by the newly-enforced requirement for a user-agent header? It's caused some bots to fail and has been discussed at WP:VPT and on wikitech-l. — Richardguk (talk) 23:10, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Bless you, Richardguk. That was the problem. I've got login working again, and have retooled the query to be efficient enough to go back to hourly updates. I've also added a line stating replag and the time of the last update, so that should be helpful. Let's hope they leave Toolserver alone for a while! --JaGa^talk 10:18, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

I've been working thru 160-odd pages that link(ed) to Bass (musical term) which is a redirect to the disambig page Bass. Are these included in the competition? Tayste (edits) 19:07, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

Links via redirect are included in the competition, but only for articles in the monthly list, which doesn't include Bass this month (unless I'm overlooking it). The redirect to Bass was probably done in February, thus missing my lists, which are based on the state of disambigs on the last day of the previous month. --JaGa^talk 20:16, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

Before anyone tries to fix links to

Sorry about this month's results - I'll be fixing it about 12 hours from now, when I'm back from work. Or someone else could do it, just get the last update from User:JaGa/Short leaderboard - but I've got to catch a train! --JaGa^talk 07:28, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

I figured out a way around the firewall to get at the data and fix it, so everything should be OK now. --JaGa^talk 09:37, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

It's likely that the musical dabs (or at least most of them) on this month's list will be reverted back to the primary topic. There's a discussion at the Musicals WikiProject about it. If this happens, any fixes to these dabs will not be recorded by the contest. So you may want to wait before fixing, for instance, Brigadoon. --JaGa^talk 07:34, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

I fixed it up. I think it makes sense to distinguish between professional & recreational golfers—

Golfer redirected to Golf or Professional golfer, depending on what the incoming links show. As for Amateur golfer, I was thinking that, pending the creation of a separate article, it should be redirected to Professional golfer, which discusses the distinction between the two. What do you think?--ShelfSkewed Talk

20:41, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Because professional golfer seems to be about the distintction between professionals and amateurs (as noted above), I think the best approach would be to retool it slightly (like retitled it something like "Amateurism and professionalism in golf" and re-direct golfer, professional golfer, and amateur golfer to it. Or in the alternative, I think it would be fine to redirect golfer to "golf." I think if amateurism or professionalism is so important, someone would specifically seek that in their search term. DABs are supposed to be facilitators, not extra barriers before people reach content pages. --JamesAM (talk) 15:31, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

If anyone is interested in trying to power through some of these, we have about 25,000 disambiguation links on disambiguation pages, most of which are intentional links that need to be redirected through their "foo (disambiguation)" counterparts so they no longer show up as requiring repair. Cheers! bd2412 T 21:56, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

Hi all, there's been a non-backwards-compatible change to how Media Wiki API logins work, which means my script is not able to update the leaderboard, even though the data is being updated properly on the Toolserver (for instance, look at Woohookitty's status; the leaderboard has him at 2000, but you can see from the status page it's really much more!)

A user has posted a fix in the Toolserver mailing list, so I hope to fix this tonight when I get home. Then we can see where this intriguing R'n'B / Woohookitty battle stands. Could this be Woohookitty's first non-first place finish in 2010? (I doubt it! :D) --JaGa^talk 11:18, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

The standings here seem to be up to date. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 14:46, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

True that. But I've got it fixed now, anyways. --JaGa^talk 21:27, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

In Equilibrium chemistry the link to free energy is intentional as the term relates to both of two kinds of free energy, Helmholtz free energy and Gibbs free energy . The alternative, separate links to each topic would be cumbersome. I have removed the disambiguation tag and wait to see if it reappears. Petergans (talk) 16:44, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Rather than linking to the dab page, why not pipe-link to the umbrella article Thermodynamic free energy, which discusses, and links to, both Helmholtz and Gibbs free energy?--ShelfSkewed Talk 17:03, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

I see nothing wrong with that. --JaGa^talk 20:51, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for this suggestion. I did not realise that the Thermodynamic free energy page existed! Petergans (talk) 11:50, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

