User:Barticus88/Dab FAQ

 Randall Bart's disambiguation FAQ 


I do thousands of edits for the purpose of disambiguation. Sometimes an edit causes concern amongst those watching a particular page. This is my attempt to answer some Frequently Asked Questions.

What does "dab" mean?

"Dab" is short for "disambiguation" (or "disambiguate"), and means "fixing ambiguous links". It is inflected as a normal English noun and verb (dabs, dabbed, dabbing).

Why are you doing this?

I am doing this for Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links, which is part of Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation, which is part of the War on Error. If we don't disambiguate links, the errorists have won.

What does "temp for dab" mean?

Sometimes I will put something on a disambiguation page to change how it shows up in Popups. If I am intending to remove it when I am done, I put "temp for dab" in the description. Typically I will put <includeonly>[[foo (disambiguation)]]</includeonly> on a page so that [[foo (disambiguation)]] will appear in Popups.

But you didn't remove it.

Yeah, sometimes I forget. If it bugs you, remove it yourself.

What is Popups?

Popups is a javascript which enhances the Wikipedia experience. It shows you a thumbnail image and the first few lines of text without actually opening a page. It also has some disambiguation tools.

Why do you make changes "for Popups"?

When the text that shows up in Popups is too short, badly formatted, or leaves out some fundamental piece of data (like voivodeship name), I will edit the lede of the article to improve the text Popups shows.

Stop reverting article X!

That's not exactly a question.

Stop delinking [[foo]] in article X!

Those still aren't questions.

Why did you change article X again you boorish idiot who can't take the time to read the summaries on the history page or what I just wrote on the talk page?

Okay, that's a question. I am a WikiGnome with no lasting interest in that particular page. In the process of disambiguating a particular word, I edit over a hundred pages, sometimes several hundred. I keep going back to the What links here page and I work on them until they are gone. If I change a link, and then you change it back before I am finished, I will see it on the What links here again and I will fix it again. Even if I recognize the page, I will just assume that:

1. This is actually a very similar page with the exact same paragraph
2. I accidentally closed that tab of my browser without saving
3. The edit got a database locked or server overload error, and I closed the tab without noticing
4. I edited a vandalized page, and sumbuddy reverted my change, or
5. Something happened

In rare cases I will even make the change a third time (though I am trying to minimize the chance of that). The best thing for you to do is to change that link to somewhere other than the disambiguation page. As it says in the lede to Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links, "Ideally, Wikipedia articles should not link to disambiguation pages". If you strive for the same ideal, we will not collide. Often the best solution is to write a stub article on the subject. I wrote a stub at [[Ordinance (Christian)]]; perhaps you would like to write one for [[Mace (marching)]]. However, if you really, really, really want it to point to the disambiguation page, just keep changing it, and in a few hours or a few days at the latest, I will go away. Or you can leave a rude message on my talk page telling me to stop. Just understand that in a few months another disambiguation gnome will come along and change it again. See also below about [[foo (disambiguation)]].

Stop linking [[foo]] to [[bar]] in multiple articles!

If you honestly think I have misunderstood either [[foo]] or [[bar]], and you want to stop my mad dab run before I change a hundred more pages, by all means put something on my talk page. Please understand that I sometimes have 50 tabs open in my browser, so I could easily change dozens more pages before I even see the new messages message, but I will stop and read it eventually. I may then continue exactly as before. I may continue, but with more deference for your ideas. I may go back and change the ones you object to. I may just abandon that word and move to the next word on the list. It depends.

Why link to [[foo (disambiguation)]] when it's a redirect to [[foo]]?

I know these links appear paradoxical, but they assist in disambiguation. As explained at Category:Redirects to disambiguation pages, this explicitly marks a link as a link not to be further disambiguated. An example is List of Greek words with English derivatives where [[chorus]] appears. The article is about the origin of the word, not a specific use of it, so it can't be further disambiguated. By linking it to [[chorus (disambiguation)]], we disambiguation gnomes know that it has been done.

Why did you delink [[foo]] in article X?

Delinking is fundamentally different from changing a link. In Popups, changed links are marked as minor edits, but removed links are not, in recognition of this difference. When I change a link, in theory the original editor marked a place for a link, and I made it better. By delinking, I am saying the editor who made the link was wrong. This is inherently an act of disrespect.

