Most people are familiar with the Emerson quote: ^[1]

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,

This quote is occasionally misstated, excluding the word "foolish". Consistency is often a positive trait, although the quote notes that it can be carried to an absurd extreme.

With that caution in mind, I decided to examine the hatnotes and the lead section of the articles about the integers between -1 and 150.

This section is about the hatnotes— I will follow up with a comparable section on the lead sentences.

The following collapse table has three sections:

1. The first five rows are a legend to explain the shortcuts for various types of hat notes
2. The next row is a summary count which counts how many of each type of hat note exist
3. The third section is the detailed section with a header row and then detailed information for each integer between -1 and 150

No Hatnote

The most common situation (in 116 out of 152 entries) is to have no hatnote at all

Link to dab page

The next most common situation as entry "D" which means there is a link to the disambiguation page. This occurs in 38 of the 152 entries. Note that while it is very common in integers 1 – 10 and in 23 of the integers up to 25, it is oddly missing from  12 and 15. After 25 it occurs on occasion but in no obvious pattern

Hatnote "This article is about the number."

Another comments situation is denoted by the letter "N" which indicates that the article is about the number. 23 of the entries have this hatnote. It exists in all integers between one and 12, but after that appears to be haphazard whether it is included or not.

Link to Year page

A number of entries include a hatnote denoted by the letter "Y", signifying disambiguation from the article on the year. This occurs in every integer between one and 12 except for 11, and after that exist for the integer 38 and 50 but no others.

Hatnote identifying a link from a Roman numeral

Some entries disambiguate the Roman numeral, designated by the letter "R". This exists in several  (but not all) entries between 16 and 26, and then again 65.

Other Hatnotes

Then there are a variety of other disambiguation pages which I haven't separately classified but denoted the model with the letter "O"

Suggested handling

Other Hatnotes

It is far from my intention to suggest that we ought to have exactly the same treatment for all integers. Particularly the case of those marked "O" those hatnotes appear to be specifically associated with a property of that particular number. Open to any discussion but my intention would be to preserve all of those.

However, I suggest that we ought to discuss the treatment of the other entries.

Hatnote "This article is about the number."

Starting with something easy, many entries have texts such as "This article is about the number." There are some variations such as: "This article is about the number 23" or ""This article is about the number 69". I don't think there's any justification for the slightly different wording, and if we are going to include something along these lines, we ought to make it consistent. The easiest option is to stick with the most common situation "This article is about the number."

Hatnote identifying a link from a Roman numeral

Slightly more complicated is to determine when this hatnote should be used. The Roman number hatnotes are also difficult to justify as is, although there may be a rationale. This may be a little outside our scope. For example, XVII is a redirect, and thus mentioned, but XV is not a redirect. While I haven't checked them all, it might be that whenever there is a redirect, it's mentioned here but not mentioned if the Roman numeral is a dab page. That does suggest the need for discussion to determine whether those decisions (whether the characters corresponding to a  Roman number should be a redirect or a dab page) ought to be rationalized. if anyone wants to take that on, go for it, and if so it will have implications for these pages but short of resolving that, I suggest we leave the Roman numeral hatnotes as is.

Link to Year page

A number of entries disambiguate from the page about the year denoted by "Y". As noted, this occurs in all entries between 1 and 12 except for  11, and then exists for 38 and 50. While it is understandable there should be no such entry for -1 and zero, I'm struggling for a clear rationale for the inclusion in numbers 1 next– 10 and only three entries after that. One option is to include everywhere, another option is to include nowhere, and yet another option is to include in some range (or defined subset) but we ought to have some rationale for the range or subset.

General discussion