Talk:AO

Manual of Style

Portions of the Manual of Style for disambigation pages that are especially relevant to recent edits:

"Keep in mind that the primary purpose of the disambiguation page is to help people find the specific article they want quickly and easily."

"Where several variants of a term are being disambiguated together, significant variants may be included in the lead sentence. [...] However, it is not necessary to mention minor variations of capitalization, punctuation or diacritics. For example, 'AU may refer to:' is preferable to 'AU, au, Au or A-U may refer to'."

"The description associated with a link should be kept to a minimum, just sufficient to allow the reader to find the correct link. In many cases, the title of the article alone will be sufficient and no additional description is necessary."

"Within each group within a section, and within each non-subdivided section, entries should be ordered to best assist the reader in finding their intended article. This might mean in decreasing order of likelihood as user's target, alphabetically, chronologically, or geographically, not to the exclusion of other methods."

"Each entry should have exactly one navigable (blue) link to efficiently guide readers to the most relevant article for that use of the ambiguous term. Do not wikilink any other words in the line."

"On a page called Title, do not create entries merely because Title is part of the name (see Wikipedia:Disambiguation#Partial title matches)."

The latter excerpts are especially relevant to the listing of several firearms that have "AO" in the name, e.g. AO-18. It seems extremely unlikely that someone would search for "AO" looking for "AO-18". But if they did, they would be served by the link I had provided to List of firearms, a single link that meets the MOS guidelines while providing the user with access to information about any of the firearms using the AO prefix, including those firearms that should not be listed here because they don't have articles, and those that have articles but were nevertheless not included here for reasons I don't know.

While I'm discussing that list, I'll also point out that labeling the name of a firearm as "military terminology" is confusing at best, an issue compounded by the fact that many of the listed firearms don't have any apparent connection to the military. (Also, how does describing an entry as "a military term" provide any kind of guidance when it's already under the category "military terminology"?)

Oh, and I'll throw in:

"Disambiguation pages will often have an 'Other uses' [not "Other"] section at the end for entries that don't fit neatly into another section."

I hope this is helpful. 63.104.174.146 (talk) 15:41, 11 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the above. It's 2am here - I'll respond tomorrow. Pdfpdf (talk) 16:31, 11 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That's fine. I've removed the violating content (again) in the interim. If you can wait to discuss our disagreements, you can wait to slam the "undo" button. 63.104.174.146 (talk) 20:11, 11 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, since it feels inevitable that this will come up, I might as well just write this now: I took out the letter-number-combination template because I don't see any guideline that suggests that it should be used, or that it has to be used just because someone made it. I don't see any reason to think that someone who types in AO might also be interested in the disambiguation pages for AP or BO, and therefore it seems to serve no benefit toward the purpose of disambiguating this term (or, for that matter, toward the purpose of anything). 63.104.174.146 (talk) 20:29, 11 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Dear Pot. I have better things to do with my time. Regards, Kettle. Pdfpdf (talk) 00:58, 12 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]