Talk:Munster

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Maveric149: "(replacing full disambiguation with a disambiguatio block --- all the other "Munsters" have natural disambiguators so there is no need to parenthetically name the province)"

Shouldn't Irish provinces be labeled as such? eg, "Munster province", or "Munster, Ireland"? I'm curious about this, because we go to that sort of trouble for most cities (and where a conflict exists, for many states and counties.) This policy seems fairly arbitrary.

For somebody who arrives here looking for Munster, Indiana or Munster, Germany, being told to click off onto a separate disambiguation page looks kind of silly. But I won't change this (again) unless other people agree.

"Munster province" could be used as a natural disambiguator if the term is actually used. I suspect it isn't in the same way as "California state" is not used. It just sounds silly. If you think that having a raw link to Munster (disambiguation) looks silly then just change it to "click here or something similar. Disambiguation blocks are now being preferred to full disambiguation whenever possible in order to minimize the use of parenthetical. --mav

I use the term "New York State" every day, even though the state is technically just "New York" (see the New York article for an example of why this causes yuckiness.) We don't say California State because we rarely have a context problem in every day speech. But an encyclopedia isn't every day speech.

The reason people hate paranthetical is that its ugly. Still, it's there for a reason (one that will someday hopefully be provided for by the software). Other encyclopedias make a great effort to accurately classify their topics, rather than just assuming that certain topics should be the default for a particular term. The problem with linking to "Munster (disambiguation)" is that disambiguation pages are only something you really get to by accident-- some article not directly linking to the correct topic-- so manually specifying one makes no sense. Also see my response to Zoe, below. But if you guys feel that it should stay, then it stays.

Not at all artbitrary. We don't need to differentiate each province by its country -- we don't say California (United States) or California (state). The only exception being Georgia. -- Zoe

That's because there are no major cities named California. What I'm worried about is people accidentally putting in a lot of links here (eg "Munster is a city in Germany..."), which will force readers to go through this somewhat unintuitive "click here if you're looking for something other than Munster, Ireland" process. In addition, people who are actually looking to read the Munster, Ireland article now have a great big blob of ugly text at the top... In both cases, the remedy actually seems to create a less-than-ideal situation for everybody. The root cause of this is underuse of the paranthetical, for (apparently) aesthetic reasons.

You may think it is ugly to have disambiguation blocks but I and many others think it is even uglier to have full disambiguation pages at the end of seemingly valid links. Munster is such a link. Disambiguation blocks only take up a single line at the top of the page -- if anybody arrives here from a misdirected link then they instantly are informed of this fact and an actual article on at least one use is just below. If there were one use which dominated the others in importance then it would be at simply Munster but since this is not the case then other issues are dealt with. In this case the choice was easy; each use except for the province had a natural disambiguator. --mav

So I went and checked out the Wikipedia disambiguation policy after you mentioned it. It seems that full articles w/ disambiguation blocks are only recommended when the article is about the obvious topic you would expect to see under that heading. So, for instance, it would be acceptable to have an article under Thomas Edison that would refer to Edison the inventor, rather than, say, Thomas Edison the janitor from Illinois. The point of this is that when somebody is writing an article and casually links to Thomas Edison, their link will should to something useful.

So the question is: when people link to Munster, what will they expect their links to connect to? My guess is that 90% of them won't be referring to the Irish province. Most linkers will probably be thinking of the German city (as they would expect to in the case of, say, Paris or Munich). Since this article hardly refers to the "obvious" topic, it's hardly in accordance with any sort of Wikipedia policy. It's actually a perfect place for a disambiguation page.

Furthermore, the issue of disambiguation blocks vs. pages isn't about aesthetics. It's about what makes practical sense for the future. Sooner or later, the number of links is going to reach the point where manually updating them becomes too much trouble, and Wikipedia will want to begin keeping track of ambiguous links. Disambiguation pages facilitate this process, because they're easy for a machine to identify. I envision a process whereby ambiguous links will be presented in an obvious way, so that an author can tell if he/she has just created an ambiguous link.

If we stick with this policy, when somebody does get around to implementing this stuff (whether it's next year or ten years from now) we're going to have to manually go through the entire encyclopedia and check all of the links (for example: "does this article really mean to link to Munster, Ireland, or were they being ambiguous?"), not to mention hand-remove all of the disambiguation blocks (because I doubt that software will be sophisticated enough to do this.) In summary, we're creating a long-term problem for some not-so-compelling reasons. Obviously this is a subject that's best posted to the Wikipedia pages, and I have.

So anyway, sorry to make such a big deal of this over one page, but across all of the articles in Wikipedia, it really is going to be a huge deal sooner or later. -Dachshund

To confuse matters slightly without contributiong anything of substance: there is actually a town called Munster in Germany, and a separate town called Münster. Most everyone who links to Munster actually means Münster. AxelBoldt

LOL, one can find a "exhaustive" collection of Munster/Münster/Minster place names at Munster (disambiguation) -- User:Docu

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I fixed most of the Münster-links pointing to Munster. To faciliate checking, I set up the redirects Province of Munster and Munster (province) and replaced some of the links with them. This way, one can easily check which of the articles on Special:Whatlinkshere/Munster may not be about the Irish province. -- User:Docu

[edit] Should Munster redirect to Munster (disambiguation)?

There are loads and loads of places called Munster or Münster. Is there any particular reason this article should be pointed to directly, rather than going through the disambig page? Bear in mind also that many people looking for the city in Germany Westfalen will not be capable of searching for Münster directly, nor think of searching for Muenster. Stevage 16:05, 13 October 2006 (UTC)