Wikipedia talk:Partially disambiguated page names

Labeling as a proposal

An editor has added a hatnote to this essay that says "This is a failed proposal." In my view, it is not a proposal, as it does not propose anything. I think the current second hatnote provides an accurate and sufficiently complete description by itself. It says "Although the current version of this essay only provides information without proposing any specific changes to Wikipedia guidelines or policy, a prior version contained a proposal ..." I suggest deleting the first hatnote, since I believe it is not accurate. —BarrelProof (talk) 18:30, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

After no response to this comment in three days, I am proceeding to remove that hatnote. —BarrelProof (talk) 18:29, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Actually, after further studying the history, it also appears that this essay was never really a proposal, since the essay was created after the discussed proposal was removed from the guideline. Within a few days of creation of this essay, it had become just an information page essay. —BarrelProof (talk) 19:13, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Maybe it should just be deleted? In ictu oculi (talk) 15:11, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

I'm not sure whether that "it" refers to the hatnote or the entire information page / essay. The page seems useful to explain the history of the question and to collect information about the known cases. It seems widely known and is frequently referenced in relevant RM discussions. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 18:22, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

RM with PDAB at issue.

This discussion could use some expert input:

• Talk:Folklore (Taylor Swift album)

—В²C ☎ 04:17, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Thankfully RM already failed. Taylor Swift is not yet in demigod zone where fans can work against en.wp norms. In ictu oculi (talk) 17:44, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Well, she's developed a pretty strong Reputation lately. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 01:01, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

And now also 1989 (album). —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 18:39, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

And now more Taylor Swift topics. Having separate articles about new recordings of the same albums creates a kind of understandable subordinate relationship though. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 23:41, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Discussion for television and films

A discussion of partial disambiguation for the naming convention of television shows and films was opened at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (television)#Partial disambiguation on 20 June 2023. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 16:42, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

Suggestion to remove list

Talking about List of partially disambiguated article titles

The idea to manually maintain things is not well thought out. I see a net negative value of having this list around.

I suggest we simply remove this woefully out of date list (maybe as out of date as 2013?). If it is possible to replace it with some automated tool, category or other wiki magic, that's something else and entirely okay.

CapnZapp (talk) 13:10, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

Adding that while this page itself is a low impact essay, it *is* linked to from Wikipedia:Disambiguation#Incomplete_disambiguation. CapnZapp (talk) 13:11, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

I've produced a first approximation to an automated list. Titles beginning with a digit are false positives, as are some others. We may be able to refine it. It needs a counterpart where the main qualifier comes last, e.g. Joe Foo (politician) vs Joe Foo (Ruritanian politician), which is here. but that is currently producing no results (perhaps there are none; more likely there's a bug I haven't had time to fix yet.)

Is this a job for a category? Should we add articles like Sam Jackson (actor) to Category:Incompletely disambiguated articles or similar? Certes (talk) 17:54, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

I think the list would be better thought of as a list of cases that resulted in an explicit consensus to partially disambiguate, then a list of all such cases, since there are no doubt thousands that have eluded the community's attention. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 20:18, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

In that case we probably want a category, added retrospectively now and to new cases whenever such a consensus emerges. Perhaps the list I produced is more of a to-do list for gnome-like addition of hatnotes than the list we're looking for. Certes (talk) 20:24, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

Actually, it's proving a very useful to-do list, though I'm only up to B. In some cases, there's no clear primary topic, so I've fully qualified the partially disambiguated title and made the resulting redirect into a dab or retargetted it to an existing, more general dab. (For example, I moved Aleksandr Sokolov (politician, born 1949) from Aleksandr Sokolov (politician), which now redirects to dab Aleksandr Sokolov.) Some were are a messy nightmare: Bangladeshi Abdul Mannan (politician) is not to be confused with Abdul Mannan (Bangladeshi politician), nor with fellow Bangladeshi Abdul Mannan (politician, born 1952), a year which also saw the birth of Abdul Mannan (West Bengal politician). Certes (talk) 12:21, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Converting to a category would lose all the notes about why each case exists and whether there has been discussion and a consensus or simply neglect, which I think is very useful. The current format provides an ability to study the phenomenon and the identified instances, and I don't think the length is excessive. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 17:54, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm still working through partially disambiguated titles that aren't listed and taking action where appropriate. However, I'm finding cases which are not listed, often because there's been no formal discussion, but still have a clear primary subtopic. An example is Abdur Rehman (cricketer), with over 50 caps for a major international team, whose pageviews dwarf those of Abdur Rehman (cricketer, born 1917) and Abdur Rehman (cricketer, born 1989). I don't think that moving such articles would be helpful, so I'm skipping them, but someone may wish to list or otherwise deal with them. Certes (talk) 20:13, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

I've added a table of other cases where there is a partially disambiguated title but (probably) no consensus that it should be so. Certes (talk) 22:43, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

Personally I'm almost always against partial disambiguation. But the point I was trying to make above was that (the prose section of) this page should be a permanent list, not a worklist that gets cleared, so someone making an explicit and knowing decision that the partial disambiguation is correct suffices. I've moved Abdur Rehman up to the main list. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:53, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

@Pppery: Thank you for the good work on filtering false positives from the table I added and fixing some of the cases. I did a rough triage on a a much longer list and have fixed a few myself but it's a long and tedious process. Certes (talk) 10:56, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure what is meant by a "knowing decision the partial disambiguation is correct" – some of us probably think all PDABs are a bad idea. I think of the prose section as merely a list of cases that have been studied by someone, not as a conclusion that their titles are appropriate. I just moved Vertigo (film) up to the prose list. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 18:16, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

