Chapter 16. Getting Readers to the Right Article: Naming, Redirects, and Disambiguation
With more than 2.5 million articles on the English Wikipedia, how do you get to the one you want? For example, when a reader types âmercuryâ into the search box, what article does she expect to be displayed? And if she wanted the article âmercury (element)â but put a comma instead of space between âmercuryâ and â(element),â would Wikipediaâs search engine find it? What if someone creates an article called âMercury (Roman god)â when there already is one called âMercury (mythology)â?
Wikipedia depends on editors to fix naming errors, to create pages (redirects) that automatically correct typing errors, and to set out guideposts to readers to help them find their way (disambiguation). The cumulative effort of millions of editors has created web of articles and links that get virtually all readers to the right place within one click.
Naming and Renaming
The best way to deal with an error is to not make it in the first place. Thatâs why Wikipedia has a naming convention for just about any kind of new article. The more you and other editors follow these conventions, the less renaming youâll have to do. But with so many naming conventions (see Figure 16-1 for a sampling), new editors can get confused and name articles incorrectly.
Figure 16-1. The table of contents of the ...
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