Oblivion talk:Desolate Mine

Redirect?

Does this need to be a redirect? The quest and place are not named the same thing, and Oblivion:Desolate_Mine_(place) defies the naming conventions for the other Places in Oblivion. — Unsigned comment by Kementari (talk • contribs)

There are three others (Priory of the Nine, Weynon Priory and Miscarcand) that have the same (place) suffix (along with Disambiguation pages), so whilst it's unusual I don't think it "defies" the naming conventions. I'd also say that whilst you're correct that "Desolate Mine" and "The Desolate Mine" are different, the definite article is usually not something people type in to search boxes. My vote would be to keep things as they are, but I'm not hugely committed either way. --Rpeh^Talk 06:02, 4 July 2007 (EDT)

To get a bit technical, this is actually a disambiguation, not a redirect, although you may have started out trying to open The Desolate Mine, which is a redirect (to Desolate Mine). Disambiguations are the standard way to do things when there are two articles that otherwise would have the same name. It's even to some extent built into the wiki software: if you type [[Oblivion:Desolate Mine (place)|]], the software will automatically display that as Desolate Mine; any text in parentheses at the end of an article name is assumed to be there for disambiguation purposes, rather than being part of the "real" article name.

And IMO, if two articles only differ because one has an article and the other doesn't, then the article names are identical. The "go" function on the search box ignores articles when doing searches (so a search on "Path of Dawn" will take you to The Path of Dawn; a search on "The Ghost Ship of Anvil" will take you to Ghost Ship of Anvil), because most readers won't double check whether or not the quest name starts with "The" before trying to look it up here (we're lucky if the readers even know the correct name for the quest most of the time!). In other words, the bottom line is: if a reader types in "Desolate Mine" in the search box, what page are they likely to be looking for? If there's a good chance it's either of the two articles, then a disambiguation is needed so the reader gets to make the choice for themselves. At least, that's how things are being done at the moment. --Nephele^Talk 14:50, 4 July 2007 (EDT)