Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation pages with links/Archive 14
Finding dab links in a WikiProject's articlesI believe that if I could take the Disambiguation pages with links list, somehow convert it to a piped list, feed that into AutoWikiBrowser's "What links here", then run a compare against a WikiProject's article list, I could more easily fix dab links in that WikiProject's articles. But the "somehow convert it to a piped list" part is the stopper, because I don't see a way to download the data. Am I missing something, or is there a more direct way of doing what I want to accomplish? Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 17:07, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
Templates with disambiguation linksThe maintenance list "Templates with disambiguation links" is now empty for days, something what is highly unlikely. Is that page still maintained? The Banner talk 15:22, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
Links to Project Page, Monthly List and Bonus List are downTitle says it all; I think the links have been down for more than a day now. Would somebody with the right technical knowledge please effect repairs? Thanks, PKT(alk) 16:35, 17 April 2015 (UTC)
The tools are down today - can somebody please effect repairs? Thanks in advance! PKT(alk) 21:40, 5 June 2015 (UTC) Issue with templatesI've noticed that the tools don't seem to update correctly with templates. For example, I believe that I've fixed the dab links linking to Providence Academy, but for some reason, there are still pages listed under the "What links here" Wikipedia tool and the WMF labs tool ([1]). Most of the dab links were caused by this template, Template:Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, which I disambiguated. Am I missing something here? Thanks, Natg 19 (talk) 21:55, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
Countdown on articles with multiple dablinksThe "Articles with Multiple Dablinks" tool reports on disambiguation status/progress from a different perspective: how many articles have how many outgoing ambiguous links. While number of disambiguation pages and number of incoming dablinks to them is what iscovered by the Monthly Challenge and by the Daily Disambig report. Is this worth tallying/reporting? --doncram 20:22, 22 July 2015 (UTC) Manually tallying for now:
References
I think this is an excellent addition to our metrics. bd2412 T 12:51, 23 July 2015 (UTC)
Outgoing vs. Incoming changes and totalsToday's "the Daily Disambig" has the following report:
Thanks, R'n'B, for that! I'm curious if it will agree completely with the approach for tallies done so far. And, do these reports on OUTGOING links reconcile with reports of INCOMING links? I think changes in the two types have NOT agreed so far. It is not clear, but the totals of the two types are possibly compatible, possibly disagree with each other, so far. For July 30, per the Table 3-reported tallies of Outgoing links (plus specifics on July 30's 5+ items below), the total number of Outgoing links is: =10x2 + 9 + 8 + 7 + 5*4 + 4*(126-9) + 3*(1069-126) + 2*(8260-1069) + 1*(114,457-8260) = 57 + 468 + 2,869 + 14,382 + 106,197 = 123,973. That's close but does not agree exactly with the July 30, 2015's Table 1-reported 124,106 incoming links (differs by 133). The July 30 items having 5+ outgoing links are: 1. List of football clubs in Ghana 10 links FIX 2. Night of Champions (2015) 10 links FIX 3. The Fillmore Detroit 9 links FIX 4. List of the works of Bastien and Henry Prigent 8 links FIX 5. Ancient tell 7 links FIX 6. Beachborough Manor 5 links FIX 7. List of populated places in Kosovo by municipality 5 links FIX 8. List of the busiest airports in California 5 links FIX 9. Tourism in Paraguay 5 links FI Any small discrepancy does not matter; the point of these reports is to give general feedback on progress in disambiguation and give general guidance as to where effort can best be applied (e.g. if there has been a big increase in the number 5+ outgoing pages, then applying effort there will probably be fairly productive). --doncram 17:32, 30 July 2015 (UTC)
bot message confusingI just received a DPL bot message saying
I've gotten lots of DAB link notices before, but I don't remember them being this unclear. I wasn't sure whether this meant or does it mean
? I got that figured out: The message was wrong. WikiBlame said, "katha was already present in the first revision found dating from 13:36, 28 June 2010", so I followed instructions and left a message for JaGa. But this all took a whole lot more time than I could afford. I had done quite a bit of editing on Mantra, so I was looking through my edits till I remembered WikiBlame. So please fix the message format to
Brevity can be a virtue in telegrams, footnotes, etc., but adding two letters and a space on each of two lines surely won't break the bank here. To discuss this, please {{Ping}} me. --Thnidu (talk) 20:04, 30 April 2015 (UTC)
TV channel mayhemAs can be seen witnessed from the project page, there's an inflation of "Channel xx" dab pages, usually referring to TV channels. As a side effect, this is leading to a massive inappropiate use of the (disambiguation) qualifier to link to them, e.g. Template:American TV by channel number. Since most of them are TV channels, wouldn't it be best to shift all TV channels to set index articles called Channel xx (TV), thus purging the dab page and using it only for the purpose it's supposed to serve. And when the page contains TV channels only, just get rid of the dab tag and replace it by an SIA one. Feedback? --Midas02 (talk) 15:39, 6 May 2015 (UTC) Lazdynų PelėdaI've started a discussion on the Talk page of Lazdynų Pelėda, as there is a disagreement over whether it should be de-dabbed. Nick Number (talk) 22:47, 10 May 2015 (UTC) Please be aware of a proposed article move with discussion here, which would also involve the move of disambiguation page Sabbatarian to Sabbatarianism (disambiguation). I see that the disambiguation page is on your maintenance list, which I wouldn't want to touch, not understanding your processes. If there are any concerns, please speak up at the discussion site, as there is no apparent controversy about the article move, and things could happen soon. If I make the move, I'll post notice here. Evensteven (talk) 03:09, 1 July 2015 (UTC)
Mass damaging of dab pagesHi, could someone keep on eye on 86.221.26.249? He/she is mass damaging dab pages related to Indian names, apparently completely ignorant of the dab guidelines. --Midas02 (talk) 04:05, 29 July 2015 (UTC) August 2015 disambiguation contestI aim to win the August 2015 disambiguation contest. Don't take this as discouragement, though. Quite the opposite: come at me. bd2412 T 15:23, 30 July 2015 (UTC)
GaliciaThere has been a lengthy discussion about the layout of Galicia. It probably isn't necessary to read the entire thing, but it would be helpful if people could offer their opinions on the layouts proposed in my last entry, with the names "All geographic entries in one section" and "Spain and Eastern Europe entries at the top". Nick Number (talk) 17:56, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
dab to surname conversionsDiscussion in a section above about the Noronha example raised some issues about the possibility and value of identifying and converting disambiguation pages to surname pages. For the Noronha example, there's agreement it should no longer be a dab, even though it has a place item, which itself is a partial match, as the place is named for one of the persons. One issue: Are there a lot more of these? I found what seems like a lot by running Results of Catscan search for categories= "Disambiguation pages" and "Surnames" and NOT templates="surname", which yields 7022 items, and then reviewing selected ones that appear more likely to have usage as a lastname only. In review, discard ones where the dab page shows there's a company of that name or major places, etc. --doncram 22:32, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
Dab to surname page candidates
Using the CatScan results above, find ones ending in "man" by control-f searching for "man", which gets 156 hits. For hits where "man" ends the name, review the dab page, and if it seems placename or usage would be prominent, leave it out. (So expect most usages will be as family names). Resulting in:
bot requestHaving gathered these names, I feel inclined to request they be converted by bot that would remove any disambiguation template, add the surname template at the bottom, add an administrative tracking category. And have bot remove WikiProject Disambiguation if present on Talk page? Or add it if it is missing, with a new class? Anyhow, I'd like support here before making a bot request to implement it. It is not very many items; it could be done manually, but I would hope to have other batches to be run later. Is is okay to convert all of these? And to do so by bot request? --doncram 22:32, 7 August 2015 (UTC) DiscussIt is common practice where there are more than a few persons with a surname on the dab page to split them off to a separate surname page. But it is a judgement call as to whether the surname page is the primary topic, or even whether readers are better served by separating the surnames from the dab page.older ≠ wiser 23:22, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
I don't think this can be done by a bot. If you have actually looked at
You have to give credit to Doncram for thinking out of the box. Instead of fixing links to dab pages, he's thinking: let's get rid of dab pages! End result will be the same, less effort required. :) Joking aside, I feel very strongly about this. Speaking multiple languages, I often find myself scouring other Wikipedias trying to figure out how many articles, dab pages, family pages, surname pages, duke, earl, peerage and other title pages there are on some family names, and which is which. The result is that you often find yourself with a bunch of people sharing the same family name, usually some place names derived of that, or vice versa, sometimes a link about a "Foo family" (usually for nobility), then add to that some peerage as well... Anyway, needless to say, for the simple contemporary English family names, it shouldn't be too hard to clean up, in all other cases, an experienced someone will need to look into it to find the best solution. No bot can do that. Another remark, you mention dab pages carrying the surname template? That's dead wrong, it's either one or the other. So what you could do, if there are such pages, they need to be tagged with dab-cleanup. But be careful, people won't appreciate you doing this for hundreds at a time. What's wrong with your tool by the way? It's supposed to be looking for pages with a disambig and a surname tag, and for me it comes up with pages carrying the disambig/Page with surname-holder list tags. Which is not the same, and the latter ones definitely don't need cleaning up. --Midas02 (talk) 01:37, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
General Secretary and similar articlesHey, I disagree with this edit converting General Secretary from an article into a disambiguation page. It goes the opposite direction to the conversions we ought to be doing, in general, and adds 900 articles to the number of disambiguation pages with links that need fixing! To editor Altenmann, would you please consider wp:DABCONCEPT and comment here, and to others would you please consider and comment upon this as well? I ask here at wt:DPL because this is individual article is a large and important issue, and because the editor changing this has modified other articles similarly recently, so it is important to come to some shared understanding. Right now I think it is a matter for discussion only, not requiring any change of policy, but perhaps also an RFC could be needed. (Disclosure: I and Altenmann were on opposite sides of some other issue recently, but, sorry i have touched so many articles recently that I can't right now remember where. I think that was completely unrelated, so I feel it is okay for me to open this discussion. However I hope completely uninvolved others could take the lead addressing this.) sincerely, --doncram 12:06, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
I became convinced that the {{dab}} I added must be removed. Please confirm that the same is true for First secretary, which is of the same ilk (since 2012). - üser:Altenmann >t 16:16, 8 August 2015 (UTC) A truly main article about the concept would be the one which traces the genesis of how a lowly "secretary" duty has gradually climbed to the top ranks. - üser:Altenmann >t 16:27, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
A generic solutionI noticed the following remark of User:BD2412 in the previous section:
And it strikes me that it would be a great idea to do the same here: introduce the concept of {{office title}} type of page. I suspect there are quite a few pages have (paraphrasing BD2412) " nothing but examples of offices which share the title", and "A good page about a title should" have a well-referenced encyclopedic text, rather than a blurb "This title is used here and there". I believe this solution will kill many problems associated with the articles of this type and permit a painless cleanup of these. - üser:Altenmann >t 16:36, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
Now that we are at this, what do you think about splitting a separate page for Executive assistant, which sits now within "Secretary" page? IMO it is a separate subject, midway between "secretary" and "secretary-general", with no overlap, which would have justified a merge. - üser:Altenmann >t 16:38, 9 August 2015 (UTC)
Countdown on editors dablinking a lot
I dunno, this is just another idea, not sure if it is very worthwhile tracking. From the "New Article Dablinks Arranged by Editor" report:
References
--doncram 18:33, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
convert 1,000+ "common name dab pages" to set index articlesBeing involved here at wp:dpl, I have come to appreciate that many dablinks are properly eliminated by changing a dab page to a set index article or other regular article. And in my view now, there are 1,138 dab pages on common names of animals, including fish, that all should be converted to set index articles. Converting these should eliminate some number of current and yet-to-be-created dablinks in this area.
All 1,138 of these meet terms of wp:DABCONCEPT, and should be converted, right? This comes up because "bollworm" is in the current month's DAB Challenge (wp:MDC) list. There were 6 dablinks to the former dab:
It seems to me that these are all cleared properly by changing bollworm from a dab page to a wp:SIA, which i did. And then I noticed that it was in the category of animal common name dabs. I browsed around and all find Category:Set indices on animal common names (which has 45 members now), and I applied that to bollworm article. All of the others should be converted and put into Category:Set indices on animal common names, too, IMO. There's even a note at the SIA category that it is to include some disambiguation pages too, not just SIA pages. Because, I guess, they all should be SIAs already.... Is this all correct? And, if so, how is this best implemented, including where should there be any discussion, and where should notice be given? Probably a wp:BOTREQUEST could take care of the actual changes. I don't want to make waves unnecessarily, so I hope for some advice/comments here. :) --doncram 00:48, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
A proper analysis would also require one to consider the downsides of a move from dab page to SIA. Have you considered those, what would be the effect on links, users, the disambig situation and the ecosystem as a whole? --Midas02 (talk) 20:11, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
I'm largely responsible for populating the categories being discussed. Earlier this year, I went through all of Category:Disambiguation pages and added categories to all entries that I could readily identify as being common names shared by multiple organisms (though I'm sure I missed a bunch of non-obvious ones). For plants, I converted all the pages only listed plant meanings from DABs to SIAs. Barring any additions in the last few months Category:Plant common name disambiguation pages is entirely pages that list two or more plant meanings and at least one non-plant meaning, and the SIA category is pages with only plant meanings. Using SIAs for plant common names has been discussed several times at WikiProject Plants, and I feeel that there is sufficient consensus among plant editors to convert DABs to SIAs. However, I've encountered differing opinions from some editors working primarily on DABs. There is seems to be some disagreement about how much detail can be included in compliance with MOSDAB and whether or not links must include the title of the DAB page (i.e., whether the scientific name can be linked or whether a parenthetically disambiguated redirect from the common name such as Pawpaw (genus) should be linked). There hasn't been much discussion about how animal common names applied to multiple species should be handled, so I simply tagged the ones I found with Category:Animal common name disambiguation pages rather than converting to SIAs. I added project banners to all the common names that covered two or more organisms in the scope of one of the animal projects (i.e., a page that listed two fish and one insect got tagged as a disambig with the fish banner, but not the insect banner; one fish and one insect got no banners, and two fish and two insects got both banners). I believe guiding readers to the correct page will usually require more detail than permitted by (my understanding of) MOSDAB, so I am in favor of converting animal DAB pages to SIAs and adding further details. At present, the animal common name DAB category is a mix of pages that have at least one non-animal meaning (which should remain DABs), and pages that have only animal meanings (candidates for conversion to SIA), so a bot can't be used to switch them all over. I don't think pages should be converted to SIAs merely to reduce the workload for WP:DPL. Incoming links to ambiguous common names should still be disambiguated if possible, but I know in many cases there is insufficient context to determine which organism is meant and it's essentially impossible to disambiguate. I'd love to see an incoming link report for SIAs similar to the reports here. I guess another issue is the concept of "sets". It is usually easier to provide details that would guide the reader to the correct article for organisms that have little in common but a shared common name. Organisms that have much in common (forming more of a set) are harder to differentiate. Plantdrew (talk) 20:39, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
draft animals dab and sia plan, to be edited
fixing up categories for dabs and sias
Another example raises a question: should new SIA pages be classified similarly to disambiguation pages they replace? I just cleared 7 dablinks in this month's Dab Challenge by converting Dace from a disambiguation page to a SIA page. It had template {{disambig|fish}} on it which I changed to {{sia|fish}}. I imagine that SIA pages perhaps should be categorized together, i.e. have a category of fish - SIA pages, especially because it is possible that there will be back and forth conversions. But I have no idea if SIA pages are categorized that way. And if they are being categorized, i have no whether my edit was done properly (would capitalization to {{SIA|fish}} be necessary?) or has any effect. I don't immediately see an fish-SIA-related category in the article. Plantdrew, could you possibly please comment? (To be clear, I think the classification of dab pages done by Plantdrew, including for the Dace article in early 2014, is very valuable.) Others' comments welcome too of course. By the way I did not attempt to dismabiguate the 7 inbound links before converting the page, but I did note them on the Talk:Dace page. Currently, some of us are working on converting dabs to SIAs and so I think we should set them up with whatever categories are proper, but i understand we're not working on clearing inbound "sialinks". Also, an expert might consider the numerous species sometimes called dace to be very different, but to a common reader they are all the same IMHO. --doncram 16:27, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
Plants have a (mostly) consistent scheme. Animals are all over the place in terms of category titles and content. Category:Plant common names contains articles (more developed than SIAs) with Category:Set indices on plant common names as a subcategory, which is also a subcategory of Category:Set indices on plants. Pages included directly in Category:Set indices on plants are all ambiguous scientific names (although there are also ambiguous plant scientific names in Category:Species Latin name disambiguation pages; the distinction between SIAs and DABs isn't very consistent here). I'm not quite sure what you're suggesting. I don't think Category:Reptiles etc. should be filled with a bunch of SIAs. Broad categories like that tend to fill up with articles categorized by editors who aren't very familiar with the category structure for a given topic, and need maintenance. There's almost always a more relevant subcategory. In the interests of making it easier for editors to put pages in appropriate subcategories, common names SIAs should have a subcategory so they don't clutter the main category. That could be either "Foo common name" or "Set indices on foo" or something. I don't both "Foo common name" and "Set indices on foo" are necessary unless common name articles (e.g, eagle, hake, mackerel) are being placed in the "Foo common name" category. I'd go with singular for the switches, but it should be possible to make both singular and plural work. Plantdrew (talk) 01:29, 12 August 2015 (UTC) I was getting confused. I outline existing vs. "preferred" dab categories and SIA categories and common names below. Note the existing category tree doesn't make sense.
