Wikipedia talk:Links to (disambiguation) pages

The article says:

Pages and redirects should be added in the following format:

#[[ATB (disambiguation)]]

To save space, don't add a pipe to the link.

I think it would actually make the whole thing a lot clearer if pipes were added, since the (disambiguation) suffices take up most of the space on screen, and are distracting. There used to be a type of HTML list (the DIR list) which allowed the browser to display multiple columns, like a directory listing: this would be ideal for this scenario if it were not for the fact that this type of list is now deprecated. --Phil | Talk 11:03, Apr 26, 2004 (UTC)

"The nice thing about deprecated HTML tags is that they always work." .. Ok <dir> proves it wrong, but did it ever work?

I was thinking about the source when writing about the space. As this page can easily be updated from the database .. maybe <small> is sufficient to reduce the display size ;-) . Anyways, feel free to add the pipe if you really want to. -- User:Docu

/How to update

What is it?

more than 100k long - split?

«This page is 104 kilobytes long.» That makes it harder to update manually. Shouldn't it be split? Will it cause any other problems? If to split how? Subpages by letter? Or should I forget about updating it at all? --Nabla 13:44, 2005 Jun 8 (UTC)

I got the impression from Wikipedia:Links to (disambiguation) pages/How to update that this list was actually generated by a database query, so I didn't think people would be updating it manually at all. But yes, the list is getting so long it should be split up into subpages, the way Wikipedia:Links to disambiguation pages is. Noel (talk) 00:27, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

Purpose?

If we can't come up with a good reason for this list, I'm going to nominate it for deletion. - brenneman 02:24, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

To keep disambiguation pages off Special:Lonelypages, which only lists the first 1000 lonely pages. That's a good point, but I don't see any other one. --Alvestrand 06:21, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Is that valid? The first page I looked at was already linked to. Aren't most "X (disambiguation)" pages linked to from "X"? "4th of July (disambiguation)" is linked from "Independence Day (United States)". "511 (disambiguation)" is linked from "511". What's the point in this list? Stevage 12:52, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree. It appears to be totally senseless. Gene Nygaard (talk) 13:41, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

I had thought that the purpose of these links, when I saw them in "what links here" for a disambiguation page, was to identify diambiguation pages which had links other than from the article being disambiguated, or from talk pages. In other words I that it was to identify disambiguation pages which probably had some links in need of being disambiguated. That would make sense; but it is impossible to use in that manner for someone trying to do such cleanup, if this list includes even thos pages which have links only from the pages being disambiguated. Gene Nygaard (talk) 13:44, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Links to disambiguation pages

Not all disambiguation pages have "(disambiguation)" in the name e.g. Lincoln, C2C, etc Simply south 09:31, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Yes, and they are listed here: Wikipedia:Links to disambiguating pages. Salad Days 20:27, 10 April 2007 (UTC)