Talk:Generator

In the field of electricity, I think this term is also used to refer to a "producer of electricity", as in "a company that produces electricity".90.190.225.121 (talk) 12:59, 27 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Help: Should manuals of style lead to non sense ?

In mathematics "generator" means almost always "member of a generating set". If this is not said to the users concerned with the mathematical meaning of "generator", the disambiguation page generator does not play its role. Recently User:JohnBlackburne (talk) has systematically reverted all my edits aimed to insert the mathematical meaning of "generator" in the mathematics section of generator, invoking various manuals of style for justifying his reverts. The problem here is that generating set is also a disambiguation page. It is clear to me that we are in a rare case where a disambiguation page should link into another disambiguation page. What should I do for having a satisfying generator page without entering in an edit war? D.Lazard (talk) 04:07, 12 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The reasons for my changes, which I tried to give in the edit summaries, are based on the manual of style for disambiguation pages and related guidelines. In particular MOS:DABENTRY which says

"After the introductory line comes a list of individual entries – lines which direct the readers to Wikipedia articles on the various topics which might be referenced by the term being disambiguated. Keep in mind that the primary purpose of the disambiguation page is to help people find the specific article they want quickly and easily." (my emphasis)

After which it emphasises that each line should link to an article, and only one article. WP:DABREDIR says that redirects should not be used, with a very few exceptions which does not include the mandated "xxx (disambiguation)" required by WP:INTDABLINK. The proper place for links to disambiguation pages is the 'See also' section, as described at MOS:DAB#"See also" section.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 04:37, 12 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I suggest (given the ambiguity of the term within maths) that a reader looking for one or other of the mathematical senses of "Generator" will be better helped to find "the specific article" by an entry under "Mathematics" (ie by a link to the Generating set disambiguation page, piped through the redirect, from where they can find their specific context) than by the See also reference to a different named topic. This looks like a case for WP:IAR, in the interests of the reader. PamD 09:30, 12 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Portable generator

@Wtshymanski: Portable generator redirects to engine-generator and is boldfaced in the lede of that article. It should therefore be mentioned in the summary description on the DAB page per MOS:DABENTRY. The idea of DAB pages is to make finding the correct article easy, not difficult. I added those words for the benefit of future readers after it had taken me ten minutes to work out which was the best link to replace an ambiguous link to this DAB page. Please discuss. Narky Blert (talk) 06:12, 4 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

These aren't synonyms. I fixed the error at Engine-generator. --Wtshymanski (talk) 22:33, 6 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

But they are a hyponym and hypernym, which might be close enough for MOS:DAB? Andy Dingley (talk) 22:41, 6 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]