Talk:Inanimate

Disambiguation

I was wondering why this broad term redirects to the linguistic article animacy. Shouldn't this be a disambiguation page? The main definition of this word is lifeless, a concept which could potentially be worth writing an article about. Or am I missing something? TheBartgry (talk) 16:28, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Not sure how long this discussion will last as the talk page of a redirect, but you'll be able to see it in the history in an emergency. The first thing to understand is that redirects are not articles, they are not definitions, they are not even synonyms. They are just redirects, they take a reader looking for a particular term to the best location currently in Wikipedia (see WP:PRIMARYTOPIC). In the case of Inanimate, this is considered to be Animacy, a detailed article discussing the grammatical animate and inanimate. If you think there is a better location then you are free to change the redirect target, although don't be flippant or petulant about it and don't get into an edit war if someone disagrees. The definition of a primary topic involves the most common usage and the longterm significance of a usage. This is intended to get the most people to the right place with the least fuss, ignoring temporary glitches such as current news or items trending on social media. Practically you can get an idea by looking at pageview counts for different articles that you think may be possible redirect targets, googling terms (with care to avoid self-fulfilling prophecies and biases, so perhaps searching books or journal papers), and also existing wikilinks to the ambiguous term. For any redirect, you must check all existing wikilinks before changing the target, or you break those articles, and for longstanding redirects you should consider the possibility of external links to the redirect (there could be thousands) which you can't practically detect or fix. In this particular case, the articles linking to inanimate are intriguing and I suggest you go through them before doing anything else. You might then think about how Lifeless, an existing disambiguation page, fits into the scheme of things.

Disambiguation pages (dab pages) are when there is no clear primary topic that a term can or should be redirected to. Dab pages are a list of possible articles currently in Wikipedia (and only very occasionally not yet in Wikipedia) that someone might be looking for when they entered an ambiguous term. They are not lists for their own sake, they are not definitions of ambiguous terms (although there are some specialised types of short article that amount to a definition and a list of other articles), and they are not lists of possible meanings for an ambiguous term - they are just lists of articles in Wikipedia to help people find what they really wanted. Your dab page failed in two important ways: it listed only the (assumed) primary topic and a redlink, which is effectively pointless; and it is not correctly formatted (see MOS:DAB).

You may feel that there should be an article Inanimate (lifeless). Consider carefully whether this would offer any better information than existing articles (eg. Animacy or Death) and whether it could be more than a dictionary definition (Wikipedia is not a dictionary). Remember that Inanimate doesn't have to be a definition of "inanimate" or even redirect to a synonym of "inanimate", simply to offer a reader the best information on that subject and not even on every definition of the term so long as it is the one most people will be interested in. Hatnotes can be placed at the top of articles which are the targets of redirects to help the minority of people interested in a different version of a term get where they wanted to go. This gets the majority to the right place with no interruption and the rest to the right place with minimal interruptions. Dab pages are for cases where there is no primary topic and too many alternatives to fit into a sensible hatnote (note that dab pages of the form ambiguous term (disambiguation) can still be created when there is a primary topic, but again do it only to serve a purpose, not as an end in itself).

On a practical level, you started at the end by turning a longstanding redirect into a dab page with no alternative articles. Consider first creating any articles discussing other meanings of "inanimate", or at the very least finding existing ones. You can do it under a disambiguated name such as inanimate (lifeless) (that's an example, not a suggestion or endorsement!) or in draft and rename it later, possibly after discussion. Or perhaps just create a redirect of that disambiguated term to an existing article. Only then consider whether there is a need to create disambiguation pages or change existing redirects. Lithopsian (talk) 17:32, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

You mentioned this ‘intriguing’ list of articles which contain a link to inanimate. As expected, a substantial number of articles in this list (e.g. Ghana, Tigger, Narasimha, Puppetry, Painting, Fables and Parables, Traditional story, Olaff the Madlander, among others) uses the word inanimate with the meaning ‘lifeless’, not in the linguistic sense, thus redirecting the reader to the wrong article. Given this, it seems to me that a disambiguation page is both an appropriate and a logical step. TheBartgry (talk) 10:51, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

So you're halfway there. You spotted that, let's say nearly half, the links are incorrect, expecting a different sort of article. However, your solution would simply break the other, let's say somewhat more than half, links that are actually OK. And you still don't have anything other than a non-existent article to add to your proposed dab page, so creating one is out of the question at this point. Before you get ahead of yourself, find somewhere more appropriate for all those links to actually point. Then possibly fix them to point there, or create a redirect (eg. inanimate (lifeless)) and point them at that. Then and only then do we have a discussion about whether either of the two articles is a primary topic. If not then there should be a dab page. However, when there are only WP:TWODABS there is almost always a primary topic simply because one will be more popular/significant than the other, however small the margin. Even if you get the redirect slightly wrong, you've inconvenienced fractionally more than half of readers and they'll have to click through the hatnote that is normally placed on a redirect primary topic page. Sending them to a dab page inconveniences everyone, an outcome we should strive to avoid. Baby steps, see where it takes you. Lithopsian (talk) 21:22, 22 November 2019 (UTC)