Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation/Archive 57

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Archive 57

top/common ordering as a matter of style vs. navigation efficiency

I've noticed a few cases recently where MOS:DABCOMMON formatting was a bit of an issue:

• Talk:IPA#clickstreams data - whether to sort items by reader interest etc
• Talk:Charlotte#post-move - whether to include some items and whether to make a section heading for the top list
• Talk:Cell#common section at the top + Talk:Cell (biology)#Requested move 13 July 2024 - whether to include more than one item in the top list, whether the formatting of the top section affected the clickthrough rates etc
• Talk:King Charles#followup to move discussion - whether a volume of clicks inside the first section is readers missing the single-item common list above
• Talk:The Sun (disambiguation)#followup to move discussion - whether the top link inside the sentence was good enough

Several of the discussions at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Disambiguation pages/Archive 44 have been about ordering, too. The search of talk page archives here brings up a lot of discussions on ordering as well. Maybe we need to ponder this matter more coherently.

It seems to me that we should move the part of the style guideline that affects the top of a disambiguation page into the main guideline here, because this doesn't seem to be a matter of just style per se, rather it might be making a significant impact on ensuring that a reader who searches for a topic using a particular term can get to the information on that topic quickly and easily. --Joy (talk) 09:54, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm not sure that advantage of having a common uses group at the top is always clear-cut. It can result in slowing navigation if readers jump to the relevant section expecting to find the specific item listed there only to have to look back up to the top. This is similar to what can happen with a primary topic as well and raises question of whether such entries should be duplicated within the appropriate section as well as at the top. older ≠ wiser 12:54, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

I agree, we should actually list the common items in both places. If the list is already relatively long, duplicating a couple of popular items shouldn't lengthen it unreasonably, and we hopefully catch most of those cases. --Joy (talk) 16:52, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

That and also with relatively short pages, it may be unnecessary or even counter-productive to try to pull out a couple. older ≠ wiser 17:21, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

Because of so much possible variety, we'd have to test on specific examples. For example, is it 1 common 20 uncommon, or 2 : 20, or 1 : 10, or 3 : 10, and then the varying levels of how common each of the common ones is, etc. --Joy (talk) 18:51, 26 July 2024 (UTC)

It looks like we found a case of such a relatively short page - at Deadlock, most of the common entries were in Other uses, and @Zxcvbnm removed them[1]. --Joy (talk) 07:14, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, that seems reasonable as two of the duplicates were in "Other uses" section and the third was in weakly coherent "Politics and law" section that had only remaining entry merged into other uses. It's a bit odd that impasse remains duplicated in the see also section. older ≠ wiser 11:06, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

In the meantime, at King Charles, adding a duplicate listing in the appropriate section immediately below the top listing looks to have been helpful to at least half the readers who missed the top listing before, per two monthly measurements afterwards. --Joy (talk) 09:14, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

Capitalization of a disambiguation page title with both all-caps and lowercase senses

I seem to recall that there is a rule that if a disambiguation page has both all-caps and lowercase senses, then the title of the page should be at the lowercase title, if that is available. In particular, I am thinking of LOR (for which many Lor senses exist). Lor currently redirects to LOR. I am not asking for a page move here, but for where the rule on this can be found. If there is no rule on this, where should one be put? BD2412 T 01:58, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

I think what you're looking for is two of the bullets under WP:DABNAME:

• A word is preferred to an abbreviation, for example Arm (disambiguation) over ARM.
• The spelling that reflects the majority of items on the page is preferred to less common alternatives.

Those can sometimes be contradictory, but it's probably best to hash those out on a case-by-case basis. Station1 (talk) 06:01, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

The real question here is do we have to account for this merge in the first place? If you see distinct usage patterns based on capitalization, and if it would make navigation more efficient if the reader didn't have to wade through both lists together, they should simply be split up, as this guideline is not actually consistently applied in the first place, cf. Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation/Archive 56#WP:DABCOMBINE not actually with organic consensus in the acronym space.

In my browser, I have to do PgDn twice already to browse that list, so if that can be two lists of Lor and LOR and if these would be more straightforward, that would actually make more sense. The idea of merging is valid where we believe there's a huge amount of traffic of people e.g. typing in "lor" but wanting "LOR". If these could be served with a link to LOR visible on the first page without scrolling, that seems better than forcing the readers to go through two pages of a more complex list on every visit. And, it would become measurable, we could see in the statistics how many readers needed to do that. --Joy (talk) 07:25, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

... as this guideline is not actually consistently applied in the first place ...: It is a guideline, until it is modifed or removed. Until then, it's unclear if other examples are WP:OTHERSTUFF or WP:IAR.—Bagumba (talk) 09:53, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

Well, the WP:DABCOMBINE guideline is only useful if it actually makes sense. The current text is just too broad:

Terms that differ only in capitalization, punctuation and diacritic marks. These should almost always share a disambiguation page.

This just says 'terms', but it doesn't have to be that generic: for example, Mediawiki forces us to combine arm and Arm, but it doesn't force us to combine Arm and ARM. If we have 9 known meanings of Arm, 3 known meanings of both Arm/arm and ARM not because of laziness in typing (company, software, language), and 34 known meanings of ARM, it's neither trivial nor obvious to just advise these almost always need to be one list of 46 items, and we should not guide people towards that solution in such strong terms.

This guideline sounds like it was written only for short, more trivial use cases, and I sincerely doubt that anybody ever checked if it was actually battle-tested by analyzing its outcomes. We should change it to be less strong. --Joy (talk) 09:39, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

@Joy: I have seen much longer "merged" pages, and would be concerned that some people searching for "LOR" will not bother to capitalize when typing the letters into the search box. BD2412 T 17:50, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

In the case of long pages, that can be handled by adding, for example, "LOR (disambiguation)" to See Also, or even adding it as a hatnote if See Also is really far down the page. Even with merged pages I think it's easier for readers to find what they're looking for if the Lors and LORs are split into separate sections. Station1 (talk) 18:03, 2 August 2024 (UTC)