It means a consensus that Thriller (album) is so much more notable than other albums called Thriller that we should take the reader directly to that article rather than to the dab. Certes (talk) 20:53, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

That's not what the WP:PDABLIST list means. It's just a list of PDAB cases that have been observed to exist, and some notes about them. It's not an endorsement of their titles. The table of other detected cases was only added a week ago; until then, the WP:PDABLIST list was the only place where examples were listed. People put cases into that list regardless of whether they think the titles are well justified or not, and regardless of whether there has been any discussion of them or not. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 23:45, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

Ignoring "Song and album articles with no other standalone article" (which is the explicit result of a RfC saying that form of disambiguation should be used), 29 of the 72 listed cases have explicit RM discussions endorsing the current disambiguation. And in each of the other cases someone made a decision to list it here as opposed to moving (or RMing) it to a complete disambiguation. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 00:15, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

That doesn't mean that the person who listed it thinks it's justified. I wouldn't want people (including myself) to be reluctant to add things to the list because they think that would be interpreted as supporting the current title situation. To some extent, putting a title in the list should be an encouragement for other people to study it. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 00:55, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

Tyla (musician)

@162 etc.: Why isn't Tyla (musician) partially disambiguated? Isn't a singer a kind of musician? For example Category:Singers is a subcat of Category:Musicians. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 23:56, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

I agree, and there will be a lot of other cases which are hard to detect systematically: John Doe (baseball) vs John Doe (pitcher); Someplace, India vs Someplace, Assam; etc. Certes (talk) 08:08, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

See WP:SINGERDAB. 162 etc. (talk) 17:11, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

The reader who's an expert on every nuance of Wikipedia's article naming practice, and who knows that the Englishman plays guitar despite perhaps only having heard him sing, would know exactly where to look. A normal person would not, because both Tylas sing and each of them sings and/or plays a musical instrument. Certes (talk) 17:44, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

I mean, if you want to say it's potentially ambiguous, sure, start an RM. But it's not partially disambiguated, which is what this list is about. I'll note that the previous article title was a PDAB, and the current titles are the result of an RM which was closed only last month (Talk:Tyla (singer)#Requested move 12 September 2023.) 162 etc. (talk) 19:09, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

Talk:Tyla (musician)#Requested move 4 November 2023 * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 18:21, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

30 (Adele album)

Talk:30 (Adele album)#Requested move 22 December 2023 proposes to move 30 (Adele album) to the partially disambiguated page name 30 (album). Certes (talk) 17:38, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

WP:TWODABS

Many of the cases of partial disambiguation are when there are only two candidate topics for a partially disambiguated term. The threshold for a topic to be considered primary in such a situation seems lower than when there are more than two candidate topics. The page formerly described such situations, referring to WP:TWODABS, but this discussion was removed about a week ago by Pppery. I think that information was helpful and should not have been removed. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 22:09, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

@Pppery: Any comment about this? —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 23:43, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

I don't have anything more to say on this than my fairly lengthy edit summary. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 23:59, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Anthrax and Jet: a contrast

It's interesting to compare two recent RMs: Talk:Anthrax (American band)#Requested move 11 February 2024 (closed 18 February) and Talk:Jet (Australian band)#Requested move 5 February 2024 (closed 17 February). These two RMs were open at the same time. The page view ratio was actually higher for Anthrax, but moving the American band to a PDAB title was clearly opposed, while the Australian Jet was agreed to be renamed as a PDAB. I'm kind of scratching my head over that. My impression is that the difference of outcomes was just a random result of who happened to be voicing opinions in the discussions. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 23:41, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Agreed. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 23:59, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Comma disambiguation for places

@JohnCWiesenthal: There are 6771 859 places called "Town, Some County, State" which are ambiguous with a different place called "Town, State". We may need to leave these as a separate exercise if and when we finish the more important cases already listed, as we've done with other anti-patterns such as John Doe (pitcher) vs John Doe (baseball). Certes (talk) 19:30, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

I doubt the PDAB Municipality, State articles belong with either the prefix or the suffix tabs at § Partially disambiguated article titles detected but not yet studied. Should a different tab be created for these types of PDABs? JohnCWiesenthal (talk) 19:38, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Possibly, but I've added a link to the list alongside your example for now. Certes (talk) 20:05, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

I think we should restore the note deleted in Special:Diff/1208566807 ((note this does not include places in the US, Australia and Canada, where comma disambiguation is considered somewhat part of the name)) and remove all US places. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 20:08, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, a title like Anderson, Alabama is the WP:COMMONNAME rather than WP:COMMADIS like Windsor, Berkshire. That makes Anderson, Etowah County, Alabama an ordinary comma disambiguation, apart from the oddity that the qualifier appears in the middle. Following that logic, Anderson, Alabama is not a disambiguated title, and thus not partial disambiguation. Certes (talk) 20:22, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Also, that list contains some Municipality, State "articles" such as Midway, Arkansas that are actually disambiguation pages. JohnCWiesenthal (talk) 20:20, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Hence more evidence that the "Municipality, State" name is being treated as a base name not a disambiguated title. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 20:22, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Good spot. I'll refine the list in case it's needed later. Certes (talk) 20:23, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

How about moving them (including Anderson, Alabama) to a new drop-down tab in § Partially disambiguated article titles detected but not yet studied for future discussion. (It would take a while to add them all though.) JohnCWiesenthal (talk) 20:44, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

It's an idea, but we may be able to deal with them as a group rather than individually. Certes (talk) 21:43, 6 March 2024 (UTC)