The following may read better in an edit window, where indentations are uniform and with intended linebreaks. Parentheticals are about the contents of each type. Here: Existing dab categories:
Preferred dab categories:
Existing non-dab categories:
The SIA ones also fall into:
The common names ones also fall into:
Preferred non-dab categories
The SIA ones also fall into:
There are to be no categories with "common name" in their title, unless there are multiple articles written about naming practices for fish, etc. How does the above do? To implement those names would require renaming of some categories and removal of other categories in a big CFD. --doncram 23:49, 12 August 2015 (UTC)
template for dabs convertedI drafted a template that I hope might be helpful when converting a dab to an SIA or standalone article. New {{DabConceptExpand}} is adapted from {{DabConcept}} (also known as {{Dabprimary}}). See Category:Former disambiguation pages converted to broad concept articles, which as of this writing has 15 members. All are recent conversions of dabs noted in the Monthly Dab Challenge by myself or others. Why? Sometimes converting a dab to an article is a big change and may not be appreciated. Other editors deserve notice and invitation to participate, and this might help in creating necessary understanding, I hope. --doncram 00:24, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
Okay, I created Template:SIA-Conversion-Expand, to apply better to cases when a new SIA has been created by conversion of a disambiguation page. Its wording is better in some ways but too long; revisions are invited. Note this proposes usage of "topic (SIA)" redirects, akin to "topic (disambiguation)" redirects, to differentiate intended links from those which might be unintended. It adds a tracking category. Engine house, on this month's Dab Challenge was just converted to an SIA and as of this writing is the category's only member. Some of the 16 pages converted recently by disambiguation page conversion, that received the {{DabConceptExpand}} template, should be switched over. As of this writing there are 310 pages marked with the DabConcept / Dabprimary template, waiting to be converted. (Updated continuously: There are now 467 articles in Category:Disambiguation pages to be converted to broad concept articles.) As Midas02 notes, these should be converted sooner rather than later, so that legitimate inbound links are not removed. I hope using these banners help other editors understand what is going on, and encourages them to help rather than to reverse good conversions (which has been happening). Here are some counters:
Hope this helps. --doncram 22:28, 14 August 2015 (UTC) What to do with an irresponsible dab fixer?Hi, I was alarmed by the disappearance off the dab list of a topic which I found highly difficult to disambiguate. Investigating, I stumbled upon someone who has been making a string of highly questionable edits. Now, what to do about this? This is a public forum, and it's not about naming and shaming. But that person needs to be called to order. --Midas02 (talk) 20:06, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
notice of proposal to merge "The Sunday Telegraph" into "The Daily Telegraph"I have made a proposal to merge The Sunday Telegraph into The Daily Telegraph at Talk:The Daily Telegraph#proposal to merge "The Sunday Telegraph" into "The Daily Telegraph"; you may be interested in participating there. This relates to wp:DPL due to the workload of disambiguating what I believe is the #1 most frequently linked disambiguation page, The Telegraph. Merger would make disambiguation easier. By the way, a possible follow-on, not mentioned in the merger proposal, would be to consider moving the combined page to The Telegraph. I am not sure, but the combined usage of these two may be larger than the usage of all other "Telegraph" newspapers. If so, then we would be agreeing that when "The Telegraph" is wikilinked it should be understood to be the U.K. publication(s), and the #1 source of disambiguation workload for wp:DPL will be eliminated. But the proposal is merely to combine the U.K. articles. --doncram 16:48, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
Set Index Articles Needing DisambiguationWhen a dab having incoming links is converted to an SIA (sia), that changes the dablinks into what I want call "sialinks". What to do with them? One view is that they're no longer in the domain of this wp:DPL project. (Note there are lots of incoming links to existing SIAs that wp:DPL is not examining.) Another view suggested is that one should fix all the incoming links first, before converting the dab. That can be done for links that clearly should be revised to point to specific articles listed on the dab/sia. And some incoming links may be correct, intended as they are. But others can be impossible to resolve properly. So something like a "siadn" tag, for "SIA disambiguation needed", is needed. Rather than discuss or request, I set something up. See template:siadn. Tagging a sialink with {{siadn|date=August 2015}} puts the article into new categories:
I applied it in Harada Daiun Sogaku at a sialink that i could not resolve, incoming to newly converted-to-SIA Ankoku-ji. Ankoku-ji is a dab on this month's Dab Challenge list. For another sialink that correctly comes to the SIA page, I revised it to link to Ankoku-ji (SIA) instead, to show that it is intentional. It seems more responsible to mark the sialinks than to ignore them. Perhaps some part of this project, or other Wikiprojects or other editors may want to know about them and fix them, or at least the ones in their own areas. Currently if you click on the "SIA disambiguation needed" tag in the article, it brings up DabSolver, but DabSolver doesn't "find" the ambiguous link. Hopefully DabSolver can be adapted to do so, and to understand that a link to "article (SIA)" is intentional and does not need fixing, and to offer up "Link to SIA page" as an option. --doncram 20:26, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
convert 500+ "Battle of X" dab pages to SIAsThere are 550 to 570 "battle of X" type SIA pages at Category:Disambiguation pages from "Battle of" on. The vast majority of these should be converted to Set Index Articles. In this month's Disambiguation Challenge, there were two: Battle of Kharkov and Battle of Târgu Frumos. In last month's there was at least one more, and the Battle of Ypres was also recently changed to a dab then re-converted by me. It is perfectly fine for there to be a link to any one of these, such as saying, for example, in the 28th Rifle Division article, that it "fought at the Battle of Târgu Frumos." Who knows for sure if it fought just in the First Battle of Târgu Frumos, 9–12 April 1944, or just in the Second Battle of Târgu Frumos, 2–8 May 1944, or both? Or for all of the time inbetween where the lines were relatively static but lives were lost every day? In fact Soviet historiographers didn't consider it to be a battle until relatively recently; they considered it to be part of a larger Soviet offensive and not worth talking about separately. Maybe to downplay that it went poorly for the Red Army. While the Wehrmacht's history plays it up. There exist commissions on the determination of battle periods and names, anyhow, which shows how arbitrary definitions are; insisting that all past and current and future sources use any single partition of a long campaign into separate battles is futile. We should not be encouraging monthly dab challenge editors, or anyone else, to delink battle names like these. Nor should we be forcing editors to make guesses in order to keep links in, or force them to complete difficult research and then use awkward language like "the unit fought at the 'First Battle of Q' and the 'Second Battle of Q' and part of it fought in the 'Battle of R' (which some call the 'Third Battle of Q'{{cn|date=2007}}) but most sources say it was in reserve during the 'Battle of S', an arguably lesser engagement{{says who?}} that others call the "Fourth Battle of Q", and then they fought in what some call the "Fifth Battle of Q", and they were given an award for their performance in the 'Battle of Q' but that is a misnomer because it seems like they missed parts of it." No, simply state they received the award for the name of the battle in the award statement, the 'Battle of Q'. It seems non-strategic to go through 275 to 285 months (20+ years) while we address the two per month that randomly show up in the MDChallenge, and make mistakes of inconsistency while "fixing" them, instead of fixing them all at once, well, and then enforcing the line on that (i.e. noticing and combatting slippage like someone changing the Battle of Ypres into a dab). I wonder, could the regular MDChallenge be redefined for October, say, to address permanent fixes like these conversions? Or, can 10 people agree to handle 1/10 of the conversions needed on a worklist? Or, do people think it's best to deal with these as they come up? --doncram 17:51, 29 August 2015 (UTC)
Chiefs of ... (military)Hello, have a look at Chief of Army Staff which is on September's dab list. It is also linked to some other 'Chief of' pages. My first impressions: should these be dab pages? Not all chiefs of ... of every country will have their own article, so it only seems logical there should be a generic article about them. They are en:Category:Military ranks, and I would rather throw them into that category than to keep them as a dab page. How was this solved for other, similar, situations? --Midas02 (talk) 02:16, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
RingtailWhy was Ringtail converted to a SIA? As far as I can see it lists different species, so should be dab'able. --Midas02 (talk) 00:22, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
Increase of the monthly disambiguation batchI guess this message is primarily concerning R'n'B, assuming he's the one taking care of the software compiling the monthly dab list. Everyone will have noticed the number of links to resolve has gone down considerably. The current list has an average of 7 links per dab page, where this was still 11 or 12 a couple of months ago, and the number of links to resolve per month has gone down from about 12-14,000 to about 7,000 now. As a result the list is more and more frequently falling short of the end of the month. We're now halway trough the month, and the number of pages with more than 6 links is already down to less than 200, the number of pages with more than 4 links less than 300. This is a missed opportunity given there is a strong momentum to be going faster. My suggestion would be to increase the batch to 1,500 a month, and even to 2,000, as previous months have proven that 12-14,000 links per month can be dealt with by the community. So could you give it some thought please? --Midas02 (talk) 06:51, 16 August 2015 (UTC)
Midas02 has a point with the scary scenario. May I connect that to a point that I would like to make, that fixing the newest dablinks promptly is probably the best use of effort. Fixing dablinks on so-called Today's articles (really yesterday's) is more successful in delivering feedback to other editors, while they are still working perhaps on the same article or on related ones. I get more "Thank you" notes from fixing those, than anything else i've done in wikipedia. I believe the editors a) notice the change made, b) if a fix has been done will then be somewhat more likely to use the correct link instead of the dablink in their other articles right away, c) if a "disambiguation needed" tag has been added they will likely fix it, d) be more sensitive in general about need for disambiguation (sometimes reminding past participants in the Monthly Challenge that they can come back), and e) are just a bit more encouraged and happy about contributing, from the fact they can see others noticing their work. So, would it be possible to add Today's dablinks to the monthly points competition? Meaning you get to earn points fixing new dablinks, but only while they appear in the Today's Dablinks report. This way, we'd be much more certain to make progress every day, and we'd be spending more effort where it has the best effect. :) I don't know if this is technically possible or not, but I hope, knock on wood, that it is. What do @JaGa:, @R'n'B:, and others think? --doncram 23:28, 30 September 2015 (UTC) Dabsolver errorHi, Anyone else having problems. When i click fix on the watch list tool it comes up The URL you have requested is not currently serviced. Then says if you maintain this tool you have not enabled a web service for your tool, or it has stopped working because of a fatal error. You may wish to check your logs or common causes for errors in the help documentation.Blethering Scot 12:21, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
The guessing competitionThere's something rotten in this project. I have, unfortunately, started taking a habit of investigating article histories whenever I'm encountering a link that doesn't make sense in an article. In many cases, I find it do be due to a faulty dab fix, even by established editors of the likes of RNB or BD2412. I can't blame them for that, because I don't know in which circumstances the misjudgement was made, maybe they just made an honest mistake. What I'm seeing now, though, is not acceptible. There are a few editors, one in particular, who are racing through hundreds of - nontrivial! - fixes in the space of just a couple of hours, averaging two or three per minute. Considering the rate, brave will be the man who dares to suggest that these people are sure about the "fix" they are applying, because obviously they are not. A handful of seconds barely gives you the time to actually read the paragraph. So they are just applying best guesses. I've spoken out in the past on the perverse effects of the leaderboard. I'd like to believe that this project is being supported by people who take in interest in correcting links, properly and responsibly, applying the necessary due diligence, and who couldn't care less about being up a ranking. The guidelines itself are calling for it is more important to disambiguate correctly than to disambiguate quickly. Right now, that's clearly not happening. As such, it's about time the project is being brought back to its basics, doing it correctly, and responsibly, or not doing it at all. I'm therefore wondering if there is a will to exclude these editors from the ranking, or if things should just go on like this? --Midas02 (talk) 19:24, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
Before we criticize efforts to fix links, we should be addressing edits like this one, retargeting a a longstanding redirect to a disambiguation page with no discussion. In this case, I reverted the retargeting, but since the target of this redirect has basically been stable for a decade, I think that it would be completely appropriate in my view to change all the incoming links to direct links with little further review. We should be addressing the ability of editors to make thoughtless links to disambiguation pages in the first place - who in their right mind links to "John Smith" for example with the expectation that the link will lead to the person they have in mind? bd2412 T 15:44, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
I fully support that we double check each others edits to find discrepancies and problematic edits made. But until we have found that doing edits quickly has acctually geenrated in a lack of correctness, I don't believe we can make such an assumption. But please, feel free to point out where I've made mistakes, it will only help the encyclopedia if you do! Tool list/* Count contest edit summaries */
SELECT a.rev_id, user, COUNT(*), rev_comment
FROM p50380g50692__DPL_p.ch_results as a
JOIN revision as b ON a.rev_id=b.rev_id
WHERE rev_comment LIKE "%AWB]]"
GROUP BY 2
ORDER BY COUNT(*) DESC
LIMIT 50;
Regarding the tools listed. Does anyone still use solve_disambiguation.py? And besides you BD2412, AutoWikiBrowser's disambiguate feature? At a cursory look it's mostly WPCleaner, Popups, and my Dab solver. Should this be a list of all tools or just the most useful ones? — Dispenser 22:13, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
Another possible feature: expert focus support, on my wish list for tools.
Dab solver wrap upSo I dedicated November to improving Dab solver. Now the month is over and I'm needed on other projects (Geo, Link checking, telnet client), so I'm going have to stop working on improvements. Here are some of things I accomplished:
Changes related to mobile support
Have fun disambiguating. — Dispenser 21:23, 3 December 2015 (UTC) In going through the dab links to this page, I found that nearly all of them are in the "see also" section of each article. I noticed that most of those "see also" sections were very similar, and I started wondering if a template added to those articles would be more efficient, because this ongoing war will be creating even more ambiguous links as time goes on and battles pile up. I found a template already created, and have decided to boldly add it to these articles and weed out the "see also" sections. So a lot of the dab links will be going away. — Gorthian (talk) 23:48, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
This rather peculiar specimen is on next month's dab list. Needless to say it needs some attention as it's... Well, what is it? --Midas02 (talk) 05:04, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
Convert the Saint pages to set index articles?There is an increasing number of Saint pages on the monthly dab list. That problem will probably only get worse since it's often quite difficult to establish which particular saint a building (or other item) was devoted to. In order to get them off the list, and to avoid people being tempted to guess them away, or to remove links, wouldn't it be best to convert them to set index articles? It would also allow for some additional freedom in adding explanations and the likes, something people tend to do quite frequently on these pages. Mind you, my proposal is only concerning the actual saints, so humans, not churches and monasteries named after them. Any takers? --Midas02 (talk) 04:32, 15 January 2016 (UTC)
A Summit Lake messHello, someone with a lack of understanding of MOSDAB guidelines has been making a bit of a mess of some Summit Lake articles. There is a dab page called Summit Lake, but now there is also a "dab page" called Summit Lake (Alaska). Although the last one should clearly be a "List of" article. However... there is also such a thing as a List of lakes of Alaska article. No point in having duplicates I'd say. I can't figure out what would be the best solution here. Merge Summit Lake (Alaska) with the list of lakes of Alaska article, and refer to that article from the Summit Lake dab page for all lakes which do not have their own article? If someone feels inspired, please look into it. Note there's also a handful of links hanging off all of those pages. --Midas02 (talk) 02:34, 19 January 2016 (UTC)
Question on updating "done" pagesHi folks, I have a quick question about updating pages as "done" once all the links are fixed. I followed the instructions to add the done pages to the end of the list (this round, Thar and Athenaeum), but when I view the list at Wikipedia:Disambiguation_pages_with_links#February_2016, those page still show up under the "To-Do" section. However, when I look at Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/February 2016, they show up properly under the "Done" section. Did I mess something up, or is there a lag in the main page updating? I'm brushing off the cobwebs from a long, long hiatus, and want to make sure not to break anything. One additional question - when we finish a page and add it to the "Done" section, are we also supposed to update the number of fixed links in the section "out of a total of 6,764 links, approximately 4,396 have currently been fixed"? Thank you for the information! All the best, -- Natalya 17:30, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
Monthly DAB Challenge February: Not updatingNo updates on the February count for over 10days now, and it all looks rather quiet. Any news? Klbrain (talk) 19:39, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
Proposal to reduce workloadI've made a proposal at Village Pump that could reduce the workload here; please check it out and comment if you can. —swpbT 18:16, 12 May 2016 (UTC) BarnstarsI don't mean to sound needy, but is it still customary to award barnstars to winners of the Disambiguation Challenge? It doesn't appear that anyone has received one since last September. Nick Number (talk) 15:39, 11 April 2016 (UTC)
False positivesI'm sure some of you have already noticed a number of false positives (that is, links that have already been fixed) appearing on the various disambiguation link lists on tools.wmflabs.org. This appears to be due to corruption of the Tools Lab database replica. I reported this a couple of days ago, but so far none of the system admins seem to think it is important enough to do anything about. If you want to monitor the bug report, it is at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T134203. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 14:11, 4 May 2016 (UTC)
Top 1000 links below 5000see Table 2 2601:541:4305:C70:4C71:5D70:4A5A:C8A (talk) 18:46, 8 July 2016 (UTC) Bonus list@JaGa: The bonus list appears to be down. Nick Number (talk) 14:34, 23 July 2016 (UTC)
St. Peter ad VinculaI'm proposing a merge of St. Peter ad Vincula to Liberation of Saint Peter, with some rearrangement of the pages. Comments would be welcome at the linked talk page. Nick Number (talk) 19:17, 27 July 2016 (UTC) Ponce de LeónI've started a discussion of whether Juan Ponce de León is the primary topic for the term Ponce de León. Comments are welcome at Talk:Ponce de León. Nick Number (talk) 17:25, 29 July 2016 (UTC) The Monthly DAB Challenge is doing more harm than goodTrue, this contest is doing a lot of good and I can honestly say that the majority of all link disambiguations I've seen are correct. But there's still a significant minority of plain wrong ones and I think one of the major reasons this is happening is the goal-scoring point-and-shoot behaviour that such a contest encourages among a proportion of editors. And I'm not sure the contest nowadays has a good raison d'être. This isn't the situation of five years ago when there were thousands of dab pages with more than a hundred links each and when you could just pick a single dab page, study the articles listed and then use that to disambiguate hundreds of links. Now dab pages have only a handful of links each and the cost of due diligence (relative to the reward of links disambiguated) is much higher. And given the impossibility of tracking down incorrectly disambiguated links, I don't think the whole thing is really worth it any more. Any thoughts anyone? I'm sure I'm not the first to bring this up but I don't see anything in the archives of the last year. Thanks. Uanfala (talk) 08:53, 1 August 2016 (UTC)
Numbers don't matchI'm curious: at the moment, the total of participants' edits is 1,754, yet the number above the progress bar says that 2,338 have been done. I know these numbers aren't precise, but that's a difference of 584. Does anyone have an answer to this discrepancy? — Gorthian (talk) 18:00, 3 August 2016 (UTC)
JasonanaggieUser:Jasonanaggie, an active contributor to this project, continues to be reckless in disambiguating links. I've had to approach them on the need for some care on four occasions in the last two weeks [4], [5], [6], [7]. I don't know if I've sounded like I was picking on them, but they don't reply to the issues raised and they don't seem to have taken note at all. Even after my last post on their talk page, I see the same pattern of obviously bad disambiguations, for example link "fixes" that break template syntax [8], creating a red link with "(disambiguation)" in its title [9], a completely arbitrary disambiguation [10], and ones that suggest they haven't even looked at the context in which the link appears [11], [12], [13]. Is it just me or this user is creating way more harm than good? Is there anything that can be done? Uanfala (talk) 18:38, 12 August 2016 (UTC) I have no idea what this user has against me, but they have been trolling my edits in an attempt to show they have superior knowledge, it seems. I have looked at the reverts that this user has taken issue with and honestly he/she is being very nit-picky with the attempt to call my edits incorrect. I will say that this individual has caught a couple errors I made, but then I think they wanted to find fault where none existed and sought to make my edits look like they were in bad faith. They were not, after continually hearing this individual commenting to me about my edits I just toned out this individual as it seems like he or she was exhibiting this trolling behavior that I initially thought he or she was performing to begin with. I don't know if this user is trying to look like a big shot or what. I always take constructive comments well, but what can you do when a troll latches onto you, hellbent to find error in any edit you perform? I must say nobody else has found issue with my edits, only thanks have come my way for the work I have done. -- Jasonanaggie (talk) 19:08, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
Some of the faults you are finding are with the design of the software presenting the disambiguation in question. When it is shown in the software it is not clear that there is a template issue. Oh, and I see no issue with the DDR disambiguation you pointed out, that is just fine. Jasonanaggie (talk) 20:41, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
Hugh O'Neill - prematurely declared doneI've been trying to figure out the currently alleged connection between Hugh O'Neill and Newtownards and was surprised to see that the Hugh O'Neill line had been moved to the "Done" section of Wikipedia:Disambiguation_pages_with_links/August_2016. I think I've now tracked down the proper connect, though not with the greatest of sources, but better than anything we had before. But as part of WP:DPL I was disappointed to see items claimed as "Done" that had not been completely resolved. [On a different note, I'm very impressed to see that the completion percentage has exceeded 90%!!!] —jmcgnh(talk) (contribs) 02:08, 20 August 2016 (UTC) KogaI have a question over here that needs fresh ideas. Thanks. — Gorthian (talk) 05:01, 20 August 2016 (UTC) I'm currently trying to work the "xxx disambig pages joined the list today, including:" list. Most of it is very easy - but I can't handle even half of the 400-odd new entries per day. Would anyone be interested in dividing up the work to avoid duplication of effort? Opening a "What links here" to find zero problems is great - but opening several in a row suggests that another DABhunter has already been on the case, rather than than that several users have had User:DPL bot on their tails and have felt guilty about it. I managed to do A-L today, but that was heavy going. It really needs three or four of us to resolve or DN-mark each day's batch; e.g. start from the top ... start from the bottom ... start from the middle and work up and down. Most of those resolutions don't count towards the monthly scoreboard; but if your goal is to reduce the headline numbers in the TDD tables, who cares? Narky Blert (talk) 01:09, 31 August 2016 (UTC)
Note: If you see a questionable disambiguation page with a large number of incoming links that has been created without discussion by moving an existing page or turning an existing redirect into a disambiguation page, do not hesitate to revert the change and request that it be discussed first. bd2412 T 01:32, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
I just made a request to move this to Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk (disambiguation) and restore Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk as a redirect to the primary topic, FC Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk. When that happens, all these links will disappear for good. Don't disambiguate any more. — Gorthian (talk) 05:26, 4 September 2016 (UTC) Quality control?Following on from the previous discussion, I'm wondering if it isn't time to adopt some kind of formal, but light and unintrusive, quality control. How about performing an audit of a sample of the disambiguations done by the top three editors and then proceeding to list them in the hall of fame only if the error rate is below a threshold? Uanfala (talk) 18:55, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
For those interested, the results of our exploratory trial audit are on Uanfala's Talk page. —jmcgnh(talk) (contribs) 23:39, 4 September 2016 (UTC) Question about moving things to the "Done" listI try to remember to move each dab page from the "to do" list down to the "done" list when I've resolved all the pages that link to it. If I can't resolve a link, I mark it with {{dn}}, but I don't move that dab page to the "done" list because the links are not all done. Have I been doing this wrong? I ask because I like the challenge of those pages that have only one link left; I find them on the monthly list (when it's working). Then, if I'm successful at resolving the last link, I move the page from "to do" to "done". Unlike previous times, this month I keep finding that the dab pages have already been moved into the "done" list, even though there was still a link to be disambiguated. Is this a practice I should adopt? — Gorthian (talk) 02:12, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
@R'n'B: In this edit, you moved Tomaszów (among other pages) to the "Done" section, even though there is still an article that links to it. I'm curious to know your reasoning behind doing so. — Gorthian (talk) 21:49, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
PFC Spartak VarnaDisambiguation of PFC Spartak Varna is a task for a bot owner. In fact, all links to PFC Spartak Varna should now point to PFC Spartak 1918. It took me some time to figure it out when fixing the templates last night, to find that out that PFC Spartak Varna had changed its name twice since 2010 (so no name conflicts) but that in 2015 a new football club was founde with the name FC Spartak Varna (minus the P of the old club). The Banner talk 09:53, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
