Disambigs Really Necessary?

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Darien Shields

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Is it really necessary to have a disambiguation page for every pokémon saying "Do you want the species, or this one specific one?" especially in instances where it's like "Persian the pokémon, or the Persian Giovanni had?", with the latter being relatively unimportant. I think it'd be better to either just stick to having a list of links to specific instances in a section at the bottom of the article, or follow Wikipedia's model, have a link at the top in italics (to the other article, if there's only one) or to a Disambig'. It makes the wiki a real pain in the butt to use when I try to look up something, only to find another page in my way first (my connection is a little frazzled, so it takes longer than it ought to to load the wiki in the first place).

Well... just a suggestion.

Also, while I'm here- do you really need a hundred-and-one titles and subtitles in every article? The contents lists look bigger than the articles themselves...
 
If you know you want the species article, go directly to it by adding the (Pokémon) suffix.
 
The top link in italics should usually just be used when it is far more likely that the searcher is looking for one than the other. See: Viridian Forest

Individual Pokémon are a little more notable.
 
Individual pokémon are FAR less notable than the species as a whole - because the individual pokémon is only relevant in the manga or anime, whereas the species as a whole is relevant in all pokémon fandoms. It was decidedly irritating while trying to look up stats for critters to either have to type up "pokémon" (as Zhen unhelpfully suggest), or to wind up at a "Hey, Ash has a Turtwig, too! Don't you want to know more about it?" pages.

I definitely agree with the original poster. Aside from MAYBE Pikachu due to its status as head of marketing, there isn't a single specific pokémon that warrants being put on equal footing with the species as a whole and given a disambig page over it.
 
I agree with the OP. Especially when I find a disambiguation page trying to see if I want to go to the actual pokemon's page or some pokemon owned by a COTD whom I can't even remember. Honestly, when someone looks up pidgey, are they really looking for Orville the pidgey?

Considering the 'pedia loads slow enough as it is, having to wade through useless disambiguation pages is obnoxious.
 
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I honestly don't see why everyone's too lazy to click one link. It's not like it's asking you to click through five pages to find what you want. Heck, I use the searchbar in Firefox and just search the name, and if it's a disambig page, I just click to the species.

Believe me, if we had it the other way, people would whine about how "omgz i cant fiend ashz charzerd" and make some terribly misspelled version of it at "Ashs Charizard".

Sure, if you want to BP link here, you gotta type in [ bp=Treecko (Pokémon) ]Treecko[ /bp ] (without spaces of course) to get [bp=Treecko (Pokémon)]Treecko[/bp] and bypass the disambig page, but is it really that much harder? Most Pokémon fans should memorize the Alt keycode of 130 and 0201 to get é and É so that things are spelled right, and... whatever the Mac, Linux, and so on versions of that are (Mac's Option + e, then e again, I dunno about Linux).

If it's possible, I'd imagine a [bpp] code could be used here so you could just have [ bpp ]Treecko[ /bpp ] and link to the page on Treecko, but only if it could be done, I don't know crap about programming new tags for forums.
 
It's not a matter of laziness, it's a matter of my time being wasted. Pages on the bulbapedia take forever to load, and having to get through a disambiguation page just wastes more of my time.

I'm fine with disambigs for pokemon of the main characters, but they really shouldn't be there for characters of the day.
 
Meowth is a notable exception, as is Pikachu and a handful of others, where the species may not actually be as popular as the individual.
 
Agreed. Aside from Pikachu or Meowth, 90% of the time you're going to be looking for the species instead of an anime character. It's especially silly since the species articles always have a link to the the anime Pokemon articles right in the "In the Anime" section, for one. For another, if someone was looking for Ash's Turtwig, I'd think they'd look at Ash's pages first, specifically, rather than look for all Turtwig in general.

And typing in "Ash's Turtwig" is a hell of a lot easier than typing in "Turtwig (Pokémon)" - with that annoying "é".
 
And even there, these few others...I can see a *small handful* of the movie legendaries (by which I primarily mean Mewtwo, though Latias comes to mind too) as warranting it, and very little else. Maybe Charizard, and even that is debatable.
 
