Talk:St. James Catholic Church and Cemetery

validity of dab page for 2 topics lacking articles

This article was prodded and i removed the prod. The page is valid: it differentiates between two valid topics, though there is an article for neither one. Each of the two items gives what i'll call a "primary redlink" to the topic article title, but also includes a valid supporting bluelink. "Primary redlink" type items are valid to include in dab pages, per Dab guidelines, see specifically MOS:DABRL. There is no prohibition against having a dab page consisting of just such redlink items either. There will be articles for these eventually, within time frame of a year or two, and sooner if a bot run will create articles for all NRHP-listed places so far missing articles. Also, the dab page serves a useful purpose, of providing clarity on what names should be used for articles on the two places, when they are created. Also the dab page does already serve readers who might be looking for either of these places, who would like to find out that a) there is no article about the place yet and b) by the presence of the redlink it is suggested that an article would be welcomed.

This has actually been discussed before, too. Please comment. --doncram 18:38, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

The very MOS guideline you cite (MOS:DABRL) says at the very top, "A link to a non-existent article (a "red link") should only be included on a disambiguation page when an article (not just disambiguation pages) also includes that red link." The Illinois entry has one non-dab inlink, while the Wisconsin entry has no non-dab inlink (and I did not find it on a search of the NRHP website).

That being said, I usually don't pursue deletion very aggressively when it comes to pages created in good faith. Would you be amenable to merging these into St. James' Church, a dab page with a lot more entries? Based on your comments I think that these two redlinks would be better served on that dab page. I recently went through that page and removed a lot of entries, largely because it appeared that people were trying to use it to list all possible churches with "St. James" in the name, even where it appeared such churches would never merit an article. But given the nature of these two entries, I'm sure if/when the article on the IL church is created it will meet notability criteria; I'm still on the fence on the WI church because I didn't find it at NRHP, but then again that could be my own fault. —KuyaBriBri^Talk 19:03, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Oh, okay, u r being meticulous about checking the supporting bluelinks, presumably by clicking on the redlink and then "What links here". I see you were correct that the Wisconsin one's redlink would showed no pages linking, and also that the Waukesha County Wisconsin NRHP list that was supposed to the supporting bluelink did not show a St. James church item. I fixed that now by adding to the Waukesha County Wisconsin NRHP list article.

For any NRHP entries like these which you find to be deficient, could you please just notify me and I will fix them. There's another disambiguation-focussed editor who occasionally finds problems and notifies me. And, I am slowly working through all 3,200 or so dab pages having NRHP entries, to verify each NRHP entry is valid and fix where not perfect. Perhaps you could join that cleanup campaign working alphabetically through the K's right now, at Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation/NRHPdabcleanup2010. Or just let me know of any specific problem and i'll fix it out of order. Thanks. --doncram 19:24, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Further, about your suggestion to merge this into the St. James' Church dab page, I actually think these two items should appear there, too, but that having this dab pages serves readers looking for one of these specific places. For NRHP-listed places, there are multiple internet websites naming the places exactly as appears in the National Register's database, because the database is public domain and used to generate those websites. A reader browsing at private website "www.nationalregisterofhistoricplaces.com" can find either of these two churches, and then look for it at Wikipedia. The other option is to redirect from the base name "St. James Catholic Church and Cemetery", but I think that is less stable, because the church articles might be created and changed to simply "St. James Catholic Church" or to some other current, non-NRHP-given name, and then the dab page entries there will be changed and the connection for new arriving readers is lost.

My working rule of thumb is that a dab page is needed for every specific name, UNLESS a combo dab page will show the specific name at the top as a bolded alternative name or otherwise indicate that the specific name redirects to there. It would be excessive to have this with "and Cemetery" at top there. Note i did edit at St. James' Church to add mention that St. James Catholic Church now is merged in there, rather than creating a separate dab page for those 2. --doncram 19:35, 4 March 2011 (UTC)