Talk:Aliquot

message: The article is about mathematics, chemistry, pharmaceuticals, music and land surveying. Seems it's a Wiktionary / disambiguation page grown awkwardly. Is this really ok? Shreevatsa (talk) 18:18, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, I was also wondering whether this shouldn't be turned into a real dab page rather than this half-dab half-article thing it is now. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:37, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  I feel the same way. CRGreathouse (t | c) 20:02, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Based on this discussion I went ahead and turned this into a disambiguation page. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:19, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mathematics article? 

message: This is a reply to David Eppstein's comment on my talk page about reverting my changes.
This page suffers from a number of problems, IMHO. 
* The introductory line is way too long—look at the examples in WP:MOSDAB.  It should not contain any etymology, that's what the Wiktionary link is for.  Please read this guideline which explains that disambiguation pages are not to contain dictionary definitions.  It doesn't matter that the Wiktionary entry is sub-par, that's their problem.
* Individual entries are also far too long.  You should read all of WP:MOSDAB carefully, but especially this section.  The entries on this page break almost every style guideline there:
** Entries should nearly always be sentence fragments
** Each entry should have exactly one navigable (blue) link
** The description associated with a link should be kept to a minimum, just sufficient to allow the reader to find the correct link
* The (totally non-standard) "Additionally" section contains entries which do not correspond to any article at all.  Two of the articles these entries point to do not even mention the term aliquot!
This last point, I think, is a good example of the most common mis-understanding about what a disambiguation page is.  It is not a list of meanings of the term in question.  It is a list of articles that the user might conceivably have been looking for when they typed in an ambiguous term, as the first sentence of Wikipedia:Disambiguation makes clear.  No one is going to type in "aliquot" to try to find the chemistry page, thus there should be no such entry especially since chemistry doesn't say anything at all about the term.  We might argue about the very last entry, since the PLSS article at least mentions the term.
In short, the ideal version of this page according to WP:MOSDAB is far closer to the version you reverted than the current state.  I'll make these changes one at a time, if you prefer, with pointers to the appropriate sections of the guidelines. —johndburger 03:33, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Part of the issue is that this used to be a (bad) article before it was converted to a dab. I agree that the extra blue link in one line should go. And we can get rid of the word "is" in most of the entries if writing in fragments makes you happier. But I think the length of each entry (a single line, but with enough detail to clearly describe the meanings and allow them to be distinguished from each other) is about rigt. And the "additionally" section contains meanings which are used in several mainspace articles including several that bluelink to this dab page, so I think removing those entries would be a big mistake. And in particular, the two very different meanings of "aliquot part" need disambiguation, despite the fact that only one of them is a bluelink. The only thing that seems to be nonstandard about the "Additionally" section is that it is not headed "Aliquot may also refer to:" as the example in MOS:DAB#Items appearing within other articles suggests. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:22, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Non-standard DAB