Disambiguation is the way of resolving conflicts in article titles that occur when one title can be associated with more than one topic.
For example, "quicksilver" is ambiguous because it may refer to many things, such as the first volume of The Baroque Cycle, the first book in that volume, the element mercury, or Jack Shaftoe (it's one of his many names). Each of these topics is likely to come under the title of "Quicksilver". It is necessary to disambiguate between these various topics so that users that go to the "Quicksilver" page can find the article related to sense of "Quicksilver" they intended.
Disambiguation can be done through disambiguation pages or disambiguation links.
Disambiguation Pages[]
Disambiguation pages list all the articles which may fall under a certain title. These should include:
- A sentence explaining that the title can refer to several different articles
- Put the ambiguous term in bold
- If possible, begin the sentence with the term
- A bulleted list of sentences quickly describing each article with a link to the article
- Sentences should be short
- There should be no more than one link in each sentence to avoid confusion
- The {{disambig}} template
- This adds an explaining that the page is a disambiguation page
- It also categorizes it as a disambiguation page
For an example of a disambiguation page, see Quicksilver (disambiguation).
Creating disambiguation pages[]
A disambiguation page should be titled X (disambiguation) where X is the term it disambiguates. It is also a good idea to have the page titled X redirect to the disambiguation page. When them term is very likely to refer to a specific topic, the page titled X can redirect directly to its article—but be certain that the article page has a disambiguation link at its top.
Disambiguation Links[]
Users may reach an article that covers a topic different from the one they expected. Disambiguation links are placed at the top of article pages to notify users that there are other articles among which may be the one they are looking for.
There are two kinds of disambiguation links, each with a certain template. These should be placed at the top of each article that could come under an ambiguous title.
- When there are more than two or three articles to be disambiguated, use the {{otheruses}} template and pass it the ambiguous title.
- For example, in the Quicksilver (volume) article, adding {{Otheruses|Quicksilver}} will generate
- When there are only two or three articles to be disambiguated, use {{youmay}} template and pass it a short description of the current article, and a short description and link to another article.
- For example, in the The System of the World (volume) article, {{Youmay|the third volume of ''The Baroque Cycle''|the [[The System of the World (book)|book]] in the third volume}} will generate
- It's also possible to list more than one alternative: {{Youmay|A|B or C}}
- Do not list more than two alternatives. If there are more than two, or if they cannot be quickly described, use a disambiguation page instead