Category talk:Disambiguation Pages
Add topicDisambiguation is a new word to me. It isn't in either Oxford or Chambers and with respect, it sounds like a schizophrenic neologism to me. Can we perhaps express ourselves more clearly? PNJ Pnjarvis (talk) 17:09, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Unfortunately we are stuck with the term as our big brother, Wikipedia use it for a similar purpose.
Logic being, that it is needed with terms like Snowdon Ranger. Beddgelert, Stations, James Spooner
We the first example, we have a station, a house magazine for the WHRS, and not one, but two engines that have carried the name. So in just making an ambiguous statement like "I have been on Snowdon Ranger" could mean any three of the options given (okay, could be all 4, if you have appeared on the cover of the mag!!). A diambiuation page exists to explain this to a user, and to point him in the correct direction he intended. Also they can exist to split between the different branches of the railways/companies (like stations - there are 3 seperate station index pages)
The Category exists just to bring all these together --Keith (talk) 2008-12-16T18:16:58 (UTC)
The term "disambiguation" comes from computational linguistics and deals with a process that most humans find easy (see Keith's example above, to which we could add a character George Borrow met) but computers (and hence anything mediated via them, like this wiki) find difficult. It's an accepted and useful part of Wikipedia structuring and adopting it here strikes me as good practice:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disambiguation
French Wikipédia calls it "homonymie", which is another way of looking at the same problem, but I prefer the English approach as it indicates a process. Ben Fisher (talk) 22:19, 16 December 2008 (UTC)