There are many reasons I disrespect a link. If the place I would otherwise link is already linked near by (compound subject or even a paragraph or more away), I will often delink. If the meaning is clear in context and there is no particular article to link to. I will delink rather than create a circular link, eg, [[childbirth]] had a link to [[labour]], which I would have linked to [[childbirth]] in any other article, but because that would be circular I delinked. There are many articles which are heavily overlinked, and while I won't remove most of those links if they go to articles, if I am working on a dab, I am likely to delink. There are many common nouns that shouldn't be linked without a specific article in mind.

I do not delink place names; I redlink them instead. If it only occurs once I will just redlink it in place; if it occurs more than once I will put a redlink on the dab page. The assumption is that we will eventually have some article on each of these places.

When I say place name I mean a name. To explain by counterexample, I mean [[Old Town]] is often (and [[old town]] is always) a common noun. If there was not an article on [[Old Town, Foo]], I delinked I did not redlink. (Actually I did redlink some cases, but let's pretend I didn't.) There were a hundred some where I would have linked to [[Gamla stan]], except Gamla stan was already in the sentence.

I have absolutely no respect for anything that takes place in fiction space. And when I say fiction space I am mostly thinking about comic books and games, but I include classics. If Hamlet sent someone to [[Fooburg]] and I am left wondering whether it is [[Fooburg, Norway]] or [[Fooburg, Scotland]] I will certainly delink it. If the writer of this article about this fictional thing doesn't know the exact Wikipedia article to link to, then there is no way they knew enough to justify the link.

And every once in a while I delink because the writing is bad. On one occasion I literally could not parse the sentence well enough to tell if it meant [[convention (norm)]] or [[fan convention]]. Damn right I delinked it. Damn right that's disrespect. Go learn to write.

Why did you link [[foo]] to [[bar]] instead of [[baz]] in article X?

WikiProject Disambiguation is an improvement project, not a perfection project. I linked to what I believed to be a better link. Perhaps if I knew more I would have chosen differently. I will often go for the generic over the specific when I have any doubt. If it's probably a Woolworths supermarket, but it might be a department store, I link to [[Woolworths Limited]]. I might link to [[Goth subculture]] where I could have linked to [[Goth fashion]]. If I am not interested in the article, I am not going to spend a lot of time searching for the perfect link. If you are interested in this article, and you can make it better, do so.

But in this case [[bar]] is way wrong

Sometimes I make mistakes. In Popups it's pretty easy to make the wrong click, and sometimes I just have a brain fart and can't remember which one is Woolworths Limited and which is Woolworths Group. That's part of the beauty of making a second loop through to transmit the changes; sometimes I catch my mistakes. Of course, sometimes I don't catch my mistakes. Thanx for finding it; please fix it. Of course if I made the same mistake in more than one page, tell me about it.

But [[bar]] is a redirect to [[baz]]

This is a philosophical thing, and different disambiguation gnomes will disagree. It just depends. If [[bar]] is a redirect marked with {{r with possibilities}}, then I believe that a better article will someday be written. While I was working on [[ordinance]], I had [[ordinance (Christian)]] redirected to [[Baptist ordinance]], even though I was linking non-Baptists there. Later I came back and made [[ordinance (Christian)]] a stub.

Why did you link [[foo]] to [[bar]] in article X but to [[baz]] in article Y?

There are many ways this occurs. As I go through a hundred articles linking to a subject, I learn more about it. It may be that I stumbled upon [[baz]] (and added it to the dab page) between changing article X and article Y. It may be that I misinterpreted [[baz]] the first time I read it, and wasn't linking there until I got a better look at it (or worse, I was linking there until I got a better look). It may be that I genuinely thought there was a difference in how [[foo]] is used in those two articles. It may be just random variation inside my head. And I will sometimes do it deliberately because of the compound subject problem.

What is the compound subject problem?

I'm glad you asked that. When multiple nouns are conjoined, there is a Heisenbergian relationship between them. Synonyms can't be separated, such as "[[Bacchus]]([[Dionysus]])". Sometimes they are technically different, but essentially indistinguishable, eg, the phrase "[[treaties]] and [[conventions]]" cannot link anywhere but [[treaty]]. [[Civil engineering#Hydraulic engineering]] tells us:

This area of civil engineering is intimately related to the design of [[Pipeline transport|pipelines]], [[water supply network|water distribution systems]], drainage facilities (including [[bridge]]s, [[dam]]s, [[channel]]s, [[culvert]]s, [[levee]]s, [[storm sewer]]s), and [[canal]]s.

What is a channel that's not a culvert, levee, storm sewer or canal?

However the goal is to avoid delinking or linking two words to the same place. In such a case I may link a particular usage to [[bar]] unless [[bar]] is linked nearby, in which I case I choose [[baz]].

For example, in Chalcedonian, the expression "[[Armenian]] Christians" appears. Normally, I would link this to [[Armenian Apostolic Church]], but that is already linked in the sentence (and in this case the two are contrasted), so I linked to [[Armenians]].

Why didn't you learn the difference between [[bar]] and [[baz]] before you started disambiguating [[foo]]?

That's the plan, but sometimes it's hard to know what you don't know. I don't read the whole articles, but I read the lede of every article I direct links to. I often expect a subject to be divided a certain way, and then skim the lede assuming it's what I am expecting. I will often give too much credit to the article name, and article names don't always tell the whole story. Can you tell the difference between [[Selective breeding]] and [[Artificial selection]] by the article names?

Why did you dab a dozen cases of [[foo]] then no more?

Sometimes I start into a dab run and hit some pages that frustrate me. I often just skip the first frustrating one (close the tab). I try looking for links to add to the dab page. Sometimes this is very rewarding, I pump up the dab page with great links, and then fix every page to point to one of those links. Sometimes I get bogged down and just give up and go to the next word on the list.

Are you just guessing at some of these?

It's fair to say that sometimes I make an educated guess. If an airline flies from Santiago to Salvador, I just guess that it's Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. There might be a Salvador in Chile or Argentina, but there's no Wiki article on such a place, and I am figuring that the world's busiest air destination named Salvador is very likely. I usually spend a minute or two looking when I am not sure, but if I find nothing to dissuade me from a guess, I go with it. If I guessed wrong, let me know about it.

The edit summary said you changed [[foo]] to [[bar]], but what about all this other stuff you did?

When I am on a dab run and I notice a particular page needs a little work, I will often piggyback that change on the same edit that Popups generated. Usually this is spelling or fixing other links. Sometimes I fix broken boxes and tables. I usually don't change the edit summary that Popups generated. If I think it's a big change, I will add more text to the summary, and uncheck the minor edit box. If I didn't think it was a big enough deal, then I didn't think it was a big enough deal.

In article X, [[foo]] is linked to [[foo bar]], [[foo (bar)]], and [[bar (foo)]], which all redirect to [[bar foo]]. Why aren't you consistent?

I changed all instances of [[foo]] to [[foo bar]], because that was on the disambiguation page. Sumbuddy else piped those other links differently. On most articles I don't change anything but the current links to [[foo]]. It's only when I am doing a lot of other stuff in the article that I make the links consistent. It doesn't really matter, and if [[bar foo]] has been subject to move wars, there's no point in trying to keep up.

Why don't you have "bot" in your name?

I am not a bot.

Come on. You already said you're using Popups. You gotta be a bot.

Popups is not a bot. Popups is a tool written in Javascript, and while bots may be written in Javascript, Popups is not a bot, because I personally select where to direct [[foo]] on each page, and then I get a chance to glance at what Popups has generated before saving.

Come on. You edited 40 articles in one minute. That's less than two seconds a page. You gotta be a bot.

It looks that way, but look at my history over a longer time interval. I open dozens of tabs, I loop through them finding the links and having Popups generate the edits, then I loop through again submitting the edits. I submitted 40 changes in one minute, but I spent about 15 minutes getting there. My highest sustained rate is about 150 per hour.

Come on. You edited 150 articles in one hour. That's 24 seconds a page. You gotta be a bot.

I figure it something like this. I go down the WLH opening tabs at faster than one second per. I loop through transmitting them at faster than two seconds per. In between I loop through, finding and fixing. The operation of ctrl-tab, alt-n, pg-dn, hover mouse, wait for Popups, click the place to send it can be done in less than five seconds. I am not close to busting the practical limit.

Five seconds is not enough time to think about it

Sometimes I think for an hour. More often five seconds is more than an article needs or deserves.

How dare you say that the article about the best Goth/NuMetal/Hip Hop/Grunge/Reggae/Polka/Country/Classical fusion band in the history of the universe doesn't deserve five seconds!

I do not find Survivable Brain Damage to be the best Goth/NuMetal/Hip Hop/Grunge/Reggae/Polka/Country/Classical fusion band in the history of the universe. I am not an expert on every sub-sub-genre of popular music. I linked to what I thought was reasonably accurate. If you can do better, do so. You people who write these band pages should link the sub-sub-genres yourselves.

Is making thousands of edits and putting your name on the list dozens of times an ego thing with you?

Yup.

While I was not doing many dabs, the tombstoning was replaced with an automated list. It's still an ego thing.