Redirects are your friend...

[Christian Kleineidam]

Some things "own" a name

I don't think that getting "Sir Sam Baker" as a result for typing baker is worse than getting no result. Either way you continue your search elsewhere.

Naturally after someone writes the article "baker", typing in baker should bring you to the article about the person who cooks tasty things.

Even when having redirects will lead from time to time to arriving at a wrong page, it is a wiki. You can fix it afterwards to direct other directly to the place you wanted to go (if you think that everyone who types the thing you typed wants to the same place).

First, programming resources are in short supply, so it's unlikely to happen soon.

I think I could to the programming work for a bot in python.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

Ah, no.

BECAUSE

(I've said it before, I'll say it again till people are sick of me)

Some things "own" a name

A "baker" is someone who cooks tasty things.  Sir Sam Baker was a British explorer and Howard Baker is a US politician, but neither of those should redirect to 'baker'--ever!  (Even if 'baker' is empty!)

The rule you are advocating seems to be: a singular common noun (or adjective) in normal unambiguous usage is the default article, and redirects should be from that article (if at all).

So, baker is an article, with no separate redirect page.
And green is a redirect page, because the two common usages are green (colour) and green (piece of grass), also with redirects to persons of that name.

[Aleta Curry]

I think you might be confusing redirect with disambiguation to some extent, Martin.

Redirects go directly to the subject, no explanation.

Disambiguation pages list the various usages, usually with a short definition or explanation.

The rule you are advocating seems to be: a singular common noun (or adjective) in normal unambiguous usage is the default article, and redirects should be from that article (if at all).

Yes, I'm saying exactly that.

So, baker is an article, with no separate redirect page.

Yes, quite, only I think you mean "disambiguation" here.  If you need/absolutely must have redirecting to other bakers, it would be at [[baker (disambiguation)]]

And green is a redirect page, because the two common usages are green (colour) and green (piece of grass), also with redirects to persons of that name.

Again, I think you mean "disambiguation".  Here I would say, no, same thing as baker.

Green is an article.

The village "green" and people named green are at [[green (disambiguation)]], because it's the colour that is common usage.  American English, e.g. doesn't commonly use green in that manner.  Is it still commonly used that way in England?  It isn't in Australia, though, like the US, people would know what you mean.

The reason I'm saying any of this at all, is because if you don't have some guidelines, you end up with the WP over disabiguation using every obscure meaning you can possibly think of, and/or different disambiguation rules in every article, which drives me up the proverbial thing made of bricks.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

Yes, I meant disambiguation page

[Christian Kleineidam]

Hopefully in time we will have an article for every word in comman usage.

The reason I'm saying any of this at all, is because if you don't have some guidelines, you end up with the WP over disabiguation using every obscure meaning you can possibly think of, and/or different disambiguation rules in every article, which drives me up the proverbial thing made of bricks.

I don't think that wikipedia is wrong here. In wikipedia green would be the page about the color and there would also be a seperate [[Green (disambiguation)]] page that lists all other usages (and the top line of [] links to the disambiguation page).

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

wikipedia is definitely wrong, or at least massively USA-biased. In my vocabulary, a village "green" is almost as important as the colour; and "greens" remains an important word from my childhood memories [I hated eating them]. It is a major error for an encyclopedia to replicate or even to create cultural norms, instead of reflecting contemporary and modern historical usage across the world.

[Hayford Peirce]

This is a pretty good point. What do we do about "Green"? I'm a card-carrying 'Merkin, of course, but used to read a ton of British lit, and the "village green" is far more familar to me than the Boston Common (only one I can think of off-hand). When CZ eventually gets around to it, which "Green" is going to be the main man so to speak? I sure don't want to practice cultural imperialism here, hehe. Or the "cocacolasition du monde" as our froggie friends would say....

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

Also, I forgot "Green" as in political movement. It means that there can be no main article: it has to be a disambiguation page, which leads to various meanings.

[Derek Harkness]

The reason I'm saying any of this at all, is because if you don't have some guidelines, you end up with the WP over disambiguation using every obscure meaning you can possibly think of, and/or different disambiguation rules in every article, which drives me up the proverbial thing made of bricks.

Wikipedia's disambiguation pages. Don't get me started. Just look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton (disambiguation) What are they thinking about. Then I can go an pull one for Aleta, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth

Also, I forgot "Green" as in political movement. It means that there can be no main article: it has to be a disambiguation page, which leads to various meanings.

I don't see that it follows that 3 variations means you can't disambiguate on the top of the article. As much as possible, I'd rather disambiguate there than in a separate page.

I don't think "Green party" needs disambiguated with "Green (Colour)" for much the same reason as Sir Isaac Newton doesn't need to be disambiguated with Newton Stewart (a small town in the south of Scotland), or Newton Mearns (and even smaller town, also in Scotland). Though there is more than one "Green Party" so they may need disambiguated with themselves.

