Wikipedia talk:Hatnote

Hatnote bloat

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)

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)

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

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)

This is a good, practical idea: "a function that causes a hatnote to only appear when the user reached the page through a redirect".

Especially on mobile web, hatnotes can take up a significant amount of space before the reader sees the actual material, even though many readers arrive at a page directly and don't need the hatnotes at all. Along with being an issue on article pages, this is a problem on policy, guideline, and explanatory essay pages that have a lot of hatnotes (like Wikipedia:Independent sources). It'd be helpful if the only time a person saw the hatnote for an obscure album on top of Television show would be when they they got redirected from TV Show.

If that's not feasible for some reason, I'm wondering if multi-line hatnotes should even be collapsed by default on mobile, with a prompt to the reader to open them if they landed somewhere that they didn't expect. Dreamyshade (talk) 16:23, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

Set of related previous conversations about this topic:

• Template talk:Redirect#Different hatnotes depending on what the user searched for (2018-2021)
• T232278, "Display certain hatnotes only if the user has been redirected from certain targets" (2019, closed as invalid)
• Template talk:Redirect/Archive 1#Suggestion: display certain hatnotes only if the user has been redirected from certain targets (2020-2021)
• User:Popcornfud/The problem with disambiguation hatnotes (2021-2026)
• Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Redirect/Archive 5#Displaying hatnote redirects only when redirected. (2021)

Newer request that may be more feasible:

• T397999, "Have a way to include wikicode in a redirect that will be displayed at the top of the target page when the redirect is followed" (2025, open)

@Popcornfud Curious, since you were asking about this in the past, have you looked at that newer ticket? Wondering if a path could be: try to get consensus on obscure and too-long hatnotes being a usability problem especially on mobile web, and encourage Reader Growth team to consider this in the theme of "presenting existing Wikipedia content in ways that make every first visit helpful and memorable so that new readers return". Dreamyshade (talk) 17:04, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

@Dreamyshade I stand by the logic of the essay I wrote (User:Popcornfud/The problem with disambiguation hatnotes) but I'm loath to get involved in technical discussions myself. Gathering consensus for content changes on Wikipedia is already enough of a hobby for me, before getting into usability stuff. But any steps that can be taken to fix this I'm happy to see! Popcornfud (talk) 04:53, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

Hurricane Katrina?

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)

I couldn't find the exact diff either, looking at the formatting, but the words at least match the removal here: Special:diff/23235633.

Here's the query I used to find the right range: www.disastersearch.org in wikitext, 5000 versions starting from 30 August 2006. (Katrina was in August 2005.)

— W.andrea (talk) 17:42, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

That's good enough, i added it. FaviFake (talk) 19:28, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

Trivial information

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)

Couldn't that entire hatnote be converted into a disambiguation page? asex twin^{talk · contribs.} 23:36, 6 August 2026 (UTC)

Widespread meme virus of inappropriate hatnotes: "Cultural Name Explanation" hatnotes that refer to a legal/official name that is NOT the article title(?)

See discussion here and the larger discussion (which I believe is mostly people all failing to understand what the issues are). The discussion came up for Keiko Fujimori, but here's another simple example to show what I mean:

Cristiano Ronaldo (article title)

[Hatnote] In this Portuguese name, the first or maternal family name is dos Santos and the second or paternal family name is Aveiro.

(intro paragraph lead) Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro (born 5 February 1985) is a Portu[...]

[end of example]

Let's take another example: imagine for a moment that this example here had a hatnote that said "In this name, Reginald refers to an ancient ancestor of Elton John, and in which "Reg" is related to the words "Rex" or "King". That would be a horrible use of a hatnote, because if the info is relevant at all it should be discussed in the article not "above" the article.

I assume there are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, or articles that use a hatnote in that way, for example every Hispanic name article. It seems blatantly misleading visually and seems like a blatant violation of hatnote guidelines:

1. The hatnote has the words "this name" (specifically, "In this Portugeues name" in this example)...which fails to refer to the giant font Title Header (Cristiano Ronaldo). It refers to the name in the intro lead body text (the longer name) with -dos Santos Aveiro
2. The hatnote is about the maternal and paternal origin of words in the person's longer official name in the intro lead text, NOT the name in the title. In the Elton John example, reginald is not in the title...it's only in the lead. A hatnote is not the place for discussing it.
3. Hatnotes are not supposed to explain or discuss info that is internal to the discussion of the article. That kind of info should just be in the article. This is pretty clear in the Guidelines, and it's also visually obvious. The purpose of a hatnote being special at 'floating' above the article is because it's "on the level" of something possibly outside the article, or something on the level of the title header. Obviously the maternal and paternal derivation of the long naming convention is not appropriate to the header
4. I think the mis-use is obvious and blatant. If the info is important, it should be a small-print parenthetical script/info next to the long name, in-line, in the lead, which is in the body text
5. I even had a person claim that an explanation inside a lead would "clutter up the lead" "therefore it should go in a hatnote"... which obviously violates the hatnote purpose and guidelines. Hatnotes aren't for "moving info out" of the lead, unless the info truly is 'outside' the article (e.g. a disambiguation). In other words, people are saying it's NOT important enough to include in the article, "therefore" they've promoted it to a big special header (a hatnote)...it's absurd and makes no sense.
6. Did the viral wrong practice originate from Japanese names, where it actually makes sense to explain order which a person might be immediately confused by and needs it for disambiguation? This is not the same as "such and such morphemes in the name actually have meaning XYZ in culture ABC...", which here is my analogy to maternal/paternal explanation in hatnotes.