Cooling-off period before disambiguating new dablinksThe Daily Disambig is updated with, among other things, the new entrants to the list of disambiguation pages with links. These come either from newly introduced links within articles, or from newly created or moved disambiguation pages. Following up on the discussion in the preceding thread, should there be a recommended "cooling-off" period before editors start disambiguating these links? If yes, what is the best way to implement it? Uanfala (talk) 21:33, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
Search for disambiguations of links to a given dab pageIs there any way to get to all the edits that have disambiguated links to a given dab page? I'm trying to track down and clean up likely iffy disambiguations resulting from misleadingly worded entries in a couple of dab pages. Uanfala (talk) 22:00, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
Pardon my excitement, but that example query is bloody marvelous! —jmcgnh(talk) (contribs) 06:12, 16 August 2016 (UTC)
SELECT * FROM p50380g50692__DPL_p.ch_results LIMIT 700;
Brezovica@Narky Blert: How did you come about this decision? I must admit, I didn't wade through all of the official site to find it myself, but how did you decide that 3x3 Ljubljana-Brezovica was an acceptable article name? All the rest in that table are plain names of cities. — Gorthian (talk) 19:06, 13 September 2016 (UTC)
Extra links@R'n'B: In this edit summary, you said "1. Liga still has links to fix". But DPL bot showed there were zero links left. I checked the page—there were links there, but they had all been created by retargeting a redirect to the dab page on September 6. In other words, they didn't appear on the "official" monthly list. I don't always believe DPL bot when it says there are still lots of links to an article, but when it says there are zero links, I believe that. I fixed all the links to 1. Liga; I didn't have time to check into Others, another one you mentioned as still having links to fix, but I suspect it may have been a similar situation. Please, believe DPL bot if it says there are no links left. Thanks. — Gorthian (talk) 01:41, 9 September 2016 (UTC)
@R'n'B: Please don't "put back" entries from the "done" list to the "to do" list unless you check the newly listed links. I looked at about half of the links to Tamil that you said still needed fixing, and all were rewrites or additions since August 31, so they don't "count" for this month's contest. The monthly report is correct: there are 0 links to Tamil that need fixing. I'm not sure which report you're going by, but it's wrong. — Gorthian (talk) 17:02, 16 September 2016 (UTC)
DAB Challenge LeaderboardNeeds updating - it's still showing September, and October's results are being added into that month's. (Knock-on effects in this article and the HoF also.) Narky Blert (talk) 23:17, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
A disambiguator's trickMost likely old hat, but I hadn't thought of it before today. If you come across a link in one of those templates (e.g. an infobox) which automatically bluelinks an entry no matter how silly it might be (e.g. ? or ?? or Unknown or something clearly non-notable): you can suppress the link by enclosing the information after the = sign within <nowiki></nowiki>. Narky Blert (talk) 22:55, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
DPL bot issueDPL bot may need a kick - The Daily Disambig hasn't updated today. Narky Blert (talk) 17:16, 14 October 2016 (UTC)
Hiding article Virginia ConventionsThe article Virginia Conventions has been internally linked to a disambiguation page, Virginia Convention which lists articles that mirror the main article's subsections broken down into seventeen stubs by Dallyripple, whose contributions are automatically posted to Bkwillwm's user page as his contributions. There was no discussion or consensus to hide the main article Virginia Conventions. How is this change in article status righted? TheVirginiaHistorian (talk) 18:41, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
Direct link to fixIt would be handy if the list of articles to fix included a direct link to the fixing tool. (I have created Template:Dab fix for this purpose.) Could the bot be asked to list the articles like this? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:25, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Seeking advice - unproductive discussion with another editorAkanksha Sharma (singer and performer) has an "other uses" hatnote with two links. One is to Sharma, which is a {{surname}} page, and thus correct. However, Akanksha is a DAB page. I have had no success in persuading the article creator on the article Talk Page that WP:INTDABLINK means what it says(1), and have been repeatedly reverted with summary explanations like "the page name is Akanksha" and "per name of the page or move it". Another editor has also had a correction reverted, with the summary explanation "Akanksha (disambiguation) is a redirection to Akanksha". (1) To save you the trouble of looking up the relevant bit of WP:INTDABLINK - "In a hatnote:
Any advice? WP:ANI might be the next step, but I'd prefer not to escalate unless it's the only way. Narky Blert (talk) 22:04, 31 October 2016 (UTC)
Opposition PartyFor those of you struggling with the dab links to Opposition Party (United States), there is a knowledgeable editor willing to help. See our conversation at User talk:InformationvsInjustice#Sort of an invitation and then at my talk page. — Gorthian (talk) 02:24, 3 November 2016 (UTC) What about these disambiguation practices?I've now run into a number of disambiguation cases where one of the following has been done:
Both of these practices strike me as errors and I have now encountered it enough to think that it's not inadvertent errors. I'm well aware of the temptation to just do "anything" to get a page off the worklist, but sometimes you have to leave the task for someone else with more domain-specific knowledge. Am I understanding the goals of this project incorrectly? How do we get the word out? —jmcgnh(talk) (contribs) 14:55, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
Head up on TestosteroneThe medical folks decided to split the article into two, so testosterone is now a dab page. Because of some of the tricky subject matter, I posted a call for help at WP:MED. Some of the dabs will be easy, but there will be many requiring expert judgement. Lots of {{dn}} tags will be appropriate.— Gorthian (talk) 18:56, 12 November 2016 (UTC) The page at this name was deleted, leaving Numerary (disambiguation) as the dab page with no primary topic. I moved the dab to Numerary, and there's something like 260 links to it. Almost all of them are via the {{Employment}} navbox. I've deleted the link there, but it will take the articles a good bit of time to catch up. (It used to take just a day or two, but now it seems to take weeks before edits to the template take effect on the articles they're transcluded in.) Making a null edit on each article page will make the link to the dab page disappear. I'll be doing a few at a time; I don't have energy for the whole kit and kaboodle. Join in if you can. Thanks. — Gorthian (talk) 09:31, 5 December 2016 (UTC) Leaderboard stuckUser:JaGa/Short leaderboard hasn't updated since October 13. Anyone know how to update it? Purging and a null edit had zero effect. — Gorthian (talk) 00:26, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
For entertainment onlyA recent edit history:
Hmm, that seems to have solved the problem! - and it only needed two attempts by someone who understood the template! Narky Blert (talk) 00:42, 23 December 2016 (UTC) Dablinks resulting from page movesSometimes an article would be moved away from a primary title, which would then be taken up by a disambiguation page. It's then easy to assume that the resulting dablinks were actually all meant for the article, and then proceed to retarget them using an automated tool. This probably works for long-established articles on prominent topics that are well-integrated into the encyclopedia. But most cases aren't like that, and the resulting dablinks need to be fixed on a case-by-case basis. – Uanfala (talk) 12:51, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
Failure to complete my missionI ran into an editor with a contrary interpretation of where dab links are desirable at Talk:Cavetto#Links to disambiguation pages. I made enough mistakes in the process to withdraw. —jmcgnh(talk) (contribs) 04:33, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
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Missing entries
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- So, would this list be useful, or not? --R'n'B (call me Russ) 14:12, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
- Sorry, I should have addressed this - Dispenser's report seems to cover this ground, and all the errant links found on it should now be fixed. bd2412 T 14:29, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
- @R'n'B: IMO not worth the labour of creating such a list. Template:infobox journal isn't transcluded every day. A-K in DPL is now pretty much clean. Give me 2-3 months, and so will L-Z be. After that, it'll just be a matter of WP:DPL regulars knowing this trick, and adding it to all those others which fix DABlinks generated by templates. Narky Blert (talk) 21:50, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
- Apparently I did this wrong, as User:Headbomb reverted and then redid a number of my fixes. bd2412 T 21:53, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
- @BD2412: I today redid one of your fixes without reverting you. Simply add
|bypass-rcheck=yesto the infobox (I do it just below |abbreviation=) – and the abbreviation shows correctly in the infobox, but no longer links to the DAB page. Narky Blert (talk) 23:49, 20 November 2017 (UTC) - (See e.g. Johnsonia (journal) and Johnsonia/What links here after my fix today. Narky Blert (talk) 23:57, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
- The thing is, the best fix in most of those cases is to actually fix the underlying issue and use the actual ISO 4 abbreviation. The bypass should be used for when the ISO 4 abbreviation is also an existing disambiguation page, or there's some other problem with the ISO 4 abbreviation. In most cases, this will be single word journal with a (journal) dab. Bypassing the check when there's a bad ISO abbreviation is counterproductive, since when someone fixes the issue, they will not be prompted to create the redirects. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:50, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
- @Headbomb: Fix the underlying issue? Among lawyers, CFR is the Code of Federal Regulations. I've never heard of the abbreviation Code Fed. Regul. I have legal qualifications, and have written professional opinions citing titles of CFR. Narky Blert (talk) 01:03, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
- That's because most (US) lawyers don't use ISO 4 abbreviations, but bluebook ones, which can be specified via
|bluebook=. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:06, 21 November 2017 (UTC)- It still seems odd to have an abbreviation listed that is not properly used in practice. With the CFR for example, the proper name of any CFR provision is 'x CFR y', so an alternative would inherently be a misnomer. With respect to the other uses, it is easy to conceive of a journal name that would just be a completely different and unrelated article in Wikipedia. bd2412 T 01:22, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
- @Headbomb: UK lawyers don't either. U.S.P.T.O. rules are 37 CFR, or just CFR, and that is that. Lawyers use customary abbreviations, not something dreamt up for ISO4. There is a serious risk of drifting away from WP:COMMONNAME here.
- This argument is counter-productive. I have now cleared the pages I had bookmarked where Template:Infobox journal had created a spurious link to a DAB page. There were about a hundred of them. In ten or twenty cases, I had to add the journal to the DAB page because the journal wasn't on it. That is a much more serious problem for readers than quibbling over interpretations of ISO4. Narky Blert (talk) 01:47, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
- It still seems odd to have an abbreviation listed that is not properly used in practice. With the CFR for example, the proper name of any CFR provision is 'x CFR y', so an alternative would inherently be a misnomer. With respect to the other uses, it is easy to conceive of a journal name that would just be a completely different and unrelated article in Wikipedia. bd2412 T 01:22, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
- That's because most (US) lawyers don't use ISO 4 abbreviations, but bluebook ones, which can be specified via
- @Headbomb: Fix the underlying issue? Among lawyers, CFR is the Code of Federal Regulations. I've never heard of the abbreviation Code Fed. Regul. I have legal qualifications, and have written professional opinions citing titles of CFR. Narky Blert (talk) 01:03, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
- The thing is, the best fix in most of those cases is to actually fix the underlying issue and use the actual ISO 4 abbreviation. The bypass should be used for when the ISO 4 abbreviation is also an existing disambiguation page, or there's some other problem with the ISO 4 abbreviation. In most cases, this will be single word journal with a (journal) dab. Bypassing the check when there's a bad ISO abbreviation is counterproductive, since when someone fixes the issue, they will not be prompted to create the redirects. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:50, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
- @BD2412: I today redid one of your fixes without reverting you. Simply add
- Apparently I did this wrong, as User:Headbomb reverted and then redid a number of my fixes. bd2412 T 21:53, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
- @R'n'B: IMO not worth the labour of creating such a list. Template:infobox journal isn't transcluded every day. A-K in DPL is now pretty much clean. Give me 2-3 months, and so will L-Z be. After that, it'll just be a matter of WP:DPL regulars knowing this trick, and adding it to all those others which fix DABlinks generated by templates. Narky Blert (talk) 21:50, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
- Sorry, I should have addressed this - Dispenser's report seems to cover this ground, and all the errant links found on it should now be fixed. bd2412 T 14:29, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
- So, would this list be useful, or not? --R'n'B (call me Russ) 14:12, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
WP:COMMONNAME is for article titles, not technical information. Use of this abbreviation is rather widespread too, just not in law.Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:50, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
- @BD2412 and Headbomb: "It still seems odd to have an abbreviation listed that is not properly used in practice." Ask any chemist what they understand by JACS, JCS or JOC. All of those are DAB pages. All three abbreviations are (among others) commonly used and are unambiguous among chemists. They only get expanded when writing up for publication.
- Back to where I was a moment ago. It's all about the readers. We are their servants. Narky Blert (talk) 02:05, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
- "Ask any chemist what they understand by JACS, JCS or JOC." I'm not sure what your point is here. None of those are ISO 4 abbreviation, and none of those should appear in the
|abbreviation=field of {{infobox journal}}. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:07, 21 November 2017 (UTC)- The problem here may be the name of the parameter. abbreviation= doesn't make it clear that it is only for the ISO 4 abbreviation, not for the everyday abbreviation everyone actually uses. Of course, they're often the same, but sometimes they're not. {{infobox journal/doc#Parameters}} does explain, but how many people read that? ISO4= might have been better, though I doubt it's worth the effort of converting now. Certes (talk) 11:18, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
- The problem was mostly that prior to 2010, the documentation wasn't very clear on this. There was a spur of creation in 2009 when WP:JCW came out, which led to several bad usage out there. And prior to late August of this year, no validation was done so a page with bad parameter use could have been used as a model for new articles, making the problem worse. It's since being greatly curbed with the validation template and User:TokenzeroBot reports (e.g. User:TokenzeroBot/ISO 4 mismatches).
- Not against renaming the parameter
|iso4=however. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:06, 21 November 2017 (UTC)- If it's not too much trouble, I think that may help. abbreviation=JACS causes problems but it is a very plausible piece of wikitext: JACS is an abbreviation. I think editors are much less likely to type iso4=JACS. Certes (talk) 01:40, 22 November 2017 (UTC)
- @Certes and Headbomb: Certes makes a valid point about the name of the field. "abbreviation=" doesn't tell editors that they're supposed to do their research and to get the entry right, rather than just lazily to use the one in their lab notebook. Support renaming it to "iso4=" (or, perhaps even better, to "iso4_abbr=", to make it as plain as possible what the field is supposed to contain - and, preferably, to RTFM).
- On clearing my bookmarks to pages with spurious links to DAB pages, I found a dozen or so where the link no longer existed because an editor had recently corrected the abbreviation= field. There were several where the informal abbreviation wasn't on the DAB page, so I added it.
- @Headbomb - I've seen several pages transcluding Template:Infobox journal in which the abbreviation= field is empty, thus generating the somewhat unhelpful default entry Look up here. A report designed to find, and so improve, such pages might be useful. Narky Blert (talk) 22:56, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
- Those can be found in Category:Infobox journals with missing ISO 4 abbreviations. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:14, 24 November 2017 (UTC)
- @Headbomb: That maintenance category is a good one, and has
1,5051,500 entries. It looks as if it could be easily emptyable (while taking care to ensure that an abbreviation is correct, and that any relevant mention in a hatnote or DAB page exists). Narky Blert (talk) 00:35, 25 November 2017 (UTC)
- @Headbomb: That maintenance category is a good one, and has
- If it's not too much trouble, I think that may help. abbreviation=JACS causes problems but it is a very plausible piece of wikitext: JACS is an abbreviation. I think editors are much less likely to type iso4=JACS. Certes (talk) 01:40, 22 November 2017 (UTC)
- The problem here may be the name of the parameter. abbreviation= doesn't make it clear that it is only for the ISO 4 abbreviation, not for the everyday abbreviation everyone actually uses. Of course, they're often the same, but sometimes they're not. {{infobox journal/doc#Parameters}} does explain, but how many people read that? ISO4= might have been better, though I doubt it's worth the effort of converting now. Certes (talk) 11:18, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
- "Ask any chemist what they understand by JACS, JCS or JOC." I'm not sure what your point is here. None of those are ISO 4 abbreviation, and none of those should appear in the
150 fixes away
We are 150 fixes away from clearing Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/October 2017. Let's have at it! bd2412 T 13:02, 18 October 2017 (UTC)
- Now we are less than 80 fixes away from clearing Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/November 2017. Cheers! bd2412 T 17:45, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
Virginia State Routes
See Template talk:Jct#Not working as described. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 11:11, 1 December 2017 (UTC)
Help with editing
Victoria is a bit more complicated than other disambiguation pages that I have dealt with, and I have a couple of questions. The page is listed as having 4 links; one was Dave Hughes and I fixed that. What are the other 3 links - the transclusion pages? Do I need to do anything with them? Thanks, Leschnei (talk) 12:40, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
- I am not seeing any remaining incoming links that need to be fixed. bd2412 T 12:58, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
- Good - thanks for checking. Leschnei (talk) 13:04, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
Another question
The guidelines say that disambiguation links should go to the title that includes '(disambiguation)', even if it is a redirect. So, for example, for the five redirects that link to Hooghly, should they be linked to 'Hooghly (disambiguation)' instead? Leschnei (talk) 13:14, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
- No, this does not apply to redirects, which are merely navigational tools, and which are not interpreted by our system as errors. bd2412 T 13:32, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
- Thanks again, Leschnei (talk) 13:56, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
- Redirects aren't counted as errors, but this is based on the presumption that the redirect is correctly pointed to the dab page, and shouldn't instead be targeted somewhere else. If you've checked a redirect, there's one thing you can do: categorise it. The most often used category tags in this context are {{R from ambiguous term}} and {{R from incomplete disambiguation}}. – Uanfala (talk) 20:51, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
- Yikes, I'll definitely be back with questions on those! Leschnei (talk) 03:05, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
- Redirects aren't counted as errors, but this is based on the presumption that the redirect is correctly pointed to the dab page, and shouldn't instead be targeted somewhere else. If you've checked a redirect, there's one thing you can do: categorise it. The most often used category tags in this context are {{R from ambiguous term}} and {{R from incomplete disambiguation}}. – Uanfala (talk) 20:51, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
- Thanks again, Leschnei (talk) 13:56, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
Fixing DAB links
A discussion has been opened at Wikipedia talk:Requested moves#Fixing dab links which may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. The issue is, who should fix the incoming links to a DAB page after a WP:RM discussion and move. The relevant guideline is WP:FIXDABLINKS. Narky Blert (talk) 10:28, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
Moving articles
The Daily Telegraph (Australia) really ought to be moved to The Daily Telegraph (Sydney) but has maybe thousands of links that would have to be changed. I've just moved The Advocate (Australia) to The Advocate (Tasmania) with only a hundred or so links to edit, and doing even that number was a real chore. Is there a smarter way? Doug butler (talk) 23:12, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
- The existing wikilinks should continue to work, because The Daily Telegraph (Australia) will become a redirect to the new title. If you're going to make the old title into a disambiguation page, or a redirect to one, then WP:DisamAssist will do the job, though someone still has to press a button for each page. Automation is an option but I suspect some incoming links will refer to a different Telegraph, so they need vetting.
- Thanks for asking. Too many titles just get turned into dabs without a thought for the existing links, which someone else then has to clear up! Certes (talk) 00:16, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
- Why would the links need to be changed? Per WP:NOTBROKEN, redirects are fine. bd2412 T 00:17, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
- I'd presume that because, looking at the corresponding dab pages, there is more than one Australian newspaper with the given title in each case. – Uanfala (talk) 00:52, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
- That does not necessarily prevent one of these from being the primary topic of the redirect term. bd2412 T 02:13, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
- There are, or have been, four Australian publications with that or a similar title. None as important as the Sydney paper, but "Australia" is not a true disambiguating term.Doug butler (talk) 02:30, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
- Done! (with a lot of help from a DisamAssist expert). Thanks for the good advice. Doug butler (talk) 22:38, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
- I'd presume that because, looking at the corresponding dab pages, there is more than one Australian newspaper with the given title in each case. – Uanfala (talk) 00:52, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
Problem under Current disambiguation collaborations
Under "Current disambiguation collaborations" I am trying to update to the next month for "Category:Articles with links needing disambiguation from...", but for some reason it is showing the count as zero, when there are still articles in the category. bd2412 T 03:05, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
- Fixed: {{PAGESINCATEGORY}} assumes Category: and doesn't need the namespace. Certes (talk) 12:09, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
- Thanks - well done. bd2412 T 12:37, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
Hatnotes instead of DAB page?
It seems to me that Emmanuel Katongole could be easily replaced by hatnotes in the two relevant articles. There are no other article links to this page. I can work out how to place the hatnotes, but what happens the the DAB page in this case? Leschnei (talk) 19:11, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
- The question then is: where should we take the reader who types in Emmanuel Katongole, i.e. which page are they likely to want? If there's a primary topic then we can call that page Emmanuel Katongole and we don't need a dab, just a hatnote. But if both topics are of similar notability then we probably want a page to prompt the reader, rather than taking them to a page with a 50% chance of being about some other guy. More details at WP:2DABS. Certes (talk) 19:27, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
- Ah, I see your point. Never mind then; I don't think that either of these articles is clearly primary. Thanks for the insight. Leschnei (talk) 20:07, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
- Related question - also related to my 'Another question' above - should hatnotes read "Emmanuel Katongole (disambiguation)" or is "Emmanuel Katongole" sufficient? The help pages seem to recommend the longer version but I've seen the shorter version used more often. Leschnei (talk) 20:12, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
- That would be a good topic for an RfC. I prefer to visibly include "disambiguation" so that readers will know what they are getting by clicking the link, but I have tended to pipe it where someone else has already put the hatnote on the page, to respect that editor's choice. I would prefer that we always show it in hatnotes and see also sections. bd2412 T 20:17, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
- I tend to agree with you; I like the link to be as unambiguous as possible. When you say you pipe it, do you mean {{About||other uses of the term "White Rider"|White rider (disambiguation){{!}}White rider}} or {{About||other uses of the term "White Rider"|White rider{{!}}White rider (disambiguation)}}? Leschnei (talk) 20:27, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
- I mean {{About||other uses of the term "White Rider"|White rider (disambiguation){{!}}White rider}}; otherwise, it still registers in our system as an error to be fixed. bd2412 T 22:45, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
- I tend to agree with you; I like the link to be as unambiguous as possible. When you say you pipe it, do you mean {{About||other uses of the term "White Rider"|White rider (disambiguation){{!}}White rider}} or {{About||other uses of the term "White Rider"|White rider{{!}}White rider (disambiguation)}}? Leschnei (talk) 20:27, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
- My personal preference has been to have a visible "(disambiguation)" when referring to articles (as in "For other uses, see ....") and to hide it when referring to concepts ("Not to be confused with ..."). – Uanfala (talk) 20:42, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
- I display the name of the page: See Venus (disambiguation), as Venus has a primary topic, but See Mercury because that's the title of the dab. The second one goes via a redirect to keep it off the "dab links we need to fix" lists but can get fiddly in a template: {{See also|Mercury (disambiguation){{!}}Mercury}}. WP:DABLINK has more details. The third example in WP:INTDAB shows both BD2412's preference and mine as "correct" alternatives. Certes (talk) 20:47, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
- Thanks all, it really helps to see how other editors have handled this. I've read the various help articles but it didn't all sink in at the time. Now that I've edited DAB links a little, I think I'll have to take another look. Leschnei (talk) 20:54, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
- My approach seems to be consistent (in at least some ways) with editors who have already posted and who have more experience than I do.
- Respect an earlier editor's choice. If they chose an ambiguous name, usually prefer to correct the link by piping rather than by replacement.
- Respect WP:ASTONISH. A hatnote from a WP:PTOPIC article to a DAB page with the qualifier (disambiguation) should show the full name of the disambiguation page. A hatnote from a similar name should be piped. In summary: clicking on a hatnote link should land you on a page with the identical name to that shown in the hatnote.
- Deviously, if I think that a hatnote is hopelessly unnecessary because no-one could have landed on this page by accident, I usually pipe it. (E.g. FizBoz (planet Zog), {{see also|FizBoz (disambiguation){{!}}FizBoz}}. My reason? I won't be reverted, which would recreate the problem. If another editor later comes along and deletes the useless hatnote, great!)
