Talk:BT

Alphabetical versus "common first"

I've just reverted an edit where someone pulled three of the items to the top of the list, which is otherwise in alphabetical order. I think it was me who put it in that order in the first place, because I think a list of that length needs some logical order so as not to be a mess.

However, I can see that if we can agree what are the most important / most common meanings of the term, it would be useful to pull them out, preferably into a separate list at the top of the page. Something like: "The abbreviation BT is most commonly used to refer to ... It can also mean ... "

I'm only reluctant to go ahead and do this, because some of the things I've never heard of on this list are probably the most common uses of it in other contexts/places. So for me, the main contender for special treatment is British Telecom (which is in fact officially "BT"), but clearly somebody else thought Bluetooth and BitTorrent were right up there too - I can't say I'd think of either. And logically B.T. (tabloid) ought to be right up there, because it doesn't appear to be called anything else. And the Canadian editor who added Breakfast Television clearly thought that was a "pretty obvious" expansion...

I don't know if I'm making too big a deal of this (it has been known), but it doesn't seem to me as straight-forward to split this into a "common" list and an "others" one as it might at first seem. Anybody have any thoughts? - IMSoP 21:51, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

I've been bold and made the change. I've removed a non-notable company with no wiki articel. However I' not sure about the Tabloid, as I don't know what sort of circulation it has. The pedia article is negligable. Rich Farmbrough 16:06, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

I went and reformatted this according to Wikipedia:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages). First "B.T. (disambig)", then "BT something", then all the expanded abbreviations in alphabetical order. —Michael Z. 2005-09-10 05:53 Z

All this just goes to show the "most common first" guideline is a nice thought, but very often undecidable in practice. Alphabetical doesn't suffer from that drawback.

Urhixidur 03:21, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Most common first is rarely obvious, so I rarely use it. The MOS recommends exact matches to the title first (e.g.,"BT"), then matches with disambiguation (e.g., "B.T. (tabloid)"), then matches that are part of the term (e.g., "BT tank"), then non-matching synonyms (e.g., "Bankers Trust"), then finally terms that link to a different article or section (no examples on this page). Within each group, use alphabetical order.

Disambiguation pages should also have just enough information to disambiguate, and avoid unnecessary discussion, and especially avoid non-disambiguating links. For example, since "IATA airline designator" is not a synonym that can be confused for "BT", it must not be linked. —Michael Z. 2005-12-2 07:13 Z

All these arguments have merit, but I'm going with the suggestion on Mos:DP to group the list into categories, because I found this particular list very difficult to scan and some kind of classification might help. If you disagree, I won't be upset if someone reverts. -- Slowmover 20:33, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

I also agree that British Telecom is the appropriate headliner, since it is known worldwide. -- Slowmover 20:35, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

On reflection, I'm going to sit on this a while before categorizing. I deleted some entries where "BT" is not mentioned in the linked article. Apparently "BT" is not something you type when you're looking for "bull terrier", "big time" or "binary tree", which makes perfect sense. And nobody is going to type BT if they're looking for Belfast, but they might be looking for the meaning of the post code, so it should probably link to Northern Ireland. I'll wait a while before doing any more. Slowmover 21:25, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Have deleted a few that were not obvious (to me anyway) and created another sub header (places). AIRcorn (talk) 02:37, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Could someone please find a way to bump Brian Transeau ( BT ) higher up this list? Mr. Transeau is a well known musical composer, electronic music artist, software seller and soundtrack artist. Not to mention the only artist known simply as BT. 71.234.213.31 (talk) 04:15, 8 August 2015 (UTC)