User:Popcornfud/The problem with disambiguation hatnotes
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 | This page in a nutshell: Disambiguation hatnotes should only be displayed when the user searched for the term we're disambiguating to. Anything else is confusing and wastes prime real estate. |
If you visit the article about the band Pink Floyd, the very first thing it says is:
- "The Tea Set" and "The T-Set" redirect here. For tea service, see tea set. For the Dutch band, see Tee-Set. For other uses, see T Set (disambiguation).
This is because Pink Floyd performed under the name the Tea Set before they became famous.
The problem
If you got to the Pink Floyd article by typing "The Tea Set" into the search box, the hatnote might be useful. Maybe you were looking for information about tea sets, or the Dutch band.
But if you arrived at the article by any other means – from Google, say, or a link from another Wikipedia article, or by typing "Pink Floyd" into the Wikipedia search box – then you definitely weren't looking for information about tea sets or the Dutch band.
In the second case, the hatnote is serves no function. It's confusing (it looks like you've been redirected), distracting, and it takes up prime real estate right at the top of the article.
Right now, we're optimising for that first set of people – surely a tiny fraction of the readership.
Are these notes interesting?
Some editors have said these hatnotes have helped them discover other interesting articles.
Well, great. But:
- That's not what these hatnotes are supposed to be for. They're for helping readers find the article they're looking for, not helping them discover new pages.
- Disambiguation hatnotes are a terrible way of helping readers find related articles. We use wikilinks, infoboxes, navigation templates and see-also sections for that.
- In many – maybe most – cases, disambiguation hatnotes take readers to articles that have no relationship to the article subject whatsoever. You might as well argue we should begin each article with a random link to another article, just in case it happens to be of interest. Hey – sometimes it will be, right?
What should happen instead
In an ideal world, a disambiguation hatnote should only be displayed when users arrive at article by searching for the term the hatnote disambiguates.
For example, if the user searches for "Pink Floyd", they should get the Pink Floyd article with no hatnote. If they search for "the Tea Set", then they get the Pink Floyd article with the hatnote.
Is this technically possible?
I don't know.
But I suspect it is, because Wikipedia knows when users have been redirected. For example, search for Don Trump and you get taken to the Donald Trump article with the hatnote: Redirected from Don Trump. This leads me to wonder if we can change redirect hatnotes to disambiguation hatnotes. If so, perhaps it might make sense for disambiguation hatnotes to be set up on the redirect pages, rather than the redirect targets.