- MOS:SEEALSO links should never be piped. I am in two minds about {{main}} and the like.
- Don't make something a WP:PTOPIC unless it's overwhelmingly clear; and even then, think about it. The WP:PTOPIC for tetrahedron is unquestionably the Platonic solid. Nevertheless, that page collects links which ought to be to Tetrahedron. No error messages are created; those mistakes can only be fixed by eyeballing. Narky Blert (talk) 01:19, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
- (You can fall across some real horrors. I once came across a pair of pages called something like K. Krishnamurthy and K Krishnamurthy, about two different people who seemed to pass WP:NBIO. I then had no idea what to do – but I came across them again 6 months later, made two moves, and made a {{hndis}} page.) Narky Blert (talk) 02:01, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
- I had a similar experience with K. Sivanesan (politician). I now think I chose the new titles poorly, as the local tradition is that the common name has only the initial and not the full given name, but I'd be interested to hear of a better solution. Certes (talk) 12:05, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
- In my case, I was fortunately able to use one-word qualifiers; at least one of the articles didn't specify the given name. For K. Sivanesan, following the custom which you mention and I know too, the best alternative titles I can think of are K. Sivanesan (Jaffna District politician) and K. Sivanesan (Mullaitivu District politician); which are rather clumsy. Using their birthyears, i.e. K. Sivanesan (politician, born 19xx), would be a good alternative; but that date isn't in one of the articles. Narky Blert (talk) 15:46, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
- I had a similar experience with K. Sivanesan (politician). I now think I chose the new titles poorly, as the local tradition is that the common name has only the initial and not the full given name, but I'd be interested to hear of a better solution. Certes (talk) 12:05, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
- (You can fall across some real horrors. I once came across a pair of pages called something like K. Krishnamurthy and K Krishnamurthy, about two different people who seemed to pass WP:NBIO. I then had no idea what to do – but I came across them again 6 months later, made two moves, and made a {{hndis}} page.) Narky Blert (talk) 02:01, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
- Thanks all, it really helps to see how other editors have handled this. I've read the various help articles but it didn't all sink in at the time. Now that I've edited DAB links a little, I think I'll have to take another look. Leschnei (talk) 20:54, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
- Ah, I see your point. Never mind then; I don't think that either of these articles is clearly primary. Thanks for the insight. Leschnei (talk) 20:07, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
How to deal with transclusions?
I have run into transclusions several times while disambiguating and, for the most part, ignored them. But, on the Naos DAB page, there is a transclusion 'Naos (shrine)' which links to Naos (shrine), which is a redirect page linking to Naos. This seems rather indirect and awkward, so I was wondering (1) should the transclusion (and Naos (shrine), for that matter) link to Naos (disambiguation) and (2) how do we/should we edit transclusions? Leschnei (talk) 14:54, 20 December 2017 (UTC)
- Transclusions from redirects to their target pages are caused by the template on the redirect page. We ignore those. bd2412 T 15:11, 20 December 2017 (UTC)
- (ec) Just about to say the same thing. Though the Naos dab page is a mess -- I highly doubt that all of those articles contain a mention of the term. It looks like someone's attempt to make a sort of ancient Greek glossary page--though after checking, many do, though the organization of the page is still a bit irregular. older ≠ wiser 15:14, 20 December 2017 (UTC)
- Thanks for the answers. I agree that the Naos page is a mess but I don't feel comfortable enough with the subject to fix it. Leschnei (talk) 18:56, 20 December 2017 (UTC)
Can I blank a redirect page to make a red link?
The Deadbeef disambiguation page contains 0xDEADBEEF as one of its items. Originally, 0xDEADBEEF was not wikilinked on the disambiguation page, just described. I found that several articles referred to 0xDEADBEEF specifically, so I changed 0xDEADBEEF into a wikilink, meaning it to be a red link. However, 0xDEADBEEF is currently a redirect for Deadbeef, so I've created a circular redirect. Is it allowable to simply blank the 0xDEADBEEF redirect page to make it into a red link, or is there some process to go through? Leschnei (talk) 02:54, 27 December 2017 (UTC)
- I restored the previous redirect target of the page. bd2412 T 03:00, 27 December 2017 (UTC)
- Thanks! Leschnei (talk) 03:25, 27 December 2017 (UTC)
DAB links in tables
In Subic–Clark–Tarlac Expressway and Subic–Tipo Expressway, Hermosa should be disambiguated to Hermosa, Bataan but is it possible to have the table display just the town name with out the province? For the other table entries putting the town and province, like Dinalupihan, Bataan, displays just the town name, but these others don't have disambiguation pages. I've seen this in other tables, but I haven't been able to figure it out. Leschnei (talk) 21:43, 5 January 2018 (UTC)
- I can't figure it out either, I'm afraid. It is a problem of the template. bd2412 T 21:54, 5 January 2018 (UTC)
- Yes, that's a feature of the {{PHLint}} template. I think it needs a provdab= parameter, as I've attempted with this edit. It's not really a disambiguation issue; you'd have the same problem if Hermosa were an article about a different topic with the same name. Certes (talk) 22:04, 5 January 2018 (UTC)
- Thank you both. I'll give the provdab a try. Leschnei (talk) 22:19, 5 January 2018 (UTC)
Is there a way to disambiguate data coming from Wikidata?
Jacques Peretti has a link to the Broadcaster disambiguation page. The only mention of broadcaster in the body of the article is already disambiguated but the infobox mentions 'broadcaster' as his occupation, and it is linked to Wikidata. Is there any way to disambiguate this occurrence of 'broadcaster'? I have searched around but haven't found any answers on either Wikipedia or Wikidata. Leschnei (talk) 12:27, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
- There's a pencil next to the term in the infobox (at least in the skin that I'm using). Click it and you can edit the entry on Wikidata. I've changed it to "television producer" there since that is what the cited source actually indicates. Alternatively, you can populate local values in the infobox, which I think will take precedence over anything from Wikidata, although I haven't verified this. older ≠ wiser 12:52, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
- Thanks for your help Bkonrad (talk · contribs) After more searching I found Wikipedia:Wikidata/2018 RfC draft that talks about this issue. And you are right, local values currently override Wikidata - I tested it out by messing around with the Jacques Peretti page and previewing. Leschnei (talk) 13:12, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
- The problem can be even more of a nuisance when no relevant Wikipedia article exists. See Template talk:Infobox person/Wikidata#Spurious links created by this template. Narky Blert (talk) 10:32, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
- Other templates using Wikidata record spurious wikilinks too, e.g. {{RCDB}} links Kumba (roller coaster) → 94. Details: Template talk:RCDB. Certes (talk) 11:54, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
- It's difficult enough correcting errors inserted by humans; tracking down template errors seems like a game of whack-a-mole. Leschnei (talk) 13:29, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
- Although I can't fix RCDB without breaking other stuff, generally I try to fix template errors first. That way I can dispose of several moles with a single whack that's no harder than fixing an article. But I'm happy if other editors disagree: we need people mending both namespaces. Certes (talk) 14:04, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
- It's difficult enough correcting errors inserted by humans; tracking down template errors seems like a game of whack-a-mole. Leschnei (talk) 13:29, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
- Other templates using Wikidata record spurious wikilinks too, e.g. {{RCDB}} links Kumba (roller coaster) → 94. Details: Template talk:RCDB. Certes (talk) 11:54, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
- The problem can be even more of a nuisance when no relevant Wikipedia article exists. See Template talk:Infobox person/Wikidata#Spurious links created by this template. Narky Blert (talk) 10:32, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
- Thanks for your help Bkonrad (talk · contribs) After more searching I found Wikipedia:Wikidata/2018 RfC draft that talks about this issue. And you are right, local values currently override Wikidata - I tested it out by messing around with the Jacques Peretti page and previewing. Leschnei (talk) 13:12, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
Railway templates
Arbitrary break inserted, as the following discussion is not directly related to Wikidata
- If I can't work out how to fix a template-generated link to a DAB page in under 10-15 minutes, I flag it, even if that makes the page look unpretty. You created this problem, you fix it. My current bugbear is {{S-line}}, which seems to provide no means of disambiguating the |next= and |previous= parameters. It's bad enough trying to work out how to fix links in road pages with {{jct}} and the like, where the documentation is at least halfway adequate (but took me 10-15 minutes to work out). Narky Blert (talk) 23:29, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
- For {{S-line}} you can disambiguate previous with state1 and next with state2, e.g. next=Newport|state2=Essex. But that's not exactly intuitive, given that Essex isn't a state, and I completely agree with your point. Certes (talk) 23:57, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
- I've just called them out on that, see Template talk:S-line#Disambiguation. Taking your point, Perth isn't a state either... Narky Blert (talk) 00:17, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
- See also {{Transperth stations}}, which appends the ", Perth" suffix to appropriate station links. Certes (talk) 11:44, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
- I suspect a case of WP:OWN.
- I took a certain sort of twisted pleasure in making this edit, after I'd been told that all I needed to do to fix links like that was to spend an hour or two learning the templates. Narky Blert (talk) 01:42, 22 January 2018 (UTC)
- "[The template is] not badly written; it's complicated because it was presumably designed to be able to handle all sorts of disambiguation and other quirks (like multiple line termini and links to non-stations) for the convenience of editors. If you ever decide to bother to find out how it works, all the information you need is in the documentation (I've linked the relevant section; only the first two subsections should matter for article disambiguation)".
- Convenience? Sheesh. I expect easy disambiguations to take about 2 minutes, including checking. I do NOT expect easy disambiguations to take 2 minutes and then please-read-this-incomplete-and-confusing-documentation. Narky Blert (talk) 01:57, 22 January 2018 (UTC)
- See also {{Transperth stations}}, which appends the ", Perth" suffix to appropriate station links. Certes (talk) 11:44, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
- I've just called them out on that, see Template talk:S-line#Disambiguation. Taking your point, Perth isn't a state either... Narky Blert (talk) 00:17, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
- For {{S-line}} you can disambiguate previous with state1 and next with state2, e.g. next=Newport|state2=Essex. But that's not exactly intuitive, given that Essex isn't a state, and I completely agree with your point. Certes (talk) 23:57, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
- If I can't work out how to fix a template-generated link to a DAB page in under 10-15 minutes, I flag it, even if that makes the page look unpretty. You created this problem, you fix it. My current bugbear is {{S-line}}, which seems to provide no means of disambiguating the |next= and |previous= parameters. It's bad enough trying to work out how to fix links in road pages with {{jct}} and the like, where the documentation is at least halfway adequate (but took me 10-15 minutes to work out). Narky Blert (talk) 23:29, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
It can sometimes be less than intuitive. Getting Warsaw Railway Station and Warsaw railway station to point to the same place required additions to the list of Dutch stations, to avoid breaking an apparently unrelated German article. Certes (talk) 02:10, 22 January 2018 (UTC)
Disambiguation pages vs set index pages
I do not think this will make me popular but when cleaning up old templates I came around a glitch. For instance, WPCleaner does not find links to set-index pages as it is strictly not a disambiguation page (to my opinion, a special type of disambiguation page). Example: RAF Staff College
I am well aware that it is more than likely that I made mistakes with cleaning up by being mislead by WPCleaner (who does not find set-index pages) on one side and my own failings by not recognizing them.
Would is not be a good idea to adjust both the maintenance-bots and WPCleaner so that they can find links to set-index pages? The Banner talk 11:42, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
When do template changes get reflected in DAB pages with links?
Jón Helgason, Gabriel Popa, Peter McDermott, and Tonnerre all have incoming links that are due to navboxes. The navbox terms were disambiguated in February, and are blue, but the respective disambiguation pages still list them as incoming links. How long does it take changes to templates to be reflected here? - just curious, Leschnei (talk) 23:11, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
- In my experience usually overnight. I've done null edits on the pages which were still shewing as linked to Helgason and Popa, and that has cleared those, McDermott and Tonnere look clear to me. DuncanHill (talk) 23:18, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
- I didn't know the test edit trick - thanks for that! Leschnei (talk) 02:52, 6 March 2018 (UTC)
Andrews (surname)
Links to Andrews (surname) have appeared on Disambiguation pages with links report. I've dealt with those meant for a specific person but there are still several which genuinely refer to the name itself. I think the reason this page thinks it's a dab is that it transcludes Arthur Andrews etc. in a way that doesn't actually seem to work (faulty analysis: it's including everything except the names, rather than just the names). Is this page doing something frightfully clever that I shouldn't mess with, or does it need mending? Certes (talk) 00:25, 6 March 2018 (UTC)
- I found the problem in David Andrews. I've fixed it (for some values of "fixed") but the transclusion still produces ugly headers, and I think it introduces blank lines which will break the lists for screen readers. At the risk of straying off the dab topic, is it best that I unpick this well-meaning effort and do things more conventionally? Certes (talk) 00:59, 6 March 2018 (UTC)
- We generally don't transclude in this way, probably for a good reason. bd2412 T 02:45, 6 March 2018 (UTC)
- I agree that these transclusions should be replaced by normal text. Dekimasuよ! 02:53, 6 March 2018 (UTC)
- I occasionally use a similar kind of transclusion. Otherwise, with personal names we end up having to maintain the same dab content in two or three places. – Uanfala (talk) 03:12, 6 March 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for the helpful advice. If this should be done then I agree that WP:LST is a better way to do it. Perhaps one day there will be a methodical review of surname articles, replacing the Givenname Surname (disambiguation) links by transclusions, but until then we should probably be consistent and use normal text here for consistency. I'll remove the cleverness for now. Certes (talk) 10:50, 6 March 2018 (UTC)
Where is the link coming from?
portal – Libraries and the Academy links to Portal, but I can't find a link, or a template or Wikidata reference, to account for it. Can anyone explain this to me? Leschnei (talk) 12:31, 18 March 2018 (UTC)
- This is a known problem with {{Infobox journal}} and a few other templates. It uses #ifexist: to decide whether an article exists with the journal's ISO4 abbreviation, which in this case is Portal. Longer discussion at Template talk:Infobox journal#Links to DAB pages. Certes (talk) 12:42, 18 March 2018 (UTC)
- @Certes: it looks like you put a lot of work into this - thanks for that, and User:Narky Blert too. I started reading through the discussion but got quickly lost since I'm not any kind of programmer - do I understand correctly that adding '|bypass-rcheck=yes' to the infobox of (for example) portal – Libraries and the Academy will keep it off of the DPL list? Leschnei (talk) 01:40, 19 March 2018 (UTC)
- @Leschnei:I eventually lost track of the discussion too, but bypass-rcheck=yes should do the job. It has the disadvantage that certain errors won't be detected but on balance I think it's a good solution. Certes (talk) 01:46, 19 March 2018 (UTC)
- Great, thanks again. Leschnei (talk) 01:48, 19 March 2018 (UTC)
- @Leschnei: |bypass-rcheck=yes may be specific to {{infobox journal}}. It's poorly documented, but it works. If you come across an infobox:journal which makes that #ifexist call, check the DAB page to make sure that the journal is linked from it. It often isn't.
- Sometimes, you can override a call from one of those godforsaken templates by adding a field with a dummy link or the correct link. Don't you just love those templates which create autolinks from minimal information like a road number? or those which take you 15 minutes to guess how they've created a bad link? or those where you're supposed to go a level or two deeper into a nest of templates to puzzle out a problem? I've seen some where there was neither any disambiguation field nor any way to add a {{dn}} tag in a useful place. I tend to lose patience, and to
have a moanask for help on the template talk page. - Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair (Certes could doubtless provide other examples). Narky Blert (talk) 04:54, 19 March 2018 (UTC)
- It does make like as a disambiguator interesting. Leschnei (talk) 11:32, 19 March 2018 (UTC)
- Great, thanks again. Leschnei (talk) 01:48, 19 March 2018 (UTC)
- @Leschnei:I eventually lost track of the discussion too, but bypass-rcheck=yes should do the job. It has the disadvantage that certain errors won't be detected but on balance I think it's a good solution. Certes (talk) 01:46, 19 March 2018 (UTC)
- @Certes: it looks like you put a lot of work into this - thanks for that, and User:Narky Blert too. I started reading through the discussion but got quickly lost since I'm not any kind of programmer - do I understand correctly that adding '|bypass-rcheck=yes' to the infobox of (for example) portal – Libraries and the Academy will keep it off of the DPL list? Leschnei (talk) 01:40, 19 March 2018 (UTC)
Constitution of Zambia links to DAB page Constitutions of Libya. I raised this issue at Template talk:Africa topic#A link to a DAB page on 30 January 2018, and have been deafened by the silence. The template is protected, and I cannot edit it.
Constitution of Liberia calls the identical template, but links to Libyan interim Constitutional Declaration by way of a redirect through Constitution of Libya.
In both articles, the template is titled "Constitutions of Africa"; but inspection of the links shows that the one in Constitution of Zambia is prepending "Constitutions of" to the country name, whereas the one in Constitution of Liberia is prepending "Constitution of".
Ideas, anyone? Narky Blert (talk) 17:15, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
- I'd just remove the s in the template link, so Constitution of Zambia links to Constitution of Libya etc., per WP:LINKBACK. The Constitutions of Wherever (plural) titles are a mixed bunch of dabs and stubs but most are redlinks and I don't think it's helpful to assemble them into a template. Certes (talk) 18:45, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
- TY. Done. Seems to have worked. I looked at the three other articles called by Constitutions of Wherever, and they all seem OK. Narky Blert (talk) 21:47, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
- On the Constitution of Zambia page, the template header now appears to read "Constitution of Africa." Dekimasuよ! 21:56, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
- Thanks. Fixed with title=. Certes (talk) 22:23, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
- "A template allows you to reproduce content quickly." And also to introduce mistakes which only a very few experienced editors have any idea at all how to correct.
- Three editors involved, more than 200,000 edits between us three, and that one problem may now be fixed. How much total time did that take? I'm putting in a low-end claim for my 30 minutes. Narky Blert (talk) 00:24, 25 March 2018 (UTC)
- Time to form an interest group to lobby for the abolition of templates? – Uanfala (talk) 00:29, 25 March 2018 (UTC)
- I wouldn't go so far as that. I love those templates which enable you to enter data in unstructured order and which then sort it out for you. {{cite}} and {{infobox person}} are good examples. Templates which look for a Wiki article and add a bluelink if they find one, relevant or not, are a pest. They only get noticed if they link to a DAB page; if they link to the wrong page, those errors are unlikely ever to get noticed. However, the worst type of pest, IMO, is those templates which automatically create bluelinks and whose syntax is impenetrable to the uninitiated (or to the creator, often the same thing). Narky Blert (talk) 22:02, 25 March 2018 (UTC)
- Time to form an interest group to lobby for the abolition of templates? – Uanfala (talk) 00:29, 25 March 2018 (UTC)
- I just noticed {{Constitutions of Africa}}. Constitution of Algeria transcludes both templates, and raises the issue that the links are actually to "Constitutions of African countries" (since the Constitution of Africa isn't a thing). I'm tempted to edit the articles to use only {{Constitutions of Africa}}, so that any further changes can be made in a single place. Certes (talk) 01:19, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
- I give you Constitution of Burkina Faso, Constitution of the Central African Republic, Constitution of the Comoros, and Constitution of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the template heading is "Constitution of Africa", and Constitution of the Republic of the Congo where it is "Constitutions in Africa". Aren't templates great? Narky Blert (talk) 02:47, 28 March 2018 (UTC)
- Fixed; thanks. My auto-edit failed for some multi-word countries. (I checked that the edits I made were right, but I was less careful about having caught all cases.) In this case, I think the template actually helps: the articles are now consistent, and anyone who thinks they're consistently wrong can fix that with a single edit. Certes (talk) 11:05, 28 March 2018 (UTC)
- I give you Constitution of Burkina Faso, Constitution of the Central African Republic, Constitution of the Comoros, and Constitution of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the template heading is "Constitution of Africa", and Constitution of the Republic of the Congo where it is "Constitutions in Africa". Aren't templates great? Narky Blert (talk) 02:47, 28 March 2018 (UTC)
- Thanks. Fixed with title=. Certes (talk) 22:23, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
- On the Constitution of Zambia page, the template header now appears to read "Constitution of Africa." Dekimasuよ! 21:56, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
- TY. Done. Seems to have worked. I looked at the three other articles called by Constitutions of Wherever, and they all seem OK. Narky Blert (talk) 21:47, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
One-link pages in the monthly contest
Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/March 2018 has over 200 one-link pages at the end. I don't think we should have these in the contest. Otherwise, it turns into just an alphabetical list of links, rather than a list of pages with multiple links. Of course, they are already on the bonus list, but I think the monthly page should end at two-link pages. bd2412 T 21:18, 28 February 2018 (UTC)
- Maybe it's also time to think about retiring the stars for pages that appeared on the list in previous months? Starred entries are turning into pages that get new links on a daily basis (e.g. language/nationality ambiguity). Plantdrew (talk) 21:27, 28 February 2018 (UTC)
- Probably. It was good while it lasted. bd2412 T 22:01, 28 February 2018 (UTC)
- Congratulations to everyone on fixing so many links that there aren't enough multi-link pages to fill the list! I don't mind as long as we keep the full Disambiguation pages with links list, which is useful for searching (e.g. I just worked through the "station" dabs following template changes.) Certes (talk) 22:48, 28 February 2018 (UTC)
- As to the main proposal, I'd be inclined to leave matters as they are. The headline number in WP:TDD (Table 1 Column 1) takes a real hammering in the first 3 or 4 days of each month (1 March 2018: 505 in, 902 out), then drifts slowly up and down until month end. I imagine that some editors fix mainly from that list. It's one of the easier ones to find, one of the least intimidating, and progress on it is very visible.
- I agree with Certes about the full list, and not just for searching. I'm at #5211 in it (3rd time through).
