Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages aren't articles
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The following is a feature request for Wikipedia. The details may still be in development, under discussion, but as a whole this request should be discussed with the developers who will decide whether or not to implement it. |
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Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. |
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Right now, there are hundreds of thousands of disambiguation pages in Wikipedia. While this is fine, counting these pages as articles is not. They only offer a very limited summary of the pages they disambiguate, and so the MediaWiki software should not class them as articles (see Wikipedia:What is an article?).
[edit] Problems
This current state causes the following problems:
- The article count is off by hundreds of thousands (due to being disambig pages being listed at Special:Allpages).
- Special:Random should not take users to disambiguation pages.
- At Special:Lonelypages, many listed pages are disambig pages. This is because most of the disambig pages are lonelypages; which is exactly what they should be.
- Therefore, Special:Lonelypages will eventually be rendered useless, as it has a cap of a thousand articles, and this will inevitably become entirely populated by disambig pages.
- A lack of discrimination by Special:Whatlinkshere.
- The special pages: Articles with the fewest revisions, Articles with the most categories, Articles with the most revisions, and Oldest articles are all misleading
[edit] Redirect situation
A very similar situation exists with redirects. They are existing pages in the article namespace, yet offer no encyclopaedic content, therefore they aren't articles. However, this issue has been resolved, and redirects are no longer counted as articles. This is done by placing #REDIRECT at the top of every redirect page.
[edit] Solution
A bug report was submitted in July 2006 here, which suggested two solutions:
- Placing #DISAMBIG at the top of every disambiguation page
- Adding a boolean marker on the database (or a different disambiguation table), which is updated via a hook after a page save or a purge would work. That way, Article::isDisambig() (à la Article::isRedirect()) would just make a quick query to the field or table, and return a simple yes/no, which then can be used accordingly.
However, the bug has not yet been fixed. Please, vote for bug 6754. Perhaps if the subject is discussed in depth, and a strong consensus developed, the developers will be motivated in implementing the proposal.
