Please take a look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_(disambiguation)
which has now become an index of all things that somehow contain "Forest"
in their name, including DeForest Kelley (an actor) and Forrest Gump. It
also contains dozens of links to places in the UK that we don't have
articles about yet and that have "Forest" in their name.
User:Pigsonthewing seems to insist on having these links on the page and
keeps adding more.
This is problematic because "articles" like this become free-for-all
linklists to add unstructured, useless information. It is also not the
purpose of disambiguation pages to be a list or an index of all things
with a certain text in it -- they are not search indices and are pretty
useless as such. If I search for "Forest Glade" in the UK, I don't expect
to find that page by visiting the "forest" disambiguation page. In fact,
it might make finding things more difficult for hapless Google visitors
who stumble upon such pages from search engines and find out that they
point to nowhere.
The purpose of disambiguation pages is to list articles with the same
title where I'd otherwise have no idea where to find them. And this is
made much harder by these chaotic linklists, as the actual information
that I want gets buried under a heap of "Oh, look, I found another name
with 'forest' in it" style crap.
I believe we should set a clear policy that
- Disambiguation pages should link only to pages that actually exist -
otherwise, if the subject is worth describing, it should get a brief
description *on the disambig page*.
- Disambiguation pages should only link to pages where there is a
*substantial risk of confusion* with the actual page title.
Currently, Wikipedia:Disambiguation makes no such recommendations.
On another note, I think that our articles on numbers, such as "one
hundred one", have a similar problem in that they become free-for-alls to
add completely useless information. For example, the article
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_hundred_one
tells us that 101 is "a .com URL that redirects to the Disney .go.com
website", and "in the title of the movie 101 Dalmatians, starring Glenn
Close". This is complete rubbish. Anyone who cares about the movie knows
where to find it. If we ever have a Wikitrivia site, that might be the
kind of material worth adding to it, but it does not belong in an
encyclopedia. In my opinion, all these number articles should be deleted
except where there's something really informative about the actual number
(such as the history of the number zero).
Regards,
Erik