In Equilibrium chemistry the link to stability constant is also intentional. In this case the "umbrella article" equilibrium constant (which I created) does not link in an obvious way to the acid dissociation constant and stability constants of complexes. The three articles each serve different purposes. Your suggestions will be welcome. Petergans (talk) 12:06, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

There's nothing wrong with linking to the disambiguation page if that's the best solution. Just do it by pipe-linking through the redirect stability constant (disambiguation) so that other editors will know that you are doing it intentionally rather than accidentally.--ShelfSkewed Talk 14:04, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

This should not be a disambig page. It merely directs readers to one of three ways in which paper can be thick and stiff. This should be a short article covering the common points of those uses of paper. bd2412 T 14:49, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Free kick cannot be disambiguated as it stands. If the article is about Aussie Rules or Rugby Union or American, that can be fixed, but when it's soccer (and now they nearly all are) there's no single page, I am called upon to direct it to either

We now have articles on thousands of places in Poland, some quite small. I don't advocate a minimum size of notability for an article, but with Poland this produces a problem. When you name a village in Poland you give it a name unique within the county, but it's not necessarily unique within the voivodeship, much less Poland as a whole. There are therefore some quite large dab pages, such as the two I recently looked at: Dąbrówka, and Stanisławów.

Fixing these is not really difficult, but tedious. For Stanisławów the key was reading enough of all of the articles to determine that WWII and earlier references are all to the city in Ukraine. There were just a couple modern references, where I had to find which county or which voivodeship was otherwise referenced in the article.

When I got to Dąbrówka, there was only one article which needed fixing. It took me two hours. B^) Actually there were about 20 different things I changed in that article. Some took just a few seconds, but some were tricky. Familiarizing myself with the voivodeships of Southern Poland was part of it. (Silesia is not adjacent to Lower Silesia.) In checking the article, I found three links that were wrong, two of which I red linked.

I should go back and fix the road article about Stanisławów, and that's my point. When I was unemployed, I did barnstar numbers of dabs. Now I come by from time to time to help out the old project. I still prefer to find easy ones, and do big numbers, but there are other dabs to be fixed. In many cases, we find articles which have many dab links such as these Polish roads. There's no reason to wait for each town to individually makes its way into DPL (some of them it will be decades). It's more efficient to go through the article and fix all these dabs. It's a road, after all. Each town is going to be between the towns on either side.

Maybe there should be a queue of articles with lots of dabs.  Randall Bart   Talk  15:16, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

I would like to establish a parallel project on another Wikipedia. Can someone direct me to a script for generating disambiguation pages? --Redaktor (talk) 18:51, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

It lives on the Toolserver. Do you have an account? Which wiki are we talking about? --JaGa^talk 08:32, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

I do not have an account on the Toolserver (I think). I would like to set up a list of dab pages with links on Yiddish Wikipedia. --Redaktor (talk) 12:31, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

It looks like someone with an account on Toolserver has now taken this in hand. --Redaktor (talk) 23:25, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

There are some links I can't seem to resolve. I suspect it's part of a template or something, but I fixed the ones there. Help? –Schmloof (talk · contribs) 01:05, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

OK, they've all fixed themselves, or someone's fixed them. There's still one left, though. Can anyone shed any light on how to resolve this? –Schmloof (talk · contribs) 10:33, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

The trick in these cases is to "edit" the article that contains the phantom link, then save it without actually editing anything. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 10:43, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Got it, thanks! –Schmloof (talk · contribs) 10:53, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

As part of the movement to differentiate between intentional and unintentional dab links, I've made a change to the Toolserver scripts. From June 21 forward, the scripts will consider a link to a (disambiguation) or (number) page or redirect as intentional, and not count it when compiling the daily lists.

As an example, consider Collision (disambiguation). If you look at its what links here, you see there are several intentional links, such as Collision and Impact, and a whole bunch of links from the Collision (telecommunications) redirect. In the past, all of these links would have been counted. Now, the direct links (Collision, Impact, etc.) are not counted, but the indirect links via Collision (telecommunications) are still counted, resulting in a total count of 47 links.