To take a comparison: nobody would put pronunciation IPA transcriptions in a hatnote. The reasons are obvious: it's not hatnote material, it's first-line parenthetical material. So then why is cultural naming derivation given a hatnote, which is apparently a widespread viral meme?

If I try to stop it by moving relevant into relevant intro parentheses, what will happen? Will I lose an edit war even though I'd be stopping the use of blatantly inappropriate hatnotes? RandomEditor6772314 (talk) 03:23, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

Your comment is totally reasonable, and carefully argued. But the problem is bigger: the description of Hatnote is totally contradictory. In one place it says this is about helping readers who may are actually looking for something different; but in another there is a whole section on family names (Category:Hatnote templates for names). Immediately I have to ask a genuine question: so what happens when an article on a person with a "Spanish" name needs a disambiguation hatnote? Anyway, one of the fundamental false axioms on which WP is built is that if you scrape bits of stuff from various places, and collect them together you will get a coherent article. One reason this is false is that different (real, carefully written) books may use entirely different conventions on terminology or classification, and each book will have a section in the introduction on how this book deals with such issues. But even if the various authors of a WP article could agree on a convention for the article, there is no place to put it, with the sole exception of the family name problem. Really, therefore, there should be a mechanism for adding an "Article convention" to the top of an article, and the family name (not-hatnotes) should be moved to that. Imaginatorium (talk) 07:07, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

Agree that explaining which one is the maternal and which is the paternal name does not belong to a hatnote. In the Cristiano Ronaldo example (and similar ones), such information would very naturally fit into a footnote, just like the existing footnote [a] about the Portuguese pronunciation of his name. -- Deeday-UK (talk) 10:51, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

I take that this is an unusual, seemingly erroneous use of hatnotes, but I think what this analysis is missing is that these clarifications are not for individual use but widespread cultural customs. These are not statements about a person so much as they are usage and style notes. (It's also not talking about the etymology of his name, so I don't get the Elton John example.)

That "Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro" clips his name to "Cristiano Ronaldo" is the standard practice for Portuguese names (and Spanish, which has the same system), where a person inherits the family name of both their father and mother, but the maternal name (which comes last) is routinely dropped in everyday use. But putting a pop-up after Ronaldo's name to note this would make it look like it's some specific choice he's made — because that's how we handle people with specific and unique name situations (eg: Ralph Fiennes) — which is misleading. Using a hatnote and explaining this outside the article text makes the situation clearer.

And it's not like this is just for Spanish/Portuguese names. Plenty of people are still tripped up by how East Asian names put the family name first (especially if a person doesn't use a hyphen, like Bong Joon Ho), so the hatnote is there to help those readers out. Or the way that Icelanders do not have family names and instead use their given names in all contexts — so on a page like Jóhann Jóhannsson, the hatnote is there to indicate that our repeated reference to him as "Jóhann" (rather than "Jóhannsson) is not a mistake on our end, and it's not because he's some mononymous person like Cher or Beyoncé, but because that's just how Icelanders roll.

I don't see a better way to alert readers to these customs. Writing it out in the lead would add clutter, but tucking it away in a footnote would hide critical information from people who need it. And evidently other Wikipedians haven't come up with a better way, either, since we've been doing it this way for over a decade. — Kawnhr (talk) 17:54, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

Usage notes about the article is one thing; tangential explanations on widespread cultural customs is another, and only the former belongs in a hatnote. While I see a case for a hatnote warning the reader that Bong Joon Ho and Jóhann Jóhannsson are referred to in the article in an unusual way, I see no such need for Ronaldo and similar cases. Ronaldo, not unusually, has a full legal name that virtually no-one uses; like millions of people, he is commonly known simply by a first and a last name. People call him that way, the article calls him that way (or simply 'Ronaldo', as you would expect), so where is the urgency to tell the reader that in Portuguese names the first family name is maternal and the second one is paternal? Who is going to be misled if that information is put into a footnote? -- Deeday-UK (talk) 08:05, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Plenty. I see people get mixed up with Spanish names all the time, because it doesn't fit with the typical (European) idea of the family name being the last name — instead it is the second-to-last name that is the important one. Here's an old article from France24 that continually, mistakenly, calls Andrés Manuel López Obrador "President Obrador"! I don't see this as any different than Korean or Icelandic names; Bong and Jóhann are not referred to in "an unusual way" according to their own cultural customs, the hatnote is for readers who are not aware of those customs.

