I'm hoping to end the discussion for a good while about primary topic for "Reading" by creating some special redirects to the most common meanings and watching their traffic over time, as I've seen done in at least a couple other cases. Anyone have suggestions for what to name those special redirects, or is there anyone that can point me to one of those prior cases as I can't actually think of an example? -- Fyrael (talk) 21:35, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
One approach is to use redirects that are almost indistinguishable from the actual names of the articles (so that the readers are minimally affected). The addition of an invisible character would do, like for example the zero-width joiner. This, however, adds some overhead in having the redirects deleted after the end of the experiment, and it tends to confuse the people watching the dab page. Another approach is to use existing redirects, and the trick is to find ones that don't otherwise receive any traffic – you wouldn't want to have your data muddied up by pageviews not coming via the dab page. – Uanfala (talk)21:47, 25 October 2018 (UTC) There's an example of a slightly different approarch at Tylenol. Though with any such experiment there's always the caveat that the data you're getting is not necessarily the data you're looking for. We want to see what readers come looking for, but what we get instead is what they go away having found, and the two need not be identical. People can get distracted, especially by interesting topics they haven't seen before. – Uanfala (talk)22:00, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
When the state article was titled "New York", its For... hatnote linked via New York City. to gauge how many readers were seeking the city. The trailing blue "." replaced a black one in the standard hatnote, so the change was almost invisible. Certes (talk) 09:54, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for the responses. Turns out that this experiment had actually been run a few years ago for Reading, so I no longer have an immediate need. However, for future use...wouldn't a redirect with a nearly identical name to the actual article be bad because it could easily be found in searches, so you'd get traffic coming from somewhere other than the dab page? -- Fyrael (talk) 13:36, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
The search outputs articles, not redirects, and a redirect won't be listed alongside the article if the article title itself is a closer match than the redirect; so this shoudln't be an issue unless a reader specifically includes the invisible character (or whatever) in their search, and in the vast majority of casese this is extremely unlikely. This can be made even more unlikely by telling the search engine to disprefer your redirect by tagging it with {{R unprintworthy}}. – Uanfala (talk)14:00, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
I found this WikiProject as I came across the dab for Duncan Campbell. Although the sub-headings are clear, I wondered about changing the entries in each sub-headings to be chronological. The Style guide says 'Entries are typically ordered first by similarity to the ambiguous title, then alphabetically or chronologically as appropriate'. Is this generally best practice for people? Emain Macha (talk) 12:16, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
@Emain Macha: good question! My Golden Rule for all DAB pages, including {{hndis}}, is: do whatever you think will make it easiest to help readers find what they're looking for. Nothing else matters. If names are scattered over several centuries, chronological may be best. If you've got a bunch of C20-C21 people distinguished only by qualifier, alphasort by qualifier may be best. In other cases, some other order may be best. Trust your judgment.
As a DABfixer, I hate DAB pages of all kinds where I can't easily find what I want. Of course, as a DABfixer the link I want may not actually be on the DAB page: non-notable, should be a redlink or blacklink plus bluelink, article exists but hasn't been added to the DAB page, article exists in some other language, etc. I like to be able to find that out quickly too.
