Talk:Timebase

Ambiguity causes confusion

The template message above refers to a different page with the same title "Timebase", which was deleted in 2006. That page was described by editors as describing a:

• "non-notable fan production group"
• "group of nobodies who released some fanfic vids starring nobodies".

This page, however, refers and redirects to a "timebase" or "time base generator", usually an electronic circuit, often an electronic oscillator; or (conceivably) a software implementation of similar functions: providing a reference waveform with very stable timing. Such circuits (or functions) are needed by

• television
• video recorders
• radar displays
• oscilloscopes
• other scientific and manufacturing instruments
• audio recorders and
• audio production systems such as analogue synthesisers.

In speech, "Timebase" — a group of people — and "timebase" — a functional system component — are indistinguishable, and so are wikt:homophones. In writing, but for capitalisation, they are also indistinguishable, and so are wikt:homographs.

The page for a homographous topic was deleted, not the page for this topic. The template message above is (at least) confusing.

How can we avoid having a message like that above appear when the current (live) topic is a homograph of a deleted one? Or, having detected that these two homographous topics are different, how can we permanently disambiguate them? Some possible approaches:

1. A strategy commonly used in dictionaries distinguishes multiple senses (topics) of the same lexeme (word) by suffixing successive natural numbers, e.g. sound¹ vs. sound² to distinguish different senses of an English verb or noun. Whether this approach would work for homographous topics in Wikipedia isn't obvious, After all, the numbering of the different senses is essentially arbitrary.
2. A sensible strategy already used for some Wikipedia titles is to append a distinguishing attribute in parentheses, e.g. "Pop-eye (fictional character)" vs. "Pop-eye (steam boat)".

Is there any practical advice or recommendation given in Wikipedia policies on such kinds of disambiguation? Note, this is not WP:disambiguation, since that is always between two or more articles, rather than between an existing article's notable topic and a deleted article's, not-notable topic — which, per WP's notability rule, shouldn't have an article. (Though the WP:DAB article does give sensible advice on creating disambiguated names.) Would it make sense to rename the (non-existent) deleted page unambiguously, e.g. Timebase (group), then change all references to the deleted page, such as the one above that starts this Talk page, to refer to that; in essence, rewriting Wikipedia history? And if so, how could one do so? yoyo (talk) 23:44, 22 February 2019 (UTC)