Template talk:Other

Other versus Disambiguation

Based on several months of house-keeping I decided to "up" the threshold for when we should use disambiguation pages. The reason is a try to avoid erratic links, pages that link to the disambiguation page rather than the intended page which has a specifier. Even if it is possible to click oneself out of the disambig-page a visitor should never end up there by an editor's mistake. Remember, this is a proven problem -- while house-keeping I find such erratic links at a daily basis (intentional plural) -- it is not imagined ;)

The less disambig-pages we have the smaller the risk will become, and it will also become easier to regularly walk over those pages and verify correctness by using the what-links-here on each of them. Thus...

• Use disambiguation pages only when more than 3 same-name pages exist.

Exception may occur if the resulting sentences become horribly hard to read whatever tricks we use to shorten or clarify them.

• Use as dense text as possible in the Other-template.

Remember that page names in themselves are informative enough, plus that the other-links in themselves carry across information on location, level, etc. However, duplicated texts carry negligible value but they just make the sentences much harder to read.

Zimoon 06:36, 12 November 2012 (EST)

Wanted (perhaps)

From Category talk:Disambiguation Pages#Suggestion 2 it struck me that we probably want another kind of Other template, too. One less verbose which may be used for pages which have informative page names in themselves. Thus the new template could potentially replace some use of disambiguation pages (and the editor-errors pertaining with those pages).

A new template would tentatively emit the following:

"This page is about bears in Eregion. See also X (Enedwaith), X (Dunland), X (Starkmoor), X (Gap of Rohan)."

Since the page names convey full information this is very dense and in no way less useful than the about double line length using the old template. That would reduce the need for disambiguation pages for same-name pages in the range 3 to 5 pages, or even more. Then we could use the old template for 2-3 (or even 4) same-name pages when we really need to tell some information per link.
-- Zimoon 10:18, 9 November 2012 (EST)

Possible Bug?

Unfortunately, I think I just discovered an issue with Template: Other. It does not appear to like Zagh, Master of the Guard, perhaps because of the comma included in the article title? I suspect the comma because I noticed that the Use2 link truncates the original term. Unfortunately, the truncated term (Zagh) is exactly the situation we're trying to correct by including Template: Other - similarly named articles pointing to completely different things. -- Squirmier (talk) 21:44, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

Ok, just added Template: Other to Zagh, Master of the Guard. Where the comma isn't an issue??? But the links seem the wrong way round. Or I'm confused - which appears more likely to be the case. I thought it should show: This page is about Zagh, Master of the Guard. For Zagh, see Zagh. -- Squirmier (talk) 22:11, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

Hiya - sorry for the confusion! From the usage documentation, the first parameter is for describing the current page, the second for describing the "other" page, and then the third parameter is the actual link to the other page. Since you didn't tell the template where to link to, it just made a guess with the "Zagh (disambiguation)" bit. I've updated Zagh, Master of the Guard so it should look more as you expected now, but feel free to change the wording if you like and do the same for Zagh. Sethladan 15:23, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

Add Vertical Space?

I would like to add vertical space below the output from this template. Standard Wikipedia does not but it provides pages with their top section 99.9% plain text. So it is not needed with any extra space delimiter. We are using info-boxes and often a big header as the first entry, which Wikipedia almost never does.

For a while I have manually added two blank lines under this template to make it stand out from the page contents a bit. It looks nice I think. I suggest adding two <br><br> to the end of the output from this template. What do you think? — Zimoon 21:15, 29 June 2022 (UTC)