Talk:Sun (disambiguation)

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Disambiguation

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I'm not sure what was meant by "uncivil", but it sounds like an editorial jab to me. -- Beland 03:37, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Style

A disambiguation page is not an article. Its purpose is to navigate people to their desired article quickly. Excess wikilinks slow down this naviagion, so I have reverted back to the version with only essential wikilinks. --Commander Keane 06:37, September 11, 2005 (UTC)

Hi! Sorry it's high time for lunch now. Will think about it over noodles. Get back to you soon! :) --Plastictv 06:44, 11 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hi i'm back. That point you're making is quite debatable. i wouldn't want to open a lengthy discussion here because i have no hard feelings over these things. i checked several major disambiguation pages and they don't all follow your style. So i suggest you bring it to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages) if you wish to. Anyway there were a few things i added besides the wikilinks, so i'm being bold and going ahead to add them back in alright? :) --Plastictv 07:28, 11 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry about reverting over your added things, I took your edit summary at face value, I'll be more careful next time. About the style, I thought my version was good, I'll get some others to take a look and see what they think. --Commander Keane 08:04, September 11, 2005 (UTC)

Nah it's alright. 'Twas my fault that i didn't make it clear. However, i do want to raise another issue here. i believe that it is not necessary to follow the disambiguated word to the strictest extent. Therefore, it's not quite necessary to say "Sun or The Sun may refer to...", nor is it so to exclude "Phoenix Suns" just because it is in the plural. What do you think? --Plastictv 14:45, 11 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for discussing it. I'm not quite sure what "to follow the disambiguated word" means exactly, but I think all dab pages should start with "Foo may refer to:", because it's a clear indication that it's a dab. If you stumble across the page accidentally, you realise what the page is all about without having to scroll to the bottom and read the dab notice. Also, you realise which words this particular dab is taking care of. I removed "Phoenix Suns" becasue I thought it was extremely unlikely that someone would type in "Sun" or "The Sun" and expect for the team (baseketball?) to pop up. "The Suns", yes. "Suns" yes. I wish I had some noodles. --Commander Keane 15:10, September 12, 2005 (UTC)

What i mean is that there could be just a little ambiguity in a disambiguation page, pardon the irony. :) Some readers might not be exactly sure of what they're looking for either. Just a little ambiguity helps them find what they want. Therefore, "Phoenix Suns" is acceptable while things like "You Are My Sunshine" probably aren't. Again, this is just my opinion. --Plastictv 16:34, 12 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

We are here to help readers, so if you think it will help, put it back in. Interestingly I don't think Suns is an article. Maybe if they are called that frequently then that should be a redirect, but I'm not sure. --Commander Keane 00:53, September 13, 2005 (UTC)

The Sun magazine

There is also a The Sun magazine, see here: [1] . Might be worth mentioning if it's not already. --DanielCD 20:59, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Importance

Am I the only one who thinks that the star we orbit is a tad more important than the British tabloid newspaper? I think that 'The Sun' should give the star not the newspaper by default. SmokeyTheCat 15:27, 6 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

12/29 cleanup

As part of my cleanup of the page, I merged the formerly separate-sections "Canadian newspapers owned by Sun Media" and "Historical newspapers" with the other papers under a single "Newspapers" heading. I didn't see much point in separating them out, especially as a) it seems unlikely that people would know whether a given Canadian newspaper was owned by Sun Media or not, and b) the New York Sun that existed until 2008 was listed under "historical", and not "current or recent newspapers" -- if 2008 isn't recent, then what do these headings mean, really? Even for older papers, it's reasonable to guess that someone who's looking up a newspaper that existed a long time ago might not know whether that newspaper is still in operation or not. But they would probably know where it was published.

I also removed The Sun (Nigeria) from the list, because I couldn't find any article to bluelink for it (as required by MOS:DP; the purpose of disambiguation is because Wikipedia has information on multiple topics by the same name; if Wikipedia doesn't have any information on this newspaper, there's no purpose in including it on a disambiguation page). It wasn't mentioned in Lagos or Nigeria that I could find.

I also moved most of the people to the list at Sun (surname), since there didn't seem to be any logic to which people were listed here and which were listed there (and there was quite a bit of overlap between the two already). Propaniac (talk) 20:54, 29 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Common usage of sun

One of the most common usages of sun is as a synonym of star or specifically for a star at the centre of a planetary system. I have tried to add this numerous times but it was reverted for no apparent reason. I will stop adding it when someone can prove it's wrong or it contradicts Wikipedia policy or guidelines. Just in case anyone was wondering, here are some dictionaries who agree: Oxford Dictionaries Online, Merriam-Webster, OED. McLerristarr | Mclay1 01:33, 14 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Please do not simply keep adding your text in the absence of consensus to do so; note that your previous attempt in January was not accepted either. Wikipedia bases its treatment of "Sun" per the IAU definition. Your changes are more in line with how Wiktionary handles the matter. --Ckatz^chat _spy 03:09, 14 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"Wikipedia" cannot have a POV of what "sun" means. If reliable sources say it means something, then we have a duty to provide that information. It doesn't matter if you don't agree with that definition, the two most noteworthy dictionaries in the world trump your opinion. Why is me continually adding it wrong but continually removing it in the face of reliable sources is not wrong? McLerristarr | Mclay1 05:30, 14 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The content is appropriate for a dictionary. But unless the linked article supports the usage, there is nothing to disambiguate in Wikipedia. older ≠ wiser 01:47, 15 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The linked article does use the term "sun" (lowercase) several times to refer to stars, so I think there could be a case made that "sun" here is a plausible alternative name for the star article and would thus be an appropriate entry on the dab page.--NapoliRoma (talk) 04:25, 15 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Those were two minor issues with wording that have now been fixed. --Ckatz^chat _spy 06:21, 15 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Why did it suddenly need to be fixed? It aligns with common usage and reference sources, and has been in the article without comment for years.--NapoliRoma (talk) 07:10, 15 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There are many (many many many) little fixes in need of fixing in the millions of articles on the site, a large percentage of which go unnoticed. When noticed, we fix them. In this case, it works better, avoids confusion with the dozens of other "Sun" uses in the article, and aligns with the convention used in the astronomy articles. --Ckatz^chat _spy 08:02, 15 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

