Template talk:Disambiguation

Just noticed that Disambiguation pages have three categories (All article disambiguation pages, All disambiguation pages, Disambiguation pages). Can we reduce it to one? Pestergaines 17:04, 17 November 2011 (MSK)

The reason it does that is because the categories allow for more specific (and sub) categorization. You can see how it works at wikipedia:Category:Disambiguation pages. I am familiar with the "yeah but we're nowhere near the size of Wikipedia. When we get bigger we can start implementing more specific protocols and labeling conventions."

And I can agree with that in some respects...I don't think it's necessary to include the scores of categories that appear like "American money managers" and "University of California, Berkeley alumni". But for technical pages that deal with how the encyclopedia functions, I, for one thing, don't see how this crowds articles or harms the user experience, or bogs the software, and for another, it seems to be much more wise to have these type of things implemented all along, as opposed to having to try to retrofit everything later...which even with bots can be cumbersome.

With something like a biographical article, those pages get visited all the time and those categories can easily grow organically with users adding to them over time as the project grows...but for non-encyclopedic content, that doesn't really happen that way...especially with such a small userbase. We have such a gift in Wikipedia in that so many things have already been worked out...issues that had to be tested and fiddled with and refined before workable and usable conventions came to order. The market had to figure a lot of things out, including the most efficient and effective ways to organize and code things. I really don't see a problem in taking advantage of the road that has already been paved and not trying to reinvent the wheel. --John James 06:27, 18 November 2011 (MSK)

I think I've addressed the main concern by creating the categories and adding {{maintenance category}} to two of them, thereby preventing them from appearing when the disambiguation page loads. We may want to add the same template to Category:Disambiguation pages, if content-based subcategories will be used for all disambiguation pages (like "Political party," etc.). --Forgottenman (talk) 06:45, 18 November 2011 (MSK)

Thanks! I wondered about pages having several (partially nonexistent) categories with similar names. Now that that is addressed things are fine for me. Pestergaines 15:42, 18 November 2011 (MSK)