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Latest comment: 15 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Disambiguation pages disambiguate Wikipedia articles (WP:D: "Disambiguation in Wikipedia is the process of resolving conflicts in Wikipedia article titles that occur when a single term can be associated with more than one topic, making that term likely to be the natural title for more than one article.") The entries that have been removed several times now have no Wikipedia articles to disambiguate, so are not displayed on the disambiguation page since they provide no navigational assistance to the reader. Wikipedia is not a dictionary (WP:NOTDICDEF) nor an indiscriminate directory (WP:NOTDIR). Please read WP:MOSDAB, and in particular MOS:DABRL: "A link to a non-existent article (a "red link") should only be included on a disambiguation page when an article (not just disambiguation pages) also includes that red link. A red link should not be the only link in a given entry; link also to an existing article, so that a reader (as opposed to a contributing editor) will have somewhere to navigate to for additional information. The linked article should contain some meaningful information about the term." And don't use the UNDO function without changing the edit summary unless the edit undone is obvious vandalism. -- JHunterJ (talk) 13:44, 14 February 2009 (UTC)Reply
This seems to me like a poor policy decision. People come to Wikipedia for information, which means they're often confused about the subject. If a person searches Wikipedia for GADS because they saw the acronym in an article elsewhere like I did, they may not be aware that they want information about airport software for example. If they reach a disambiguation page that makes no mention of their target subject, it's likely to make them even more confused than before. By contrast a brief explanation of other uses which may not have (or deserve) their own Wiki articles would have the opposite effect of giving them some of the information they want and clearing up their confusion. If the objective of Wikipedia is to be a repository of knowledge, it seems to me like poor policy to deliberately obfuscate that knowledge by removing helpful information merely because there's not a complete Wiki article on the subject. In other words, this seems contradictory to Wikipedia's vision statement "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment." The vision statement would need to be amended to "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of Wikipedia." ike (talk) 03:00, 17 February 2009 (UTC)Reply
The objective is not to make Wikipedia into an indiscriminate repository of knowledge, or to make it into a dictionary. Changes to the policies should be suggested at WT:MOSDAB (red links on disambiguation pages) or WT:NOT (indiscriminate collection, dictionary). An alternate approach would be to add either a new Wikipedia article on the subjects or to add information on the subjects to an existing Wikipedia article. Then the disambiguation page entries could have blue links (instead of or in addition to the red links), and the reader would be served. -- JHunterJ (talk) 11:48, 17 February 2009 (UTC)Reply
