Talk:Bird Island

possible WP:MOSDAB issues here

The page has been marked for cleanup by another editor when yet another asked for help to clean it up. I don't see major issues with it, but here are some items that might possibly be cleaned up:

red links

While red links are not prohibited, they can make navigating the page difficult. If it is unlikely that an article will be written for a given topic, unlinking the term is better. One way to assess this is click on the redlink and look at "What links here" (in the list of toolbox links to the side). If there are several links in, then it is probably more likely to be written.

Nature Preserve

Following the "what links here" for the nature preserve indicates there are two Bird Island Nature Preserves. There should be two entries here.

Sections

The sections are small enough that the order within them probably doesn't matter (this is has been a matter of some discussion at Wikipedia:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)). My inclination would be to order them by how "popular" I think the item may be within the section. This usually means the redlinks are lower. Some like alphabetical. I don't see it useful as the reader will not know that disambiguation term they are looking for.

Also, for consistency, the last section should be "See also."

(John User:Jwy talk) 03:01, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I'm not at all clear about what you mean when you say "the reader will not know that disambiguation term they are looking for." Can you explain that statement? Readers come here by either typing in a search term or following a link. How can they not know which dab term they are looking for? Viriditas (talk) 21:54, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I should have said "will not know the title of the article they are looking for." My thought: If they came here looking for a Tasmanian "Bird Island," they would not now where to look alphabetically - not knowing for sure what would appear in the parenthesis after Bird Island. So, in my opinion, alphabetical here would not help. There are cases where it might - The city of Springfield in a section of American cities sorted by state (Springfield, statename) makes sense. (John User:Jwy talk) 22:35, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've held off making changes myself as it seems you were interested in doing so. And I just realized you may have been wondering if you should alphabetize the subsections themselves (rather than within them). If you believe that will make navigation faster, go ahead. There is no rule about alphabetical or geographical orders. The goal is ease of use. (John User:Jwy talk) 23:24, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]