Incomplete short descriptions can be another nuisance. I dislike (and routinely trim) overlong descriptions because they distract and confuse, but ones which omit obvious details lead to unnecessary googling. How was I supposed to guess from the DAB page that Pink Panther (gentleman) was also notable as a scholar and an acrobat? Narky Blert (talk) 20:55, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
Macedonian art
Macedonian art has become a dab with incoming links from several articles such as Art of Romania ([show] the "European art" template at the foot). I could edit all such articles to read {{European topic||art|MK=Art of the Republic of Macedonia}} but that feels wrong, especially as the Republic's name may soon change. Is it best to produce a simple new template {{European art}} where we can code such variations in one place, or is there a better solution? I'm sure this sort of thing must have come up before. Certes (talk) 12:28, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Comment. As soon as I saw the word 'Macedonian', my alarm bells started ringing. It's one of those national/ethnic words which editors with too much time on their hands and/or too many bees in their bonnet fight over at great length (Assyrian is another). See Talk:Rise of Macedon for a depressing example of more heat than light. Tread carefully. Narky Blert (talk) 21:13, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
Мой аккаунт логин Intersetuz был заблокирован бессрочно, по причинам: Обход блокировок администраторам Q-bit_array. Я редактировал другие вики-сайты (аналог Википедии) имеющий схожесть к этой википедии. Здесь в главную википедию просто интерес у меня не было. Зарегистрировался и задал вопрос: "Узбекский википедии заблокировали в Узбекистане. С прокси не могу редактировать. Что сделать", Q-bit_array все мои вклады откачивал и заблокировал. Как такой может быть? Какой ещё обход? Вы меня с кем-то перепутаете. Мой IP провайдер texnopromsistem в прошлый год, новогода, бесплатно раздавал статический IP для создание серверы. В результате некоторых IP блокировались в другие аналог вики (ссылку не дам, спам). Пришлось подать заявку на получение Ташкентский IP и вот дали от 185----197. Я понятые не имею действие администратора Q-bit_array. Если надо, я могу подтверждать свою личности, что он меня перепутает с других вандалов. 185.248.45.8 16:38, 4 ноября 2018 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 185.248.45.8 (talk)
I stumbled across this and wondered whether to fix as a disambiguation or classify as a stub broad-concept article. I'm not sure, I would welcome opinions in the discussion on the talk page. Thank you. MegaSloth (talk) 13:13, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
Is there a tool to view click counts of each links in a disambiguation page? e.g. which one of the links in Peter Adamson get clicked the most by the user? I feel this will be useful to inform whether there should be a "primary article" for a disambiguation page. HaEr48 (talk) 00:28, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
I think the information is available to the devs and a Phabricator ticket has occasionally been raised for important cases. Alternatives include diverting the links via redirects that are not used elsewhere, then viewing pageviews for those redirects. Usually we just estimate them from the existing pageview totals. Certes (talk) 00:44, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
The fact that the page was created by Neelix rings alarm bells but it was checked. I would disagree with the top line Sectoral can refer to…; I don't think that single word can refer to any of the meanings listed. As you say, they're PTMs, and several other titles beginning with "Sectoral" are not listed. I'm always reluctant to delete content but I'm not sure that this page is helpful. Certes (talk) 12:25, 12 December 2018 (UTC)
Neelix actually created it as a redirect to Sector, which makes a little bit of sense. It was converted to a "dab page" later. I've reverted to the redirect, but if anyone disagrees, feel free to revert my edit. I also have no objection to deletion. Station1 (talk) 20:27, 12 December 2018 (UTC)
Please see a new how-to guide I wrote on Surname pages. I welcome comment. It's really an anthroponymy project page, but it covers some issues related to disambiguation pages as they relate to lists of people with common surnames as well. Coastside (talk) 11:21, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
The restaurant is probably the primary topic. Beyond that, I'm not sure what else makes sense. MB17:30, 21 January 2019 (UTC)
I've cleaned up the entries on the jumper dab, which seems fine now. I'd say that the gold rush article should just live at the base 'Claim jumping' name. The squatting entry on the current dab seems like non-notable slang (and isn't mentioned in the linked article. -- Fyrael (talk) 19:32, 21 January 2019 (UTC)
Oops, logic fail. I forgot briefly that the gold rush link is not its own article. Claim jumping should probably just redirect to land claim (shame that article isn't in better shape) and the gold rush redirect can just be deleted. -- Fyrael (talk) 19:35, 21 January 2019 (UTC)
What should we do about Sarangapur? I've just fixed links to several villages called Sarangapur, none of which have articles, so the dab is good for detecting misdirected links. On the other hand, I don't see much value in a list of redlinks which fail WP:DABMENTION, so I'm tempted to boldly replace it by a redirect. Advice welcome. Certes (talk) 14:39, 13 February 2019 (UTC)
Generally, pairs like Sarangapur and Sarangpur are easily confused because of the syncopation of shwa vowels common in languages of northern India. Even though in this case the vowel is apparently not a schwa (though you can't tell that from the English spelling) and the language concerned is not from northern India, the two terms are still likely to be confused by a substantial portion of our readers. Not to the extent that I'd want to combine them in a single page though (and if they're combined the two sets of entries would need to be neatly separated).
