Oblivion talk:Pumpkin (disambiguation)

Disambig?

Generally, a disambiguation page is made when it may be unclear which of the 2+ subjects one is intending to link to. In this case, I think people are far more likely to link to Pumpkin as an ingredient than they are to link to the creature page, so I'm thinking the Ingredient page should be moved back here, with maybe a link at the top pointing to the creature page. I don't think many people will care enough about the dog to require a separate disambig page just for that. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 23:15, 2 February 2008 (EST)

I'm not sure that's true. Given that there were two pages linking to the wrong article I think it's fair enough. –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 02:55, 3 February 2008 (EST)

I'm inclined to agree with Lurlock on this one. I think readers are far more likely to be interested in the ingredient than in an obscure dog with no quest relevance, useful loot, or other real importance to the game. Existing links support that belief: 24 links to the ingredient and only 6 links to the creature. Furthermore, there are links to the disambiguation page that are supposed to be links to the ingredient and cannot be easily fixed: the link on the Ingredients page uses a special template that would need to be revamped for this one special case; the alchemy calculator would need to add a bunch of otherwise unnecessary coding to link to "Pumpkin (ingredient)" instead of "Pumpkin." Yes, it would be possible to fix these too, but is it really worth the effort? --Nephele^Talk 21:33, 9 February 2008 (EST)

I've moved this page to a disambiguation page and moved the ingredient page back to the main page at Oblivion:Pumpkin, based on my previous comments. In particular, the deciding factor for me was that in several cases where there are links to the ingredient, the links cannot easily be fixed to point to "Pumpkin (ingredient)". Game Lord's earlier edit to Oblivion:Ingredients made the link on the page point to the correct article... but at the expense of making in-page links (e.g., Oblivion:Ingredients#Pumpkin) no longer work. And the alchemy calculator links directly to Oblivion:Pumpkin. If I really believed that readers would be equally likely to be looking for the creature as for the ingredient, I'd be willing to put the extra effort into finding another solution. But I don't. I'd rather just make it so that when a reader searches for Pumpkin, the reader gets taken directly to the ingredient page. --Nephele^Talk 14:21, 7 June 2008 (EDT)

Would this be a solution? In the same cell as the Ingredient Link we put <span style="display:none"><h2>Pumpkin</h2></span> - Game Lord^{Talk|Contribs} 15:33, 7 June 2008 (EDT)

Umm... no. In a plain HTML environment, that code would do nothing except increase the size of the page: the tag <h2> doees not add an HTML anchor. In a wiki environment, that code adds a pointless "Pumpkin" entry to the TOC and messes up the appearance of the cell, because the wiki tries to make sense of what you're doing and fails. If we needed to add an anchor, then it would be better to add code designed to add an anchor, for example, <span id="Pumpkin"></span>. Or just add |exname2=Pumpkin to the Oblivion Ingredients Link template, since that's what the template is there for anyway.

But even more to the point: the problem is already fixed. So why are you trying to come up with other ways to alter a page that is no longer broken? As I've already said repeatedly, it's only worth trying to find other solutions if the ingredient page is not likely to be the page that most UESP readers are looking for. But if, as I believe to clearly be the case, the ingredient page is the most commonly used page, then it should be at Oblivion:Pumpkin and the rest of this is all irrelevant. --Nephele^Talk 13:26, 9 June 2008 (EDT)

(←) I still think this page is now useless. It's orphaned, and it's very unlikely anyone would ever need to link to it. And though (disambiguation) pages may be standard on Wikipedia, it's usually only when there are more than 2 articles linked from them, and the articles themselves have a link to the (disambiguation) page on the top. Right now, Oblivion:Pumpkin links directly to Oblivion:Pumpkin (creature) and vice versa. Neither of them links here, and there's no reason for them to, because there isn't a 3rd article that you might be looking for, and there probably never will be. (The only other one is Oblivion:Pumpkin Vine, and that's just a redirect to Oblivion:Pumpkin.) Somebody typing in "Pumpkin" into the Search from anywhere on the site will end up going straight to Oblivion:Pumpkin, and if they were looking for the dog, it's only one more click. There is no circumstance under which somebody would end up on this page unless they were specifically looking for Oblivion:Pumpkin (disambiguation), which is highly unlikely. It should also be noted that NONE of our other Disambiguation Pages use the (disambiguation) suffix on the page titles. This is because there's no need for it. Almost no article has more than one other article it could be confused with, so a single direct link is sufficient. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 14:15, 23 June 2008 (EDT)

I think we should keep the page. I think we should start more generally to create "(disambiguation)" pages in cases where there is one main page and other disambiguation-style pages. One reason is just to document that there is a disambiguation happening in this case. Now Pumpkin gets listed in places such as Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Disambig so if there is some general need to do site maintenance on disambiguation-style pages we can find all examples (for example, if we want to introduce a standardized format for the "see also" blurb on the tops of the disambiguated pages). Also, wikipedia users who are used to having "(disambiguation)" pages may automatically check to see whether such a page exists in cases where they get taken to the wrong place. I know that I have occasionally assumed that such a page would exist on wikipedia, and gone straight to it when I knew I was looking for an uncommon use of a word.

In this specific case, there is also the fact that there has been such a lengthy discussion about disambiguation in general on this talk page. Therefore I particularly don't think that the main article should be deleted, leaving the talk page orphaned (or deleted), especially just for the sake of tidying up the page. --Nephele^Talk 14:37, 23 June 2008 (EDT)