Template talk:Disambiguation/Archive 1

Wording of the msg

Will an admin remove the word "just" from this message? Seems to unnecessarily devalue pages which are actually necessary and useful Jamesday 18:23, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Done. You might want to fix the boilerplate (ie Wikipedia:boilerplate etc) in other places if you feel strongly about it. I was going to suggest fixing the pages that have it on, but I realised there may 2000 of them according to Google. :) Angela. 06:45, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Thanks. I've done the Wikipedia:boilerplate for this and a couple of others. There's also a change request at MediaWiki talk:Legal. I suppose if I really wanted 2,000 edits to the circa 1,500 I have so far I could do the rest, but I think not...:) Jamesday 18:26, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

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Shouldn't the tense in the message be the present perfect? This is, "If you HAVE followed a link here" – since the time is not defined, nor is it important, and the action has been completed already, a perfective tense ought to be used. Could someone amend this? Sinuhe 20:53, 16 Mar 2004 (UTC)

No, it shouldn't. This is a single, simple past action, and perfect tenses are for refering to events either

• completed relative to other events or times:
  • "Tommorow i will have seen a battle, and be considered a veteran.";
  • "By December, i had experienced all five of Vermont's seasons.";
• or completed, but without a specific time:
  • "I've been here before.";
  • "I've told you repeatedly."

We are in fact interested in the possibility that the reader just did get here via a link in the last few minutes, and is likely therefore to remember, or be able to back-up to, the page with that disambiguable link. (We're not interested in any of the times when the reader has followed a link here in the past, because they are unlikely to remember what link they came on, and thus probably not in a position to fix that link.) --Jerzy(t) 00:15, 2004 Mar 22 (UTC)

Oh, OK, another British and American English difference I suppose. In British English, one would most certainly say (and other variants are considered wrong) "the reader has just got here" (yes, the past participle of 'to get' is got, not gotten), exactly as in all other sentences when just is used in its time sense. Sinuhe 12:55, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

No, Jerzy, the word was has, not had. It was still the present, a span rather than a spot. However, using the simple past makes the suggestion apply after any time. No, Sinuhe, the past participle is not "got" outside corrupted English. This is an objective, not dialectoregional, assessment notwithstanding that I say that English got messed up (corrupted; mea culpa <- my bad; quasi <- as if; circa <- around <- agird...) after Latin crept in with its fastenish mindlessness (religious nonsense). lysdexia 20:44, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)

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However, the wording

other pages that might otherwise have the same name

is ambiguous, inviting the reader to ask how those pages could have the same name [as each other]; what kind of otherwise would make that feasible (a non-deterministic architecture?....)

The real otherwise is "if only one of them had an article in WP", but we can

• keep the "otherwise what?" from being asked very often, and
• point the reader in the right direction for answering it themself if it is asked:

other pages that might otherwise have this article's name

or

other pages that might otherwise have this article's title

directs attention to where the title can be seen, and if the reader is interested in the "otherwise", they'll infer "if it weren't in use by this dab", and it's a short leap from there to the formulation (BTW, too long to include in the boilerplate) "if a dab weren't needed, which would only be the case if there were only one article for which the ideal name would be this one, or if the other articles' claims to this title could somehow be ignored." --Jerzy(t) 00:15, 2004 Mar 22 (UTC)

Format of the Boilerplate

Revert. Older version was better. This multi-line message is harder to format nicely than the short stubone. — Sverdrup 18:23, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I'd prefer if the multi-line text isn't centered. Maybe a <hr> is sufficient to separate the note (in the initial format) from the page. -- User:Docu

I think I prefer the old one as well. Perhaps we should have a poll? Sarge Baldy 03:24, Mar 19, 2004 (UTC)

I think this is rather unprofessional-looking. Also, I don't really see a reason for drawing attention to the message; what a disambiguation page is is readily apparent just by looking at one. As for separating the message from the page, I think that the italics do that just fine. -- Djinn112 07:16, Mar 20, 2004 (UTC)

Pretty much the same discussion is in MediaWiki talk:Stub; the format should probably be consistent. --Shallot 12:27, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)

More or less, except that these message is bit long (maybe even too long) .. Anyways, in the meantime, I reverted it to the previous version and added the <hr>. -- User:Docu

I liked the "boldly edited" box, but i'll be happy as long as something distinguishes the dab b-plt from dab'g text. I'd prefer more than italics; how about centered & italic, with a borderless, transparent box?

But just don't drop formatting completely; i just went thru manually checking 29 dabs yesterday, that i kept a record of having worked on, to be sure their B-plt was a msg and my "----"-coded hr had been removed; i feel entitled to ask for clear separation.--Jerzy(t) 00:15, 2004 Mar 22 (UTC)

A Special Case

Oh, i don't suggest doing anything about it until this settles down, but Corn has long had a variant dab b-plt; someone deleted the b-plt completely, i think in response to the push to standardize; i restored it and converted it to the pale-blue-box format. Someone should decide what to do about it at the end of this transitional period. --Jerzy(t) 00:15, 2004 Mar 22 (UTC)