I don't think there's anything wrong with the existence of Sarangapur: if most readers searching for a place with this name are actually looking for something other than the one village we currently happen to have an article about, then a dab page helps to avoid potential misunderstandings. Not misleading readers is more important, in my view, than having impeccable dab pages. If anything needs to be done to that dab page, it's expansion with redlink entries for the other villages of the same name. – Uanfala (talk)20:26, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
@MaoGo:@Certes: ... except that St Vitus' dance is not in accordance with MOS:POSS: "For the possessive of singular nouns, including proper names and words ending with an s, add 's" (italics from the original). Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 19:54, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
I would interpret that part of MOS:POSS as applying only to phrases made up by the writer. St Vitus' dance is a standard phrase, more like the official names discussed in the following subsection. Certes (talk) 00:26, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
A search reveals the use of Vitus, Vitus', and Vitus's. The idea of having a Manual of Style is that we use it to standardise our style, despite other style uses elsewhere. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 08:10, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
What's important is that we have the full set of redirects to this dab page from St/St./Saint Vitus/Vitus'/Vitus's Dance/dance - and I think we've got most, if not quite all of them, in place (should be 17 of them: 3x3x2-1): good work there. PamD10:08, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
The wording of G14 and {{db-g14}} can hardly be called ambiguous; maybe this is just an issue of a few misguided editors, who need to have it explained to them individually? —swpbT • go beyond • bad idea23:18, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
Yeah, the wording probably can't get any clearer (unless it's expanded with examples of proper and improper use). If there is indeed an increase in improper tagging, it's probably down to the greater visibility of a disambiguation-specific speedy deletion criterion to users of Twinkle and similar tools. Before G14, editors would have had to know that G6 could also be applied to dab pages, which kind of presupposes that they would have at least read that in detail. – Uanfala (talk)23:35, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
This needs a fix as the first entry is piped which causes confusion with the actual singer. But I think it probably doesn't belong at all since the person in the target article is named only "Jisoo" (without a hyphen) and the without the surname "Kim". Just lookingfor a second opinion. MB02:08, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
There is a disambiguation page for Canas and it mentions that Canas can refer also to Cañas.
However, given that when you search Rio Cañas you find lots of articles, shouldn't another disambiguation page be created for Rio Cañas or should Rio Cañas instances be added to the Canas disambiguation page?
The following Río Cañas exist in Puerto Rico and there are barrios named Río Cañas (and other variants) as well.
name - GNIS -municipality
Río Cañas 1612455 Aguada
Río Cañas 1612449 Caguas
Río Cañas 1612451 Juana Díaz
Río Cañas 1612453 Mayagüez
Río Cañas 1612454 Naranjito
Río Cañas 1612452 Ponce
Río Cañas 1612450 Sabana Grande --Level C (talk) 02:02, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
If anyone's bored, I could use help with a bizarre little conversation where this user insists that putting a circular link at the bottom of a dab page is a good idea. I just can't figure out what they're thinking. -- Fyrael (talk) 18:30, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
Whose job is it to update dab pages when a new article gets created?
You've probably come across the daily report which tracks some types of missing entries from dab pages. The number of dab pages with missing entries – today that's 12,654 – tends to go down very, very slowly (my estimate is that at this rate it will reach zero in a couple of decades). However, most of that downward trend is due to the untiring activities of one or two editors, and when they take a break, the total number immediately shoots up. If they stopped editing altogether, the number will start increasing pretty fast.