- Milestones. (1) WP:TDD Table 1 Column 1 below 8,000. It was 29,000 in March 2017. (2) That number is within 5,000 of the total in Category:Articles with links needing disambiguation (c. 3,300). Those two numbers aren't wholly comparable, but they do show how close we are getting towards looking at new problems in something approaching real time. Narky Blert (talk) 13:35, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
- Just FYI, I haven't had a chance to work on any of these things this month, so don't expect any changes in the April contest. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 15:44, 30 March 2018 (UTC)
Short descriptions
@Pbsouthwood: I've seen a number of edits like this one on my watchlist lately. I haven't followed the development of the short description concept (at first glance it seems reminiscent of the deprecated Persondata tag, and something that would be better suited to Wikidata), but regardless of its overall validity, if every dab is going to have the description "Disambiguation page", wouldn't it make more sense to add this functionality to the Disambiguation template rather than editing every single dab to add a new tag? Nick Number (talk) 17:39, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
- Nick Number, It is not only disambiguation pages, eventually all articles will have a short description. The reasoning, history and other details can be found at the Wikipedia:WikiProject Short descriptions page, so I won't repeat them here. The template will be using a new "magic word" that WMF hope to deploy at the end of the month which is supposed to produce efficient code for the search engine - or so they say - the tech is beyond me. Anyway, it is more than disambiguation, so trying to fudge the dab templates is not likely to be much help. Unless you can come up with some practicable solutions? Read the background first, so you get the context. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 18:01, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
- I realize that there's more to the initiative, but in the particular case of disambiguation pages (and set indices, and probably anthroponymy pages as well) it seems like there's a very simple way to handle it. I don't know why you characterize it as fudging. If every dab is going to have the same description then having the extant Disambiguation template add the magic word would be a lot easier. What's gained by adding an identical tag to every individual dab? Nick Number (talk) 18:41, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
- I fully agree with Nick Number, if short descriptions are going to be implemented on disambiguation pages then the disambig template should include the short description, rather than doing a separate edit to each disambig page. In fact I made the same proposal on Pbsouthwood's talk page. -- intgr [talk] 21:32, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
- Is it not desirable to have variants on "Disambiguation page" for different categories of disambiguation? If a single short description is good enough for all of them, then maybe it can work. I am not sufficiently expert in template coding to be sure. It is certainly a less tedious solution.
- Fudging may not be the right word. If inclusion in the disambiguation template can do everything that needs to be done it would be a good solution. I dont know if or how this is possible. This is ordinary ignorance, not a claim that it can't be done.
- If someone can show me that putting the short description template in the disambiguation template would work I am eager to be persuaded. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 06:44, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
- I fully agree with Nick Number, if short descriptions are going to be implemented on disambiguation pages then the disambig template should include the short description, rather than doing a separate edit to each disambig page. In fact I made the same proposal on Pbsouthwood's talk page. -- intgr [talk] 21:32, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
- Is there a reason these are going at the very top of pages (where they are most obtrusive to normal editing) as opposed to at the bottom? Dekimasuよ! 20:43, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
- DekimasuThey are at the top of pages because they are annotations to the title, and if you use a script to make them visible on desktop then they should display just after the title. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 06:38, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
- I realize that there's more to the initiative, but in the particular case of disambiguation pages (and set indices, and probably anthroponymy pages as well) it seems like there's a very simple way to handle it. I don't know why you characterize it as fudging. If every dab is going to have the same description then having the extant Disambiguation template add the magic word would be a lot easier. What's gained by adding an identical tag to every individual dab? Nick Number (talk) 18:41, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
- There is relevant information at Wikipedia:Short description and Wikipedia talk:Short description, which have gone up in the last 10 days. Dekimasuよ! 21:11, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
- A couple of questions:
- Does Wikipedia actually want these descriptions, or are they being introduced by WMF without discussion? If the latter, just use the Wikidata descriptions. If they're inaccurate and libelous, that's WMF's problem, not ours. If WMF don't like it, they can go and edit Wikidata or turn the descriptions off again.
- Assuming we want descriptions, is it a requirement for every Wikipedia article to explicitly contain the magic word SHORTDESC, or can this be in a template which the page transcludes? If the latter, and if "Disambiguation page" is an acceptable description, then surely we should adopt Nick Number's suggestion of making one simple edit to {{Disambiguation}} which provides an accurate and consistent description for all present and future dab pages.
- — Certes (talk) 21:36, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
- Certes, There has been discussion, including a Village Pump (Proposals) RfC, which is about as public and wide audience as we have on Wikipedia for discussions. You can read all the tedious haggling at the links provided on History. The end result of the discussion is that there was a consensus on Wikipedia which WMF quite plainly stated they would not respect as they consider they know better than us and we can't do anything about it. WMF Reading Team do not care about the quality of the descriptions, whereas Wikipedians do, as it reflects badly on Wikipedia when they display crap from Wikidata as a description of a Wikipedia article.
- Would the proposed edit to {{Disambiguation}} allow for different short descriptions for different categories of disambiguation page, or is there a single short description that will be acceptable for all categories of disambiguation pages? Is there a way to get the short description embedded in {{Disambiguation}} to display on desktop view so that users can monitor the content? (a css user script does this for the short description template at present) If this is all possible I would be delighted not to add short descriptions to dab pages, as there are far more interesting things to do. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 06:27, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
- If {{Disambiguation}} just transcludes {{Short description}} with a particular value, then that's just like putting {{Short description}} on the page directly, and visibility or not would be turned off by the same piece of CSS that controls the visibility normally. But {{Disambiguation}} would need appropriate coding, if it were desired that the {{Short description}} transclusion (when made visible) should always appear at the top of the page. Jheald (talk) 11:01, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
Wow. Would love to see the short description be displayed in the title area, so current "titles" are relegated to just the url of the article. This would finally allow duplicate titles. --В²C ☎ 00:08, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
- The intention is to clarify the scope of an article beyond what is obvious from the title, in just a few words. There is no intention to hide the actual title used in the url. If possible I hope that there will be a way to get the short description to display after the link in lists like categories, but I have no idea if or how that would be done. It would be very useful when browsing a category, to be able to toggle a view where the short descriptions all show to clarify what the articles are about.· · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 07:06, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
- I left a similar note elsewhere, but just to clarify: this is going on all pages in all namespaces, right? Not just articles? (Disambiguation pages aren't articles.) Dekimasuよ! 07:09, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
- @Dekimasu: All pages in namespace 0, I think -- or at least potentially. I don't think there has been any call to add it to templates, categories, images etc. Jheald (talk) 10:55, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
- I left a similar note elsewhere, but just to clarify: this is going on all pages in all namespaces, right? Not just articles? (Disambiguation pages aren't articles.) Dekimasuよ! 07:09, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
Proposed insertion of short description into disambiguation template
Jheald, Born2cycle, Nick Number, intgr, and anyone else who may be interested. I have proposed an edit to {{disambiguation}} to add the short description template. I have tested in the sandbox and it seems to work, and RexxS has checked that the API returns the local short description. Those interested please take a look at the proposal and test it in any way you think might help. Suggestions for a better way also welcome. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 20:34, 30 March 2018 (UTC)
- Looks good to me. Nick Number (talk) 20:53, 30 March 2018 (UTC)
- Reping Jheald, due to typo. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 09:22, 31 March 2018 (UTC)
- Thanks, responded at Template talk:Disambiguation Jheald (talk) 09:36, 31 March 2018 (UTC)
- Reping Jheald, due to typo. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 09:22, 31 March 2018 (UTC)
This feature is still under development
Does the Daily Disambig really need to say "This feature is still under development" at this point? bd2412 T 21:58, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
- Good point. I should change "still" to "permanently". :-) R'n'B (call me Russ) 23:11, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
A WikiData link
The INT Photometric H-Alpha Survey calls wikidata:Q3146779, which fetches the DAB page I band into the infobox and does not link it. It should fetch the redirect I band (infrared) and link it. I've just wasted 10 minutes and more trying unsuccessfully to edit the WikiData entry, and have lost patience. Does anyone round here know how to solve this problem? Narky Blert (talk) 18:16, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
- I just removed it from the Wikidata entry altogether, since the link is clearly wrong there. bd2412 T 18:38, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
- Pragmatic. Narky Blert (talk) 19:32, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
- A moderate request? d:Module talk:Cycling race#A link in Wikipedia to a DAB page. Narky Blert (talk) 01:52, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
- Wikidata can't link to redirects. The solution is to temporarily save the redirect as a non-redirecting page, make the Wikidata link to the former redirect, and then revert it back to a redirect. Plantdrew (talk) 19:18, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
- I'm pleased to hear that that trick of converting a redirect page into an "article" and back again works. I'd been thinking of trying it. Narky Blert (talk) 19:32, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
- Surely that has to count as a bug that should be reported (phabricator?) and fixed. Certes (talk) 20:11, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
- Phabricator task. Also see d:Help:Handling sitelinks overlapping multiple items for some links to discussions of the issues here. Plantdrew (talk) 21:01, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
- Surely that has to count as a bug that should be reported (phabricator?) and fixed. Certes (talk) 20:11, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
- I'm pleased to hear that that trick of converting a redirect page into an "article" and back again works. I'd been thinking of trying it. Narky Blert (talk) 19:32, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
- Wikidata can't link to redirects. The solution is to temporarily save the redirect as a non-redirecting page, make the Wikidata link to the former redirect, and then revert it back to a redirect. Plantdrew (talk) 19:18, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
- A moderate request? d:Module talk:Cycling race#A link in Wikipedia to a DAB page. Narky Blert (talk) 01:52, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
- Pragmatic. Narky Blert (talk) 19:32, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
On the flip side, perhaps there is some way we can make our tools ignore Wikidata-generated links? After all, no bad link actually visibly appears on the page here. If it doesn't show up in our reports, then we won't trouble ourselves with it. bd2412 T 16:33, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
- As I understand it, the tools query the same database table as Special:WhatLinksHere. That table records both normal wikilinks which appear on the page and invisible wikilinks generated by template code, without distinguishing between the two types. Typically, that template code is
#ifexist:. In this case it's more complex: {{Infobox astronomical survey}} calls Module:WikidataIB, whose function _getvalue calls mw.wikibase.sitelink, which I believe records an invisible wikilink. I don't think there's a column in the database table to record that the link is an invisible one. I have found a rather convoluted way to avoid recording the link at all, but this has disadvantages. Certes (talk) 20:11, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
Links to DAB pages generated by templates with call Wikidata which then calls a DAB page
I've only tried this technique once, but it seems to work. Yes, it is cumbersome.
- Find the Wikidata Q-number in the article which is making the problem call. Fire up Wikidata, and enter that Q-number into the search box. You should now be looking at the problem Wikidata page.
- Search for the problem link. You cannot edit it – yet.
- Write an article with a correct (i.e. usually a properly-qualified) name.
- Open its Page Information. Keep refreshing until Page ID contains a Q-number. Copy it.
- In your Wikidata link, select Edit, post in that Q-number, then hit Publish. You will not be notified that anything has happened, and may get what looks like an error message.
- Refresh the Wiki article which was making the problem call.
The one time I've tried this exact sequence, the Wiki article then contained a good link.
I haven't tested the variant where the new article is clearly hopeless, and you {{db-author}} or WP:PROD it yourself after getting a Q-number, Narky Blert (talk) 20:10, 7 April 2018 (UTC)
I have commented at Template talk:Infobox video game#The series field regarding a matter which affects this WikiProject. Narky Blert (talk) 01:27, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
Please weigh in on the proposal to convert the collection of links regarding Western United States Indian tribes known as the Paiute to a set index, as it is ill suited to be a disambiguation page. bd2412 T 11:41, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
Problem pages
There are pages that keep bouncing back to the DAB bonus list whether they are solved or not. These pages seem to have problems that are beyond my ability to solve. Maybe someone else can figure them out. Starting from the beginning, numbers 1, 3, 4, 16, 40, 41, 53, 54, 63, 73, 74, 83. Out of the first 100 that's enough for now.
Vmavanti (talk) 22:08, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
- Perhaps we need two lists (with page names, as the numbers keep changing): pages that stick on the list despite appearing to have no problems; and pages with problems that are hard to solve. I'll nominate Elections in Korea for the second list, as {{Infobox political party}} assumes systematic titles which have articles for North Korea and South Korea but are dabs for "Korea". Certes (talk) 00:09, 14 April 2018 (UTC)
- I changed the infobox call in one of them from Korea to Korea under Japanese rule (since that is the relevant period). For the other one, I don't know what the call would be. Is there a name for Korea between the end of Japanese rule and the split? bd2412 T 00:18, 14 April 2018 (UTC)
- That worked, in the sense that it suppressed the useless links to dabs because there's no Politics of Korea under Japanese rule page. We don't have articles for 1945–48 either. Your change was reverted, so I've tried simply removing the parameter, which works too. Certes (talk) 01:18, 14 April 2018 (UTC)
- I apologize for that. I forgot the numbers would change. I'll add the article names instead of the numbers. Soon. I can post a list of stumpers here or in another thread.
Vmavanti (talk) 21:47, 14 April 2018 (UTC)
- I apologize for that. I forgot the numbers would change. I'll add the article names instead of the numbers. Soon. I can post a list of stumpers here or in another thread.
- That worked, in the sense that it suppressed the useless links to dabs because there's no Politics of Korea under Japanese rule page. We don't have articles for 1945–48 either. Your change was reverted, so I've tried simply removing the parameter, which works too. Certes (talk) 01:18, 14 April 2018 (UTC)
- I changed the infobox call in one of them from Korea to Korea under Japanese rule (since that is the relevant period). For the other one, I don't know what the call would be. Is there a name for Korea between the end of Japanese rule and the split? bd2412 T 00:18, 14 April 2018 (UTC)
Portals
I seem to remember a grumble about WP:PORTALs, either here or on another WP:DPL editor's Talk Page. There's a discussion underway at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#RfC: Ending the system of portals. Narky Blert (talk) 22:00, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
Sremski Karlovci
Here's an entire sentence that needs disambiguating. What it needs is to be torn down and rebuilt.
"The Metropolitan of the Serbian Orthodox Church, built by the grandfather of Vojislav Stanimirovic, Zika Stanimirovic resided in the town."
The link Metropolitan leads to the title Metropolitan bishop and the link Serbian Orthodox Church leads to the denomination. Both are general terms, in other words. So "built" doesn't modify anything. I don't know what Ziki Stanimirovic is modifying either. It's a garbled sentence.
Vmavanti (talk) 21:45, 14 April 2018 (UTC)
- Often, when there’s near-gibberish like this, I suspect that the article’s been vandalized (or edited by someone who has a tenuous grasp on English). Sure enough, I found that back on April 1, an IP dumped that nonsense into Sremski Karlovci. I edited it back out, then checked their other contributions. Turns out there were other articles they embellished with Vojislav Stanimirovic, which was never sourced or referenced. I also found good-faith edits by you and Narky Blert (and others) trying to disambiguate those links. Such fun. NOT.
- Some other articles were Roy Cohn, Olympic Tower, and Kalmi Baruh (from a different IP). — Gorthian (talk) 03:01, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
- Vandalism isn't always easy to spot. I have been rv'ed when another editor has spotted some behind me, and have rv'ed other experienced DABfixers (with an apology in the edit summary) when I had done the same thing.
- I came across an article a couple of days ago, alerted by User:DPL bot about a link to a DAB page. It looked like the article was failing WP:NBIO, and then some; so I was setting about a WP:BEFORE search, when I noticed that one of the citations in the article on this seemingly insignificant person was to Cricinfo. I looked at the Edit History. Ah. The simplest solution (which I implemented) was to ignore the half-dozen-and-more recent good-faith edits, and to plonk the last good version of an article about a notable cricketer on top of the feeble autobiography which had been written over it. (That's one way to avoid WP:NPP. I've seen it before.) Narky Blert (talk) 22:22, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
Stumper list
Australia national basketball team- fixed. This one had some tricky template syntax to figure out. bd2412 T 04:02, 16 April 2018 (UTC)- Beatrice of Navarre - I declare myself defeated by that one, which I recognise. I found the original French text in Project Gutenberg, and still couldn't solve the problem. Narky Blert (talk) 22:03, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
Bill Kennedy— unlinked — Certes (talk) 12:18, 16 April 2018 (UTC)Bill Phillips— unlinked — Certes (talk) 12:18, 16 April 2018 (UTC)Blackwood- unlinked - the source just says "bois noir" (wikisource:fr:Page:Jean de Léry - Voyage au Brésil - Gaffarel vol 2, 1880.djvu/46), and there seems no hope of ever being more precise. Narky Blert (talk) 23:04, 16 April 2018 (UTC)Blanche of France— fixed — Certes (talk) 12:18, 16 April 2018 (UTC)Boresight— already fixed by someone else — Certes (talk) 12:18, 16 April 2018 (UTC)British Rail Class 316— fixed — Certes (talk) 12:18, 16 April 2018 (UTC)- British folklore — tagged it as a BCA — Gorthian (talk) 06:31, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
Bryan Fletcher— fixed — Gorthian (talk) 06:42, 16 April 2018 (UTC)Bulgaria national under-23 football team— templates again. Fixed. — Gorthian (talk) 07:04, 16 April 2018 (UTC)Cabrera- absolutely no idea on this one. I've looked at it at least three times. Narky Blert (talk) 22:27, 16 April 2018 (UTC)- Found it! It's actually Kibera (per slide 17). bd2412 T 00:32, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
Captain Pantoja and the Special Services (disambiguation)- no idea, it could have been either film. I know this one, and had searched in Spanish. Narky Blert (talk) 22:51, 16 April 2018 (UTC)- Fixed to the 2000 film; the 1975 film is described as a notoriously poor production, and therefore an unlikely film festival choice. bd2412 T 13:07, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
Caribou River— redlinked — Certes (talk) 14:18, 16 April 2018 (UTC)Challenger— I think I’ve fixed these. — Gorthian (talk) 05:55, 16 April 2018 (UTC)Charles Dietrich— unlinked — Certes (talk) 14:18, 16 April 2018 (UTC)Charles Jarvis— redlinked — Certes (talk) 14:18, 16 April 2018 (UTC)Charles Lynchfixed. bd2412 T 13:48, 16 April 2018 (UTC)Charles Messenger— already fixed by someone else — Certes (talk) 14:18, 16 April 2018 (UTC)Charles Russell- fixed - Leschnei (talk) 13:19, 16 April 2018 (UTC)Charles Sternberg- fixed Leschnei (talk) 13:19, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
Plenty more, too.
Vmavanti (talk) 21:56, 14 April 2018 (UTC)
- Although I'm a Brit, I've begun to adopt a rule about non-notable-looking CEOs and the like who keep turning up in Disambiguation Pages with Links. I give page watchers and other DABfixers a chance to correct the link or to add a qualifier after a {{dn}} tag has been added; but, if I see the link a third time, that's three strikes and File:Cbbuckner25016.jpg. Narky Blert (talk) 22:48, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
Sea of red
How does the team recommend we deal with lists of links which don't point to anywhere useful? I'm thinking of a page like List of Luxembourg national rugby union players, which is a sea of red with a few islands of links to dabs and links to unrelated people who happen to share their name with a rugby player. I'm reluctant to undo someone's hard work by removing the brackets (or, in this case, revising the templates), especially when similar lists contain useful wikilinks, but the current situation isn't ideal. Suggestions welcome. Certes (talk) 12:14, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
- I'd recommend delinking. Just a quick check of a few of the blue links show even those are mistaken. If there are articles in another language, then perhaps {{ill}} might be useful. older ≠ wiser 12:52, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
- I've just redlinked the lot, bar a few where the target is ambiguous and which I've tagged {{dn}}. It wasn't just the 35 links to DAB pages - there were another 35 bad links, including one to a C17 Italian cardinal which gave me a chuckle.
- I'm reluctant to delink international sportspeople, there's a prima facie case for notability. Narky Blert (talk) 21:16, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
- I would just as soon change all ambiguous cases to "Name (Luxembourg national rugby union player)" links. It is a very precise target, and will eventually get sorted out, if these articles are ever made. bd2412 T 21:21, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
- Thanks for the advice and for doing the donkey work (which I planned to do once we'd decided). My favourite player was Kim Zimmer. Certes (talk) 21:32, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
- For no particular reason, you've just reminded me of one of the best ever sporting nicknames - Rikki "Zippedy" Duda. Narky Blert (talk) 22:46, 20 January 2TC)
- I didn't look into all those redlinks; but in the few cases where I looked at dewiki, frwiki and lbwiki for those players, I found nothing. That is of course no proof of lack of notability - all rugby union was amateur until 1995. Narky Blert (talk) 01:39, 25 January 2018 (UTC)
- IMO BD2412 is right (and notifying Certes). Cumbersome redlinks like those should (hopefully, will) get sorted out if articles are ever written. Meanwhile, if we cannot unify redlinks or specify them precisely, then making such cumbersome redlinks may be the best method of getting them out of our hair. Narky Blert (talk)
- I'm belatedly wondering whether they pass WP:NRU. I don't see Luxembourg in Wikipedia:WikiProject Rugby union/Notability criteria, though they may qualify via club rugby. If not, then should that carefully curated sea of red become all black? Certes (talk) 12:10, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
- WP:NRU, now that I've looked at it, appears thoroughly sensible (I know the game). Playing for Luxembourg does not pass it, and I don't see why it should. I'm mildly surprised that there seems to be no Luxembourgeois playing professionally for a French club who has given up hope of ever winning a French cap, and has turned out for his country instead.
- I suggest leaving those redlinks to mature for a bit, on practical and cynical grounds. (1) It'd be a fair bit of work to turn them all black. (2) If they were turned black, an editor might "helpfully" turn them all red and blue again.
