Talk:Chaucer

Why do we need this page? Geoffrey Chaucer isn't the only "Chaucer" there's ever been, and anyone searching on "Chaucer" is going to find the article "Geoffrey Chaucer," so wouldn't it make more sense to search on "Chaucer" to find any unlinked references to Geoffrey Chaucer in the articles and simply link them to that page? -- isis 14 Sep 2002

The reason we need this page is that people will continue to write things like "as described by Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales" in the future - of course, if you want to go around and point all of the links to here to Geoffrey Chaucer instead, then you're welcome to do so, but this page is going to be useful in the long run, because I'm sure new links will end up pointing here.

If there is another famous Chaucer, then this page should be a disambiguation page, but I can't think of any myself. --Camembert

I get 139,000 hits on google on "chaucer -geoffrey" and at least some of them are not about geoffrey chaucer. So is the consensus that if I'm willing to fix the links, this page can be deleted? -- isis 14 Sep 2002

Really, I for one would argue quite strongly against deleting it - the danger, I think, is that somebody writes something in an article along the lines of what I wrote about ("as described by Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales"), sees that there is no article at Chaucer, and so starts to write one, wasting their effort on duplicating stuff that is already at Geoffrey Chaucer (or at least putting new stuff in the wrong place). And while I don't doubt that there are other people and things called Chaucer, the question is, would we want to write encyclopaedia articles about any of them? If not, I think things are best left as they are. That said, I agree that in theory at least it's better to have links pointing at "Geoffrey Chaucer" than at "Chaucer", and good on you for fixing them. It's just that in practice, people don't always make links in the way we might like :) --Camembert

So what you're telling me is that because some contributor may screw up by creating this article in the future, we should create it now on purpose? But that means we should create a redirect page for every misspelling or typo we can foresee they might make, doesn't it? Don't you think if the new article 'Chaucer' ever pops up in the list of recent changes, somebody's going to jump on it just as I did this time? And if someone has been "wasting their effort on duplicating stuff" it will help them by teaching them to check for existing articles before they do that, so deleting it would be doing them a favor by not encouraging their sloppy work. -- isis 14 Sep 2002

Isis, this is not a "misspelling or typo". This is how Chaucer is very VERY frequently referred to. This is how he is frequently linked to. And few, if any, other topics are likely to be named Chaucer here. This should be a redirect to Geoffrey Chaucer, period end of quotation. Don't delete it. --Brion 16:45 Sep 14, 2002 (UTC)

Gee, Isis, I guess we'd better change Jesus to make it disambiguate between that famous Jewish guy and Jesus College, Cambridge! Or not. I'm moving that to a disambiguation block in Geoffry Chaucer unless you can think of something better than that. --Brion 17:17 Sep 14, 2002 (UTC)

Contributors should ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS do a search before creating a new article, EVEN if they are following a "ghost link" -- it could be a badly-formed name, or simply that several names are possible. For example, I am keeping an eye open for "Ealing comedy" and "Ealing Studios" -- same subject pretty much, two valid titles. Duplicated stuff can always be merged, but it's a waste of effort and time. -- Tarquin 17:50 Sep 14, 2002 (UTC)

In Our Time

The BBC programme In Our Time presented by Melvyn Bragg has an episode which may be about this subject (if not moving this note to the appropriate talk page earns cookies). You can add it to "External links" by pasting * {{In Our Time|Chaucer|p003hycq}}. Rich Farmbrough, 03:12, 16 September 2010 (UTC).