What does this mean for this project? A couple of things. One, slightly better monthly lists in the contest (goodbye, unfixable Nowa Wieś and John Smith). Two, you have another way to fix an article. If you find a link that is intentional (usually a hatnote), if you change that link to point to a (disambiguation)-titled page - even if the page is a redirect - that will be considered a "fix". --JaGa^talk 22:59, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Oh, and per Russ' request, I'm generating a new daily report called named disambig pages with links, that tracks all the links that are now excluded from our counts. --JaGa^talk 08:15, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

First off, great to hear. Secondly, I ran across another example, but want to make sure I understand correctly before I do anything to 'fix' the links so they don\t get counted. The pafe in question is Nowy Dwór which currently does not have a (disabiguation) page created for it. If I were to create said page, redirect it to Nowy Dwór, then update all the hatnotes, Nowy Dwór would no longer be part of the page counts, is that correct? Ulric1313 (talk) 19:03, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes, exactly. I did the same thing for Nowa Wieś. --JaGa^talk 21:43, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Bull, currently a disambig page, is a regular magnet for links. You can guess what they most frequently intend to reference. I have begun putting together a draft at Bull/proposed article with the intention of moving the disambig page to Bull (disambiguation) and erecting an article in its place that would be comparable to what Stallion is for male horses. Any help would be appreciated, as it would solve a longstanding disambig linking problem. bd2412 T 00:30, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

I think the proposed article is ready to be moved to mainspace. Opinions welcome. Cheers! bd2412 T 21:34, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

I expanded one section a bit, but really, this article is beyond ready to go "live". Nice work! --JaGa^talk 23:22, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. I agree that it is ready for the mainspace. I was thinking of letting it sit for another 24 hours, in case someone was planning on cobbling together a brilliant exposition on why the male of cattle is not the primary topic, but realistically that's not going to happen. Therefore, I'm going to be bold and move them now. bd2412 T 00:18, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

I'd like to propose that when this list is generated in the future, the links be piped through a "foo (disambiguation)" redirect; if any of these redirects are missing, they can be automatically generated at the same time as the creation of the list. bd2412 T 22:37, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Why? The (disambiguation) redirects are useful for distinguishing links in the article namespace, but links in the Wikipedia namespace are not really an issue, because they can already be easily ignored by disambiguators. --ShelfSkewed Talk 22:50, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

First, it's one way of insuring that we have the redirects. Second, there are occasional instances of bad redirects in project space (in draft articles, for example) that should, ideally, be fixed. I see no reason why anything should ever link to a disambig page without going through a an intentional redirect. bd2412 T 23:09, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Should Reed (plant) really be a disambig? Especially if you consider this version, before it was pared down to be more dab-like. I've been thinking about biology articles like this - like Cypress, for instance, where you have an article for the generic term instead of a disambig. I could see Cedar going the same way. Thoughts? --JaGa^talk 10:27, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

I boldly de-dabbed it. We'll see if it sticks. --JaGa^talk 22:16, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I did that with

Grass years ago - it was contentious for a while, and then it stuck. bd2412 T

01:28, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

I just noticed that Royal College of Surgeons is on this month's list. Discussion of whether this should be a disambig page at all is underway at Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation#Royal College of Surgeons. bd2412 T 17:13, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

