Help:Disambiguation

From Star Trek: Gamma One

Disambiguation is the process of resolving the conflict that occurs when articles about two or more different topics have the same natural title.

Our wiki thrives on the fact that making links is simple and automatic: as you're typing in an edit window, put brackets around USS Enterprise (like this: [[USS Enterprise]]) and you'll have a link. But which Enterprise were you intending to link to?

How to disambiguate?

There are two ways to disambiguate. The first one is to create a disambiguation page listing and linking the different meanings of a term. The second one is to add disambiguation links to other meanings to the top of the article with the natural title.

If each of the topics themselves only has a sentence or two, it may be even simpler just to put all of them together in one article. Each method should depend on the specific subject and the amount of content that is/will be in the article.

Disambiguation page

A disambiguation page generally is placed at the natural title and links to all articles that naturally would have this name. A good example of this would be USS Enterprise. When creating a disambiguation page, you should include the following template at the bottom the page:

{{disambig}}, which will appear as

This is a disambiguation page; that is, one that points to other pages that might otherwise have the same name. If you followed a link here, you might want to go back and fix that link to point to the appropriate specific page.

However, if there is one primary definition of the title, the more important subject can go on the main, simple title. This is open for discussion, though. In this case, the disambiguation page can be placed at Title (disambiguation) and should be linked from the main article using the following template:

{{disambiguation link TERM=Dra | PAGENAME=Dra}}, which reads

For other possible meanings of "Glarpin", please see Glarpin.

Links to disambiguation pages

While it's generally okay for disambiguation pages to be orphan — it's more appropriate for other articles to link to the specific subjects rather than to the disambiguation page — we want to avoid cluttering the List of orphaned pages with these intentional orphans. Thus, all disambiguation pages should be linked from Links to disambiguation pages.

Of course, there will be accidental links, and in some cases it will even make sense to point a reader to the disambiguation page rather than to a single specific article (generally, if you want to let the reader choose which topic they are looking for).

This page was created from portions of Memory Alpha's Disambiguation page.