This WikiProject is a forum for gnomes who try to fix such bad bluelinks, to avoid duplication of effort and to share techniques. This is not the place to discuss things like specific
WP:Guidelines (WP:PG) or
WP:Requested moves (WP:RM) - the appropriate
WP:Talk pages (WP:TP) are thataway →
This is everyday gnoming. If there is a corresponding (disambiguation) page or a
WP:ONEOTHER-type hatnote, look at that. If there is no match there (and the search tool turns up nothing - it sometimes does), choose between unlinking,
WP:REDLINKing, and creating a new
WP:REDIRECT - and, if appropriate, add an entry to a DAB page or a {{redirect}} hatnote to an article. If in doubt, ask at
Wikipedia Talk:Disambiguation (WT:DAB) or at
Wikipedia Talk:Disambiguation pages with links (WT:DPL).
Techniques for finding bad bluelinks
The human eyeball is the only sure resource. However, some search techniques have proved useful in getting the numbers to be looked at down to something manageable. You can help by adding others:
Uppercase versions of PTOPICs which are not proper nouns (e.g.
Bull). (Such searches often turn up violations of
MOS:CAPS; you can console yourself with the thought that even if you haven't corrected an error, you have improved the encyclopaedia.)
Lowercase versions of PTOPICs which are proper nouns (e.g.
slough, which may mean
slough (hydrology) rather than the town).
Links in quotes or italics (e.g. "
FizBuz" or FizBuz) without obvious need because the main article does not have them (e.g. The Crown, which may mean
The Crown (TV series)). Such links may turn out to be
WP:QUOTES or
WP:ITALICS violations; for the consolation, see above.
Variations on the above, where links to the main article should be in quotes or italics (e.g.
hamlet, which may mean
hamlet (place) rather than the play).
Advanced search techniques for (among other things) efficiently finding such links can be recorded and discussed in
WP:WikiProject Bluelink patrol/Workshop.
This section is broadly set up from oldest to newest, with the idea that new ideas get posted at the bottom, get looked at, and finally bubble up into Past or Ongoing. That scheme also applies within subsections: oldest first - newest last.
@
GoingBatty: Sorry, that's an old list and I'd done all the easy wins on it. I've replaced it by
G works of art. I've already done Gramophone and Narky Blert fixed Gladiator recently but others near the top may be fruitful. I can generate lists H–Z and put them somewhere more accessible if they would be useful.
Certes (
talk)
10:43, 26 May 2021 (UTC)reply
@
Certes: If you want to generate additional lists (and decide on a way for us to document what we're doing so we don't step on each other), I'd do more work. Thanks!
GoingBatty (
talk)
20:41, 26 May 2021 (UTC)reply
Saxon in progress. This looks like a nightmare, where the majority of inlinks may be wrong. In every other similar case I can think of (
English,
French,
German,
Italian, and so on), the adjective is a DAB page at the basename, not a redirect to an ethnic group. This may need cleanup followed by a
WP:RM.
Narky Blert (
talk)
22:27, 19 May 2021 (UTC)reply
Grass,
Stone (+
Stones) – primary redirects with a large number of incoming links (respectively 4,000 and 550). This is convoluted, it may lead to some article rewriting and will likely also involve a few discussions. I'll be working on it in the coming months. – Uanfala (
talk)
22:11, 1 July 2022 (UTC)reply
If you have thought of a bluelink which might be worth looking at, or looking at again, or indeed are in the process of looking at, post it here as a bulleted list entry with brief comments (and sign). Please keep date order: oldest at the top. If you complete one of these investigations, please move it to the Archive, or to Recently completed investigations (just above).
Most of the 1300 links are from articles which mention US or America. Maybe skip this one as improvable in theory but not actually wrong?
Certes (
talk)
14:33, 11 March 2021 (UTC)reply
A quick initial search turned up a few links specific to Canada or USA, usually tied to the date (they're about 6 weeks apart). I'll have a more detailed look.
Narky Blert (
talk)
15:07, 11 March 2021 (UTC)reply
User:Certes/Trove lists the main offenders with suggested replacements. I've had a go at fixing them all, but they will recur. I've also e-mailed the
NLA, who replied courteously but don't seem to have changed anything yet.
Certes (
talk)
16:23, 18 December 2022 (UTC)reply
Currently (but very slowly) trying to fix some of these: \[\[([hH]ip[- ]?[hH]op)\]\]->\[\[$1 music|$1\]\]. I'm trying to be careful with things that essentially say "influenced by hip hop" since that could mean either the culture or the genre.
eviolite(talk)03:06, 5 May 2021 (UTC)reply
Tons of
parliamentary constituencies in many countries and subnational regions, e.g. provinces. These often share names with cities or regions within (e.g.