So where is this upward trend coming from? I compared the missing entries reports for two dates 13 days apart, and the newer one had 284 articles not present in the older report. A very small number of these are due to vandalised dab pages and the like, but the overwhelming majority are articles that have been created in the intervening period. Of course, over time as editors stumble upon stuff, some of them will eventually get added to the dab pages, but there doesn't seem to be any systematic way of ensuring this happens.
We can't rely on the missing dab reports, as they only cover some possible cases: for example they don't ignore titles with comma-separated disambiguators as it's technically difficult to filter out the false positives, and obviously they don't deal with natural disambiguators. So it's not possible to track all missing entries like that. So, the big question is what way is there for us to make sure that dab pages get updates as new articles get created? One radical solution is to delete all dab pages – that way users will always see the search results, where no article gets left out. But other than that, what options are there? – Uanfala (talk)03:12, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
I always look for possible disambiguation page fits when I make a new article. This is my new favorite report, though. bd2412T03:17, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
I had also never seen this report and am excited to make use of it. Seems like a much better use of a spare hour than just patrolling recent changes like I do now. -- Fyrael (talk) 14:56, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
Perhaps, when a page is created with a title that includes a parenthetical disambiguator, there's a way to add a dialogue box to remind the page creator to consider a disambiguation page entry? Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 12:23, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
I don't think we should expect all editors to be aware of (or be bothered by) the need for updating dab pages (though I wish more people did that), and any extra steps in the process of publishing content (even as small as this one) could, in the long run, have the effect of deterring people from contributing. And we don't really need that: titles with parenthetical disambiguators are easy to track anyway. – Uanfala (talk)03:53, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
Permission to proceed
BANDES is a Venezuelan bank that should be written Bandes (acoording to their page and logo). The problem is that Bandes is a disambiguation page that includes BANDES and Susan Bandes. Would it be a problem to move BANDES->Bandes and forget the disambiguation page? I do not think Susan Bandes is a valid disambiguation.--MaoGo (talk) 11:56, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
@MaoGo: The article and four of the English-languages sources quoted refer to Banco de Desarrollo Económico y Social de Venezuela as "BANDES". The bank and one source use "Bandes". As an acronym, neither is wrong, so I'd lean towards the majority usage of upper case. "Bandes" is certainly ambiguous, as in [Susan] Bandes joined the DePaul faculty, but the bank may still be the primary topic. It's in the news this week but may not yet have shown enough long-term significance. Personally I think it's slightly better to leave things as they are, but that's just one opinion and others may come along to disagree. I've also added another person to the dab. Certes (talk) 13:07, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
Linking to WP:REMOJI, which sums up the current practice with respect to emoji redirects: it's relevant even though it doesn't answer the question posed here. – Uanfala (talk)02:12, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
Yes, the page simply stores the character's number 1F52B, and the graphics are provided by the fonts on our individual computers. The image may vary, just as we may be reading these words in different fonts. I see an old-fashioned handgun but some font designers may have drawn a toy gun, despite the character being called PISTOL. Certes (talk) 03:26, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
Although it's hard to judge intentions without edit summaries, the IP editor now seems to have found a version which achieves their goal without breaking anything. Certes (talk) 09:49, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
... and it's back. Rather than clog this page with my running commentary, please see the template's page history for details. Certes (talk) 11:26, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
Two minor points came up at RST 1. "Organizations and enterprises" vs "Organizations" 2. ordering inside a section: a (minor) DABMENTION acro vs spelled out articles titles forming the ambiguous term as acros. More opinions are welcome at Talk:RST. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Widefox (talk • contribs) 23:50, 25 January 2019 (UTC)
A new Newsletter directory has been created to replace the old, out-of-date one. If your WikiProject and its taskforces have newsletters (even inactive ones), or if you know of a missing newsletter (including from sister projects like WikiSpecies), please include it in the directory! The template can be a bit tricky, so if you need help, just post the newsletter on the template's talk page and someone will add it for you.
