Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by BostonMA (talk | contribs) at 21:38, 24 January 2006 (Disambiguation). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Interesting. He criticised the way Indian music was made "superficial" and "marginalised" , yet he played a major part in encouraging this by playing at Rock festivals with the Beetles and allowing this to happen himself.

Disambiguation

The question has arisen whether or not the page Ravi Shankar ought to be a disambiguation page for Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Ravi Shankar (musician) and others. Although the immediate question pertains to the Ravi Shankar article, this question touches upon some larger questions related to when should an ambiguous title point to a disambiguation page, versus when should it point to the most commonly expected page.

I will start the discussion by pointing out that there are three types of links that need to be fixed:

1. links to the wrong article
2. links to disambiguation pages
3. links to non-existent articles

Whether an ambiguous title points to a disambiguation page or to the most likely article will affect the types of bad links that are created. If the ambiguous title points to the most likely article, then in cases where the most likely article was not intended, naive links will point to the wrong article. If the ambiguous title points to a disambiguation page, then naive links will always be links to disambiguation pages. In one case, some, perhaps most, links will not need fixing, in the other case, all links will need fixing. But in addition to the issue of the relative proportion of links that need fixing, is the issue of the costs associated with each type of bad link.

Costs of links to disambiguation pages

There are at least three ways that users may arrive at a disambiguation page.

1. by typing in the name of the page in the search box and pressing Go
2. by typing in a search term in the search box and pressing Search, then selecting a page from the results.
3. by clicking on a link that points to that page

I don't have any figures regarding the relative frequencies with which these methods are used to reach a page. I will, however, make some general observations.

1. When a user clicks the search button, they would probably not inconvenienced by the appearance of a disambiguation page
2. If the percentage of links to a disambiguation page is small in comparison to links to the disambiguated articles, then the likelihood of arriving at the disambiguation page via a link becomes correspondingly small.
3. If the ambiguous title points to a disambiguation page, then most attempts to reach a related article using the Gobutton will bring the user to the disambiguation page.

Cost of links to an incorrect page

The main difficulty in correcting a link to an incorrect page is that the location of such links is generally unknown. Such links may be found through browsing the articles, or by iterating through the "What links here" list. The effort required to find errors by iterating through "What links here" lists must be repeated over and over again if it is to find newly introduced errors. Thus the cost of fixing such links through planned effort is high. On the other hand, if a user, browseing Misplaced Pages comes across an incorrect link, there are several possibilities.

1. The user recognizes that the link is in error and fixes it.
2. The user recognizes that the link is in error and does nothing to fix it.
3. The user does not recognize the error, but draws no incorrect conclusions.
4. The user does not recognize the error and arrives at incorrect conclusions. (For example, a user might conclude that Ravi Shankar, the musician, is an alumnus of Government Victoria College, Palakkad, which is false).

Costs of links to disambiguation pages

The costs of links to disambiguation pages differ from the costs of links to the wrong article.

• Links to disambiguation pages are easy to find, via "What links here" enabling them to be efficiently corrected through planned effort.

When a browsing user clicks on a link to a disambiguation page the user may

1. Click through to the page they seek without making the original link a direct link
2. Fix the original link to a direct link as well as proceed to their desired page.

If no planned effort is used to fix links to disambiguation pages, then the quantify of inconvenience to users by the link to the disambiguation page depends on the frequency with which users change such links to direct links.

My opinion

Given the above considerations, I am of the opinion that the greatest costs are associated with links to the wrong article, even when one particular article is much more like to be the desired article than others. The costs associated with links to disambiguation pages I think are significantly less than the costs associated with links to the wrong article. The area where the issues seem most clouded are when users attempt to reach pages with the Go button. All in all, I would argue that it would be a net win for the Ravi Shankar page to be a disambiguation page. --BostonMA 21:38, 24 January 2006 (UTC)