• Done. bd2412 T 01:28, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

The various lists of acronyms and initialisms (from

• I started the process with "A", but stopped when I realized there's hope to get those XYZ (disambiguation) redirects created by RussBot. (I'll admit it, I cheered out loud when I saw the bot request. It's a lot of hassle making those things!) If we don't get a bot to fix the initialism articles, I'll pick it up again once RussBot has had its big run. It's pretty easy if you use Dab solver. --JaGa^talk 21:36, 13 August 2010 (UTC)
  • I haven't tried that one, but I sure will now. Between these lists and the intentional links coming in from hatnotes and from disambig pages cross-referencing one another, we could potentially solve tens of thousands virtually overnight. Of course, that would just highlight the real number of flat out bad links requiring resolution. bd2412 T 21:42, 13 August 2010 (UTC)
    • RussBot is on the verge of getting cleared to do this job. Should be a doozy! bd2412 T 19:55, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
      • Redirects are being created even as we speak, but given the size of the job it is going to take a while. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 21:16, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
        • Is RussBot going through the entire DPL list in straight-up alphabetical order? You could move pages like those discussed above to the front of the queue, although I suppose there would be no great payoff in doing so. bd2412 T 01:21, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Seems they're all done now. Very, very nice. bd2412 T 19:16, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Many of the links to Highland are from text in infoboxes for places in Highland (council area) in Scotland. Text in the infobox just below the map reads "Helmsdale [or whichever place the article is about] within the Highland council area." Unfortunately, Highland links the dab page not the council area page. Unfortunately, I don't see anywhere in the editing page to correct this. I suspect in may be in some sort of template. For any of your guys more knowledgeable than me, this looks like a good opportunity to knock a bunch of links off one of the highest pages in one fell swoop. --JamesAM (talk) 02:03, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Raised, along with more minor fixes, at Template talk:Infobox UK place/local#Disambiguation and redirect fixes. (Most of the other changes that I have simultaneously requested relate to page move redirects which would not usually matter but are worth updating in a template.) — Richardguk (talk) 13:32, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Fixed. But it may take a while for WhatLinksHere to update. — Richardguk (talk) 02:15, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Symbian should not be a disambig page. All of the meanings are variations on the theme of the Symbian OS platform. bd2412 T 00:02, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

• Made into a stub article. bd2412 T 22:30, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

This should not be a disambig page. It merely links to articles on the different kinds of tackle positions, and it should therefore probably just be a general article on those positions. Several hundred incoming links. bd2412 T 19:15, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

I agree. I asked the mover to go ahead and make an article (he seems to be an article factory, and knowledgeable about the tackle position to boot) and he's agreed to do it eventually. --JaGa^talk 20:25, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Great - thanks! bd2412 T 21:09, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

I merged the articles. Below is commentary copied from the September 2010 to do list. 69.3.72.9 (talk) 15:19, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

1. Tackle (American football): 366 links - discussion underway to make this no longer a disambig bd2412 T
   21:03, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
   • Where? 69.3.72.9 (talk) 04:55, 7 September 2010 (UTC)
     • Here. bd2412 T 12:08, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Nicely done. Cheers! bd2412 T 16:16, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Bomb shelter should not be a disambig. It does not link to other pages with the same name, it just lays out different kinds of bomb shelters. bd2412 T 02:05, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

• I've gone ahead and turned it into a stub article. Let's see if it sticks. bd2412 T 22:30, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

• Good. It was only very recently that this page was converted into a dab anyways. --JaGa^talk 08:50, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

These seem more like indices than disambig pages to me, and are well nigh unfixable without invoking a real expert with access to some quaint records. bd2412 T 03:37, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Agreed. Those have always seemed well-nigh impossible to "fix", and they fit

WP:SETINDEX. --JaGa^talk

08:42, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Done. bd2412 T 03:13, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, but the big article is already 110 kB. A merge would probably not be approved. Perhaps a merge combined with a better

WP:Subarticle? I would beware, though - these articles live in the land of strong POV - there be dragons. --JaGa^talk

08:51, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps the one covering the more recent period should be considered the primary, then, and hatnoted to the other one. That would match the intent of virtually all incoming links. bd2412 T 18:21, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

It turns out most links are template driven, which is probably best solved by making the template an intentional disambig link. bd2412 T 03:13, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Consider the following ratios of disambiguation page views to article page views in August 2010:

