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The accompanying main-namespace page is not remotely a Dab. Dabs exist to help users find their way to the correct one of several articles that could each have had the Dab'd title, but for the eligibility of others for the same title. Not only are there no articles, there are no red-links for the the articles. This can be converted into a multi-stub article, but it has too little information to be likely to pass AfD. I will ProD it when i finish the conversion to m-s. --Jerzy•t08:09, 4 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
One of the guys have a Russian page (added link), perhaps more have, but I'm not reading Cyrilic alphabet. The page could have some usefulness, making their names searchable in Latin alphabet. Not convinced wiki will be better off deleting this harmless list. Power.corrupts (talk) 15:18, 5 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
There's one more, per the surname's Dab page and (assuming the Surname, Given-name Patrynomic format) a check of "pages beginning". But you betray myopia in saying "searchable in Latin alphabet": there is no such thing as the Latin-alphabet transliteration. Sergei Prokofiev is the most common English transliteration of ru:Прокофьев, Сергей Сергеевич, but de:Sergei Sergejewitsch Prokofjew is the German one, pl:Sergiusz Prokofiew the Polish, da:Sergej Prokofjev the Danish, fr:Sergueï Prokofiev the French, and so on. (Yes, i left out a couple that are closer than these.) And even if you stick to one language, i was shocked the other day to discover that Yuri Zhivago's foster family's surname, verified from IMDb, is Gromeko, which i'm pretty sure is pronounced in the American film exactly like that of Andrei Gromykoru:Громыко, Андрей Андреевич. Turns out there are two similar names, Gromyko (pronounced roughly Gromeeko) and Gromeko (pronounced roughly Gromyecko i.e., Gromiecko, nothing like in the American film). (And BTW, the Russian WP search engine finds Gromeka, Gromek, and Gromeko if you search for the last of those three, IMO probably bcz of reflecting gender in the last syllable of a surname: even in the American film, Antipov's wife is surnamed Antipova.) Your idea is nowhere near as good as you presume; the real solution is an order of magnitude or two harder than the one our lang links tackles. I'm proud to have held 3 German library cards simultaneously, and to have used another 5 German libraries. And i can laboriously sound out Russian Cyrillic without a reference tool. But i'm not much closer than you, to being the solution to the kind of problems you're making well-meaning gestures towards. Whether WP will be better off deleting is not the criterion; no useless article is truly harmless bcz altho WP is not paper, every useless page is a land-mine that puts you in an attention-sink when you step on it. --Jerzy•t06:05, 6 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Your arguments make me smile, my ignorance overwhelms me, no solution in sight as I realize I know less and less by the day. Your comments convince me ever more of the importance of disambig pages though, interesing that you arrive at the opposite conclusion. I think you dramatize, information overload is not a landmine, it's a plain reality, it will be worse, and people will learn to cope with it. Precisely for that reason, I would say that your comments above are very usefull, and so would this Dab be. (smiling). I wish you the best of luck with your fourth library card. - Power.corrupts (talk) 07:57, 6 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Somebody said that Francis Bacon was the last person who knew everything; ignorance is indeed our fate, as knowledge increases. People are learning to cope with IO -- WP, and Dab pgs in particular, are part of that. An important part? Well, i plead ignorance on that. About languages:
I read a few years ago, in the Scientific American, that there are enuf bilingual pairs of Web pages that they could drive programs that learn to translate texts, without relying on kluges like translating into an intermediate language like English, Chinese, or Hindi. (Hmm, could you synergize those two strategies, or even synergize all four of them?) I'm getting to be a mini-app bug (with Google toolbar, Firefox add-ons, WP Gadgets -- on Prefs page -- and starting this week, Vista Gadgets), and in due time i found the Google Translate tool (which to be honest i made light use of in writing my preceding contribs on this tk pg). (It does synergize, BTW, at least in a wiki spirit, by offering a "Suggest a better translation" lk!) I usually don't try to translate articles to produce even stubs for :en: WP, but using the spotty Google translations reduces labor and often detects nuance i'd have missed, in trying to clarify details in an existing article from a non-English article, even a German one. Learning a foreign language has 4 components: grammar, vocabulary, usage, and speech; the first three tend to rise and then fall in importance, in that order, and speech is the most powerful tool for making gains in all 4 areas; i've always exploited opportunities for oral German practice; my grammar is pretty solid, my vocab mediocre, and my grasp of idiom, metaphor, and so on are spotty. As to Russian, i know the alphabet and most of the orthography, but beyond that, just sparse snippets of grammar (no definite article!) and vocab (narod-, bolsh-, mir y drugzha, slava), and usage (Russians don't have middle names, they have patronymics, and bcz of that Kirill Alexeyevich Naryshkin is probably called Kirill Alexeyevich more often than he is called Kirill Naryshkin, which may explain the absence of any ru:Kirill Naryshkin Dab. I also recall that Pravda always used names of at least well known people with two initials and surname, even "N. S. Khrushchev".) but i don't "know Russian" at any level.
BTW, you just got me to add the Interlanguage links [[en:Naryshkin]] to ru:Нарышкин, and [[ru:Нарышкин]] to Naryshkin. I haven't checked, but my impression is that lks like you're advocating are excluded from Dabs and limited to external lks sections otherwise. I'm not going quibble abt whether they are more or less valuable than my orthodox interlanguage lks, but if you can come up with the lks you did, at the least you also probably can be effective doing the universally approved interlangs. (The only caution i offer is that an interlanguage lk on an article or list can't point to a Dab, nor vice versa.) --Jerzy•t06:12, 8 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I'm about to finish the article on Kirill Poluektovich Naryshkin, so hopefully some of the overzealous Wikipedians will stop this dab-deleting frenzy every time they see a dab page full of red links. IMHO, users may still want to know who was who even if all the people on the dab-page are redlinked. KNewman (talk) 14:46, 10 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
They might want to know, but that isn't the purpose of dab pages. Information on Wikipedia resides primarily in the articles; dab pages should have only enough info to let the reader distinguish between articles. --Auntof6 (talk) 01:45, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
