User talk:Andrewa/Larry Sanger on Primary Topic

Why this page

I'm interested in exactly where the Wikipedia concept of Primary Topic came from. Andrewa (talk) 05:38, 26 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sanger's very next line, perhaps? The part you conveniently left out. Here's the line with more context:

Be precise when necessary
Please, do not write or put an article on a page with an ambiguously-named title as though that title had no other meanings!
It's very important that we name our article titles precisely. If a word or phrase is highly ambiguous, and your article concerns only one of the meanings of that word or phrase, you should probably--not in all cases, but in many--use something more precise than just that word or phrase[1].

The essence of primary topics was recognized at the very beginning, as demonstrated by the phrase: "not in all cases, but in many". That makes the case for The Americans as well as Paris, and countless others. --В²C ☎ 19:37, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

And here is the first reference about the concept added to WP:D, on April 5, 2002, by Lee Daniel Crocker:

If the title clearly has one central most important meaning, and one or two lesser-known meanings in narrow contexts, one alternative is to have the full article about the primary meaning under the simple title, after which is a brief link to the special use. For example, the poker article covers the card game; it is unlikely that there will ever be an encyclopedia article on fireplace pokers, but if we did create one, it could be linked to from the existing poker article without having to move that article to "Poker (game)".

Worth noting: we do have a Fire iron article today, created in 2006, listed among about a dozen uses of "poker" at Poker (disambiguation), and to which Fireplace poker redirects. But the card game remains the primary topic of Poker. And rightfully so. --В²C ☎ 20:15, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Also worth noting is that the reason for putting primary topics at base names was not explained until years later. Oh, and the earliest expression of an argument against primary topics that I can find is also from 2002, in Archive 2 of WT:D at Wikipedia_talk:Disambiguation/Archive_2:

At some point we're going to have to accept the fact that in Wiki, as in dead-tree encyclopedias, topics with multiple meanings require topical classification-- even if the primary "meaning" appears obvious to us. At that point, we'll be forced to clean all of the crap off of these pages, which is a lot of work that's going to have to be done by hand. Disambiguation pages may seem ugly, but they lead to nice, clean articles. The worst thing you can say about a disambiguation page is that it forces people to make their links more specific. So what-- that's easy enough to do. In fact, links that lead to disambiguation pages could easily be catalogged by the software if the problem gets bad enough. Disambiguation that's embedded in the text of an article has to be manually scrubbed out.

--В²C ☎ 20:48, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Previous posts

I did a brief description of the history of the term both in Wikipedia and in Linguistics, not sure quite where. Watch this space. Andrewa (talk) 05:38, 26 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The concept usually if not always arises before the term. I wouldn't get too hung up on the term primary topic itself. It's the idea that's important. The idea that many ambiguous names each usually refer to one particular topic, and anyone searching or linking with that name is most likely looking for or intending to refer to that topic. For lack of a better term, we refer to such topics as primary topics. But, again, it's the concept that's important, not the imperfect term we use to refer to it. --В²C ☎ 19:42, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]