Forum:Policy for disambiguation pages

Moved from User talk:Simsilikesims at suggestion of Romartus.

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[Regarding Ranger/Rangers]: A specious edit on your part. The previous search engine failed to find plural forms that only had "s" at the end. The current one does not. Therefore, there is no problem with using only singular forms.

I was told not to put in nonexistent entries on a disambiguation page. (Park ranger) is illegitimate, except possibly as a one-time joke. Nonexistent entries have been used too often to pad out a disambiguation page that would only have one link; that is considered illegitimate, too, with two entries being rather useless to justify disambiguation. I see you felt it necessary to pad "Ranger" out since "Sloane Ranger" links to the article Sloanes.

I am unable to follow multiple masters in trying to clean up what all of you have failed to do for years and years. Dead weight is immaterial when you are not paying for space like in Wikia days; it's costing money now, so can I assume you have funded the site sufficiently to keep it going? I've thrown in some cash.

Have at it; I am done with this cleanup project and certainly do not like your micromanagement. Everything was fine before? Bullshit. -- (talk) 19:02, 4 July 2019 (UTC)

Nonexistent entries might be funny. If they were funny, that would override any rule against them. If they were not funny, of course it's trolling the reader to make him click to find that a page doesn't exist. (Unless he's fool enough to click on a red-link.)

My Truth or Consequences is a disambiguation page to three Uncyclopedia articles, none of which exist. Spıke 🎙️19:31 4-Jul-19

I think we can come to a sensible agreement as regards this issue? On the subject of article feedback, that system was designed when we had a far larger user base than now. Of course in those days, you required a review from somewhere before being able to nominate an article.RomArtus*Imperator ITRA (Orate) ® 21:09, 4 July 2019 (UTC)

It's more like a rickroll, where you are taken to somewhere you don't want to be. Yes, yes, I don't have to go there by rolling over the bluelink and looking, but the place is well and truly full of misleading bluelinks, redirects and suchlike. Working on stubs, Dead-end pages, Orphan pages and examining lots of entries on category pages tells me rickrolls are about as common as genuine links. When I say "genuine", that includes links to inexact matches.

After a point, rickrolls aren't funny anymore. Ask readers trying to navigate this site. This is the second most common complaint I've gotten, behind "poor quality/not funny generally". I don't try to get people to read the site anymore even though I've told people to stick to featured articles. They don't, are sorely disappointed and let me hear about it. And your response and the existence of old terrible articles and stubs tells me you don't read the site much. You should.

Sensible agreement: a requirement would be to bring the entire site in line with whatever was agreed. Reality says this is not going to happen. And the propensity to "cheat" and not allow others to do the same remains. Truth or Consequences proves that. Re-read [1]. Dab content is a gray area. But micromanaged reversion of dab pages and other things is really nasty. If I'd done this reversion, I know I'd hear about it and get re-reverted. Some of you just can't get beyond "My way or the highway". It is again no wonder this place was a desert when I joined two years ago. -- (talk) 04:17, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

I don't understand what this is all about, but I don't see why we can't have one "ranger(s)" page with all the entries on it and the other one as a redirect. It would begin something like "Ranger or rangers may refer to ...". I notice you've been suppressing redirects a lot when moving pages, which can be bad for user experience and SEO because of links to the original titles. (Of course if the original title is that bad, it makes sense.) Also, you mention space. Nothing ever really goes away on MediaWiki, even if it's deleted or reverted, unless it's removed from the database directly. ❦ Llwy-ar-lawr • talk • contribs • 04:49 5 July 2019

Llwy, the basic point is efficiency for users over throwing blocks in users' way to (supposedly) fluff up the site and get a cheap laugh from a rickroll. Phone users don't seem to have much tolerance for such nonsense and don't seem to find it funny, except (as a guess) to maybe to come back and post non-malicious vandalism as their version of the joke. But you guys really like that, right? I say dab pages for disambiguation first, humor second. Overused lame humor by constant rickrolling puts one back in 3rd grade. You other guys go to sleep now, you have school tomorrow.

