User talk:BostonMA/Disambiguation

This is an archive page. Please do not edit this page without permission. If you would like to comment, please do so at User talk:BostonMA. Thank-you.

Ravi Shankar

Hi, while I complement your enthusiasm in creating Ravi Shankar (disambiguation), I am sorry to say that it has been misguided in moving Ravi Shankar to Ravi Shankar (musician). I understand that you are new, hence this msg with examples. Usually, when a dab (i. e. disambiguation) page is of the form [[XXX (disambiguation)]], then [[XXX]] would only have a link to the [[XXX (disambiguation)]] disambiguation page at the top. Instead, if the dab page is of the form [[XXX]], then we would have articles such as [[XXX (musician)]] etc. So, in this case, moving of "Ravi Shankar" to "Ravi Shankar (musician)" is wrong. I would revert your changes after a week if I do not hear from you. Meanwhile, please desist from changing "Ravi Shankar" to "Ravi Shankar (musician)" on countless articles as un-doing it would take a lot of time, which can be better spent on improving the encyclopedia. --Gurubrahma 17:51, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I too felt that my message may not have been very clear. Ok, consider this. X is a famous musician. There are two more X's, one a politician and another an actor. The article X currently points to the musician. I will use two scenarios here.

The first scenario: Let us assume that the musician X is more popular for the moment. There are 100 editors linking to X in their articles. As the musician is more popular, 80 of these links intend to point to the actual musician and hence point to the right article, so, no problem. 15 of them intend to point to the politician and 5 to the actor but as X points out to the musician, these links are wrong and need to be fixed. So, we have a 20% probability tht the article would point to the wrong person. If we have a X which is not about the musician but is a dab page saying that there are three famous people named X and the editors believe wrongly (as they would not know what a dab is) that X would point to the respective articles they are intending to, then all the 100 editors would make a mistake. In such a scenario, X should point to the musician.

The second scenario: All the three X's are almost equally popular. So, in this case, of the 100 editors, 35 are to point to the musician, 33 to the politician and 32 to the actor. Here, we will have the probability that 33+32=65% of the time, the article would go to the wrong person. So, here X should be not the page about the musician but about different people named X. While here also, ppl. may link to the article with names, it can be easily fixed by regular editors through projects such as Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation because the cost of having 65% error is higher than some regular editors correcting it. However, regular editors correcting it would be a waste of time in the first scenario when potential for error is just 20%. Also, please read Wikipedia:Disambiguation.

My solution - leave Ravi Shankar (disambiguation) as it is (it's a fine effort, by the way). Move back Ravi Shankar (musician) to Ravi Shankar. Revert your changes to multiple articles, and finally, delete the redirect of Ravi Shankar (musician). My rationale is that the musician is popular and that Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, though popular, is never addressed as "Ravi Shankar" but only as "Sri Sri..." I am away for the next week. You may want to take a second opinion from some one like User:Commander Keane who is active in dab issues. --Gurubrahma 18:31, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Hello BostonMA. You have some very good points and ultimately this will be a tricky descision - governed by consensus that will be sought on the talk page of the article. Responding to what you wrote on my talk page, one more thing to consider (which I think Gurubrahma may have pointed out) is the cost the the reader. If the sitar player is the intended target for Ravi Shankar 90% of the time (and Ravi Shankar is where the article about the sitar player is) then 90% of the time a reader will turn up in the right location. 10% of the time a reader will have to think then click twice, once to Ravi Shankar (disambiguation) and then to their desired person. If Ravi Shankar redirects to Ravi Shankar (disambiguation) then 100% of the time a reader has to click once - to get to their desired person.

So we have two choices, your model and Gurubrahma's model. I can't tell which one is better - both have advantages and disadvantages (at the moment I am liking your idea, since the possibility for confusion, mentioned in your appendum, is worrysome). What we need to do is have a discussion with as many people as possible and then form a consensus about what to do. This will take place at Talk:Ravi_Shankar. It will also be a good idea to drop a few notices about the discussion in the appropriate places - eg maybe Wikipedia:Indian Wikipedians' notice board etc. I need to sleep now. If you haven't started the discussion by tomorrow I'll do it for you. Have a nice day.--Commander Keane 20:03, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Ravi Shankar

