Talk:؟

Arabic question mark

Stick a WP:HATNOTE, linking to Question mark on the Irony mark article if you're so concerned about the plight of the user who is apparently reading Arabic, comes upon a punctuation mark that he does not understand, and decides that looking it up on the English-language Wikipedia is the best way to solve his confusion. Propaniac (talk) 13:11, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Why? -- Evertype·✆ 01:28, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

If you mean "why use a redirect/hatnote instead of putting a disambiguation page at the base title," the answer is because the irony mark is the primary meaning of the symbol in English. If you mean "why bother with a redirect/hatnote at all," that's not my cause to defend. Propaniac (talk) 22:43, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Propaniac, would the fact be of any relevance to you that the character titling this page isn't the irony mark (unicode "REVERSED QUESTION MARK") but is actually the Arbaic question mark, meaning that if someone did find this character somewhere on the internet and pasted it into wikipedia to figure out what it is, they would probably have found it used as a question mark in an Arabic or Persian text. A disambiguation is a clear way to inform readers about the different possibilities of usage, whereas a hatnote in the article to which a reader is automatically redirected actually conveys the false impression that the character typed in is chiefly a Latin puncuation mark. Remember, this specific character is an Arabic punctuation mark, it's not like someone might have drawn an irony mark with a pencil into the search box. So that's why having this disambiguation page is better than not having it. On the other hand, what's the drawback on having it? Is there a general policy to avoid disambigauation pages on wikipedia or is it something personal? Dan ☺ 00:36, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

To answer the last point first: sending users to useless disambiguation pages is an unnecessary inconvenience and often perpetuates misunderstandings about what Wikipedia is for and how it is used (a user sees something done badly and thinks that that's how it's supposed to be done). Disambiguation pages that only list two meanings are generally useless, because you can serve the same purpose with a hatnote, and in doing so make things easier and more convenient for all the users looking for the primary topic (and no more inconvenient for users looking for the other topic, because either way, it's one extra page and one extra click). Creating disambiguation pages merely to inform users about entries that do not, in my view, meet the purpose of the encyclopedia (such as translations in other languages, or dictionary definitions that have no articles) is also detrimental.

That being said, this is obviously a weird case, and you seem to make a fair point above, so I'm willing to stand down on our disagreement. But if the disambiguation page is restored, it should be brought into compliance with the Manual of Style so that it can be taken off the disambig-cleanup list, which was my goal in converting it to a redirect in the first place. Each entry should have one bluelink and the description should be only long enough to allow users to distinguish which link they're looking for. I'll let the dab page exist, but I'm not going to clean it up. Propaniac (talk) 14:54, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

The two way disambiguation page could also be avoided by redirecting directly to Question mark#Mirrored question mark, with a reference or hatnote sending you from there to Irony mark – unless there's a notable number of occurrences of the character "؟" on the internet actually used as an irony mark. Dan ☺ 17:19, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

So if no-one objects, I'll redirect ؟ to Question mark#Mirrored question mark with a reference there to Irony mark. Dan ☺ 13:12, 1 May 2010 (UTC)