To put the idea more clearly. Things that have exactly the same name or can be abbreviated to the same name need disambiguated. So Green colour and green village do need disambiguation. However, things that contain elements of each other names but couldn't be precisely the same name don't need disambiguated. Newton Mearns cannot be abbreviated to just Newton so it cannot be confused with the professor.

I'd like to see some sort of real time disambiguation. Check out the predictive disambiguation that happens on www.answers.com which to a large extent removes the need for a disambiguation page.

[J. Noel Chiappa]

if you don't have some guidelines, you end up with the WP over disabiguation using every obscure meaning you can possibly think of, and/or different disambiguation rules in every article, which drives me up the proverbial thing made of bricks.

I agree with you that whatever system we have, we should use uniformly.

I think part of the reason Wikipedia doesn't is that going to a uniform system would have meant fixing the bazillions of inter-article links that would have needed to be fixed. I did a few of those things, and let me tell you, it's a major pain. So I think it behooves us to work out what we want to do on this front ASAP, so we don't create this kind of 'immovable object'.

I proposed a particular system for Wikipedia - you can read about it here, and there are a few useful comments on the talk page here. I still think the scheme suggested there is the best one (modified by my comment about 'tree' on the talk page).

As to "every obscure meaning you can possibly think of", what's the problem? This is supposed to be a definitive repository of knowledge. Yes, we should make sure the common ones are prominent, but that's no reason to leave out the others.

Noel

[J. Noel Chiappa]

I don't see that it follows that 3 variations means you can't disambiguate on the top of the article. As much as possible, I'd rather disambiguate there than in a separate page.

Sorry, I think it looks ugly to have a (potentially) large header of the form "for X, go here, for Y, go there, and for Z, go back there". That's why disambig pages got started to begin with.

However, things that contain elements of each other names but couldn't be precisely the same name don't need disambiguated. Newton Mearns cannot be abbreviated to just Newton so it cannot be confused with the professor.

What's the problem with helping people find the thing they are looking for? Sometimes they don't remember the exact name, etc, etc. (And I love the serendipity - sometimes on a disambig page, I'll see something interesting and click on it to learn.)

Yes, disambig pages need to be organized so the less-useful links are less prominent, but as long as they are well organized, I don't have a problem with reasonable amounts of terms (of course, one can always take anything to a ridiculous extreme).

I'd like to see some sort of real time disambiguation. Check out the predictive disambiguation that happens on www.answers.com which to a large extent removes the need for a disambiguation page.

Do we have programming support to make that happen? Given that far-more-useful things like automated article approval don't exist yet, I would guess it may be a while before we'd get this.

Noel

[Christian Kleineidam]

The problem of the newton example is that, at least the wikipedians think that the name [[Newton]] is owned by the physical unit.

At the moment the user experience of someone who searches for Issac Newton and types Newton into the wikipedia box is:
1. He will find himself at the page about the unit
2. The first line of text mentions that the unit is named after Issac Newton, so he will click on Sir Issac Newton.
3. He is at his intented destination.

I think that is reasonable when you think that Newton normally means the physical unit. While the general public might mean the person, physicists (experts) usually mean the physical unit when they just say Newton. Since we want to serve experts I don't think that it is wrong to do it that way.

[Hayford Peirce]

Since we want to serve experts I don't think that it is wrong to do it that way.

No, I think you have that wrong.  We want experts to serve the general public.  And I think the Newton example is a good one: I'm a fairly well-educated guy who has actually written so-called "hard" science ficiton, primarily for Analog, the mag. for engineers and rocket scientists. I don't know what the hell a Newton is, and I would be *very* disconcerted if I typed in "Newton" and got the science article with a redirect to Sir Isaac.

I know that this makes me seem like a dummy, but trust me, *far* more people who access WP and CZ are gonna be interested in looking up Sir Isaac than whatever his namesake is....

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

I repeat the proposition, as it originated from Aleta and supported by me:

a singular common noun (or adjective) in normal unambiguous usage is the default article, and redirects should be from that article (if at all).

This does not cover "green" and probably should not cover "newton" (because of the importance of the person). Such words need to be disambiguated precisely because there is no agreement on unambiguous common usage. Putting the disambiguation at the top of the page is clumsy and unhelpful, as Noel says.

I cannot understand why there is any debate about making a disambiguation page about such words, unless it can be explained by the proposition that some people think that their belief in the primacy of one meaning of a specific word should be imposed on others. This is clearly unacceptable.

[Aleta Curry]

Martin explains it in a nutshell.

I do think, though, that's it's reasonable for the primary colours to default as the main article.  ((red)), ((green)), et cetera et cetera (you'll have to imagine the Yul Brenner voice).

((red (diambiguation))

* ((red)), a primary colour
* ''red'', a pejorative term for a communist
* ''to see red'' is to be angry

Blah blah blah

Interesting side note, here--I just had to remove the double square brackets [[ ]] because the markup made it come out in colours! (Did I get that right, Noel, "markup"?)