I'm sorry that you were offended, but I don't believe that my comments at Talk:Ravi Shankar were in any way inappropriate. I didn't call you names or use foul language, and I didn't misrepresent your actions, since the fact of the matter is that the first time around you moved the page and altered all the links, despite a not insignificant amount of opposition from myself and others. I admit to being relatively annoyed with you for doing so, and that may have come through in my comments, but that alone doesn't warrant striking out or removing anything. Microtonal 23:18, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

The "significant opposition" from yourself included the statement "I don't see any harm in what you propose". My understanding of consensus is not that everyone necessarily agrees, but that everyone can live with a particular decision. I'm sorry if I misconstrued your comment as implying a lack of a strong objection. The other objections were equally mild. If there had been a strong objection, I would not have taken the actions I did.

Your comments state:

"I stated that this was a pointless move the first time the issue came up, but you went ahead and did it anyway."

However, I made the move after an extensive discussion in which I sought consensus, and observed no strong objections after several days. You also write:

"Yes, BostonMA, disambiguation and redirects always cause problems for editors, but I don't think it's at all fair of you to appeal to editor-friendliness as a reason for moving articles around when you're the one who changed all the links to Ravi Shankar (musician) in the first place, thus instigating the entire problem. And quite unnecessarily so, IMO."

In this statement, you claim that I "intigated" "the entire problem", and "unnecessarily". If you are unwilling to remove this statement, could you please explain what problems were experienced, and how I was the cause of these problems? Thanks. --BostonMA 23:38, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Please don't misquote or quote-mine me. I'm not one to take offense easily, but misrepresenting what I've said is pretty much the only way to really piss me off. To wit, the phrase "not insignificant" is in absolutely no way equivocable to "significant", and you'll find that my statement "I don't see any harm in what you propose" was followed immediately by "but I also don't see the need for it." I'd like to add that I was attempting to be diplomatic, there, but apparently I did not make my true opinion of your proposed move clear.

Please do not take offence. I did not intentionally misquote you. Perhaps my comprehension of English is not as good as yours, but I did not see the difference between what I wrote and what you wrote, and will probably require someone to explain it to me. Be that as it may, I understood that you followed the statement I quoted with "but I also don't see the need for it". I realize you were neither agreeing with me, nor supporting my actions. However, I interpretted your statement in light of my (possibly flawed) understanding of how consensus works on Wikipedia. My understanding was that everyone need not agree, provided everyone can live with the result. I do not think you needed to throw a temper tantrum. However, you could have said "I think the proposed change would be harmful". That would have been clear. (I do not fault you if we miscommunicated, as that is part of life.)

It isn't necessary for a proposed change to be harmful, only that it be unnecessary or just generally unwanted. I think that most commentors made their disagreement clear, and I personally believe that unrestrained use of redirects and dabs is, in fact, harmful when viewed in the aggregate. As someone else (I've forgotten who) already said, the ideal Wikipedia would have absolutely no redirects or dab pages, since they're a fundamental waste of server resources. Anything we, as editors, can do to get closer to that ideal should be actively pursued.

As for the difference between "not insignificant" and "significant", think of the difference between "more than zero" and "one million".

Now, to the point: From the discussion I see at Talk:Ravi Shankar, it appears that the majority of posters (Wasted Time R, Silence, Natalya, Zoe, William Allen Simpson and myself) actually disagreed with you, both prior to your first move and again the second time around. The fact that no one threw a temper-tantrum about it in no way mitigates the fact that few users, if any at all, thought the page should be moved according to your proposal. Understand that I am not accusing you of moving the page in bad faith, I simply think that you did so in bad judgement. The fact that you "sought consensus" does not mean that a consensus was actually reached, and the fact that you did not perceive a "strong objection" does not mean that there was no objection.

I understand.

As for the problem itself, I'm talking about the same one you are: the existence of allegedly "ambiguous" links to Ravi Shankar. Yes, that's a minor problem, and perhaps a slight inconvenience for the casual editor who may or may not know how to use the "what links here" special page effectively, but the absolute LAST thing you should do when faced with "ambiguous" links is to create an entire new article. By doing so, you have increased the potential for ambiguous links, rather than decreased it, because more pages equate to more chances to get the link wrong. This is particularly true when the page you want to be the "main article" is a dab page or has a parenthetical title. You're going to find that most editors, when linking Ravi Shankar, are never going to write [[Ravi Shankar (musician)|Ravi Shankar]], and you're just going to have to go through and fix all those new links, anyway. In every case, it is the link that is wrong, not the article that is being linked, and that is what should be fixed. Leaving Ravi Shankar as the main article and dispensing entirely with Ravi Shankar (musician) and Ravi Shankar (disambiguation) (at least until they become absolutely necessary, which doesn't seem likely) is going to cause all of us significantly less link-fixing work in the long run. It also has the advantage of not being blatantly and arbitrarily contrary to Wikipedia dab policy.