Even a person who knows about this system can get tripped up in certain situations. For instance, Portugal/Brazil has the same custom of both paternal and maternal names, but the order is flipped — maternal comes first. That's also true in the Philippines, despite being a former Spanish colony. So, one might see a name like Ferdinand Emmanuel Edralin Marcos, see two family names, and reasonably (but mistakenly) assume that Marcos was his mother's name and he chose to go by that instead. Isn't it better to just give the reader a quick heads-up and link them to the article explaining this in full, rather than a) giving an explainer in the lead; b) tucking it into a footnote and hoping they're curious enough to look at it; or c) assuming they'll see his parents' names in he "early life" section? — Kawnhr (talk) 17:35, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Provide evidence of people getting mixed up with the names of Cristiano Ronaldo, Carlos Alcaraz, or Gustavo Petro, and I will agree that a hatnote is appropriate there. Look at Pedro Sánchez: it has no Spanish name hatnote and has a footnote instead; that's the sensible way of doing it!

It's quite telling that you talk about "hoping" that the reader is curious enough to look at a footnote: we shouldn't write an encyclopedia based on our hope that the reader will take an interest in what we editors are passionate about; we should write it the way that best serves the reader.

Biography articles are primarily about individuals, not ethnic groups and their naming customs. Readers curios about naming customs will likely see that there is more information right next to the name, in the note; the rest (arguably the majority of readers) won't care much or at all, even if you slap that information in a hatnote in the most prominent (and distracting) place in the article. -- Deeday-UK (talk) 08:15, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

I will concede on Ronaldo, since he's basically mononymous and people don't really use either family name for him. But here is an article on Carlos Alcaraz that always calls him "Alcaraz Garfia" — not strictly wrong, but definitely a misunderstanding of Spanish customs. Here is an article from Gulf News that refers to Gustavo Pedro as "President Urrego"; here is a statement made at Caricom from a Barbadian cabinet minister that "offer[s] my gratitude to President Urrego". Also, here is an article that refers to Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo as "President Pardo", and one that can't decide if she's "President Pardo" (the headline) or "President Sheinbaum" (the body); two articles that refer to Spain's PM as "Perez-Castejon"; and here US Congressman Ritchie Torres says he wrote a letter to "President Zablah" of Honduras (that is, Nasry Asfura. hope he got the name right in his letter!). You say we should write it the way that best serves the reader, and I agree — alerting the reader to a different custom best serves the reader, since many people misunderstand Spanish names. — Kawnhr (talk) 23:00, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

No, that's not what best serves the reader. The hatnote on Gustavo Petro currently reads "In this Hispanic American name, the first or paternal surname is Petro and the second or maternal family name is Urrego." So what? The article is titled Gustavo Petro: isn't this guy called Mr. Petro? Yes, he is, so just tell me about the guy; don't force me (yes, force) to parse generic statements about Hispanic names that I am most likely not interested in.

On the contrary, on Jóhann Jóhannsson the (rather verbose) hatnote "This is an Icelandic name. The last name is patronymic, not a family name; this person is referred to by the first name Jóhann" does serve a purpose: it makes it clear to the reader that it's not a mistake that the article refers to the guy as Jóhann instead of Mr. Jóhannsson.

Can you not see how out of place the hatnote on Petro's article is, and how that kind of information, in that context, is what footnotes were invented for? -- Deeday-UK (talk) 21:33, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

No, I don't see how it's out of place to give a heads-up for names that are regular misunderstood by even reliable sources, in the exact same format that we give clarifications for other names. Nor do I see how a quick, single-line clarification is a burden on the reader. Is it that the clarification comes before the full name is listed? I think a pre-emptive clarification is perfectly fine. It's also not only Hispanic names that have hatnotes like this, because Hong Kong names are similarly complicated (eg: Carina Lau). But I thought you said you'd agree that a hatnote would be appropriate for Gustavo Petro there was evidence of people getting mixed up with his name? — Kawnhr (talk) 22:23, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

From a brief search on Google Gemini: "President Urrego" is virtually non-existent in mainstream news coverage compared to "President Petro," occurring in estimated proportions of less than 0.01% versus 99.99%." You still think that a hatnote is warranted on that article?

This matter should be decided case-by-case. A blanket application of these hatnotes to all biographies of a given ethnic group makes no editorial sense. -- Deeday-UK (talk) 08:32, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

If you're going to move the goalposts, I'm bowing out of this conversation. Cheers. — Kawnhr (talk) 13:57, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

Yep, I express myself clumsily once, and that's a great excuse to disengage, right? You are in luck that we seem to be the only two who care about this matter, and I can only be bothered so much. -- Deeday-UK (talk) 15:09, 28 August 2026 (UTC)