• Stag
  : 980/3687 = 27%
• King (disambiguation) vs King: 1747/20802 = 8.4%
• Worker
  : 140/1711 = 8.2%
• Cow
  : 988/16955 = 5.8%
• Mare (disambiguation) vs Mare: 634/12646 5.0%
• Bull (disambiguation) vs Bull: 751/17850 = 4.2%
• Bitch (disambiguation) vs Bitch: 1410/50215 2.8%
• Calf (disambiguation) vs Calf: 462/17653 = 2.6%
• Kitten (disambiguation) vs Kitten: 601/25279 = 2.4%
• Stallion (disambiguation) vs Stallion: 328/17837 1.8%
• Nymph (disambiguation) vs Nymph: 1111/60921 = 1.8%
• Dam (disambiguation) vs Dam: 773/53045 = 1.5%
• Larva (disambiguation) vs Larva: 410/33997 = 1.2%
• Cattle (disambiguation) vs Cattle: 474/85776 = 0.6%
• Boar
  : 48/9063 = 0.5%

The above is sorted by ratio. At the top of the list are some problem cases where perhaps the article should be moved to another name and the disambiguation page moved into its place, because the ratio is far above average.

OK, so what do you propose? To me, status quo looks good for everything except Stag. (Although I don't support the idea of making decisions based solely on page views.) --JaGa^talk 08:58, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

I think

Boar. Not deciding on the basis of page views, but using the page views to screen for pages that have navigation problems. 69.3.72.9 (talk

) 09:07, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, but I oppose this whole-heartedly per

Stag. --JaGa^talk

09:16, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

I agree with JaGa in opposing such a reconfiguration. bd2412 T 16:16, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Cow

Hm.

Cow redirects to Cattle and Cattle is looking an awful lot like a disambiguation page. Especially the section Cattle#Other terminology. 69.3.72.9 (talk

) 18:00, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Not at all. Nothing in the "other terminology" section suggests anything other than names for variations of the domesticated bovine. It would look like a disambig page if it listed, for example, an album named Cattle, or a band, or a TV series episode, or a person named Joe Cattle, or a town named Cattle. bd2412 T 19:55, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Actually, the whole section Cattle#Terminology is like that, and it is not encyclopedic. It is a laundry list of nearly dictionary definitions of this, that, and the other thing. The list quality is what makes it like a disambiguation page, and bordering on content more suited to Wiktionary. All those terms could be (and should be) made encyclopedic by putting them in context. An encyclopedia should explain freemartins in the context of reproduction and stirks in the context of life cycle, etc. 69.3.72.9 (talk) 03:52, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

No, the list quality is what makes it unlike a disambiguation page. Wikipedia has tens of thousands of lists that have nothing to do with disambiguation, like a list of subtypes for a given type. bd2412 T 22:21, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Stag

Looking at incoming links and the huge numbers of redirects involved in

For the first time ever, the Daily Disambig shows our total DPL count at under 900,000. Amazing work! bd2412 T 03:14, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, we're flying now that we have the

WP:INTDABLINK policy. I wonder if it'll be under 800,000 by Christmas? --JaGa^talk

18:37, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

I've almost finished "Highland", but I'm having trouble with Ardnamurchan Point. On the right, there's a map of Scotland with a caption that reads "Ardnamurchan Point shown within Highland". The caption doesn't seem to be in the page markup and I can't figure out how to get at it. Can someone help? It should be disambiguated to Highland (council area). --Steven J. Anderson (talk) 19:54, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Fixed. The |shire_county/state= of {{Infobox UK feature}} was not working correctly, but as the map description was of Scotland not Highland, I deleted the parameter instead of trying to hack a broken template. — Richardguk (talk) 22:07, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Well, in the course of trying to improve redirects around

There are maybe 25 incoming links now. 69.3.72.249 (talk) 23:27, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

A user has recently "merged"

• Itinerant brings vagrancy to my mind. bd2412 T 19:33, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

I went back more than a year and even then Itinerant was mostly a disambiguation page with a few trappings of an article. I have no problem with the page Itinerant being a disambiguation page. I am wondering though if all the content moved to Nomad belongs there. 69.3.72.249 (talk) 23:20, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Definitely

Scottish Parliament constituencies and regions; the other is historic (although very recent history). --JaGa^talk

08:53, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

I just went through all those links today, and 100% of them without exception were referring to the "historic" (from a decade ago) regional governments. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 19:11, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Since they are done, it should be no problem going forward, right? ;-) bd2412 T 19:33, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

