MarioWiki:Proposals

Writing guidelines
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New features
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Change the sentence about the About template on MarioWiki:Naming
When disambiguation pages are used, the articles should link to them in, but if a disambiguation page is not used, the articles can merely link to the other same-named page.

I find the first part, about articles needing to link to the disambiguation page, to be unnecessary, for the simple fact that the about template is almost always unnecessary in these situations. Let me use Stamp (Mario's Time Machine) as my example:


 * 1) If a reader ends up there by chance (say, by using Special:Random), they weren't interested in a particular stamp in the first place and there's no need to point them to the disambiguation page.
 * 2) If a reader ends up there through Stamp (disambiguation), then they were already at the disambiguation page. It's redundant to link to it again.
 * 3) If a reader ends up there through a link within the body of another article, then the context should be enough to let them know where they're going, and failing that, "Mario's Time Machine" is right in the title. They clicked on the link because they wanted more information about the subject discussed within the article, and even if they had another Stamp in mind, the article quickly shows what it's about.
 * 4) If a reader searches for "Stamp", they'll first see the most prominent Stamp and then Stamp (disambiguation). Even if they go to "Stamp" first and that's not what they wanted, that page already links to the disambiguation page, which goes back to the second point.

I used the Stamps for my example, but this extends to all similar pages. I simply cannot think of a situation where someone would end up at the page while thinking that they were going to end up somewhere else, and then being confused or disappointed about where they ended up. In these circumstances, the about template is a piece of fluff that doesn't help readers and distracts from the rest of the article. It shouldn't be a requirement to use it on every article when disambiguation pages are involved. It's not as if the about template is useless in all circumstances - for example, Stamp should link to its corresponding disambiguation page, as mentioned above - but it's hardly a necessity for all pages.

I am not proposing to outright remove the about template; I propose to make the following change to the sentence:

When disambiguation pages are used, the articles should only link to them in when necessary, but if a disambiguation page is not used, the articles can merely link to the other same-named page.

In short, use common sense and don't shoot your foot off.

Proposer: Deadline: August 23, 2017, 23:59 GMT

Support

 * 1) Per TT.
 * 2) - I've sort of been doing this myself already anyway
 * 3) Per proposal.
 * 4) Sure. I have never really used those pages when I wrote articles of the Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS's levels. I only started using the about template when it was just either Super Mario Maker or the remake that had this set of numbers. Even then, I use this to send the reader to the other place, not the one that had both. In general, the only times that they need to be link the one to the one with many uses is on the most commonly used the most often. Which means that it is in s. And if your wondering why I haven't said the name even once, the reason is I don't know the name well enough to type it out very easily. This doesn't mean I don't know what it does. Per proposal.
 * 5) I have my doubts, but I think maybe this should specifically apply in certain cases where there aren't enough disambiguated pages (like cases where there are only two pages to be disambiguated). Per all.
 * 6) Per all
 * 1) Per all

Oppose

 * 1) Redundancy when comes to linking is a delicate matter. If it makes sense to link to other pages similar to the current page, the reader might be interested in reading more. It's not like we are linking a completely irrelevant page. This is especially true for the first case, if the reader stumbled upon this page by pure chance, they are willing to read more, and expanding the number of rational links to similar and related topics is helpful. If the reader reached the specific page he wanted, a million links to other articles will never stop them from reading, so regarding that as a distraction is a poor reason. Also my comment

Comments
Let's take the navigation template by the same reasoning:
 * 1) If a reader ends there by chance, they weren't interested in any particular page, and there is no need to point them to many other articles that just share the same game.
 * 2) is a moot point
 * 3) If a reader ends up there through a link within the body of another article, then unless they blindly clicked a link (brings us back to point 1) or they reached the article they wanted to read (sends us to point 4)
 * 4) If a reader searches for any article, they'll arrive at it. So? Why even direct them at potential reads?-- 18:46, 17 August 2017 (EDT)
 * Pardon, but I'm not sure I understand the relevance to this proposal. 18:47, 17 August 2017 (EDT)
 * I was trying to illustrate that redundancy when it comes to linking is not enough reason to remove the link.-- 18:58, 17 August 2017 (EDT)
 * Don't we already remove redundant links per the Manual of Style? 19:03, 17 August 2017 (EDT)
 * If you mean reoccurring links, that's a different situation, as it is already linked once in the same article.

I'm going to butt in here and say that one of the reasons why it's not entirely necessary to use on pages with identifiers is because the reader might search for the same page title and possibly look for different identifiers. 22:43, 19 August 2017 (EDT)