Talk:Scott McGregor

Organization

I wanted to proactively open a discussion on the organization of this disambiguation page! Tassedethe recently reorganized the page "per WP:MOSDAB" to remove categories and form one single list of Scott McGregors. I reviewed WP:MOSDAB and didn't find any specific directions or guidelines that I could identify for the change. My primary concern with one single list was that it was growing long and there was no discernible order by which it was sorted, making it hard for a reader to find the most pertinent Scott McGregor for their search. I tried thinking of ways to improve it as a single list, but I couldn't think of one sort order that made sense to me; alphabetical by topic in parentheses? That put similar Scott McGregors far apart (if the reader saw "baseball" would they know they were really looking for "right-handed pitcher"?)... chronological by date of birth? "relevance" seemed too subjective... I couldn't tell.

I reviewed WP:MOSDAB and WP:LONGDAB, and, with those two pages in mind, organized the page to include categories again. Per MOS:DABORG, "long disambiguation pages should be grouped into subject sections." What qualifies as long? The only relevant guidance I could find was on WP:LONGDAB, which refers to categories/sections when it says, "Sections with more than ten to twelve entries should usually be divided, if practical. Use judgment based on the particular page." I surveyed ~75 disambiguation pages via Category:Disambiguation_pages to see what happens in practice, and found that disambiguation pages with <=5–6 links were almost always uncategorized, and pages with >=7–9 pages were almost always divided into categories. With ten links currently, it seems to me this disambiguation page is borderline, and could maybe go either way.

Because the Scott McGregors on this disambiguation page seem to fall into 3–4 easily identifiable categories (entertainment (3), sports (3), business (1), fiction (2), see also (1)), it seemed to me that categories might best support the goal outlined at the top of WP:LONGDAB: "Readers should be able to find their target article in one pass – narrowing down from sections to subsections to entries – without needing to re-read anything." This lets readers compare similar Scott McGregors in one place (which baseball player? Which Australian television actor?), and click into the one they intended on their first try.

If categories are to be used, I then followed general guidelines in both MOS guidelines:

• Category titles are sorted alphabetically (excepting "See also" at the very bottom, and "Fiction" under the WP:LONGDAB guideline "Always separate fictional entities from real ones.")
• Within categories, individual entries are sorted per advice at MOS:DABORDER:
  • "ordered first by similarity to the ambiguous title,
  • "then alphabetically or chronologically as appropriate."

Conveniently, Scott McGregors related to sports are alphabetically and chronologically sorted, although the two Scott McGregors in entertainment are sorted only chronologically.

I understand Tassedethe is one of the most experienced editors on Wikipedia, so I wanted to do my research and open a talk page discussion so I could learn if my conclusions were inconsistent with best practices! —Shrinkydinks (talk) 05:39, 22 June 2020 (UTC)