The page itself is/was quite odd. In fact, neither of the pages that were linked from the dab (before you redirected it) could accurately be described as a "list of regions," although at least one of them did contain a list of regions as a section of the article. I'd have suggested re-targeting

List of regions of Scotland title for deletion. --R'n'B (call me

Russ) 20:12, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Should we just create an actual list of regions? bd2412 T 20:57, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

(Horrible pun coming - wait for it). Chlamydia should not be a disambig page; primarily this page lists different strains of the Chlamydia bacteria. Why didn't someone catch this sooner? bd2412 T 01:43, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

It probably should remain a disambiguation page, if only to help editors figure out which "chlamydia" is intended. I have sorted the entries. 69.3.72.249 (talk) 23:16, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

If we make it a page on the bacteria generally, it would still contain all the information presently on the disambig page. bd2412 T 02:09, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Most of the links I disambiguated for this page when to Chlamydia, that is, the disease resulting from the bacteria's presence in a human host. I think it would be better to keep it as a disambig page, because people may be interested in the disease, the organism, or the various strains. Another alternative would be to merge content from the bacteria article and the infection article together with links to the strains. The next best alternative would be to the make the Chlamydia page about the infection with links to the bacteria. --JamesAM (talk) 20:07, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

there was a dab on

A few links to composite refer to fictional "composite beings", created when the personalities of two or more other fictional characters are merged together into a new character (this is different from a composite character, which is a fictional character created with attributes of several real people). A good example would be the Star Trek Voyager episode where a transporter accident caused Tuvok and Neelix to be merged into a single person, Tuvix. Is there an appropriate article on this topic, or does one need to be written (and what would it be called)? bd2412 T 03:47, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

I propose making this an article on the general idea of the wild dog, and moving other meanings to a "foo (disambiguation)" page. bd2412 T 14:15, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

This really needs to be asked at the relevant projects. In general, "wild X" and "feral X" are different, and should not be confused. Disambiguation pages are important. Are you having trouble fixing incoming links to

Wild dog? 69.3.72.249 (talk

) 23:06, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Consider articles like

Taenia (tapeworm), for which the link appears to be intended to refer to wild (never domesticated) dogs of all types. Perhaps make this an article on the truly wild ones, have a separate hatnoted article on the feral dogs, and a "foo (disambiguation)" page to cover the rest. bd2412 T

02:06, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

On further review, there are some degrees of nuance. Some "wild" dogs include instances of domestication (like the dingo). What would you call a feral descendent of a domesticated dingo? bd2412 T 20:35, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

This page just lists three kinds of sodium citrate. I don't think it should be a disambig. bd2412 T 00:39, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

It claims that the third is the most common. Perhaps a redirect to trisodium citrate and hatnotes for the rest? –Schmloof (talk · contribs) 07:54, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

I de-disambiguated the page. Sodium citrate is merely a parent category of chemicals, with the three types being children of the parent. bd2412 T 15:10, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

We are close to fixing 50% of all dabs on the list for the month, and with nearly a week left to go. Let's aim to close that gap! bd2412 T 20:32, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Now at 50.5% done! Great job! bd2412 T 17:16, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Does anyone agree that this should not be a disambig page? bd2412 T 20:41, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Well, all of the links are related to the same franchise. But how better to organize them? --JaGa^talk 16:50, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

It's a single fictional universe, like that of Star Trek. It should be treated much the same, with a single article disclosing the characteristics of that in-game universe, and laying out the media that occur within it. bd2412 T 22:50, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

TWODABS situation. Redirect to one with a hatnote to the other? If so, to which should the redirect point? bd2412 T 00:25, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Hmmm, I dunno. Really, it's sandstone, New Red Sandstone, and Old Red Sandstone. And I don't see any way to say Old trumps New or vice versa; they seem equally important. I'd say we're stuck with it. --JaGa^talk 16:56, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Per the Fatal Fury discussion above, the primary topic is the generic fictional universe of Tekken, which should be addressed in a single broader article, with a "Foo (disambiguation)" page for the other fairly obscure meanings. bd2412 T 20:34, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

