Wikipedia talk:Hatnote

Could someone check whether these reverts were justified under WP:NOTAMBIG? Reverts: revert #1 and revert #2. I believe the template additions were appropriate according to the {{Redirect}} template documentation and disagree with the reverts, but wanted to check here first before raising a complaint. ~2025-44035-28 (talk) 17:38, 30 December 2025 (UTC)Reply

For me as a non-linguist, I'd say those hatnotes are useful, since the characters look quite similar and could easily be confused. It would be good to get some input from the other editor @JMF: as well. --Jameboy (talk) 16:11, 17 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

First, a thank-you to ~2025-44035-28 for raising it here, even if it has taken six weeks for anyone to notice. And I don't think it is a question of linguistics but rather whether is a credible risk of confusion, that the question only occurs to an editor who is already in the article by the conventional route and wonders whether someone else might be confused.

Let's reword WP:NOTAMBIG to see how it might be relevant

It is usually preferable not to have a hatnote when the name of the article is not ambiguous.

The double acute accent (◌̋) is a diacritic mark of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. It is used primarily in Hungarian and Chuvash, and consequently it is sometimes referred to by typographers as hungarumlaut.

The Latin script letters A̋ a̋, Ő ő, Ű ű and the Cyrillic letters Ӳ ӳ redirect here. For Ä ä, Ö ö, Ü ü, Ÿ ÿ , see Two dots (diacritic)

Here, the hatnote can be removed. A reader who is following links within Wikipedia is unlikely to end up at Double grave accent if they were looking for other other diacritics. A reader who is looking for Ä is unlikely to end up at Ä. [but if they do mistype it, the error will be immediately obvious.]

A hatnote may still be appropriate when even a more specific name is still ambiguous. For example, Tree (set theory) might still be confused with Tree (descriptive set theory).

The presence or absence of hatnotes in articles with disambiguated titles has been a contentious issue. There are cases where some editors strongly believe that such hatnotes should be included, such as the various articles about treaties called Treaty of Paris.

While to my eye, it might be reasonable to have {{hatnote| A̋ a̋, Ő ő, Ű ű and Ӳ ӳ redirect here.}} it would be purely because of (and IMO over-interpreting) the wp:principle of least surprise, I see no case for a {{Distinguish}} or a hatnote emulating it. I haven't looked but I assume that the See Also has Double grave accent, Two dots (diacritic) etc. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 19:02, 17 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

Hey, much like how we have an East Slavic naming convention hatnote, I think it'd be very convenient having a hatnote indicating that all dates in an article are given in the Julian calendar (unless otherwise specified). Obviously, this'd be most useful for articles on Russia and Eastern Europe. Mnohohrishnyi (talk) 19:52, 24 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

I've been encountering more cases of hatnote bloat lately. A couple of examples include Streaming media and FIFA World Cup. I'm not sure what to do about these. No single line seems inappropriate, but together they take up a significant chunk of screen space. I wonder if we need a function that causes a hatnote to only appear when the user reached the page through a redirect? Praemonitus (talk) 13:26, 17 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

I've combined two of the three lines at Streaming media into one, in other cases {{Redirect-several}} may be useful. As for FIFA World Cup, I'm not sure but possibly replacing the lot with {{about|the men's association football tournament|the ongoing event|2026 FIFA World Cup|other competitions|List of world cups#Football|the video games|FIFA World Cup video games}} would work? Thryduulf (talk) 23:00, 18 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

In line with WP:MANYOTHER, create FIFA World Cup (disambiguation) and point to it.—Carter (Tcr25) (talk) 23:36, 18 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

That would just be a partial duplicate of List of world cups#Association football (soccer) plus a partial duplicate of FIFA World Cup video games, which doesn't seem particularly useful? Thryduulf (talk) 01:32, 19 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

In § External links, the page gives says A previous version of the Hurricane Katrina article contained:, but I was unable to find the exact diff. Could anyone try to find it? WikiBlame didn't give any results but maybe i used it wrong. FaviFake (talk) 08:58, 14 July 2026 (UTC)Reply

The WP:TRHAT section is about a trivial detail or use of a term. It only gives one example where there is no direct disambiguation, and the note listed is bound to be uninteresting to most readers.

Should this also clarify how to deal with situations where there is an article that we can disambiguate to, but the content in that article will likely be of little or no use to most readers?

On Advertising, there's currently a disambiguation to the TV quiz show List of QI episodes because the episodes are named after nouns and one of them was "Advertising". The target article merely lists this in a table among the 300+ episodes, giving a broadcast date and guest list. A reader who is actively looking for the TV show episode is very unlikely to try to get there by searching Wikipedia for "advertising", and a reader who notices the hatnote and is curious won't learn much beyond what it has already told them, by clicking on it. Belbury (talk) 17:30, 16 July 2026 (UTC)Reply