The redirects I bagged were plural forms, or variant to bizarre capitalizations. Since we have a search autocomplete, it looks like there are many pages when there is only one or two. Rickrolled again if somebody goes back and checks out the next autocomplete entry and the next and the next. We do have variant pages on the same topic with slightly different presentations made so they could co-exist, but there are only a few.

If double redirects are considered bad, then circular redirects, direct or indirect, must be equally bad or worse(?). I feel there is potential for that if different dab pages or redirects have ranger/rangers/Ranger/Rangers/ranger/ranger/ad nauseum.

There are also many years in Anniversaries that were and once again linked to a redirect. Why? Years are rarely bluelinked in articles. It is also a pure waste of time to bluelink every year possible; it takes too long without writing a program to do so.

Llwy, I'd agree with your solution with one dab page. As things stand now, the "Ranger" dab page MUST be linked to the "Rangers" page and vice versa. That is stupid.

We also have auto dab pages using a first name as a prefix as the parameter. Every one of those creates a link to itself. Also stupid. See the page Anna (ahem); I'm stuck on this on how best to present two different articles on the same person. Maybe the jokers here would just add the same descriptive line to both to be funny. Then it just looks like an amateurish error. Some other pages like this were changed, like Lee, as it not only linked to itself, but had links to "Leeanne" (semi-useful) but also "Leech", "Leet", etc. (not useful). Mindless and stupid and not editable. There might be, but I could not find a suffix-based method to generate "Robert E. Lee", etc. Nonetheless, Wikipedia has both first and last names "Lee" on the same dab page, separated in groups with a comment, and not on two pages. Worksforme and I followed that scheme. -- (talk) 07:15, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

If SEO is more important than keeping users it attracts but can't navigate the site cleanly, I think you've lost the big picture. There should be some middle ground. Uncyclopedia is again so far down in readers it's not encouraging. By comparison, I was building content and being pretty much the sole contributor to this site: [2]. My concept. This is a rather obscure branch of collecting. My site was/is a part of a much larger established site. But my obscure sub-site would receive 1500-2000 unique visitors a month, about half the total for the entire site at the time. This was achieved after 2 months, with up to 600 entries/records being added a month -- new stuff always. The only publicity was posting a link on my posts in one forum and a few links occasionally posted otherwise, sometimes on another forum by the site owner. I've left that project behind. I am stopping any activity here that would be considered constructive by me but destructive by others. Let's see where our ranking goes from now; my activity should have counted for something with the bots. And we are still behind 2.0 in Google, a site that has shown zero activity in the last 30 days minimum. -- (talk) 09:58, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

I said "user experience and SEO". They're supposed to go together. I agree that if you're putting SEO ahead of user experience, you're doing it wrong.

The redirects you describe are standard practice on Wikipedia. See Category:Redirects from other capitalisations (405,200 pages) and Category:Redirects from plurals (18,520). Their search box is about like ours. A reader may type in some word and see what look like pages about "foo", "foos" and "FOO", then click through and find there's really just "foo", but is that harmful? I don't see this as "rickrolling" any more than dictionary definitions of the form "foo: see bar" or "foos: plural of foo". I've heard a lot of complaints about Wikipedia but not that one. Do the people you've talked to object to these redirects? I think they help readers because once you've already typed "foos" into the search box you won't see "foo" anymore, someone could type something directly into the location bar, and links (both on the site and elsewhere) and search results can exist for redirects or pages that were moved. By the same argument, every redirect is potentially misleading because it could come up in the search box and look like there was a real article at that name. If I type "Foo" into the box, the first thing I see is Foo, but if I click on it I get sent to Foobar. Surprise, there's not really an article called "Foo"... but when Foobar discusses the term so much, does it matter?

