A quick note on something that’s been bothering me. If you search for something on Wikipedia and arrive at an incorrect page, the link at the top that you click to refine your search says “disambiguation”. Clicking it, though, will not make your search less ambiguous, but more ambiguous: it presents a list of options from which to correctly identify your search target. Shouldn’t this link be called “ambiguation”? Isn’t Wikipedia removing its assumed, false specificity and embracing the ambiguity of your search?
I discussed this with my friend and concluded that disambiguation—which I think is an industry-standard term, so not Wikipedia’s word choice—refers to you the user making your search unambiguous by eventually specifying the exact end node you seek. It’s the equivalent of the link reading “Click here to specify which ‘Wall Street’ you’re looking for.” That makes sense. What bugged me was the fact that the actual operation that the program performs is, of course, very much an ambiguation. It takes you from a specific page to a less specific page. In the same way that a restaurant menu’s “Salad” section is more ambiguous than “Cobb salad”, Wikipedia regresses toward ambiguity so as to allow you to re-specify.
In conversation, specificity is usually easy to achieve. If I ask you, “How was that thing last weekend,” and you start talking about something else, I can quickly perform a lateral move directly to another specific topic. “No, I meant that concert.” Specificity achieved. Wikipedia allows this by including a link to “Wall Street (1987 film)”. Without a direct link, however, the search has to become temporarily more ambiguous to reach the same point. It would be as if you responded with a list of things you did last weekend so as to find which one I’m referring to. I still contend that it would be a clearer description of what the software is doing to say “Wall Street – more options”. Whether this debate was ever held at Wikipedia HQ, or if there even is a Wikipedia HQ, I remain unclear.
Wikipedia on Ambiguity:
ReplyDeleteAmbiguity of information, in words, pictures, or other media, is the ability to express more than one interpretation. It is generally contrasted with vagueness, in that specific and distinct interpretations are permitted (although some may not be immediately apparent), whereas with information that is vague it is difficult to form any interpretation at the desired level of specificity.