Talk:IRA

Should the kind of IRA (Individual Retirement Account) that is financial in nature have a place on the IRA page? --Dante Alighieri 19:40 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Ideally this should be a disambiguation page. But we need to orphan this page first in order to prevent misdirected linking (most pages linking here intend to go to an article about the Irish Republican Army. --mav

Surely the Irish Republican Army meaning is vastly the more significant of the two. Renaming the page because of a purely US financial TLA would be silly. Tannin

I don't think so. IRA's are very common in the states so there is a reasonable ambiguity problem here that should be resolved. --mav

And there are similar ones here in Australia - one in particular that I notice every time I see it here on Wikipedia but has sliped my colander of a mind at the moment. (This is Monday, right?) If I changed those to disambiguation pages, there would be a serious outcry, and rightly so. Why should a wordwide meaning give way to a purely local (and undoubtedly temporary) one?

This isn't something that is going to be resolved by discussion though: the facts are plain, and there is no particular rational argument to be made one way or another that isn't obvious at first glance. It's simply a judgement call. I firmly oppose the change. If others from the international Wikipedia community agree with me, then it should not be changed. If, on the other hand, a "consensus minus one" situation develops, then (and only then) the change should go ahead. Let's see what the general opinion is. Tannin

This isn't a policy or anything so I don't see a point in having to wait for a "consensus" to emerge. But since you mentioned it, Dante did ask the mailing list about this exact issue and the consensus so far there is that this should be a disambiguation page. The usage in the USA is not going to go away anytime soon - besides there aren't that many pages linking here as it is (unlike with football). Just about any acronym that is less than four characters long is going to be ambiguous. Heck, if there weren't so many damn links to USA I would advocate that that too be made a disambiguation page (there is a United Software Association and probably many other uses of USA). In short we shouldn't supporting lazy linking behavior for short acronyms since these are used by many different entities. It would also be interesting to know all the different uses for these ambiguously short acronyms. --mav 06:55 22 May 2003 (UTC)

I wouldn't like to see IRA become a disambiguation page , but I was staggered to find that the first hit when putting IRA into google is the International Reading Association! So I concede that there is an argument for doing so. Mintguy

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You could make IRA a redirect page, then at the top of the page that it goes to, say "IRA redirects here. For other uses, see IRA (disambiguation)[?]". I've seen this format used on Wikipedia elsewhere. Evercat 19:37 23 May 2003 (UTC)