When you say "convention" this is by consensus, say from members of WP:AST? I looked on the project page to see if this was a published guideline, but if there's a guidelines page, I wasn't able to find the link there (could be me; it's certainly happened before).

Again, at least from this layman's perspective, this seems to not take into consideration a common usage of the word "sun" (see http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=483 , for example). Even if consensus dictates it not be used in more technical articles here, I might gently suggest that vigilantly scrubbing it from this dab page might be an example of Sayre's Law in action. Regards, --NapoliRoma (talk) 16:50, 15 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Generally, to be considered ambiguous for the purposes of disambiguation on Wikipedia, the use of the term as an alternate name for an article (or subsection of an article) of a different name would need to be clearly mentioned in the the linked article. That was not the case, even prior to Ckatz' recent edits. Unless the ambiguous usage is clearly supported by the linked article there is really nothing to disambiguate. And if the usage is at all controversial it should also be referenced. From my perspective, I have no stake as to whether sun is ambiguous with star. My only point is that we do not as a rule send readers from disambiguation pages off to articles where there is no supporting evidence of the ambiguous usage. older ≠ wiser 17:00, 15 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to me there are two ways this could have been handled:

There could have been a small amount of additional material added to the star article to reinforce the already implicit context within (especially appropriate in the discussion of Giordano Bruno, by the way, and kind of weird in its absence now), that lowercase "sun" with no definite article is frequently used to refer to stars with planetary systems other than Sol. This would seem to me to be an example of building the web, justified by common usage and multiple references and still within WP:MOSDAB, but I can see where reasonable people might differ.
We could take explicit action to remove any existing justification for such a link.

I'm really not sure why the second course would be taken. I'm in favor of keeping cruft out of dab pages, but this does not appear to me to be cruft.--NapoliRoma (talk) 17:45, 15 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

As far as I'm aware, there is nothing in Wikipedia policy or guidelines that say the disambiguated term must be mentioned in an article for the article to be included on the disambiguation page. I have provided references on this talk page but references shouldn't be placed on the dab page itself per MOS:DAB. It doesn't matter what the astronomically correct definition of "sun" is – we don't write Wikipedia for astronomers; Wikipedia is written for the people and it is very common for people to use "sun" as a synonym for "star", especially a star that has planets. I was looking the generic meaning of star up but for some reason Wikipedia seems to deny it exists – that's why I added it to the dab page because clearly it's useful to some people. More information is better than less information. McLerristarr | Mclay1 15:40, 16 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation pages don't, as a general rule, direct readers to pages that make no mention of the ambiguous term. The fundamental question as I see it: is star ambiguous with sun? That is, would a reader entering "sun" into the search box be likely to be looking for "star"? I don't know, but on the face of it, the ambiguity is not evident. It appears to be an occasional analogical usage. So unless there is something that establishes the ambiguous usage, there is no basis for including the term on a disambiguation page. WP:DAB: Each disambiguation page comprises a list (or multiple lists, for multiple senses of the term in question) of similarly-titled links. Is "star" similarly titled with "sun"? Not in any obvious way. older ≠ wiser 15:56, 16 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Then that's a bad explanation of a dab page on behalf of WP:DAB. Foo (disambiguation) could contain "Foo", a song by Bar "Bar" isn't similar to "Foo" in any way. If it's just a question of wording, I'm sure we could sort that out. Your fundamental question has been answered, as I have pointed out several times, by the OED, among other reliable sources. It is highly plausible that someone could be wondering what a sun is, they find their way here and realise it's just a synonym for star from analogy with the one true Sun. I tried to do that but Wikipedia provided no answers so I looked elsewhere. The whole point of a website is to make people read it. McLerristarr | Mclay1 18:06, 16 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think you may be missing the point. Foo (disambiguation) could contain "Foo", a song by Bar because the song titled "Foo" is ambiguous. That the song is by a group called bar is incidental. If the article for the group Bar made no mention of the song, then there would be no basis for including an entry on the disambiguation page. But assuming there is supporting mention that Bar did indeed have a song called Foo, the disambiguation entry is completely appropriate. Simple synonyms are the stuff of dictionary definitions. The fundamental point is that directing a reader to an article that provide no support for the ambiguous usage is unhelpful. Besides, you seem to be assuming that a person looking for such a synonymy would already know that. Aside from some exceptional situations, a person looking for "sun" in Wikipedia would arrive first at the Sun article and would only get to the disambiguation page from the hatnote because they could not find what they were looking for. The introductory line of Sun includes a link to star, so I just don't see how another link on the disambiguation page for a term that is not really ambiguous is helpful. older ≠ wiser 18:47, 16 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]