Brighter Shores:Orphanage

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Brighter Shores:Orphanage is a place where orphaned pages and files are "stored" to prevent them from appearing in Special:LonelyPages and Special:UnusedFiles. Pages (or images) should not be linked here just because they appear in these special pages, but linked because they are "orphans". (See the definition of "orphan" below.)

What is an orphan? Edit

There are several factors that can classify an article as an orphan:

Orphan: An article with fewer than three incoming links which meet the criteria for linking below.
Isolated article: An article that cannot be reached via a series of links from the Main Page.
Walled garden: A group of articles that link to each other, but have few or no links to them from any other Brighter Shores Wiki articles. In effect, that group is orphaned. Theoretically, a walled garden could have numerous articles if they all link to each other but no others link to them.
Orphaned project page: A project page (starting with "Brighter Shores:") with few or no links from other project pages. Essays are most likely to be orphaned.
Orphaned image: An image not used on Brighter Shores Wiki directly.

What is the problem with an orphaned article? Edit

A company with no advertising will not be known to others, and as a result, will get few if any customers.

Likewise, orphaned articles, since they have few links to them from other pages, are difficult to find, and are most likely to be found only by chance. Because of this, few people know they exist, and therefore, they get less readership and improvement from those who would be able to improve them.

In particular, if the topic is more obscure, this may make it difficult for many to locate. If not for links to a page, the only way such an article can be found is by a person who knows the topic entering it into Brighter Shores Wiki or doing a web search, browsing a category in which it is contained, looking at the edit history of a contributor to the page, or having it show up as a random article.

Criteria Edit

An article is orphaned if fewer than three other articles link to it. Currently our priority is to focus on orphans with NO incoming links at all.

For the purposes of the strict definition, the following pages do not count toward the three incoming links:

Disambiguation pages
Redirects
Lists
Discussion pages of articles
Pages outside of article space

Ideally, except for disambiguation links, disambiguation pages should be orphaned. The only pages that should link to them are articles bearing the title (via templates such as Template:Redirect) and "See also" sections of other disambiguation pages (when separate disambiguation pages are created due to long length or variances in the titles).

List of orphaned articles Edit

A list of orphaned articles can be found at Special:LonelyPages

Template:Construction

Disambiguation pages Edit

Disambiguation pages are created in order to resolve conflicts in article titles that occur when a single term can be associated with more than one topic, making that term likely to be the natural title for more than one article. In other words, disambiguations are paths leading to different articles which could, in principle, have the same title.