Chippenham and
Chippenham (UK Parliament constituency)). Also be careful with former districts. I'll try to cook up a spreadsheet sometime for various countries to make a list of them(this is probably infeasible and unhelpful since the constituency and city/region are related), but currently I'm going through searching through insource:/MP for \[\[[A-Za-z ]*\]\]/ which seems to be a decently common format.
20UF6(talk)23:33, 2 May 2021 (UTC)reply
I'm monitoring Cambridge (300 fixed so far including a few for
Cambridge, Ontario and
Cambridge, Maryland; about two new cases per month). As you say, there are too many to search rigorously and my heuristics will have missed some. What did you fix? It may suggest a search pattern for similar cases.
Certes (
talk)
23:42, 23 October 2021 (UTC)reply
There's a dispiriting tendency in New England to have villages, towns and cities which are in near enough the same place which have the same name which are indistinguishable without checking local records; I just {{dn}}, in the hope someone knows. See also
North Vancouver. I've had some success in modern cases by hitting Google Maps for the street address, or (for roads) by looking at other articles with the same link. In a very few cases, dates of incorporation can help. For places with the same name in different counties, sideways evidence like ZIP or dialling codes or names of roads or schools can help (it's useful to know that names of US Post Offices are unique); but some problems (notably birthplaces of ballplayers born late C19 or early C20, but even some late C20 and C21 deathplaces) are simply insoluble online. For problems which are truly insoluble (e.g. places in pre-modern England, or in prewar central Europe), I sometimes resort to a neutral "could be this/could be that" footnote.
(My least pleasant experience, by some way, on WP was addressing three problems, one after one after the other, relating to places which are in modern Belarus. I managed to solve them all by multilingual/multialphabetic searching, even though all that survives of one is a memorial plaque laid flat in the middle of a field. It took me a good hour, and a subsequent break.)
Narky Blert (
talk)
03:11, 24 October 2021 (UTC)reply
Just the one fixed: turned red, in one of those articles we love so much where an editor wikilinks a huge list of tiny villages in the hope that none of them shares its name with anything notable.
Certes (
talk)
19:12, 20 February 2022 (UTC)reply
Desmos was an article on tree genus. Now it is a redirect to a calculator, which correctly looks to be PT. Links to genus need to be changed.
MB01:46, 16 August 2022 (UTC)reply
Thanks. The editor that changed the redirect thought so, and I looked at pageviews which show the calculator gets overwhelmingly more views than the genus. If you agree, or at least don't disagree, I'll just boldly move it.
MB14:59, 16 August 2022 (UTC)reply
Equatorial: there are 126 articles that use the lazy link [[equator]]ial[3], and from a quick look it seems that in many cases something else is meant instead. I'm not going to have the time for this, so please help yourself. The dab page at
Equatorial may be incomplete. –
Uanfala (
talk)
12:42, 22 November 2022 (UTC)reply
Suresh - given name page with a bunch of links. Some of them are due to a recent move request where the links weren't cleaned up after and can be fixed using AWB, but some of them are longstanding, and need someone to work out which person they are referring to.
* Pppery *it has begun...20:21, 6 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Abd al-Rahman and its redirects seem to have a lot of links that should be going to specific people. More generally there seems to be no process for fixing links to set indices/given name pages, so there's probably a lot of mislinks to them lurking.
* Pppery *it has begun...02:28, 8 March 2024 (UTC)reply
I had a trawl through our hundred or so most-linked surname pages in 2020 and fixed links intended for individuals (or other topics. The winner was
Leopold Zunz, with 125 articles linking his name to
Zunz. I added the worst offenders to
a list of pages whose new incoming links I monitor daily. However, there will still be plenty of such links that neither I nor anyone else has noticed.
Certes (
talk)
21:25, 8 March 2024 (UTC)reply
More similar names with many mislinks (often) through redirects. Some of these are due to
Template:Bir Bikrom, which could do with a once-over to check all the links in it go to the right person.
I moved a bunch of partially disambiguated titles to fully disambiguated ones revealing a bunch of links which I could not easily determine which person they referred to, and there were a lot of longstanding ones as well.
* Pppery *it has begun...20:50, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Bir Bikrom is one of many templates which seem to have been created by putting square brackets round each item in a list without checking the destination of the resulting links.
Taher is probably
Abu Taher rather than the Algerian city, but only a subject expert would know. The cited source for recipients is not in English (and has a bad web certificate). Sometimes we may just have to unlink, and consider deleting the worst templates which end up with few or no blue links.
Certes (
talk)
23:08, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply