User:Romney yw/Drafts/Disambiguation
< User:Romney yw | Drafts
HELP! I'm reasonably new to Wikipedia, and I'm just starting to get to grips with page moves, redirects and disambiguation. I could do with some advice about how to deal with the following situation which I have just discovered:
- I moved page Dr. John Dickson to John Dickson (doctor) as I believe wikipedia guidelines deprecate the use of "Dr." in page titles.
- I discovered that the page John Dickson already exisits about a US politician, and that it has a disambiguation link to John Dickson (author) about an Australian writer.
- I feel a disambiguation page similar to John Dickinson (sic) is appropriate. I assume this page could be named John Dickson (disambiguation), or would it be better to move the existing John Dickson to John Dickson (politician), so that the dab page can become simply John Dickson like many similar dab pages?
- However, there is already a Dickson (surname) disambiguation page which lists several entries for "John Dickson", none of which relates to any of the three John Dicksons discussed here. However, one entry (the pseudonym of female American reporter Sigrid Schultz) erroneously links to the existing article about John Dickson (the politician). Do we really need a separate dab page for John Dickson as well?
- Furthermore, I have discovered via Special:Whatlinkshere, that an article about the Robert Burns Fellowship based at the University of Dunedin in New Zealand. This article suggests that the honour was held in 1988 by John Dickson, which is linked to the article about the politician (who died in 1852). This might be assumed perhaps to link more correctly to John Dickson (author) - an Australian - though as there is no evidence to support this assumption, I suspect that it may actually refer to yet another "John Dickson" (presumably a New Zealander?)
- Cursory examination of other pages that link to John Dickson suggests that there are several other erroneous links to the article about the US politician ....
As you may imagine, I'm rather overwhelmed by the chaos which I've discovered as a result of one simple page move, and I do hope this is not representative of the current state of wikipedia .... I'd be grateful for advice, and hopefully some assistance from someone more experienced than I in sorting out this kind of mess! Romney yw (talk) 23:42, 15 February 2008 (UTC)