I'm not sure about the rest of you, but I use Bulbapedia almost exclusively to for the provided base stats of each pokemon. I'm fairly certain most people automatically going to the (Pokemon) page with a link to a specific pokemon--either at the top or as a separate section like 'Notable [Pokemon]s'--won't mind at all. Trying to find information on a single pokemon is expected to be a little more difficult.

As it is, there is a slight problem of time. It's not as easy or user friendly. I feel as though there'd be less complaints directing to the Pokemon page first.
 
FabuVinny said:
The top link in italics should usually just be used when it is far more likely that the searcher is looking for one than the other. See: Viridian Forest

Individual Pokémon are a little more notable.
Click to expand...

However, all individual pokémon are members of the parent species. It's not like looking up Venus and getting disambigs for "God", "Planet" or "Women's Razor". If you look up Dog on Wikipedia, you don't get a disambig saying "Did you mean Lassy?"

TTEchidna said:
I honestly don't see why everyone's too lazy to click one link. It's not like it's asking you to click through five pages to find what you want. Heck, I use the searchbar in Firefox and just search the name, and if it's a disambig page, I just click to the species.

Believe me, if we had it the other way, people would whine about how "omgz i cant fiend ashz charzerd" and make some terribly misspelled version of it at "Ashs Charizard".
Click to expand...

I wouldn't call it being lazy. It just seems that 9 out of 10 times, if someone looks up Mankey, they're looking for the species and not the one Ash had on his team for a few episodes. Arguably wouldn't they really be the lazy ones if they can't be bothered going through a few links?

I'm beginning to think that the wiki loads a little slow, regardless of my connection. Making people trawl through disambigs more often than is necessary is frustrating for them, and an unnecessary strain on the wiki's hardware. Not to mention this comes down to a matter of accessibility. I don't
from a design point of you, you don't want to say to your users "Ugh, just type é when you're looking."

(BTW, on my keyboard, holding "ALT GR" (the right ALT) and pressing e gets you é. I wouldn't bother with it if I had to punch in a number code)

Obviously some articles warrant the clearer separation, like Pikachu, Meowth,
Togepi, etcetera. I'm mainly complaining about having a tiny disambig that offers a long, in depth article with stats, movesets, evolution charts, etc. and one that has a few sentences on a Shellder that Jessie had for one episode. In some of these cases I'd really advise merging articles so that the information on Jessie's Shellder is in the Shellder article. But, I dunno, baby steps.

Sorry to blab on so much.
 
Since there seems to an agreement that some indivdual Pokémon deserve a disambig, here's a question:

At what point do you draw the line? Be as exact as possible.
 
Pokémon that have gotten their own episode/chapter dedicated to devleoping them.
 
If you guys are going to remove the disambiguations, why not put the trainers' Pokemon on the page about the trainer, instead of removing it?
For example, information on Dawn's Piplup would be put on the page, Dawn(Anime).
 
It's not that we'd be removing the individual members of a species articles, it's that we'd be moving all of the Pokémon articles to get out of the (Pokémon) thing. We'd probably disambig, like having Pikachu (diambiguation) or something.

But even if we did that... we'd have to change every freaking {{p}} link to a [[]] link. With how many times that link template's been used in the past two and a half years, I'm assuming no one wants to do that.

Next I'm betting people will only want us disambiguating Psychic, since the Ground group's not half as important as the Ground-type, right?

...then the moves... which really need not be parenthesized anyway except for Psychic, but the whole {{m}} thing makes it a lot easier.

How many Pokémon species have disambigs, anyway? It can't be any more than there are Water-types.
 
Paperfairy said:
Pokémon that have gotten their own episode/chapter dedicated to devleoping them.
Click to expand...

And have pages for Bulbasaur, Squirtle, etc?

No thanks.

The rat, the cat and Mewtwo. Maybe two or three others.
 
Did Squirtle really get a character development episode? Sure, he did some cool stuff....

Wobbuffet, Pikachu, Meowth, all movie stars.
 
Are there any complaints other than "it's annoying" or "it's slow"? I'd like to hear them.
 
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