I have noticed a lot of

I'd like to float the idea of possibly expanding the monthly list from the top 500 pages to 1000 pages. The last expansion was from 250 pages to 500 pages was in November 2009. On October 31, 2009, the top 250 pages had 28,318 links and the top 500 pages had 52,592 links. As of today, the top 500 pages have 31,361 links and the top 1000 pages have 57,609 links. So the situation is fast approaching what we had with that expansion. Obviously, editors can always work on pages that aren't on the monthly list, but the contest seems to be a significant incentive. One counterargument would be that expanding the list could cause editors to ignore troublesome pages on the top of the list. However, we're doing okay on that front right now. The DPL-100 has gotten fairly low as have pages with 90 links, 80 links, etc. Also, I suppose a list of 1000 pages might be unwieldy to look at. Thoughts? --JamesAM (talk) 15:26, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

It is a fairly lengthy list as it is. How about stepping up to 750? bd2412 T 16:59, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

I think it's long enough now. We are lucky to get through 50% of the list by the end of the month. I'm not sure a longer list would mean more links getting fixed. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 17:17, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Tough one. When we were getting to 75%+, people were definitely running out of "fixable" disambigs towards the end of the month. 50% is not as much of a problem. On the other hand, I, for one, am guilty of only looking at the monthly list for disambigs to de-link, so an expanded list would be welcome, and probably lead to more links being fixed. But 1000 would be terribly unwieldy. Maybe expand to a smaller number, or revisit this in a few months? --JaGa^talk 17:36, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

This may be far off topic, but I'd like to see a list of the oldest persisting disambig links. I think the contest would be more exciting if there were more variations than just addressing the most-linked pages. The current setup also makes it so that some very old disambig links, coming from disambig pages with smaller groups of links, will never be addressed here. bd2412 T 18:10, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Oldest persisting dabs, I'm not sure how/if I could do that. But I have been thinking about expansion. Like you say, there are some dabs that will never be addressed with the current approach; a multi-pronged attack is necessary. I was thinking of adding a "bonus list" of one-link dabs to the contest; did you know over 20,000 disambig pages only have one incoming link? (Here's a report I created to list them, just for my own amusement - the dab is in the second column.) But I don't want to detract from the monthly list; it's going quite well these days, and I'm hesitant to do something that would take away from that. --JaGa^talk 15:07, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

hey everyone, was working on Talas and found a few links that must be inside the Turkey geography template. You can find it at the bottom of Kayseri. In the markup, it appears to be correct (Talas, Turkey|Talas) but as displayed, it links to the disam page. Anyone know whats the story here? The Interior(Talk) 06:41, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

I just learned this recently from User:PC78, having just come across the same problem, (see PC78's talk page for our discussion of Claudine (disambiguation)); apparently it just takes a while for the "What links here" page to update and register the changes. The changing of Talas to Talas, Turkey, just took place on October 9th, so it could take a while longer. Hope that helps, -France3470 (talk) 10:20, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

If you want to force an update, just make a

WP:Null edit on that page, thereby refreshing the cache. –Schmloof (talk · contribs

) 16:58, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

If you look at the cfd pending queue, you will see the count for one template that was updated on October 6. The job queue is taking 30 days or more in some cases to update everything. Maybe it is time to bug the developers again. Vegaswikian (talk) 17:25, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Null edits got rid of 20 of the 23 incoming links to that page. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 17:46, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks folks, will remember the Null Edit trick for next time. The Interior(Talk) 18:17, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

I was wondering why the total number of dab links has been dropping slowly of late. Newly-created

Is there some way to configure bot logic to do that job, i.e., have a bot go through and first change [[Foo]] to [[Foo (name)|Foo]] or [[Foo (given name)|Foo]] where the latter exists, and then to go through and change whatever dab links remain to [[Foo (disambiguation)|Foo]]? Cheers! bd2412 T 15:09, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

I saw

<<Shrug>> OK, I'm moving it. --JaGa^talk 10:52, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