I don't have any more opinions or advice on disambiguation pages, I'm afraid. I hope nobody leaves over these issues. ❦ Llwy-ar-lawr • talk • contribs • 15:17 5 July 2019

Restart

I haven't been following this page closely (it seemed "more heat than light"; I have recommended many Uncyclopedia articles to friends and have never heard that "the website's redirect policy sucks!"). Saw Romartus's recommendation that we move the discussion from a user talk page to a Forum and have done so. Let's separate the issues:

• Plurals in page titles. The main article should be the singular unless what it's about is inherently plural (Beatles, but Puritan).
• Plurals in redirects. Generally, the reader should know to type the singular. We would be doing him a favor if we had a redirect at Puritans. But Doughnuts is a waste.
• Server space. Yes, it now costs some of us money, rather than a faceless corporation hoping to make it up by sticking advertisements on our pages, to the consternation of all. But server space is now measured in gigabytes, and saving kilobytes is a waste of everybody's time.
• Search engine. Apparently our search engine is already better than Wikia's notoriously crappy one. (The Uncyclopedia bar in Mozilla's search line is not; it is happy to search for Help%3AInfobox.) And apparently it compensates for excessive rigor in our policy on page names and redirects. Now, unless we are sure we are never going to go to a different version of MediaWiki, and that the search function is never going to be "improved," our policy should not depend on how the search engine works.
• Prank piped links. This has been stock-in-trade of some Uncyclopedians for a decade. The simplest example is [[Pun|deer]]. The author wants to hide a note that "deer" is a pun, and the reader never actually wants to read Pun next. Aleister especially used to write entire sentences where each word was a link somewhere else, typically to different examples of the thing described in the sentence. He did not intend that the reader be taken anywhere, but hover over the links and read the floating text. I never liked this, because it was hiding material in a sort of performance art. But if you are going to go back a decade and try to state what Uncyclopedia policy is, this format is well-established. I don't believe it outnumbers non-prank links.
• Multiple articles on the same thing. This has been explicitly encouraged forever. We have three on Bhagavad-gita, and you can see how I handled them at Template:India. The key here in disambigs is to help authors get traffic for their pages, not strictly hew to policy. Spıke 🎙️20:55 5-Jul-19

Apologies to Llwy-ar-lawr for ignoring your complete comment. We are still basically on the same page as Spike seems to be also.

"I have recommended many Uncyclopedia articles to friends and have never heard that "the website's redirect policy sucks!" Spike, this comment falls on deaf ears. Perhaps that was my mistake, recommending the site generally with the admonition that "it's an amateur writing site". All liked a couple articles, but found the overall site to be terrible or off-putting. Most haven't been back after the first visit and don't care to talk about the site much less contribute. Problems here run so much deeper than redirects. Redirects are clearly not the problem, but facility for users should be optimized to try and keep the ones that want to stay.

Plurals Dab pages: While not the optimal example for all things, I look to Wikipedia for (say) handling plurals on dab pages and page titles, figuring they have plenty of back history on handling such things. I look there now and find a Ranger dab page, with its title in the singular with entries for both singular and plural. I did check WP before for revising our Lee dab page. Our old Lee page was originally first names only and was a uneditable Special page populated by finding "Lee" as a prefix. The first link was to the page itself, and also included "Leech" and "Leet", etc. Not very useful.

I do resent senior admins/crats one-sidedly changing my edits, like my revision of the Ranger dab page. Don't sweep that aside. The only one who does not do this is our favorite diplomat, Romartus, for which I am grateful. Gad, even "Miley Spears" gave a heads up and said "we don't do that here" first. Now if I go and fold the Rangers dab page into the Ranger one, I'm starting a revert war, no? So I'll stay in this discussion but am leaving dab pages, redirects, bluelinks, redlinks, Broken pages, etc., etc. for others to maintain. Or not, as has been the case for years.