My question is, do these pages serve a useful purpose? They seem rather like incomplete disambiguation, but I don't think that redirecting the titles to e.g. Northern (disambiguation)#Geography would be particularly helpful. Personally, I wouldn't think that people would either link to or search for these titles. Is it worth cleaning them up somehow, or should they be nominated for deletion? Cnilep (talk) 05:16, 13 April 2019 (UTC)
I tagged them for ckeanup, as they do appear to be incomplete disambiguation, but then I couldn't figure out what to do with the entries as they don't all fit neatly into any one disambiguation page. older ≠ wiser09:28, 13 April 2019 (UTC)
At the moment we have Uphill which is an article about a village, but I don't see any Disambiguation page for Uphill, I was struggling to find Dennis Uphill yesterday, do we have a disambiguation page? Govvy (talk) 09:51, 23 April 2019 (UTC)
I've changed the redirect Lo-fi into a disambiguation page and retargeted a number of redirects to it, but this has resulted in a large number of incoming links. If you'd like to help me fix them then I'd be grateful: "low fidelity" or "lo-fi" usually needs to link to:
When are interlanguage links appropriate on DAB pages? I've noticed, for example, that User:Dispenser's 'Dabfix' tool sometimes suggests {{ill}} links. User:Не А recently added several {{Interlanguage link}} to Curia (disambiguation), but it's not clear to me that the redlinks belong on the page, as no en:Wikipedia pages link to those titles. The only thing I can find at WP:Disambiguation ("interlanguage links only where a similar problem of disambiguation exists in the target language") seems to relate to the languages bar, rather than links within the DAB page. Cnilep (talk) 11:16, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
Ironically, interlanguage links is an ambiguous term. That advice at WP:Disambiguation refers to links which appear under "Languages" in the left sidebar, which can appear explicitly at the end of the wikitext but are normally generated from Wikidata. {{ill}} produces the other type of link which appears in the text and usually refers to one possible meaning of the ambiguous page title. The latter are deprecated, though I can't find written evidence of that and personally I consider them a useful and legitimate way of informing the reader. Certes (talk) 11:51, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
The fact that a word's translation is used commonly enough in another language for an article to have been created over there doesn't really seem like a good enough reason to me to override our guidelines about red links. If there's no article on the English wiki that attempts to link to this meaning, I say we shouldn't have an entry for it. -- Fyrael (talk) 14:02, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
I haven't heard that they're deprecated, and I'm likewise in favor of using them. There are often cases where there's a notable article in another language that is likely to be translated or recreated in English at some point, and these links are a good way of reducing confusion and making names consistent. Nick Number (talk) 14:28, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
I have the vague recollection this was discussed not long ago, but I can't seem able to locate the discussion. I don't think there's any consensus, and some members of the project are opposed to including links to other wikipedias. Personally, I almost never seek to include them (mostly because I'm lazy), and if dabfix suggests any, I almost always remove them (mostly because they invariably happen to be biographies and I dislike having to be bothered to evaluate whether they're mentionworthy). In principle, however, I believe such links should unreservedly be allowed. If a topic would generally belong on the dab page, and there is an article of acceptable quality on that topic, we should link to it, full stop; it doesn't matter if that article happens to be only on the Dutch wikipedia. Our readers aren't a parochial English club; for most English is in fact a second language and those for whom it isn't there are easily accessible tools for automated translation. I don't see why we should extend the logic of WP:DABRED and require that articles on the English wikipedia link to the term: we're talking about blue interwiki links, right? – Uanfala (talk)14:39, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
Could you explain how you've come to the conclusion that most readers of the English wiki only have English as a second language? That seems patently untrue. -- Fyrael (talk) 17:29, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