You say that "the problem itself" is the same one that I am referring to. However, then you continue by talking about "ambiguous links", and some other stuff about inconvenience to a casual editor. There seem to be two things here, the problem that you perceive that I have caused, and the problem that I have set out to solve. I would like to know more about the problem you believe I have caused, because I really do not understand it. If a naive editor makes a link to Ravi Shankar which is a redirect page to Ravi Shankar (musician), neither the naive editor is inconvenienced nor is a reader of the Wikipedia inconvenienced, unless I am missing something (which is quite possible). People who have an objection to redirects on principle will be put out, but there are many, many redirects and I don't see how they are harmful, as long as the redirects are not multiple redirects. Redirects allow users to reach the same page using many different queries, and this, I would think is an advantage to users. You state that most editors will write Ravi Shankar rather than Ravi Shankar (musician). But that is in most cases what I want. If you don't want to fix the links, you don't have to, and everything still works, however, if you are like me, and want to find the cases where a link to Ravi Shankar should actually have gone to Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, or to some other person who may not have an article, then it is very valuable to know which links have been researched, and which have not. Consider for a moment how it works with regular dab pages. We know that links to the dab page have not been checked, but links to the actual articles probably have. Fixing the links removes them from the list to be fixed the next time around. The difference between a link to a dab page and the case with Ravi Shankar pointing to Ravi Shankar (musician) is that links to dab pages are an inconvenience, whereas links to a redirect page are transparent.

It is not a matter of convenience or inconvenience, for you or for any other editor. It is a matter of arbitrarily and unnecessarily creating a page that no one but you wants, in direct contravention of Wikipedia policy on redirects and disambiguation.

In short, had you not created Ravi Shankar (musician), there would have been absolutely no need for you to pipe all of those Ravi Shankar links to point there, and there wouldn't now be a need for someone to go and fix all of those links so that they point back to Ravi Shankar. And if the article is located at Ravi Shankar (musician) there will always be a need for someone to keep watch over new links to Ravi Shankar and pipe them accordingly. If it isn't, that entire problem never even arises. Microtonal 01:29, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Again, I think we see different problems. You see my piping the Ravi Shankar links as a burden, which I unfortunately created by having Ravi Shankar (musician). I do not, because I believe there will always be a need for someone to watch over new links to Ravi Shankar. The links that had already been created demonstrate that people will link to Ravi Shankar, even when the person meant is not the musician. This will continue to happen, and it will continue to need correcting. The question is are we going to make it easier on those who do the correcting, or are we going to make it harder. I can appreciate the argument that the needs of the end users and the needs of the editors outweigh the needs of link-fixers. But I have yet to hear exactly how an editor or an end user is inconvenienced. If you could explain that to me, I would be very grateful.

The problem with redirects is that the Wikimedia servers have to dedicate processor time to handling them. That processor power is not unlimited, and we, as editors, are obligated to do anything that we can do to reduce that strain. Creating unnecessary and arbitrary redirects such as this one is not only against Wikipedia dab policy, but also causes undue stress on the servers that run the Wikipedia. If you view it only one page at a time, it doesn't seem like such a big deal, but if you think about it occuring across the entire Wikipedia, it adds up. There are tens of thousands of dab pages and redirects on Wikipedia, each one wasting precious system resources and slowing down the servers for everyone. We should be reducing their numbers, not creating new ones.

On a final note, your comments about me in the Ravi Shankar talk page, may or may not be accurate. That is not the point. They are hurtful to me, and I would be very thankful if you would remove them. --User:BostonMA 02:40, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

It is not Wikipedia policy, nor should it be, to remove talk page comments for any reason, regardless of how anyone feels about them. And personally, I don't believe that you're justified in even asking that they be removed unless they constitute blatant and abusive personal attacks, which my comments most certainly do not. Microtonal 04:48, 17 February 2006 (UTC)