Talk:Flashpoint

Applicable Dab format

   I can see no peculiarity of this Dab'n situation that outweighs the value of sticking to our two collectively almost universally applicable Dab formats, the primary and the equal Dab'n. These two are distinguished, and their characteristics elucidated, bcz they are virtually complete (perhaps absolutely so) in being able to handle all Dab'n situations. Perhaps there is some situation where each fails to meet the need, but even if so, the two are so close to collectively solving all Dab'n needs that there is no excuse for inventing another except in the probably virtually unique cases that truly are intractable using just the two normal approaches.
   The "clean" situation is the primary Dab'n: one sense of the ambiguous term accounts for not only more usage than any other, but in fact for more than 50% of usage instances. Nice and clean, in the sense that no user seeking the primary sense has to even read the Hatnote, which is indented (and probably ignored by repeat users of WP, who presumably get used to skipping to the lead sent of the article, and only reading the Hatnote when the lead doesn't match up with the topic they had in mind).
   The standard (and only recognized) non-primary disambiguation format is called "equal disambiguation" for a good reason: the only value of trying to split out (even two) equal (or roughly equal, or even nearly exhaustive) topics would be to save most users of the Dab from distraction by more than one unwanted topic. Primary Dab, and multiple Dabs too little differentiated from one another to justify differentiating by estimated frequency, are probably the only two cases sufficiently distinct to justify either formulating criteria for further styles of Dabn or confronting users with more than the two basic styles of Dabn. Perhaps there are cases so gnarly as to justify inventing (for a relative handful of Dabs) one-off formats, but if so they are too rare to be worth working up a format to suit more than one individual case: hardly anyone will encounter enuf Dabs that address enuf Dabs to personally profit by finding the task easier the second time.
--Jerzy•t 10:34, 17 January 2016 (UTC)