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User talk:GregKaye/List of Johns whose Britannica article titles contain broad description

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Project page reasoning[edit]

It is my contention that, in many cases, a use of titling that presents various characteristics of a person or thing is encyclopaedic.

The Oxford online dictionary presents encyclopaedia as: "A book or set of books giving information on many subjects or on many aspects of one subject ..."

I think that, if a person or thing has more than one aspect, this can be very relevantly presented in titles. GregKaye 07:33, 6 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Opposing view[edit]

Britannica has wildly differing disambiguation practices from our own. "John Wilkes Booth (American actor and assassin)" is especially absurd. I'm not even sure we can call it disambiguation, because there are cases like that one where it's used even when there's nothing to disambiguate against. It's clear that WP:CONCISE is not a concern for them. Furthermore, WP:D recommends disambiguating with terms which are concise and non-unique. WP:NCDAB says "use the same disambiguating phrase already commonly used for other topics within the same class and context, if any. Otherwise, choose whichever is simpler."

Certainly there are tricky cases where we need to resort to unique or lengthy disambiguators. Doing so as a matter of course will be an unnecessary impediment to readers, though. There's nothing wrong with cataloging another encyclopedia's practices, but Britannica is a dinosaur that we should not be quick to imitate. Better navigation is just one of the reasons we've pushed them into obsolescence. --BDD (talk) 13:14, 9 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  • "John (king of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden)" is not an article title on Britannica! The title of this article is just plain "John."[1] The article is subtitled "King of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden." The parenthesis makes this look this like a disambiguator, but that's just cruft generated by the site's search engine. If you at the articles themselves, you'll notice every article on Britannica has a subtitle without a parenthesis in it. In short, a Britannica subtitle is not equivalent to a Wikipedia disambiguator. The dinosaur here is Wikimedia software, which requires that every article have a unique title. Fernando Danger (talk) 03:35, 11 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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