- The same reasoning applies to pages like e.g. Brussels Celtic RFC. Narky Blert (talk) 20:23, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
- Make that, two seas of black. I've delinked every one in both articles. Narky Blert (talk) 22:05, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
- I'm belatedly wondering whether they pass WP:NRU. I don't see Luxembourg in Wikipedia:WikiProject Rugby union/Notability criteria, though they may qualify via club rugby. If not, then should that carefully curated sea of red become all black? Certes (talk) 12:10, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
- IMO BD2412 is right (and notifying Certes). Cumbersome redlinks like those should (hopefully, will) get sorted out if articles are ever written. Meanwhile, if we cannot unify redlinks or specify them precisely, then making such cumbersome redlinks may be the best method of getting them out of our hair. Narky Blert (talk)
- I didn't look into all those redlinks; but in the few cases where I looked at dewiki, frwiki and lbwiki for those players, I found nothing. That is of course no proof of lack of notability - all rugby union was amateur until 1995. Narky Blert (talk) 01:39, 25 January 2018 (UTC)
- For no particular reason, you've just reminded me of one of the best ever sporting nicknames - Rikki "Zippedy" Duda. Narky Blert (talk) 22:46, 20 January 2TC)
Another case: List of watercourses in Western Australia, C came up in #Stumper list 2 below. I make it 14 good links, 7 links to dab, 27 links to an irrelevant river with a similar name and 331 redlinks. Obviously we keep the 14 good links and divert any bad links where an article on the correct topic exists, but do we leave the rest red or turn them black? Of course, the article is just one in a series, and I expect plenty of other cases exist. Certes (talk) 23:53, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
- WP:NGEO isn't exactly precise. It suggests that if can wet your feet in a rivulet and it has a name, it may be notable. I have my doubts.
- I like the X River (Y River) format. It's very specific, and should ultimately lead you from Y River (Z River) to Z River, and so to the sea (or, getting cute, to an endorheic basin) - or, if necessary, to Z River (some Ocean) or to Z River (country/state). I dislike X River (Y River tributary) and the like. What else is X River supposed to be? Narky Blert (talk) 00:40, 18 April 2018 (UTC)
- WP:NCRIVER currently recommends using either political/administrative entity or Rio Puerco (Rio Grande tributary) (although this is not rigorously enforced). There was an inconclusive RFC, although there was considerable support for opinion that titles like X River (Y River) are confusing. older ≠ wiser 01:16, 18 April 2018 (UTC)
Stumper list 2
2017 T10 Cricket League— fixed (new redirect for an old adversary of mine) — Certes (talk) 00:10, 17 April 2018 (UTC)2018 World Surf League— 2 redlinked — Certes (talk) 00:10, 17 April 2018 (UTC)Aach (toponymy)— link removed — Certes (talk) 00:10, 17 April 2018 (UTC)Albrecht I of Meissen— fixed — Certes (talk) 00:10, 17 April 2018 (UTC)Anne Cummins (social worker)— fixed (Wikidata was actually useful here) — Certes (talk) 00:10, 17 April 2018 (UTC)Carew St John Mildmay— fixed — Certes (talk) 10:21, 17 April 2018 (UTC)Caroline Bergvall— unlinked — Certes (talk) 10:21, 17 April 2018 (UTC)Chasing Owls- I removed the link. Where a nonexclusive list says "this band appeared in media such as X, Y, and Z" you can just remove the Y; the article doesn't hinge on it. bd2412 T 00:34, 17 April 2018 (UTC)Chief creative officer— example removed — Certes (talk) 10:21, 17 April 2018 (UTC)Ciurea rail disaster- I recognise this one. I searched in Romanian, and failed to tie the place down. Narky Blert (talk) 01:04, 17 April 2018 (UTC) — familiar to me too; fixed by following route on map — Certes (talk) 10:21, 17 April 2018 (UTC)Czech folklore— more template shenanigans, fortunately used only in this article — Certes (talk) 10:21, 17 April 2018 (UTC)Daniel S. Peña Sr.— unlinked — Certes (talk) 12:18, 17 April 2018 (UTC)- Elhanan Bicknell
- Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Vaud
- Federal Signal 3T22
- Francesco Botticini
Germaine de Staël— fixed — Certes (talk) 12:18, 17 April 2018 (UTC)History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil— already fixed by Narky Blert — Certes (talk) 12:18, 17 April 2018 (UTC)- Institute of Historic Building Conservation
- Italian exonyms - exonym pages can be a pest. I solved a problem on that page today, reluctantly, because the exonym was not Italian but was medieval Latin. Exonym pages are often unsourced. Even when they are sourced, you can find yourself looking at some distrustable book from the 1700s in Fraktur or whatever using obsolete spellings. Narky Blert (talk) 01:14, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
Jan Shepard filmography— redlinked — Certes (talk) 13:25, 17 April 2018 (UTC)- Karel Dufek
Lewiston and Youngstown Frontier Electric Railway— already fixed by Leschnei — Certes (talk) 13:25, 17 April 2018 (UTC)List of ambassadors of the United States to Bolivia— redlinked — Certes (talk) 13:25, 17 April 2018 (UTC)List of current Atlantic Records artists— removed non-notable crooners — Certes (talk) 16:17, 17 April 2018 (UTC)- List of French exonyms for Italian toponyms
- List of Turkish exonyms
- List of watercourses in Western Australia, C — Sea of red with intermittent links to rivers not in WA. Are the 99% without articles notable, or should we paint it black? Certes (talk) 16:17, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
Martín Cortés (son of Malinche)— fixed — Certes (talk) 16:36, 17 April 2018 (UTC)Mazatlán— unlinked — Certes (talk) 16:36, 17 April 2018 (UTC)MusicEase— replaced by {{clarify}} — Certes (talk) 16:36, 17 April 2018 (UTC)- Om Prakash Sharma (artist)
Pierre Joseph Jeanningros- I know this one too. The corresponding French article links uselessly to fr:Bourg. Narky Blert (talk) 01:25, 17 April 2018 (UTC) Done. Narky Blert (talk) 15:30, 17 April 2018 (UTC)Pilipinas Got Talent (season 6)— fixed — Certes (talk) 16:58, 17 April 2018 (UTC)Red Nose Day 2007— already done by BD2412 — Certes (talk) 16:58, 17 April 2018 (UTC)- Ronald Moon (priest) I can't see a problem here. However, I have recently asked for help at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Anglicanism#Links to DAB pages and have received no response whatsoever. I have a couple of dozen similar problems bookmarked. Narky Blert (talk) 01:34, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
- Samadagha Shikhlarov — From Russian WP, CGA may be the football arm of the Central Group of Forces — Certes (talk) 16:58, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
St. Colman's College, Fermoy- Barry Murphy may be Barry Murphy (Clare hurler), but I can't prove it. Narky Blert (talk) 02:07, 17 April 2018 (UTC) — I'm pretty sure it is. Both played in this match. Boldly fixed — Certes (talk) 10:49, 17 April 2018 (UTC)St. MacDara's Island— already fixed by Vmavanti — Certes (talk) 10:59, 18 April 2018 (UTC)Studio Berçot- Carlotta unlinked. I found her, and, so what? https://fr.linkedin.com/in/carlottaillustratrice Narky Blert (talk) 01:53, 17 April 2018 (UTC)United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union— redlinked — Certes (talk) 10:59, 18 April 2018 (UTC)Víctor Trossero— unlinked — Certes (talk) 10:59, 18 April 2018 (UTC)Waitress (musical)- fixed; we don't have an article on Ben Thompson (American actor) (this one), a different person from Ben Thompson (actor) (this one). bd2412 T 15:42, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
These are articles from the Bs and Cs at the beginning of the bonus list. I alphabetized them.
Good detective work, everyone. You're a bright group. I wrote NarkyBlert about this subject before: Many geography links are simply impossible for me. I had no idea of the complexity of the divisions within countries. I'm surprised at how often sources fail to specify a location so that it can be distinguished from other locations with identical names. I recall researching the name of a hospital in Dublin. I think two had the same name, but the Irish Times never specified which one it was talking about. Maddening. I considered emailing the paper. I'm baffled by links having to do with the geography of Poland, Hungary, Russia, France, Italy, Germany, India, and the UK, and probably more. Even my own geography has surprised me. I didn't know what an unincorporated community was, for example, or the number of states which have cities with identical names, requiring you to check the township. During my whole life, I've rarely heard anyone talk about townships or unincorporated communities. My head swims when I look at DAB page with a list of Polish places and their voivodeships, and those odd diacriticals that my browser doesn't handle very well.
Vmavanti (talk) 23:23, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
- Thanks! This time we have the page containing the dodgy link, rather than the name of the dab page, which should make things easier. I've fixed a few entries where the diacritics fell off. Certes (talk) 23:57, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
- If it's in Ireland, you often need to work out if it's Catholic or Protestant. (Yes, I know.)
- Polish starosts can be a real bind. Polish Wiki is largely useless on them. The king from time to time owned certain towns, which he could hand over to his mates as a source of income and to keep them sweet. Those mates were titled starosts. The office of starost was not hereditary, and even the location might change. I solved one such problem recently by finding the German exonym for the starostship and a good-looking mention in German Wiki for the right year - only. There was nothing in any other Wiki or in a Google search. Narky Blert (talk) 01:00, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
- Germaine de Staël is another that sticks around despite apparently being fixed.Vmavanti (talk) 16:38, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
Broken tools
Tools such as Dab Solver are misbehaving due to infrastructure changes. Details: User talk:Dispenser#Disambig fix list: strike through. Certes (talk) 19:43, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
- Normal service seems to have been resumed. (Famous last words...) Certes (talk) 18:41, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
Should set index links be disambiguated?
Sattal has a link to Fish eagle, a set index article, and the link has been tagged with {{disambiguation needed}}. Is it necessary to disambiguate this link? And is {{disambiguation needed}} the right way to do it? Leschnei (talk) 18:35, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
- If you can figure out a more specific link, it would be good to change it. With three fish eagle species in India, it's not clear which one is being mentioned at Sattal. {{Siadn}} is the appropriate tag for links to set index articles. Plantdrew (talk) 18:49, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
- Set index pages are just disambiguation pages with airs, so yes, they should be disambiguated. DuncanHill (talk) 18:54, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
- In this case, it is likely not necessary. If the article just said "eagles", it might be nice to specify what kind of eagle, but we would not consider it a mistake requiring repair. Because there are several kinds of fish eagles, the term might be used to generally mean any or all of the various kinds of fish eagles. That is something that frequently distinguishes a set index from a disambiguation page. The term can refer to all of the kinds of thing on the page collectively. I would either remove the tag, or, if you think it is important to the reader to know what kind of fish eagle, to replace it with {{clarify}}. bd2412 T 19:34, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
- Thanks all for the answers. I didn't know about {{Siadn}}. For both Sattal and Anamalai Tiger Reserve, it is unclear (to me) whether fish eagle is meant in a general or specific sense; I'll change the templates to {{Siadn}} in the hope that someone more knowledgeable about eagles can fix them. Leschnei (talk) 00:50, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
- IMO fish eagle in Sattal does need disambiguation. It is inconceivable to me that two species called fish eagle could occupy the same habitat. The three possibilities are different birds and are in competition with each other. "Fish eagle" in Sattal is just wrong. Narky Blert (talk) 23:00, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
- I've asked for help at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds#Some fish eagle or other. Narky Blert (talk) 23:06, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
- There are no fish eagle records in eBird for Sattal or its surroundings, so that's no help in figuring out which species is or are meant. Craigthebirder (talk) 00:02, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
- It is worth noting that there are no sources in the article for the proposition that there are any kind of fish eagles in Sattal. Lists like this one are inherently non-inclusive (i.e., they can't possibly list every kind of bird in the region), so if one is removed, there is no harm done to the article. bd2412 T 00:09, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
- In the absence of any record, I think the decision by User:Shyamal to remove fish eagle from the list was the right one. (If there had been some sort of ambiguous record, I would have solved the problem by a footnote setting out the possibilities.) Narky Blert (talk) 11:14, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
- (OR follows) we didn't see any fish eagles at Sattal, but we saw Pallas's and Lesser at Jim Corbett, so they can both occur, the size difference probably reducing direct competition. However, Shyamal is clearly correct here Jimfbleak - talk to me? 16:18, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
- @Jimfbleak: You lucky so-and-so! (And, your negative WP:OR about Sattal is useful confirmatory evidence.) Narky Blert (talk) 19:57, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
- (OR follows) we didn't see any fish eagles at Sattal, but we saw Pallas's and Lesser at Jim Corbett, so they can both occur, the size difference probably reducing direct competition. However, Shyamal is clearly correct here Jimfbleak - talk to me? 16:18, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
- In the absence of any record, I think the decision by User:Shyamal to remove fish eagle from the list was the right one. (If there had been some sort of ambiguous record, I would have solved the problem by a footnote setting out the possibilities.) Narky Blert (talk) 11:14, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
- It is worth noting that there are no sources in the article for the proposition that there are any kind of fish eagles in Sattal. Lists like this one are inherently non-inclusive (i.e., they can't possibly list every kind of bird in the region), so if one is removed, there is no harm done to the article. bd2412 T 00:09, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
- There are no fish eagle records in eBird for Sattal or its surroundings, so that's no help in figuring out which species is or are meant. Craigthebirder (talk) 00:02, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
- I've asked for help at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds#Some fish eagle or other. Narky Blert (talk) 23:06, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
- IMO fish eagle in Sattal does need disambiguation. It is inconceivable to me that two species called fish eagle could occupy the same habitat. The three possibilities are different birds and are in competition with each other. "Fish eagle" in Sattal is just wrong. Narky Blert (talk) 23:00, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
- Thanks all for the answers. I didn't know about {{Siadn}}. For both Sattal and Anamalai Tiger Reserve, it is unclear (to me) whether fish eagle is meant in a general or specific sense; I'll change the templates to {{Siadn}} in the hope that someone more knowledgeable about eagles can fix them. Leschnei (talk) 00:50, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
- In this case, it is likely not necessary. If the article just said "eagles", it might be nice to specify what kind of eagle, but we would not consider it a mistake requiring repair. Because there are several kinds of fish eagles, the term might be used to generally mean any or all of the various kinds of fish eagles. That is something that frequently distinguishes a set index from a disambiguation page. The term can refer to all of the kinds of thing on the page collectively. I would either remove the tag, or, if you think it is important to the reader to know what kind of fish eagle, to replace it with {{clarify}}. bd2412 T 19:34, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
- Set index pages are just disambiguation pages with airs, so yes, they should be disambiguated. DuncanHill (talk) 18:54, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
A different type of stumper
We're getting a few sticky entries on the Disambiguation pages with links list:
- Dualism: 38 links
- Theosophy: 7 links
- Dasarahalli: 7 links
The first two disambiguate some specialised concepts that seem very similar to a layman like me. The last seems to be the name of every second town, village and gatepost in Bangalore. Certes (talk) 18:45, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
- If it's late C19 or early C20, theosophy is almost certainly Theosophy (Blavatskian). It was all the rage in some intellectual circles.
- Dualism is obscure. I know of at least three concepts with that name.
- I have it in mind to ask other WP:WikiProjects for help on the first two.
- The redirect Theosophist looks like another can of worms. It cannot stand in its present form. As one obvious example, it is linked from Isaac Newton. IMO it should be cleaned up and retargetted to theosophy. Narky Blert (talk) 22:49, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
- Adding two:
- Polarity (physics) — I've upgraded the dab and most incoming links fixed but a few stubborn ones remain. There may be a broad concept here.
- Product portfolio — I created redirect Product mix to deal with narrow portfolios (e.g. several flavours of soda) but these links are about wider diversification
— Certes (talk) 14:46, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
- IMO Polarity (physics) isn't a broad concept - it's at least three distinct topics called by the same name. See Polarization for a closely-related problem. Narky Blert (talk) 20:54, 29 April 2018 (UTC)
Stumper list 3
Some of these I thought I solved yesterday, because they looked easy. I don't know what happened. Others I tried several times.Vmavanti (talk) 19:07, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
2001 J.League Cup Final
Done by another editor.Leschnei (talk) 13:28, 18 April 2018 (UTC)Farfanes Done, neither of the choices on the DAB page apply, so I removed the link Leschnei (talk) 13:22, 18 April 2018 (UTC)Farhad Hasanzadeh— fixed by Vmavanti — Certes (talk) 19:38, 21 April 2018 (UTC)Felix Magalela Mafa Sibanda Done by another editor Leschnei (talk) 13:22, 18 April 2018 (UTC)Football at the 1991 Mediterranean Games Done Leschnei (talk) 13:28, 18 April 2018 (UTC)Germaine de Staël— no problems found by manual check or two tools — Certes (talk) 00:05, 21 April 2018 (UTC)Great Blizzard of 1899— unlinked by Onel5969 — Certes (talk) 19:38, 21 April 2018 (UTC)Hussain college of health sciences Lahore— fixed — Certes (talk) 19:38, 21 April 2018 (UTC)Index of philosophy articles (D–H)— fixed by Vmavanti — Certes (talk) 19:38, 21 April 2018 (UTC)Jacob wrestling with the Angel (Delacroix) Done Nothing in French Wiki or a Google search; so, La-Bas deleted. Narky Blert (talk) 21:04, 17 April 2018 (UTC)Leslie Stevenson— resolved — Certes (talk) 19:26, 19 April 2018 (UTC)List of fictional African countries Done using a footnote. Narky Blert (talk) 20:56, 17 April 2018 (UTC)List of ship launches in 1986 Done by another editor Leschnei (talk) 13:28, 18 April 2018 (UTC)Mary Kawennatakie Adams— already fixed by NotARabbit — Certes (talk) 14:31, 19 April 2018 (UTC)Ordinance Done by creating Land Reform Ordinance (disambiguation) and linking to it. There was another bad link to that page from Land Ordinance also. Narky Blert (talk) 21:29, 17 April 2018 (UTC)Philip Dodd (broadcaster) Done by another editor Leschnei (talk) 13:28, 18 April 2018 (UTC)Robert Echlin (bishop) Done Narky Blert (talk) 16:14, 19 April 2018 (UTC)Serbs of the Republic of Macedonia— unlinked — Certes (talk) 19:26, 19 April 2018 (UTC)Unicode font— more template cleverness; fixed — Certes (talk) 14:31, 19 April 2018 (UTC)Visa policy of South Africa— fixed by replacing dab with redirect to article — Certes (talk) 00:05, 21 April 2018 (UTC)William Grant Still Done Leschnei (talk) 18:50, 19 April 2018 (UTC)Witching— fixed by Vmavanti — Certes (talk) 19:38, 21 April 2018 (UTC)World Resources Forum— fixed — Certes (talk) 00:05, 21 April 2018 (UTC)Domaine du Lys-ChantillyFaith WainwrightList of baronies in the Peerage of Great BritainList of Chinese football transfers winter 2015List of Pirate PartiesList of World War II aces from ItalyLlanitoMadge Easton AndersonMegalopolisRule of FaithSocial Democrats, USASvetlana SavitskayaThomas Finch (soldier)Timeline of ISIL-related events (2015)Unforgiving: A Northern HymnWhitehall (Annapolis, Maryland)William Henry SolomonWilliam Killigrew (Chamberlain of the Exchequer)World Federation of Democratic YouthXionitesX- Armenians in Italy
- Frederick Williamson
- List of Italian exonyms in Dalmatia
- Novelty and fad dances
- Robin Ellis (priest)
- SS Zhongshan
These appeared to fixed and yet remain on the bonus list:
1926 Missouri highway renumbering— fixed link emitted by a template — Certes (talk) 18:37, 30 April 2018 (UTC)1999 LSU Tigers football team— no links to dab — Certes (talk) 18:37, 30 April 2018 (UTC)California Department of Food and Agriculture— no links to dab — Certes (talk) 18:37, 30 April 2018 (UTC)- Milot (name) — link to dab is produced by a active(-ish) {{merge to}}
Molding (decorative)— fixed link emitted by a template — Certes (talk) 18:37, 30 April 2018 (UTC)Nanterre 92— no links to dab — Certes (talk) 18:37, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
Vmavanti (talk) 18:22, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
- @Vmavanti: Could you add {{dn}} tags to the problem links in the stumpers you post here? It makes them a lot easier to locate in the article, and might get editors who watch Category:Articles with links needing disambiguation involved. Narky Blert (talk) 21:36, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
- Note: I proposed a while back to tag all remaining disambiguation links with {{dn}}. The proposal got substantial support, but has not been implemented. bd2412 T 22:17, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
- OK. I'm doing it now.
Vmavanti (talk) 22:56, 17 April 2018 (UTC) - Nearly everything left on the bonus list has a dn tag.Vmavanti (talk) 18:22, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
- @BD2412: This may be one of those ideas which is still in the overflowing intray of our colleague User:R'n'B. Six months ago, User:DPL bot was totally down after some change or other to the Wiki database structure had caused it to flail at air. It no longer does. Narky Blert (talk) 23:35, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
- My peeve about this is that we have completed all the date-tagged categories of disambiguation links up to January, 2015, but I don't know whether that means that we have actually solved all links older than that. Having everything tagged at once will at least set a baseline for what links need fixing as of right now. bd2412 T 23:42, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
- I work on Disambiguation Pages with Links with one link. I'm currently at "Reo-" (#4329 of 6455) in my 4th time through. DPL bot seems now to be finding things that weren't there on my 3rd run. I think I may have picked up a couple from 2007; but, most untagged stuff I see is from March or April 2018.
- I agree that anything that incites page-watchers to get their backsides into gear is a good idea. Narky Blert (talk) 23:59, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
- I am now pretty confident that any dablink posted before mid-March 2018 has been either fixed or flagged. Narky Blert (talk) 15:48, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
- Wow, that's wonderful news. Thanks to everyone who's helped! Certes (talk) 18:09, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
- Props! to all DABfixers, especially to those firefighters who attack those new horrors which appear every day.