Prank pipe links and such. "I don't believe it outnumbers non-prank links". I didn't say that. It is/was really, really common in the areas I noted: Broken pages, Length-challenged pages, etc., that are the ultimate repository of bad writing. If you are running out of ideas, cheap rickrolls comes easily to mind, apparently. Again, since you probably are not a regular reader of the site, it's not an irritation to you. I thought we were here to write to entertain readers, more than just ourselves. For all your past history on trying to maintain a high quality level on Uncyclopedia, I would think too many cheap shots like rickrolls/prank links would not qualify as that. Not everything has to be highbrow humor, but so much really useless lowbrow stuff like rickrolls is tiresome and rarely funny.

Multiple articles on the same thing. Choose to again misread what I wrote at your own peril. The problem was not about dupes existing but how to exactly present them. The only dab page with duplicates I've found is on the Anna page for Anna Pavlova. No explanation there so on the surface, it looks like a mistake. Stupid qualifier in the title as both articles write about her ballet career. And a number of duplicated subjects are found buried on Broken pages where it would be useful to bring them into the light. Put one of these on the "See also" of its "twin" and it will be taken as a self-referencing mistake, because I've see that done for some strange reason a couple of times. Label it as an article from an alternate universe, maybe? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Nigel Scribbler (talk • contribs)

Nigel, this website has been famously off-putting for a decade, both (1) off-putting readers by containing crap, and for (2) off-putting authors by deleting crap. In short, as Simsie has best put it, we walk a tightrope, and do so differently from another website of the same name, generally by favoring the reader. Ultimately, our obstacle is not our material but the exponential growth of alternatives to us, especially for readers who elect not to learn Wikicoding. 32,000 pages, a half dozen active editors, means crap will continue to exist, despite everything.

"Senior admins/crats one-sidedly changing my edits" (that is, creative disagreement) is a risk of any endeavor from garage bands to pick-up volleyball, and the adversary's rank is not a factor. A revert war? The alternative is dialogue. About which, watch how you do it. My reasoning might be wrong on any issue; that does not mean my character is defective. Asserting that I "make a royal pronouncement from the top of your mountain. Treating people like idiots is par for the course for you" (at Forum:Broken links/pages‎‎) (the offense being that I presented you an alternative that you had already considered) is unconstructive. Spıke 🎙️03:08 6-Jul-19

I agree except for the plurals issue -- as I said, readers can also arrive at those redirects through links.

Speaking of disk space, I should be able to free up a bit of it soon. I've got Varnish working on my website, so it's about time I installed it here and disabled the file cache. ❦ Llwy-ar-lawr • talk • contribs • 03:13 6 July 2019

I don't see any reason why there shouldn't be room for both plural and singular forms. The idea is for people to be able to find pages. If they want to create new pages, they can use the blue link at the top of the page they got redirected to, to take them back to the original page. Also, not ALL browsers have "no differentiation" between singular and plural. I am noticing there seems to be a difference on my end. Redirect pages need not prevent people from creating new pages, unless they are protected specifically. Besides, there are a limited number of people at any one given time who are willing to create new articles, and many articles that need to be written that are not covered by redirects in any way. Those articles should be a more urgent priority than the possibility that someone may someday, maybe 10 years in the future, decide to write an article that is currently covered by a redirect. Chances are, articles that are covered by a redirect would be better written by those of us who know wikicoding well enough to go back to the page the redirect is on anyway. I myself try not to redirect to pages that would not be a logical place for someone who manually searched through the search results to land. Let's not all assume bad faith here, which this rickrolling comment sounds dangerously like. A redirect page should be used similarly to a disambiguation page, except it only has one result instead of several, usually because not enough similar articles exist on the subject. Finally, I stopped editing Wikipedia once it had become sufficiently bureaucratized that editing it without being reverted by someone automatically became next to impossible. They think they know it all, so it is pointless to keep feeding the beast. Unfortunately, the more rules and strict policies we set, the closer we come to that. -- Simsilikesims(♀GUN) Talk here. 23:09, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

Simsilikesims, If you had added in the summary that the plural search problem is browser-based as a reason for the page split, I would have grudgingly accepted this. Still, the internal site search is browser-independent, no? So I would expect more users to hit the site first instead of the Uncyclopedia page showing up on the first page results of a browser search; but I suppose that's just me. We probably would have ended in discussion here in any case, but on less adversarial terms to start. I'd still rather see one dab page for "Ranger" with a redirect from "Rangers" – there are more options for the user that way.

