Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 03:46, 21 July 2005

Tools

Post proposed tools for discussion here.

• There are many thousands of disambiguation pages. They're all in various states of conformance to the Manual of Style, and they all see different amounts of traffic. Thus, we need a way to:
  • Systematize, so that we know which disambigs need work and which are done.
  • Prioritize, so that we can work on the most oft-used pages first, and leave out-of-the-way ones until later.

--Smack (talk) 03:18, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

Post comments here

• Fixing links to disambigs is mind-numbing. In my experience, after half an hour of fixing links, my head starts to swim and I have to sit and vegetate for a while. If I interrupt my progress periodically to fix pages that obviously have other problems, I can fix about forty pages in that time. To me, that's not satisfactory. It would be nice to have a bot, similar to the one used for the Wiki Syntax project. This bot would do three things:
  1. Identify every page that links to a disambig page (using Category:Disambiguation and Special:Whatlinkshere)
  2. Search through each of these pages for every link to a disambig
  3. Generate a link to an edit window in which every one of these links has been suitably marked, maybe like this: ].

--Smack (talk) 03:18, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

Post comments here

Scope addition suggested

3. addition of usage notes to disambiguation discussion pages

Several of the dab templates for use in the main article space do not have clear usage guidelines/suggestions associated with them. This could be rectified.

4. monitoring of dab-template repertoire

The template I listed on the main page which does not appear in the Template Messages: General listing is {{TLAdisambig}}, which I ran across accidentally about a month ago. This WikiProject could take stewardship of the representation of disambiguation-related templates in the Template Messages page set and actively contribute to discussions regarding deletion and creation of templates in this space.

Thoughts?

Courtland 04:36, July 20, 2005 (UTC)

3. That's a worthy task, but from what I know about wiki convention, it's something that should just get straightened out on a talk page somewhere. That said, we can create a dedicated talk page for it here, but the title would probably be a little frightening (something like Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Disambiguation/templates).

4. Also a worthy task, since disambig-related templates are among the most important, but I'm not sure that it belongs here. The two tasks that this project has at present are thrown together a bit haphazardly, but they're similar at least because they're both clear-cut and require a lot of work. This one is nebulous and requires comparatively less work. IMHO, I think that could be a separate project, but I really don't know. --Smack (talk) 01:58, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Agreed .. it's a fuzzy activity, more a matter of being a good wikicitizen than anything else (the creator of the template should place it on the index page in general, I think). Courtland 03:07, July 21, 2005 (UTC)

Page titling

Another possible expansion of scope: correcting page titling. Some dab pages are named Glop (disambiguation) but have Glop as a redirect, or vice versa. This might be too big a can of worms, though.

And then there's the fact that Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Uranus are primary topic pages but Saturn, Neptune, and Pluto are dab pages. (Mercury is a special case because of the element.) I put Venus on Requested Moves to move it to "Venus (planet)" (and turn Venus into a dab) and that idea got soundly trounced, so probably Saturn, Neptune, and Pluto should become planet pages.

Also, some pages titled Glop (1989 movie) have a dablink to Glop (disambiguation) even though it's not necessary.

I'm thrilled that somebody started this project, however, and am eager to dig in! —Wahoofive (talk) 07:33, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

I'm mildly in favor of adding this to our list of tasks.

Why is that form of titling a big can of worms? User:Jnc promoted it here, and I've been using it semi-regularly.

Second, I'm confused by the Venus thing. Venus has around 1000 links, and Venus (mythology) has around 175. Some of the reasons cited on the relevant talk page are against policy. --Smack (talk) 01:58, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

What I was referring to regarding the planets is the inconsistency; some planets have a dab page at the primary title while others go directly to the planet. The decision on Venus is already made. —Wahoofive (talk) 03:46, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Suggested way for individuals to start

A good start to work out personal processes for page updates related to this WikiProject might be for each participant to go through their own disambiguation page-related contributions and work on those first. However, looking through one's contributions list is tedious; is there a way the database can be interrogated directly to identify the set of pages I'm referring to here? Courtland 03:15, July 21, 2005 (UTC)