The page Tata Group (disambiguation) is not really a disambiguation page; it is a list or index of articles about a single set of related topics. Not sure, however, how best to rename it. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 17:02, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, the list of family members complicates things. Index of Tata Group-related articles? Or remove People and call it List of Tata Group organizations or similar? --JaGa^talk 13:24, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

The list of family members is not an ambiguous expression of the phrase "Tata Group", but merely of the name "Tata". Either way they should be removed (or mention of key family members should be moved to the lede to explain what exactly it is that makes companies in the group part of the group). bd2412 T 00:05, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

This popped up as a fairly heavily loaded new page on today's Daily Disambig. Seriously? This is a topic for disambiguation? bd2412 T 22:58, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

I'd say no, especially since there is no LGBT rights in Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic article. Needs to redirect to LGBT rights in Morocco. --JaGa^talk 11:34, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Agreed. Done. bd2412 T 16:10, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Penrith is a problem. It was a dab page, but the dab page has been moved to Penrith (disambiguation), and Penrith redirected to Penrith, Cumbria. Unfortunately, this was done without fixing the incoming links to Penrith, so now there are several incorret incoming links, and dabsolver won't spot them. Anyone fancy taking it on? DuncanHill (talk) 01:00, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Not sure that there is a primary topic so the dab page was moved back. I should add that a good number of the links are for the NSW place. Vegaswikian (talk) 01:09, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I too am unsure about there being a primay topic, and had pointed out to the editor who moved it the problem with the incoming links. Ill have a bash at it with dabsolver now. DuncanHill (talk) 01:25, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Now being discussed at Talk:Penrith, Cumbria#Requested move. DuncanHill (talk) 22:43, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

It seems to me that the

assumed good faith in your message to the editor in question. --R'n'B (call me

Russ) 11:06, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

I tried to be less sarcastic, but it proved impossible. I did not assume bad faith, and the message I left could not be construed to suggest that I did. If she had been a newbie I'd have reverted, and left a gentle explanation. She's an admin, highly experienced, and ought to know better. DuncanHill (talk) 13:38, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Well, I've been guilty of excessive sarcasm myself sometimes, so I understand completely. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 14:28, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

I've restored the redirect. I'll put a note on her talk page. --JaGa^talk 16:27, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. DuncanHill (talk) 17:12, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

I don't know how many people have noticed it, but The Daily Disambig includes a count of how many links to the month's top 500 dab pages have been fixed since the first day. I thought it would be interesting to compile the results for the last day of each month to see how we've been doing:

I suspect these numbers correlate closely with the number of links fixed by Woohookitty each month, but I haven't confirmed this.  :-)

Anyway, the trend is generally towards fixing a higher percentage of the available links, which is great, but we're going to have to redouble our efforts to beat the October record. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 16:38, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

That would be a tall order. October was the epic R'n'B vs Woohookitty battle as I recall. --JaGa^talk 17:05, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Has anyone come across pages such as

I did see them, and didn't understand them. The whole idea behind these series of several hundred disambig pages is that there are two ways of numbering the provincial elections in these two jurisdictions; one from the first election under colonial rule, and another counting from the first election after Confederation. My question about all this is whether either or both of these numbering schemes has any basis in

reliable sources, or whether one (or both) is something that an enthusiastic editor just made up for use in Wikipedia? There don't seem to be any internal wikilinks that refer to any of these elections by a sequence number, except for links generated by the template you noted. I suggest asking the editor who created all these whether there is any usage of these sequence numbers outside Wikipedia. --R'n'B (call me

Russ) 11:21, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

More immediately, I think the solution is to adjust the templates so that the links redirect through the "foo (disambiguation)" page connected each disambig page. That will mark them as intentional links, taking them out of our lists of pages requiring repair. Cheers! bd2412 T 15:08, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

We even have the {{D'}} template for doing that.--Kotniski (talk) 15:16, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

I started changing it over to use {{

39th New Brunswick general election is not a disambig, so can't have a (disambiguation) redirect, and I end up with a redlink. --JaGa^talk

07:13, 4 December 2010 (UTC)