- I've just begun my 5th run through Disambiguation Pages with Links with one link. Run #1 took about 6 months, run #2 about 4 months, run #3 54 days, run #4 44 days. Narky Blert (talk) 21:44, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
- Wow, that's wonderful news. Thanks to everyone who's helped! Certes (talk) 18:09, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
- I am now pretty confident that any dablink posted before mid-March 2018 has been either fixed or flagged. Narky Blert (talk) 15:48, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
- My peeve about this is that we have completed all the date-tagged categories of disambiguation links up to January, 2015, but I don't know whether that means that we have actually solved all links older than that. Having everything tagged at once will at least set a baseline for what links need fixing as of right now. bd2412 T 23:42, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
- @BD2412: This may be one of those ideas which is still in the overflowing intray of our colleague User:R'n'B. Six months ago, User:DPL bot was totally down after some change or other to the Wiki database structure had caused it to flail at air. It no longer does. Narky Blert (talk) 23:35, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
- OK. I'm doing it now.
- Note: I proposed a while back to tag all remaining disambiguation links with {{dn}}. The proposal got substantial support, but has not been implemented. bd2412 T 22:17, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
Walking on water
What's best to do with the links to Walking on water? I've diverted all the Christian allusions to Jesus walking on water. The rest are a mixture of holy people of other faiths, magicians and fictional superheroes. Technically these are Homo sapiens performing animal locomotion on the water surface but that article isn't relevant either: we don't have an article about walking on water in general. Shall I unlink, or is this an encyclopedic topic needing a new redlink? Certes (talk) 13:40, 27 April 2018 (UTC)
- Change them all to walking on water. bd2412 T 13:54, 27 April 2018 (UTC)
- I'd vote for unlink. Most English-speaking humans are pretty familiar with those terms. Nick Number (talk) 14:08, 27 April 2018 (UTC)
- Alternately, there is wikt:walk on water. bd2412 T 14:12, 27 April 2018 (UTC)
- Unless there's a really to-the-point target, I say unlink. The concept is pretty straightforward, and hardly needs explaining. Neither do walking or water. Narky Blert (talk) 20:46, 29 April 2018 (UTC)
- I should add that these links refer to literal movement over liquid, rather than the metaphor for general excellence explained in Wiktionary. Certes (talk) 15:05, 27 April 2018 (UTC)
Thanks, everyone. Most of the links have been dealt with in the last few days; I've unlinked the rest. Certes (talk) 22:56, 29 April 2018 (UTC)
- If you don't already know this film, well it's about time you did. It's a TFM. It has been described along the lines of "the best film about Christianity ever made by an atheist homosexual Marxist". IMO, the qualifications are redundant. See @54:25-@55:50 for the relevant bit for this discussion. If you can identify every piece of music in the soundtrack, you have my respect. Narky Blert (talk) 02:18, 30 May 2018 (UTC)
Using Dab solver
- @Dispenser: It would be useful if Dab solver User:Dispenser/Dab solver could be set into a mode where it could be called on a disambig page and, for each incoming link to that disambig page, it asks which of the disambig page's alternatives is intended there. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 14:50, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
- Forgive me if you knew this: User:Qwertyytrewqqwerty/DisamAssist fills that niche, though it doesn't have all the functionality of Dab Solver. Certes (talk) 15:37, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
National Liberal Party - Third Way
Broxbourne (UK Parliament constituency), Havering London Borough Council elections, and Castle Point Borough Council election, 2004 currently link to National Liberal Party which redirects to Third Way (disambiguation). I think that they should link to Third Way (UK organisation)#National Liberal party, but I don't know how to re-jigger {{Election box winning candidate with party link}}. Can someone advise? Leschnei (talk) 14:02, 1 July 2018 (UTC)
Presenter
On dipping a toe into the festering pool which is presenter, I quickly spotted a problem which I am unsure how to solve. Kenneth Horne is described as a presenter. I remember him. He only appeared on radio, but he was not a radio presenter. He was the central figure (and a very funny straight man) in at least two radio sketch programmes which he devised, and which were named after him. He built on what Tommy Handley had done. I'm not sure how to link KH, but presenter is just wrong; and am posting in case either anyone else comes across a similar problem, or has a good idea for a link. Narky Blert (talk) 20:18, 12 June 2018 (UTC)
- And 529 incoming links caused by Presenter's conversion to a disambiguation page! Leschnei (talk) 14:05, 1 July 2018 (UTC)
- You were late to the party. It started out at 2,767 incoming links (of which I only fixed a tiny handful). Narky Blert (talk) 03:45, 4 July 2018 (UTC)
Intricate templates linking to DAB pages
See Template talk:Georgia national football team results#A link to a DAB page and Template talk:Slovenia national football team results#A link to a DAB page. Ideas, anyone? Narky Blert (talk) 11:41, 11 July 2018 (UTC)
- I think I have fixed these, by subst'ing the template in the article page, and fixing the content generated by the subst. This is hardly an ideal solution. bd2412 T 12:11, 11 July 2018 (UTC)
- Wouldn't it be nice if editors who write templates in spaghetti code reacted to posts on Talk Pages? Narky Blert (talk) 18:35, 11 July 2018 (UTC)
I'm baffled
Can anyone work out how Korea is calling the DAB page Demographics of Korea? Here's the DPL bot report. The problem also shows in the DAB page what-links-here. This is at least the third time I've seen this problem, which means it has been around for at least six weeks. I'm inclined to suspect Template:Korea topics, but it's transcluded in many other articles without causing a problem. I've tried both WP:NULLEDIT and WP:DUMMYEDIT on Korea without effect. Narky Blert (talk) 16:43, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
- It's {{Infobox Geopolitical organization}}, which redirects to {{Infobox country}}. The text "Population" in the infobox is linked to the dab page. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 17:36, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
- Any idea how to fix it? Narky Blert (talk) 13:24, 22 July 2018 (UTC)
- I changed the target page from a disambig to an SIA, as "Demographics of Korea" is not an ambiguous concept, per WP:DABCONGEO. bd2412 T 13:36, 22 July 2018 (UTC)
- Good solution. I tend to dislike SIAs, but this is a complete set, and a page very unlikely to collect new bad links. Narky Blert (talk) 14:25, 2 August 2018 (UTC)
- I changed the target page from a disambig to an SIA, as "Demographics of Korea" is not an ambiguous concept, per WP:DABCONGEO. bd2412 T 13:36, 22 July 2018 (UTC)
- Any idea how to fix it? Narky Blert (talk) 13:24, 22 July 2018 (UTC)
Yet another template calling Wikidata
See Template talk:Cycling race/bestyoungclassification. Ideas, anyone? Narky Blert (talk) 17:28, 7 August 2018 (UTC)
- I've replied there. Certes (talk) 18:39, 7 August 2018 (UTC)
- I think that this is the fourth time that I have come across a DPL problem created by one of these cycling-related templates.
- The first two times, I wrote one-line stub articles with a citation. (Both cyclists passed WP:NCYCLING – but as I researched and wrote those articles I felt the futility of what I was doing: getting round a problem caused by a template, without creating an article of any real value to readers.) Of course, I did have to keep monitoring those articles until they got Wikidata Q-numbers, which I could use to correct the Wikidata pages.
- The third time, I wrote a one-line stub article with a citation, and it never got a Q-number. I raised the issue in the WP:TEAHOUSE - and an editor there found a matching non-English Wikidata entry and added my article to it.
- Fourth time: I give up. This problem has already wasted well over an hour's work for at least two editors. Thus, I am here, where another editor has wasted yet more time looking into it.
- There is no guarantee that a cyclist linked/called by one of these templates passes WP:NCYCLING. Wikidata does not accept redlinks. If such a template makes a bad call, then (unless you are our colleague Certes, and are willing to scan, and to look for bugs in, 3493 lines of convoluted code) the only solution would seem to be to write a WP:NN article, wait till it gets a Q-number, use it, and then to {{db-author}} the page you just made. Ridiculous. Grrr, Narky Blert (talk) 22:09, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
- I've suggested a solution at Module talk:Cycling race. Certes (talk) 22:56, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
- This problem should now be fixed. Certes (talk) 00:55, 11 August 2018 (UTC)
Leaderboard count error
Currently the leaderboard shows that I have made 16700 dab fixes this month. I know I've fixed a lot, but wow! Obviously this is an error. Is it known what's causing it? (I'd love to win the monthly challenge once, but preferably legitimately...) – Broccoli & Coffee (Oh hai) 00:09, 11 August 2018 (UTC)
- I noticed that. The system seems to think that you fixed a link to Social activity in the article Yogesh Dube about 16,600 times. bd2412 T 00:19, 11 August 2018 (UTC)
- Boy, I thought I was obsessive! — Gorthian (talk) 00:45, 11 August 2018 (UTC)
- The monthly record, set in 2009, is 9034. KUTGW...
Narky Blert (talk) 05:11, 11 August 2018 (UTC)
- Now up to 33,091. Keep going! Narky Blert (talk) 10:54, 11 August 2018 (UTC)
- My goal is to set a record nobody will ever break! – Broccoli & Coffee (Oh hai) 17:46, 11 August 2018 (UTC)
- At 542,616 (and it's not yet halfway through the month), you may be in with a chance. Narky Blert (talk) 08:39, 12 August 2018 (UTC)
- Now at 4,194,631. If this was registering on the board for total edits, you would now be Wikipedia's most prolific editor. bd2412 T 12:53, 12 August 2018 (UTC)
- At 542,616 (and it's not yet halfway through the month), you may be in with a chance. Narky Blert (talk) 08:39, 12 August 2018 (UTC)
- My goal is to set a record nobody will ever break! – Broccoli & Coffee (Oh hai) 17:46, 11 August 2018 (UTC)
- Now up to 33,091. Keep going! Narky Blert (talk) 10:54, 11 August 2018 (UTC)
- The monthly record, set in 2009, is 9034. KUTGW...
- Boy, I thought I was obsessive! — Gorthian (talk) 00:45, 11 August 2018 (UTC)
- OK, hopefully I've squashed all the duplicate entries and things should get back to normal now. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 18:14, 12 August 2018 (UTC)
- Spoilsport. Narky Blert (talk) 22:05, 12 August 2018 (UTC)
- Well, that was fun while it lasted. Now I'll have to get back to fixing things
without cheatingthe old fashioned way... – Broccoli & Coffee (Oh hai) 22:49, 12 August 2018 (UTC)
- Well, that was fun while it lasted. Now I'll have to get back to fixing things
- Spoilsport. Narky Blert (talk) 22:05, 12 August 2018 (UTC)
It had to happen sooner or later
Ø (Disambiguation) and Ø (Disambiguation). See also Ø (disambiguation). Is that a first? Narky Blert (talk) 10:18, 24 August 2018 (UTC)
- Sooner or later? Apparently, it happened eight years ago! :-) --R'n'B (call me Russ) 14:53, 24 August 2018 (UTC)
Question
Hello, can you only get points from the DAB monthly list or can you achieve points other DAB articles such as the monthly backlog categories? I have successfully undid a ton of DABS NOT from the monthly list and it does not show up as points. If only the monthly list, how does the combined points total more than the total number of links? See Fixer88 AmericanAir88 (talk) 13:59, 16 July 2018 (UTC)
- You should get a point for any page that was on either https://tools.wmflabs.org/dplbot/ch/monthly_list.php or https://tools.wmflabs.org/dplbot/ch/bonus_list.php. These pages are generated at the start of each month, so any links to disambiguation pages that were created after that will not appear (and will not be eligible for points) until the beginning of the following month. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 21:04, 16 July 2018 (UTC)
What's a DAB article? EricEgo2012 (talk) 03:47, 25 August 2018 (UTC)
- @EricEgo2012: Dab is an abbreviation for disambiguation page (which, to be pedantic, is not classed as an article). For example, Portuguese is a disambiguation page listing several articles which "Portuguese" may refer to in different contexts, and the most relevant article for "Já não há distancia" is Portuguese language. Certes (talk) 10:05, 25 August 2018 (UTC)
Chamber of horrors
This is a small select set of pages with {{dn}} tags which share three common characteristics:
- The tag was added before 2018
- If any sources exist, they should be in English
- IMO there is a good case for unlinking from maintext or for deletion from a list (as the case may be); but, that at least a second opinion is needed
- Ausable Chasm (New York) Done
- Bulkeley Hall Done (Thomas Bulkeley was a gentleman of Malpas; probably no one on the dab page. Certes (talk) 22:05, 17 August 2018 (UTC))
- Cipriano de Valera (multiple bad bluelinks, and several iffy-looking redlinks} Done I WP:BOLDly unlinked the lot as seemingly NN.
- Founder.org Done
- Index of World War II articles (W) (none of the people on the DAB page seems to have a significant connection to WWII) Done
- Kirkbride, Durisdeer Done
- List of English words of Hebrew origin
- List of words ending in ology Done
- Novelty and fad dances Done
If you solve any of these puzzles (in whatever way), mark it as {{done}} in the above list. Narky Blert (talk) 20:47, 17 August 2018 (UTC)
- There is a "William J. Simmons" listed as a WWII flying ace listed at List of World War II aces from the United States. We don't have an article. Corroboration at this site. I haven't altered the link. Dekimasuよ! 21:33, 17 August 2018 (UTC)
- Good find! I've changed that bluelink to a redlink. Narky Blert (talk) 23:06, 17 August 2018 (UTC)
- Novelty and fad dances: probably a reference to Apache (instrumental)#The Sugarhill Gang version. Again, haven't changed the link. Dekimasuよ! 21:39, 17 August 2018 (UTC)
- Kirkbride, Durisdeer: this looks to be Penpont. Note the reference to "Hunter" in the Project Gutenberg book linked in the reference. Dekimasuよ! 21:45, 17 August 2018 (UTC)
- I'm convinced that you're right. Kirkbride, Durisdeer, mentions Penpont elsewhere in the article; and Penpont mentions its presbytery in the 1760s. I've WP:BOLDly made that change. Narky Blert (talk) 11:58, 18 August 2018 (UTC)
- I did a bit of rewording on Founder.org; it’s a little less spammy now. — Gorthian (talk) 23:42, 17 August 2018 (UTC)
- I'd argue for removing the text altogether for "Jump on It" from Novelty and fad dances. Added in 2010 by an IP with exactly 1 edit. I haven't edited it, though. – Broccoli & Coffee (Oh hai) 00:29, 18 August 2018 (UTC)
- Boldly removed. Unsourced; no search hits; quite possibly a dance made up one day and quickly forgotten. Certes (talk) 00:44, 18 August 2018 (UTC)
- There’s a lot of doubt about whether the word “sindology” even exists. (In List of words ending in ology). The page history goes all the way back to 2011, when it was a stub. The post at Talk:sindology summarizes the situation. I removed the entry entirely from List of words ending in ology. — Gorthian (talk) 00:42, 18 August 2018 (UTC)
- There is a "William J. Simmons" listed as a WWII flying ace listed at List of World War II aces from the United States. We don't have an article. Corroboration at this site. I haven't altered the link. Dekimasuよ! 21:33, 17 August 2018 (UTC)
- Well, that went well! I may post another batch in six month's time. Narky Blert (talk) 05:31, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
Template:LDS area seventy
Template:LDS area seventy autolinks to any name which matches an entry, even if it's badly wrong or a DAB page. See List of area seventies of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Joel Martinez. Adding a {{dn}} tag suppresses the link, but does not solve the problem. The template takes given name and surname separately, and there seems no way either to nowiki the link or to add a disambiguator. I can't find either a middle initial or a matronymic for this Joel Martinez, which would have solved the problem. Can anyone help? Narky Blert (talk) 11:09, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
- I've added the secret
|link=noparameter to those template calls. Certes (talk) 12:38, 10 September 2018 (UTC)- Secret parameters, just what we all need. Narky Blert (talk) 22:42, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
List of Peel sessions
If you have the misfortune to fall across List of Peel sessions, the best starting point is this. If you click through from the artist to the details of a session, you will often find bandmembers' names; which can be useful in choosing a qualifier, or even in exceptional cases identifying a Wikipedia article. Peel was notorious for playing bands never heard of before or since, so don't be surprised if you can find nothing else about one. (I will have heard some of those sessions.) Narky Blert (talk) 14:42, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
Help wanted - Template:Infobox former country
Template:Infobox former country is another of those templates which autogenerates bad links and is difficult to understand. In Irish Republic and Kingdom of Ireland, it generates links to the DAB page Demographics of Ireland (not easy to find - it's under the 'Population' bluelink). Irish Republic should link to Demographics of the Republic of Ireland, and Kingdom of Ireland to Irish population analysis. Narky Blert (talk) 15:35, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
Fixed by adding |population_link=. Certes (talk) 15:53, 21 September 2018 (UTC)- Some of these template editors should have a go at the International Obfuscated C Code Contest, they'd be in with a chance. Narky Blert (talk) 21:21, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
Help needed - Wikidata
Can anyone work out how the Wikidata call in Marie L. Shedlock is creating a link to the DAB page Story-teller? and, ideally, fix it? Narky Blert (talk) 17:41, 23 September 2018 (UTC)
- Wikidata has her occupation as story-teller, which in Wikidata is a separate occupational term; however, the en Infobox mistakenly interprets this by linking to the en Wikipedia article. older ≠ wiser 18:25, 23 September 2018 (UTC)
- It's a problem we've seen before. Module:WikidataIB finds the Wikidata entity corresponding to her occupation (Story-teller). If that entity has an enwiki article then the article name gets displayed as a wikilink (good). If not then it checks whether enwiki has a redirect whose name matches the Wikidata item. If it has then that gets displayed as a wikilink, even if it redirects to a dab or other unwanted destination. Possible ways forward:
- Add a parameter
{{infobox person/Wikidata|suppressfields=occupation}}to suppress the occupation field entirely. I don't see an easy way to just get rid of the square brackets. - Edit Wikidata to link the item to an article. The best fit I can find is Storytelling but I don't think that's a legitimate change, as Storytelling is already a distinct Wikidata entity.
- Fix Module:WikidataIB. The problem lies at line 341 in function linkedItem. The code handle cases where Foo gets renamed to Foobar, leaving Foo as a redirect and leaving "Foo" recorded in Wikidata as the (outdated) article name. It's unclear how we could continue handling that case correctly whilst no longer linking to redirects to random places.
- Add a parameter
- — Certes (talk) 18:29, 23 September 2018 (UTC)
- Raised at Module talk:WikidataIB#Wikilinks for redirects. Certes (talk) 19:32, 23 September 2018 (UTC)
- Wikidata is a total pain in the anatomy, and IMO thoroughly untrustworthy. Within the last two days, I've fixed (1) a unidirectional Interwiki link (Dutch Wikipedia linked to an English redirect - I got two This-Is-Your-Last-Chance Horrible Warnings while connecting the two articles), and (2) an English DAB page which was linked to specific articles in other-language Wikipedias rather than to the DAB pages in those and other languages. I've also had connecting edits reverted in Wikidata before now by editors who could not see the identity between pages in Cyrillic, Greek and Latin scripts. Narky Blert (talk) 21:36, 23 September 2018 (UTC)
- My suggested module change won't be accepted because the existing code is a workaround for Wikidata's refusal to accept redirects as sitelinks. I've fixed this case by editing the Wikidata label to Storyteller. Of course, that does nothing to fix the general problem. Certes (talk) 21:46, 23 September 2018 (UTC)
Yet another impenetrable template
Template:LDS Temple, which is calling ambiguous redirect Kenneth Johnson in Bismarck North Dakota Temple, Brisbane Australia Temple and Perth Australia Temple. You may need to click Expand in the infobox to see the link. We have no article, so if you can figure this one out, your choice of qualifier. Narky Blert (talk) 08:50, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
- Fixed: I've edited {{LDS Temple/Bismarck North Dakota Temple}} to redlink [[Kenneth Johnson (Mormon)|Kenneth Johnson]], modelling the qualifier on the dedicator of Logan Utah Temple, and done similarly for the other temples. An alternative is to use something like
|groundbreaking_by=Kenneth Johnson<nowiki/>(sic), which gives simple text rather than a redlink but won't promote to a blue link if the article appears. - {{Link if exists}} shows a blue link if a page exists or black text if not. Would it be appropriate to use something similar here, to show "Kenneth Johnson" in black until Kenneth Johnson (Mormon) is created and a piped link thereafter? I could easily create
{{Piped link if exists|Kenneth Johnson (Mormon)|Kenneth Johnson}}but firstly I'm not sure that we should be displaying redlinks in black, and secondly I don't want to reinvent the wheel if we already have such a template. Certes (talk) 11:09, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
Yet another template generating spurious links
See Template talk:Infobox national football team#A bad link and a link to a DAB page, posted on 16 August 2018 with no response. If you can help, thanks in advance. Narky Blert (talk) 14:46, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
- Fixed with a template enhancement and a minor article edit, which I'll repeat in similar articles if there's no negative feedback. Certes (talk) 14:41, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
And another of dem templates
Template:Infobox Observatory summons information from Wikidata, which may be wrong. Teide Observatory links to STELLA, a redirect to a DAB page. Maintext shows that the link should be to STELLA Telescopes (no article in English, German or Spanish Wikipedia). Grrr, Narky Blert (talk) 10:09, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
- I've changed the description of d:Q57415862 to "STELLA Telescopes", which unlinks the text. In the short term I think that's the best we can do, for the reasons explained above. In the longer term, I see a growing case for deprecating such use of Wikidata until that project accepts links to Wikipedia redirects. Certes (talk) 11:20, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
- TY – and, agreed. Having been there before, I wasted no time floundering around in Wikidata, but cut to the chase and just posted here. Narky Blert (talk) 21:29, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
Bad links to people's names in articles about genera and species
Some editors of biological articles have the nasty habit of identifying binomial authorities by bare surname (redlinked, or bluelinked to a surname page), or of responding to a User:DPL bot nastygram by adding a (disambiguation) qualifier to a bad {{hndis}} link. If you happen to come across any such problems, please {{ping}} me: I enjoy solving them. Pison was a particularly bad example. Narky Blert (talk) 08:06, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
- On a related note, I'm looking at bad links to the genera and species themselves, such as Astarte when a piped link to Astarte (bivalve) was intended. Further details here. Certes (talk) 11:15, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
- I expect you knew this, but for anyone starting down a similar path: the two lists of biologists by author abbreviation can be useful. Certes (talk) 14:55, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
- Botany and zoology are different disciplines, and have somewhat different rules of nomenclature. Both follow the Linnaean idea that the name first proposed should stand, but that does not cross over between the two disciplines. See Category:Genus disambiguation pages for the numerous cases where genera of animals and of plants have the same scientific name. For added confusion, read synonym (taxonomy) – and then remember that some taxonomical classifications haven't been revisited in the last hundred years, and may be hopelessly out-of-date.
