User talk:Jwy/Intentional DAB Links
You are probably here because you wonder why a link from an article to disambiguation page "Foo" goes through an apparently unnecessary redirect "Foo (disambiguation)"'. It is a reasonable question—it does seem to serve no purpose. The short answer is it does serve a purpose: it helps improve the reader's experience. It helps keep Wikilinks properly maintained so readers won't end up on a disambiguation page when they should end up at an article. The advantages this mechanism provides exceeds the minor disadvantages (if any) of having the redirect. How it does so is not obvious, but the longer answer, if you don't believe us, follows. Bear with us.
The reader's problem
[edit]A harried editor might link a term in an article and assume it is properly linked if it turns blue. (Ideally, every editor would verify every new Wikilink introduced, but that is not the reality.) It is possible, however, that the targeted page is a disambiguation page instead of the article for the topic the editor meant. The reader would click on the link and be faced with a selection of articles rather than be taken directly to the appropriate article. For example, "Over the centuries, a delta has formed where the river approaches the ocean." This is not an optimal user experience.
Repair process
[edit]There are editors who attempt to repair such misguided links. They click on "What links here" on the disambiguation page, review all the incoming links and determine where each should go. When the link should not be on the disambiguation page, the article is edited to link directly to the correct article. Since the proper topic article must be determined through context in the linking article, this can be a time-intensive process.
The repairer's problem
[edit]The repaired links are no longer a problem. The next repairer to come to the page will not see them. All that is left linking to the disambiguation page are the intentional links to the disambiguation page and any new misguided links that were created since the page was "repaired" before. This means reading all the pages, including those previously identified as purposefully linked, because they are indistinguishable from the new misguided links on the "What links here" page.
The solution
[edit]The consensus solution to this issue is to "mark" the intentional links to the disambiguation page so they can be distinguished on the "What links here" page—by ensuring the incoming link appears with the "(disambiguation)" qualifier. Thus, the repair process includes changing intentional links to a disambiguation pages to use the (disambiguation) redirect.
The down side
[edit]Links may take up some server resources, but not only should editors not worry about performance, changing redirects to direct links does not significantly improve performance anyway. The only real down side is that these redirects can be confusing to editors who don't understand why they are there. We hope this page takes care of that!