That was just a hunch, sorry. It's impossible to know with accuracy, but you can get a rough idea at looking at the statistics: there were 7.5 billion total pageviews last month for the English wikipedia, 4.5 billion of which came from the major English-speaking countries of Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and the US. So far I appear to be wrong: the percentage of pageviews coming from countries where English isn't a majority language is about 40%, though that figure will rise to around 49% if weighing the US total by 0.8 (the proportion of US residents for whom English is the first language). But if we take into account the fact that a sizeable subgroup of the English L1 speakers will have good reading comprehension of a second language, then we can at least arrive at the conclusion that the majority of readers are indeed able to read in a language other than English. – Uanfala (talk)20:16, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
This would be good to revisit. It definitely shouldn't preclude adding interlanguage links for entries which are linked in English articles and would be created anyway under MOS:DABRL. I'd argue that it would also be useful to add them even when there aren't links in English, as long as the subject is clearly notable by enwiki standards. Nick Number (talk) 21:49, 16 May 2019 (UTC)
Surprisingly, the bit in DABSISTER prohibiting links to other-language wikipedias was added just six months ago [2]. Previously, the guidelines discouraged links to "sister projects". Was that really taken to include other wikipedias, or was it only for other wikimedia projects (like wikispecies or wikisource)? Looking at the history (see for example this revision from 2007) DABSISTER was explicitly justified by a reference to a poll from 2004. Two things are striking there: one, that the decision was made using means that few wikipedians today would recognise as our own; second, the sister project in question was apparently a memorial wiki for victims of the 9/11 attacks – that's a very different context from the one we have here. That puts DABSISTER on rather shaky foundations. Sure, it has remained part of the guidelines, so people have presumably not been bothered by it; but on the other hand, what it's saying to us now is very different from what it was apparently saying to the people who instituted it. – Uanfala (talk)01:02, 17 May 2019 (UTC)
Feedback sought for proposed article-to-DBA/SIA conversion at Allopathic medicine
Autogenerated surname lists by the bio bot (like on it.wikipedia)
Hi. The Category:Lists of people sharing a surname has some articles generated by an automate bot from the related bio or infobox templates, and then contributed by editors. A similar bot is bused on it.wikipedia for the same category ([[w:it:Categoria:Liste di persone per cognome]]).
There are about 399 WP articles with the word "Cortes" in the title, and
I am looking forward to extract from WP how many of them are biographies. So, I tried with the search engine, but probably there are some errors in the query and it doesn't work.
Deepcat is powerful but, unfortunately, many subcategories of "people" categories contain pages that are not biographies. You could try searching for something like Cortes intitle:/ Cort[eéè]s/ insource:/ategory:.*([Pp]eople|[Bb]irth|[Dd]eath)/. It won't be perfect but may be an improvement. Certes (talk) 11:29, 19 June 2019 (UTC)
Could we generate these in project space, and then clean them up or otherwise take steps to determine whether they should be moved to mainspace? bd2412T23:03, 20 June 2019 (UTC)
I suppose a bot (or an editor who doesn't mind the tedium) could run a series of searches or queries and format the results as wikitext in project space. Wikidata's "family name" attribute seems sparsely populated and, predictably, listing all people then filtering by name times out without producing useful results. Popular names might need a complex page like List of people with surname Smith. Certes (talk) 23:31, 20 June 2019 (UTC)
Do "De rerum natura" and "De natura rerum" mean the same thing? I ask because of the dab page De natura rerum and its entries, which at first glance seem counterintuitive. — Gorthian (talk) 04:15, 18 June 2019 (UTC)
@Gorthian: They should - Latin is a highly inflected language, and word order is pretty much unimportant. The Latin poets arranged words to fit the metre, and orators and authors for the rhythm, and a literal English translation often looks very odd. De natura rerum is "About the nature of things", and De rerum natura is "About of things the nature". (Qualification: Latin O-Level 1965.) Narky Blert (talk) 16:30, 20 June 2019 (UTC)
Narky Blert, I envy you your Latin education. It wasn’t available for me, and I probably would have been too bone-headed at the time to enroll even if it had been. Thanks for the literal translations; I find those to be very useful. — Gorthian (talk) 02:48, 21 June 2019 (UTC)
@Gorthian: I mentioned syllable stresses in my earlier post, but didn't follow through. Dé natúra rérum and De rérum natúra feel natural to me (3 and 2 stresses respectively, and different metrical feet), so choice between them might depend on the surrounding context.
