Wikipedia talk:Disambiguations are cheap

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Cheap?

The title of this essay does not describe its contents, and is misleading. Let me put it plainly: disambiguations are not cheap. Nearly every new disambiguation page displaces an existing article, and thereby breaks incoming links. Just look at WP:DPL; there are tens of thousands of articles incorrectly linking to disambiguation pages. The project to fix these links has been going on for years and consumes countless person-hours. My time is not cheap, and neither is the time of many others who contribute to this project. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 00:29, 12 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. This seems like an attempt to copy the more established Redirects are cheap essay, without actually explaining why dabs are "cheap." In fact, while redirects work seamlessly unless they're double redirects (which are quickly fixed by bots), dab pages are inherently disruptive, as general readers are rarely looking for them. I'm not arguing against dabs themselves, but of the proliferation of them on the rationale that they're "cheap" in the sense that redirects are. --BDD (talk) 16:12, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the title of this essay does not describe its contents, and is misleading. It only tries to describe when to, and when not to, create a disambiguation page - which is also, and much better, covered in WP:DAB. All this essay does is mislead visitors. Given there's nothing in this article that describes why disambiguation pages are cheap, making trimming/rewriting pointless, it should be nominated for deletion. --84.241.139.251 (talk) 11:51, 25 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]