Wikipedia talk:Title pairs for future redirects

More ideas needed for Wikipedia:Title pairs for future redirects procedures

The following long contrib was made 21 October 2005 on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals), where it drew no comment. It has moved on from there to an archive, but i've copied it here, as many of the issues remain even after the instructions and templates that i've written since.

If you prefer an explanatory anecdote or two to set the stage before diving into the specifications, start here:

_ _ Today i found my way from List of people by name: Hes-Hez to the Dab Hess, where i found the (non-MoS-compliant, but never mind) entry

* Moses Heß(Moses Hess), , a Jewish philosopher and proto-Zionist

which i have left un-fixed so you can see that "Moses Heß" is a rd-lk & "Moses Hess" is blue. Never should happen, but before neutrally making the rd-lk title into a redirect to the existing article, and un-lk'g the new rdr, i said, "Hmm, there ought be a policy-consistent place, instead of this, where people can discover that an anticipable rdr now has an article to point to.

_ _ Earlier in the week, i found that a rd-lk'd entry on List of people by name: Wil for

*[[Ian Wilson|Wilson, Ian]], Irish cultural figure

had become blue and now read

*[[Ian Wilson (composer)|Wilson, Ian]], Classical composer

which suggested that there was at least one other Ian Wilson with a WP bio but no LoPbN-tree entry. At Ian Wilson (which was then a bio on a writer on science and Christianity), i found no DoB for the LoPbN entry i wanted to add, which may be what impelled me to Google-search WP for the name. That search produced another writer, and at least three more Ian Wilsons with lks or mentions; one of these turned out to have a few lks as Ian Wilson (Australian politician) and nearly a dozen as Ian Wilson (politician). I was not willing to start the article, nor to create a rdr that lacked a target, so i satisfied myself with editing the less numerous long-titled lks into the shorter version, retitling for Dab'n between the two writers, and creating a six-way Dab at Ian Wilson. I'm pleased to report that something among these efforts apparently attracted others' edits: the second was creation of the bio article; the first, unfortunately, was an rv of one of the (then still red) lks i'd changed, which meant it stayed red when the article appeared. I say to myself, should preventing such proliferation of names depend on my alertness to my watchlist or my contribs list?

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On reflection, i think such events call for a project-space page that would have had entries for

* Moses Heß uses Moses Hess uses: Jewish philosopher and proto-Zionist

* Ian Wilson (politician) uses, Ian Wilson (Australian) uses, Ian Wilson (Australian politician) uses : (b. 1932), United Australia and Liberal parties; federal House of Representatives, Adelaide

Note

• my removal, from the material i copied for the 1st entry, of all lks except those intended to eventually become redirects or their common target, and
• my inclusion of Ian Wilson (Australian), a rdr not yet used elsewhere in WP.

These are both intended to make following lks or What-lks-here to the new page

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1. "Title pairs for future redirects" is the relatively short, but hopefully suggestive, title for a page devoted to groups (not actually necessarily pairs) of titles

   of which

   • none is yet title of a main-namespace page and
   • one should eventually become an article, list, or Dab, with the others in the group becoming rdrs to it.

   A cleverer and thereby more effective name may be needed.

2. What kind of maintenance will this need?
   • IMO, entries should be acted upon as soon as practical after the article arises, by creating the rdrs.
   • Should such completed entries be removed, or simply marked up as done?
   • What is appropriate action if a redir is created prematurely with one of the titles and no existing article as target? Deletion (under new or existing CSD?)? Conversion to a stub, even if it is likely to be CSDed as A1? Is the answer different if the rdr is lk'd to from a context demonstrating a different topic is intended?
3. What kind of attention will enhance this tool's effectiveness?
   • Until an article appears, will it help if editors are encouraged to rule out (via strike thru?) rdrs that would fail to Dab between the article in question and other potential or actual articles? To turn such red-lks into premeptive Dabs?
   • Is Title pairs for future redirects a place for advance debate abt which among the group of titles should go on the article when created? If not, should a sub-page of "Title pairs for future redirects" be created & lk'd from it, dedicated to such debate on a single group - presumably to be moved to the article's talk page when the article arises?
4. Besides this, do we also need an tool for finding uses of rdlks, that is easier than clicking "What links here from the "start this article" edit page for the non-existant page? Perhaps a page with a pane where an editor can paste and/or key in one title & then click the button to reach a second page, with both titles of pgs lk'g to that keyed title and an identical button and pane they can use to edit that keyed title into the next title, and see the corresponding linkers displayed on a third page?
5. Would we want something different if there were two visibly different shades of rd-lk, one for no-page-with this-title (as now) and one for (the currently blue cases of) rdr-to-title-with-no-page? If so, what about lks to Dab pages, which we want bypassed about as urgently as we want targetless lks (hmm, and dbl lks) bypassed?
6. I'm about to try & get the page created, even tho these two cases could be resolved without it.
7. Should this be subdivided by topic areas? My examples are bios; maybe they are numerous enuf compared to others to be worth separating.
8. How should the entries be sorted, when the pages get big? Do we want to consider a subpage for each entry, whether or not the article title is debated?
9. I may have more points to add here myself, when i have time in a few days, but i have to stop now.

--Jerzy•t 20:08, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

What to do next

I've done some creation and disambiguation for Margaret Storey, who is listed as part of an entry on this page. What's next? Do I just delete the entry on this page that mentions her? Mike Christie (talk) 08:35, 18 February 2008 (UTC)