"Let's not all assume bad faith here": if you mean me vs. the creator of that link, it's not that. What I consider rickrolling is a tired old joke link that deserves to die. We can continue to add tons more Russian Reversal jokes and lots more bad Wilde quotes. Done well, they're fine, but they're generally not done well at all in my opinion. I'd rather get rid of the worst of the old ones, but if y'all love them all so much, I'll let them live.

Consider the case of multiple redirects going to some page like Lego Escher which originally was the Lego page. I write/wrote a new page titled Lego and replaced a redirect page named that in doing so. But any other redirects (which might be "legos", "Legos", "plastic bricks") (not to mention bluelinks) that potentially more directly relate to Lego still point to Lego Escher. If you think I should not perturb what exists/the existing redirects, or if I cannot find and update those redirects in the search, then maybe my more on-topic page gets viewed less enough that perhaps there was no reason to create it.

You may not see that happening, but looking at Orphan pages and (sometimes erroneously in Broken pages), for lack of a tranclusion/back link there were good articles buried in the site. When they were duplicated topics, I've seen the other "equivalent" article before but none of these. Now that may be due to a purposely variant page title, but I feel there was some way the articles got buried when it was not deserved.

And do I really have to cook up every variant title as redirects to get my new article viewed? And when I find redirect conflicts as in the above case, do I get to change them or will just someone revert them on the basis of "that's the way they were"? We don't need absolute law, but a policy. And the ignorable policy scheme works for me. I have violated it on occasion. But it makes for a flexible, logical guideline.

"that does not mean my character is defective" The way you speak and act makes it look that way from where I sit. Perhaps some of us (not me) could excuse your behavior if you actually owned the site and were the total financial support of the spoon. Tagging a recent new member in "Recent Changes" as "probably not a vandal" helps to show a level of paranoia that is off the scale of normal. I didn't check if that person skipped off to the fork, but certainly you chased The Pioneer and Roza over there and both are quite productive there. They have been productive here in the past and could have been helping us. You may accidentally be the fork's best recruiter. -- (talk) 04:19, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

There are no redirects to Lego or Lego Escher, but any redirects that pointed to Lego Escher while it was still called "Lego" would continue to point to Lego. Redirects specify titles, not pages.

I see "probably not a vandal" in the user rights log as a lighthearted, basic endorsement of someone's edits, not paranoia. You read it more seriously than I do. There are people who left here for the fork because of disagreements with Spike, but I wouldn't count Pioneer and Roza among them. (I see Roza is unblocked but hasn't edited since 2 June.) They weren't around that much anyway and weren't treated very harshly. There's also the question of whether those who left were just facing appropriate consequences/advice and if they were really assets. Take me for example -- back in '13, I was mostly being annoying. People can change, of course, but it's not guaranteed.

Bad behavior from a site owner is less, not more, excusable. I would be happy for anyone else here to be a financial donor and/or co-sysadmin but don't expect anything more than you are willing to give. It's not fun stuff. ❦ Llwy-ar-lawr • talk • contribs • 05:11 7 July 2019

Probably not a vandal

Thank you, Llwy; this stock wisecrack of mine is certainly not paranoia, as each use of it accompanies the promotion of a new user (to the Autopatrolled plateau). So, the Admin sniffs, I don't know about you, but you're probably not a vandal. I'm told Shabidoo sees "From zero to hero" on my user page as a Victory Lap, when it is in fact self-deprecation (citing Jim Carrey) of my ascension to Admin "once everyone else left." There may indeed be people who left because of me, but blaming me was a strategy because in certain years, trying to weaken my will was seen as the best way to kill this project. I will try not to fit facts to a preconceived notion; everyone else first. And armchair psychology on paranoia, along with hatorz and phobias, is stylized name-calling. Spıke 🎙️02:43 8-Jul-19