What is the correct procedure for linking to pages that are currently disambiguation pages but have been tagged as needing to be converted to broad-concept articles? Specifically, I recently included a link to British folklore in the article for Pokémon Sword and Shield, which was subsequently tagged as needing disambiguation by Narky Blert. I feel that British folklore is the correct destination article for the link as the cited source just refers to "legends in the UK" rather than anything more specific, but I'm also not really familiar with the specific workings of dab cleanup, so I figured my best bet was to ask here. Lowercaserho (talk) 14:32, 20 June 2019 (UTC)
@Lowercaserho: If every topic on a DAB page is intended, the solution is to link through the (disambiguation) qualifier, thus: [[British folklore (disambiguation)|British folklore]]. It'll all come out in the wash when/if the DAB page is converted into a WP:BCA.
I don't think that's ultimately the best solution. We shouldn't be using (disambiguation) redirects for pages that aren't, or shouldn't be, disambiguation pages. – Uanfala (talk)14:48, 20 June 2019 (UTC)
It's certainly not the optimum solution; it's a kludge. However, it does point readers to the best current destination while getting the page out of the User:DPL bot error reports.
There are several potential problems in removing {{dab}} from proposed BCA articles. (1) I've seen several proposed BCA articles which clearly were not suitable to be BCAs. The names were similar, but the topics were unrelated. (2) Bad links-in puzzle readers. That's not so bad for actual BCAs, where they should be able to find what they want without too much difficulty. It's terrible for an article which is still a DAB page; both because (a) readers are left guessing, and (b) links-in often refer to only one of the topics on the page, and those need finding and fixing.
An even better solution would be to convert the disambiguation page to a broad concept article. A start-class BCA can often be worked out of an existing disambiguation page in ten or fifteen minutes. Since the disambiguation page already lists a collection of related concepts, I usually start the BCA by plucking the lede paragraph from each of these concepts and adding it to the BCA as an example of an instance of the subject related by the title. In this case, I would change the lede to "British folklore refers to traditional stories, myths, and legends developed in various parts of Britain. Examples include:" and then plug in the descriptive text, with attribution for each edit. Once that is included, draw the appropriate connections between overlapping elements and add any needed categories. bd2412T14:55, 20 June 2019 (UTC)
If you type Stolas you don't go to the disambiguation page, you go to one article. How do I change that please? I'm sure I found a Wikipedia article Stolas on the stolas beetle, but I can't find it now! Charlesjsharp (talk) 08:44, 3 July 2019 (UTC)
@Charlesjsharp: Wikipedia doesn't have an article on genus Stolas but it's part of subfamily Cassidinae and there's a page on the imperial tortoise beetle. If the demon is not the primary topic then we could move Stolas (disambiguation) (which needs cleaning up) to Stolas. Because Stolas exists and is a redirect to a different page, that would need an admin or page mover. If you think that would be controversial, start a requested move to discuss the options. If not, just put in a request at WP:RMTR. Certes (talk) 09:29, 3 July 2019 (UTC)
@Charlesjsharp and Certes: I've cleaned up the dab page and added one entry. It seems impossible to add a {{redirect}} hatnote in a useful place on the target page of the existing redirect, the page about demons (as the target is part of a numbered list). In any case it does not look as if the demon is the Primary Topic for a term which is also a genus and a surname. I have created a redirect Stolas (demon) and used that in the templates {{Demons in Pseudomonarchia Daemonum}} and {{Demons in the Ars Goetia}} which provided most if not all of the incoming links. I have annotated the request at WP:RM: what we need is to move Stolas (disambiguation) to Stolas as the primary topic. PamD12:12, 3 July 2019 (UTC)
Should this kept be as a dab? After removing the redlinks, there would only be three PTs left. Maybe they should all be kept, but in a List article? MB17:47, 8 July 2019 (UTC)
