Talk:Modern Times/Archive 1

What a **** up.... the situation explained

Once upon a time "Modern Times" was the article for the Chaplin film of the same name.

Then Fourohfour (that's me) wanted to include other meanings, so he created "Modern Times (disambiguation)", and included a link to it at the start of the "Modern Times" (film) article.

Then Person A decided that the Chaplin film shouldn't be the default meaning and moved it to Modern Times (film). So far so good.

Unfortunately, Person A then did a cut-and-paste move (yuk) of the complete text and talk pages from Modern World into Modern Times. Modern World was then manually redirected to point to Modern Times.

Apart from the usual cut-and-paste maintenance/history problems, the new Modern Times also didn't link the disambig page directly. So unless someone looking for the commune visited the film article first (strangely), they'd never know about the disambig page and never get what they were looking for.

Then...

Person B then said "Cut-n'-paste bad, redirect to the source article", which sounds fine if you don't know what the set-up had been before. Now there are no links to any meanings of "Modern Times" beyond the "Modern World" redirect.

Aaargh.

The current set up (after I've fixed it) will be:-

• Modern Times *is* the disambig page including links to all the "Modern Times" meanings *and* to Modern World.
• Modern Times (disambiguation) *was* the non-film meanings disambig page; it now redirects to Modern Times
• The disambig content was cut-and-pasted from Modern Times (disambiguation) to Modern Times. Although normally bad form, the disambig page was all my own work, and relatively new anyway, so nothing is lost as such.

Fourohfour 15:21, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Update: The current set up has been reverted to this after being changed (see below). Fourohfour 10:37, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Further

Paul Martin changed the above situation such that Modern Times was a redirect to Modern Times (disambiguation), moved the former's contents to the latter, and redirected talk:Modern Times to talk:Modern Times (disambiguation), overwriting the information here. I've reverted these changes.

Although user:Graham87 had suggested making Modern Times redirect to Modern Times (disambiguation); I was already in the process of fixing things. Furthermore, since there is no "default" Modern Times article, it is perfectly satisfactory for the Modern Times page itself to serve as the disambiguation page. (See Prisoner as an example of this).

Pages such as IBM (disambiguation) are only needed if there is one meaning of "IBM" which is far more common than the others and goes in the IBM article. Modern Times does not fall into this category.

In short, Modern Times (disambiguation) was a bad idea (by me) in the first place; I should have moved the film (as Paul did later) and made Modern Times the disambig page (as is normal when there is no obvious "default" article). Modern Times (disambiguation) remains in existence only because it's easier to redirect it than to delete it.

The current set-up is (IMHO) the way things should have been in the first place. It's a shame that there has been so much confusion, but I hope I've made clear why I believe things are now best left "as is".

Fourohfour 10:37, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Hi Fourohfour, I thought your comment referred to an obsolete, solved problem. But of course it can stay. I agree that the last redirect was yet not necessary.
However, the term Modern Times has a main meaning in history, cf. Early Modern Times  and Modern Times.  I'm sorry to bring a lot of trouble upon you.
-- Paul Martin 11:00, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

That was an oversight on my part, sorry. I copied them into Modern Times. Fourohfour 13:02, 16 March 2006 (UTC)