- Botanists have a rigorous formal system of standardised authority names; see {{botanist}}. List of botanists by author abbreviation is an immediate go-to in any botanical problem. Note that botanists' rules override MOS:SPACEINITS in the names of authorities. For example, the standard author abbreviation for Alvah Augustus Eaton is A.A.Eaton not A. A. Eaton.
- In the 18th century, zoologists missed their chance to establish something similar. There are no standard abbreviations. If you come across a zoological citation like 'Smith (1850)', that could be anyone, and your only resource is creative searching.
- The paradox is that botanical taxonomy is often fuzzier than zoological taxonomy, but that identification of botanical taxonomists is the more precise. Narky Blert (talk) 05:14, 28 October 2018 (UTC)
- Oh, that's very useful, thanks. Leschnei (talk) 00:21, 28 October 2018 (UTC)
Yet another template generating a spurious link
In Eoghan Bán Gallagher, the link under 'Ulster titles' in the infobox (Template:Infobox GAA player) is Ulster Senior Championship, a redirect to DAB page Ulster Championship. I haven't the foggiest idea how it's doing it, though I suspect something to do with there being a value in the iculster= field. The link in this specific instance should be Ulster Senior Football Championship. (It won't always be - there are several other Ulster GAA championships.) Narky Blert (talk) 09:56, 28 October 2018 (UTC)
- Fixed by adding
|sport=and|code=. Certes (talk) 10:29, 28 October 2018 (UTC)
Template time again
Template:Asia topic links to the DAB page Communism in India. The code is so convoluted, I'm not even going to try. Until the {{dabconcept}} article is written, the link should probably go though Communism in India (disambiguation). The template can be found in Communism in Korea Communism in the Philippines and Communism in Vietnam (right at the foot, headed 'Communism in Asia'). Good luck! Narky Blert (talk) 13:00, 1 November 2018 (UTC)
- Messy as it is, I'm tempted to leave this one. There's a genuine mistake and it's in the content of Communism in India (which, as you suggest, should be a BCA) rather than in the template or the pages which call it. I feel that "fixing" the template would be whitewashing over an error message which we do need to see. Certes (talk) 13:35, 1 November 2018 (UTC)
- I've attempted to add some ginger. See Wikipedia talk:Noticeboard for India-related topics#Communism in India. Narky Blert (talk) 03:19, 2 November 2018 (UTC)
Template:Jcon
{{jcon}} seems to provide no means for disambiguating placenames. See Kinburn in Ontario Highway 417. {{jct}} has a 'county<i>' parameter, but it doesn't seem to be available in {{jcon}} (so much for the claim of added functionality). Narky Blert (talk) 08:21, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
- Done by abusing
|nolink=yto display plain text which happens to be a piped link. Certes (talk) 17:42, 4 November 2018 (UTC)- Nifty! Narky Blert (talk) 20:27, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
Template of the day
Template:Infobox All-Ireland Hurling autocompletes some fields and does not seem to make any provision for ambiguity. See 1984–85 All-Ireland Senior Club Hurling Championship, where it twice calls the redirect St. Martin's GAA. The correct target in both cases is St Martin's GAA (County Kilkenny). I suspect that all four province fields will be affected. Narky Blert (talk) 13:14, 6 November 2018 (UTC)
- Fixed using
|leinsterlink=and|teamlink=. Certes (talk) 14:48, 6 November 2018 (UTC)
Yet another template calling Wikidata (revisited)
See #Yet another template calling Wikidata, above. This time, it's {{Cycling race/stageclassification|Q56754726}} in 2018 Tour of Iran (Azerbaijan) creating a blacklink in the article and showing up in what-links-here to DAB page Aleksandr Smirnov. A redlink should be Aleksandr Smirnov (cyclist); FWIW, he isn't in Russian Wikipedia either. Grr, Narky Blert (talk) 14:48, 7 November 2018 (UTC)
- Changing the label on d:Q56883920 should fix it but the current text of "Aleksandr Smirnov" seems to be the best value. Wikipedia's workaround for Wikidata's refusal to accept redirects breaks this case. I don't see how to fix it without writing an article which might be instantly AfD'd. Disconnecting the race from its rider in Wikidata would also fix Wikipedia here, but I suspect that Wikidata would view such an edit as pointy vandalism. Certes (talk) 15:02, 7 November 2018 (UTC)
- Aleksandr Smirnov (cyclist) doesn't pass WP:NCYCLING, so WP:A7 or WP:PROD might come into play before WP:AFD. Write the article then WP:G7 it is a possibility, but would raise serious questions about the good faith involved in writing it. Narky Blert (talk) 20:49, 7 November 2018 (UTC)
- I have stuck my oar in at m:Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Wikidata/Allow non one-to-one correspondence relationship in wikidata and display them in interlanguage link. Certes (talk) 15:48, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
- ...which revealed d:Wikidata:Project chat#Inclusion of redirects. Certes (talk) 16:24, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
Spaghetti template code
Article, Socialism in Iran. Template, Template:Asia topic. Template heading in the article, Socialism in Asia. DAB page linked (via the redirect Socialism in China), Chinese socialism. The link probably should be to the DAB page, the Kuomintang and the Maoists were fighting each other so not exactly a {{dabconcept}}.
"Template:Continent topic"s are a confounded nuisance. Narky Blert (talk) 17:53, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
- Another tough one. Each bit of wikitext and template code makes sense individually but they don't play nicely together. Socialism in Iran is the only article which uses the Asia topic template for socialism. Should we remove that template call and add more Asian countries to {{Socialism by state}} which is already present in Socialism in Iran (along with Socialism in Pakistan etc.)? An alternative is to create a {{Socialism in Asia}} template along the lines of
{{Asia topic|Socialism in|CN=Chinese socialism (disambiguation)}}so that the messy bits can be coded once in a central place but, with only one article to fix, that might just be adding more spaghetti. Certes (talk) 18:23, 10 November 2018 (UTC)- Turning Chinese Socialism into a WP:SIA would be another way of solving the immediate DPL problem. However, I loathe and despise SIAs perhaps even more than I do WP:PTOPICs (except in the most limited of cases). They are both guaranteed ways of accumulating bad links which are unlikely ever to get found and fixed. On the surface, our goal in this WikiProject is to minimise the number of links about which User:DPL bot complains – but that is only one aspect of a more fundamental goal for Wikipedia, namely to maximise the chances that links point accurately to what readers are looking for. Narky Blert (talk) 21:42, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
- SIA is an interesting idea but I don't like it for this case either. If I may digress: you're right about goals. The number of links to dabs has fallen by 97% over the last four years and, whilst new ones appear daily, we're diligently whacking the moles. Most of my recent edits have fixed links which led to the wrong article rather than to a dab. The number of such bad links can never be known but I suspect it is much more than the 4,272 links to dab, and I'm working on ways to detect and fix them efficiently. Certes (talk) 22:05, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
- Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, WP:RMs like Talk:Division of Fraser (Victoria)#Requested move 9 November 2018, Talk:Chris Pappas (politician)#Requested move 8 November 2018, Talk:Ain't Misbehavin' (song)#Requested move 6 November 2018 and Talk:Address (geography)#Requested move 6 November 2018 keep being made. Check the page view graphs. Narky Blert (talk) 20:09, 12 November 2018 (UTC)
- IDK what %age of my edits relate to bad links rather than to DAB pages, but I'd guess something in the 1-5% range. If I come across a sea of redlinks with a couple of bluelinks, I often click on the other bluelinks out of curiosity. It's remarkable how often (say} an elderly and distinguished mediaeval historian moonlights as a bad-guy professional wrestler, or someone who's been dead 200 years has appeared in a C21 reality show.
- I also click on bluelinks which my gut tells me might be wrong. I'm impressed by those Indian film studios who have hired Krishna to act in leading (and especially minor) roles. Narky Blert (talk) 03:49, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
- I've boldly made a few additions to {{Socialism by state}} and edited Socialism in Iran to remove the use of {{Asia topic}}. (I fixed a few Krishna links myself a while ago; Vishnu also seems to have had a hand in everything.) Certes (talk) 12:20, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
- SIA is an interesting idea but I don't like it for this case either. If I may digress: you're right about goals. The number of links to dabs has fallen by 97% over the last four years and, whilst new ones appear daily, we're diligently whacking the moles. Most of my recent edits have fixed links which led to the wrong article rather than to a dab. The number of such bad links can never be known but I suspect it is much more than the 4,272 links to dab, and I'm working on ways to detect and fix them efficiently. Certes (talk) 22:05, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
- Turning Chinese Socialism into a WP:SIA would be another way of solving the immediate DPL problem. However, I loathe and despise SIAs perhaps even more than I do WP:PTOPICs (except in the most limited of cases). They are both guaranteed ways of accumulating bad links which are unlikely ever to get found and fixed. On the surface, our goal in this WikiProject is to minimise the number of links about which User:DPL bot complains – but that is only one aspect of a more fundamental goal for Wikipedia, namely to maximise the chances that links point accurately to what readers are looking for. Narky Blert (talk) 21:42, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
This template employs intricate features of template syntax
In British Virgin Islands, Template:Infobox country somehow generates the legend 'Flag' with a link to the DAB page Flag of the Virgin Islands while linking to the correct image. Narky Blert (talk) 10:13, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
- Fixed by adding
|flag_type_article=Flag of the British Virgin Islands(and|symbol_type_article=Coat of arms of the British Virgin Islandsto link to the arms). The problem here is that the template prefers "common name", which is set to "Virgin Islands", which is ambiguous. Certes (talk) 12:20, 14 November 2018 (UTC)- Gud catch on the Coat of Arms, I forgot to check for that half of the pair. Narky Blert (talk) 20:15, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
Help with Draft:Open source
Getting Draft:Open source finished and moved to mainspace as a broad concept article will resolve thousands of outstanding disambiguation links. Please help! Thanks. bd2412 T 14:56, 22 November 2018 (UTC)
Another station-related obscurity
{{Infobox station}} in Aarhus Central Station is somehow managing twice to call the DAB page Struer rather than Struer, Denmark. It beats me how it's doing it, Narky Blert (talk) 16:34, 3 December 2018 (UTC)
- I edited {{DSB lines}} to fix one call. The link has gone away; maybe someone else fixed the other call. Certes (talk) 16:49, 3 December 2018 (UTC)
Need m:Touch.py to touch all pages transcluding Template:Infobox aerial lift line
The file I have edited is Template:Infobox aerial lift line/type, simply to change the wikitext displayed so that the correct articles are linked. The instructions at Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/Guide stated I should ask for this here. Can someone arrange this please? Thank you. MegaSloth (talk) 11:24, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
- Seems to be fixed; no need for further intervention. If anyone took action on this, thank you. MegaSloth (talk) 12:50, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
Open source
Open source was on this list at the beginning of December, and I disambiguation about 1,000 links over the weekend. It's no longer on the list, because Open source is no longer a disambiguation page, which drops me on the leaderboard from 1st to 4th. Any chance to reconsider this month's stats? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 05:25, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
- I've seen lesser examples of this effect before. I can only suggest that you redouble your efforts...
- The DAB Challenge is nothing more than a bit of fun, but its methodology has become flawed. It was designed in the days when there were tens and hundreds of thousands of links to DAB pages, so that a high proportion of fixes (i.e. of errors logged on the first day of the month) got counted. There are editors among us who concentrate on firefighting and whose contributions scarcely register in the DAB Challenge nowadays. I routinely score well only because, having tried my hand with the hoses and the buckets and seeing that I was duplicating effort, I decided to concentrate on the still-smouldering patches behind the front line.
- If anyone feels like writing a new version of the DAB Challenge (don't overwrite the old one!) based on the number of fixes from the 12-hourly Disambiguation pages with links reports, go ahead; but that's hardly a priority. The numbers I look at first are in WP:TDD, because they record the team effort. Narky Blert (talk) 07:50, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
- GB, I sympathize with your plight, but keep in mind that Open source was marked on the list as a page for which a de-disambiguation discussion was underway well before the monthly contest began, and the trend in the discussion itself was clear at the time. bd2412 T 12:19, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
- Thank you both for your responses. GoingBatty (talk) 00:30, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
No, it's not my imagination
When the modern method of counting was established in June 2011, the left-hand column of WP:TDD reported just under 114,000 pages. When I got interested in this game, in early 2016, there were 40,000. The number has just for the first time dropped below 3,000, and I'm starting more and more often to find pages in Disambiguation pages with links which colleagues in this WikiProject have fixed since the most recent 12-hourly update. Way to go! Narky Blert (talk) 10:57, 5 December 2018 (UTC)
- Yes; a great achievement. We have a few sticky entries near the top of Disambiguation pages with links. I've been through these and fixed the easy ones (and I expect others have tried too) but we're left with:
Open source (811 links, down from 4,573): a BCA is being discussed(now a BCA)Cable car, (23): railway or chair lift?Reticulation (13): needs a taxonomist or botanist Done Narky Blert (talk) 06:21, 8 December 2018 (UTC)- Acxiom (12): unclear which of two related companies
Adhesin (12): BCA proposed, or needs a biologist Done Narky Blert (talk) 06:24, 8 December 2018 (UTC)- Contemporary jazz (10): needs a jazz fan or musicologist
- Civilization (board game) (5): partial dab, formerly a SIA, linked in "for similar games..." hatnotes (update, 8 Dec: briefly became a redirect to Civilization (disambiguation)#Games and went to AfD before reverting to a partial dab)
- There are 1,455 articles with links needing disambiguation, i.e. having one or more links with a {{dn}} tag that someone couldn't resolve immediately. That leaves at most 1,500 links unaddressed; probably far fewer, as some of the 1,455 cover several bad links. With more links appearing daily, clearly we need to keep up the good work to keep those numbers low, but I wonder if this is a good time to think about where to go from here. For example, should we be looking at bad links to pages other than dabs, such as surnames (
she beat Murphy in the final
) or terms where popular culture's primary topic doesn't match Wikipedia's (Joe Garageband opened for Prince
)? Certes (talk) 12:49, 5 December 2018 (UTC)- Although the reduction in absolute numbers is impressive, I think many of those which are left are the most difficult and will take the most time to resolve. I have been guilty of "cherry-picking" the easier ones to deal with (and I suspect others may have done as well) therefore I would suggest not diluting the effort (?yet) by moving into other areas, and continuing with the list (remembering that a few days where the 500+ or so dab links created exceeds those resolved) can soon push the numbers back up again.— Rod talk 17:57, 5 December 2018 (UTC)
- I've been picking away at the older entries in Category:Articles with links needing disambiguation (I'm now up to July 2017). A fair proportion are self-solving: no link, already a redlink, or a good link but someone forgot to take the {{dn}} tag off (yes, me too). Of course, some of them are where an editor has responded to a User:DPL bot nastygram by uselessly linking to a DAB page through the (disambiguation) qualifier rather than by addressing the underlying problem. That sort of gimmick is very difficult to spot, and really gets on my goat.
- I see no blame in cherry-picking. The low-hanging fruit needs attention too. It seems to me that our success is precisely because we have different members willing to take on both the routine and the difficult tasks.
- I deliberately mentioned only column 1 of WP:TDD Table 1. Column 2, and the RH columns of Tables 2 and 3, are always vulnerable to an editor dumping several thousand links onto us with or without good reason.
- I have had considerable success in roping in help from some specialist WikiProjects. I single out the following for particular praise: Wikipedia:WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome, Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics and Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine, all of whom are red-hot and keen to get articles on their topics as accurate as possible. I am not (now) going to name and shame those WikiProjects which I have found as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike. There are also a couple of WikiProjects whose help I haven't yet asked for. Narky Blert (talk) 02:07, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
- I've been fixing links to terms where popular culture's primary topic doesn't match Wikipedia's (
Billboard magazine, Apple computers, Bumblebee from Transformers, Wolverine from the X-Men
). Another interesting path is plurals that are also popular culture topics (peanuts the food, mythological pixies, house windows
). I think I suggested before to expand the DAB Challenge to other namespaces, such as Book, File, and Portal. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 03:33, 6 December 2018 (UTC)- Thanks, that's very helpful work that not many other people are doing. I also spotted Billboard (74 fixed) and Apple (I fixed only a few: BD2412 also tidies that term) but not the others. I've started an essay at User:Certes/misdirected links, and there's a fuller list of Billboard-like errors — fixed by adding " (qualifier)" — in an old version. I've not publicised it widely yet, to avoid distracting attention from disambiguation. It probably needs to be a one-off or occasional effort, rather than a daily update, because it's awkward to detect new links without trawling through all the false positives again. Certes (talk) 10:57, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
- I've only once or twice done any systematic work on bad links to WP:PTOPICs. It can be tedious; but it's well worth doing, and I applaud anyone who does it.
- My bugbear is WP:SIAs, of which {{surname}} and {{given name}} are (if the newfangled short descriptions can be trusted) subclasses. Some examples.
- (1) Vostok (inhabited locality) and the like – and there are dozens of pages like that. The only features shared by the entries on that page is that (1) their name is Russian for 'east', and (2) they are all in Russia. They have no other connection. That looks to me like classic DAB page material (or DAB subpage, Vostok, Russia, if the main page is getting overloaded). I came across a group today which consisted of (a) a two-entry DAB page containing a standalone entry and a link to an (inhabited locality) page, and (b) an (inhabited locality) SIA containing two entries. (There is now a three-entry DAB page and a {{R from incomplete disambiguation}} redirect to it. In this instance, there were no bad incoming links to the SIA; but that is not always the case.)
- (2) Surnames and given names. Most links to name pages are going to be bad. I can only think of one justified case (there may be more): a link from a name page, or from a see-also from a DAB page, to a related name. I know of two problem cases in particular. (1) Sports where it is customary in match reports to refer to players only by their surnames. Association football is one. (2) Taxonomy. Taxon authorities are invariably referred to only by their surname (zoology) or by their standard abbreviation (botany). Of course, some standard botanical abbreviations are identical to the surname.
- (3) Ships. This is not an area into which I've looked at all, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are some horrors. There's a superficial attractiveness in a SIA, because no navy will have two ships with the same name in commission at the same time. Matters become more confused if you know that HMS Temeraire (1759) is the same ship as French ship Téméraire (1749), listed on both HMS Temeraire and French ship Le Téméraire; and that two ships called Swiftsure took part in the Battle of Trafalgar, HMS Swiftsure (1804) and French ship Swiftsure (1801) (which was the same ship as HMS Swiftsure (1787).
- In at least (2) and (3), any change to current practice would need discussion and consensus with relevant WikiProjects. Narky Blert (talk) 22:03, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
- Thanks, that's very helpful work that not many other people are doing. I also spotted Billboard (74 fixed) and Apple (I fixed only a few: BD2412 also tidies that term) but not the others. I've started an essay at User:Certes/misdirected links, and there's a fuller list of Billboard-like errors — fixed by adding " (qualifier)" — in an old version. I've not publicised it widely yet, to avoid distracting attention from disambiguation. It probably needs to be a one-off or occasional effort, rather than a daily update, because it's awkward to detect new links without trawling through all the false positives again. Certes (talk) 10:57, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
- Although the reduction in absolute numbers is impressive, I think many of those which are left are the most difficult and will take the most time to resolve. I have been guilty of "cherry-picking" the easier ones to deal with (and I suspect others may have done as well) therefore I would suggest not diluting the effort (?yet) by moving into other areas, and continuing with the list (remembering that a few days where the 500+ or so dab links created exceeds those resolved) can soon push the numbers back up again.— Rod talk 17:57, 5 December 2018 (UTC)
Subsistence
Any thoughts about new dab Subsistence? We may have a situation like Open source. I'm tempted to link several other articles such as Subsistence agriculture, but all apply the basic concept of maintaining a minimum level to various topics in a way which is obvious from the two separate terms. Certes (talk) 22:46, 10 December 2018 (UTC)
- I have speedy moved the page created without discussion to Subsistence (disambiguation) and restored the redirect. There was already a redirect hatnote at the target page, so I have merely modified that to reflect the existence of the disambiguation page. bd2412 T 01:37, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
- Some WP:PTMs added as see-alsos. Narky Blert (talk) 08:44, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
- Thank you both. Normal service is resumed! Certes (talk) 13:14, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
- Some WP:PTMs added as see-alsos. Narky Blert (talk) 08:44, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
More nonsense imported from Wikidata
In Fatehpur (Lok Sabha constituency), the infobox (d:Q5437428) calls the DAB page Jahanabad rather than Jahanabad, Uttar Pradesh (Assembly constituency).
Even worse, it does it by way of d:Q30678400, which relates to Bihar not Uttar Pradesh. Yuk! Narky Blert (talk) 14:42, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
- Fixed by editing d:Q5437428. Certes (talk) 15:13, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
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