TRMN:Disambiguation
 Please read through the policy below to familiarize yourself with our common practices and rules. |
- The following guide is adapted from the document written and executed by Memory Alpha.
Disambiguations are used on the TRMN Wiki to resolve the conflict that occurs when articles about two or more different topics have the same natural title or are substantially similar in title.
The TRMN Wiki thrives on the fact that making links is simple and automatic: as you're typing in an edit window, put brackets around Medusa (like this: [[Medusa]]) and you'll have a link. But were you intending to link to Medusa the ship or database?
See also
- Naming conventions, for guidelines on naming pages to further avoid ambiguity.
How to disambiguate?
There are two ways to disambiguate. The first one is to create a disambiguation page listing and linking to the different meanings of a term. The second one is to add disambiguation links to other meanings at the top of articles.
In almost all cases the "most important" article is the one that should stay at the main, natural title without any disambiguation. This is open for discussion, though. In this case, a disambiguation will be be placed at Title (disambiguation) and should be linked to from the main article.
If there are two, or more, articles of importance, the disambiguation page should be located at the natural title. For example, there are at least two chapters named "HMS Invincible": (HMS Invincible (BC-416) and HMS Invincible (SD-455), so the disambiguation page is at "HMS Invincible".
Disambiguation page
A disambiguation page lists and links to all articles that naturally would have this name, or are substantially similar in title. A good example of this would be Medusa. When creating a disambiguation page, you should include the following template at the bottom of the page:
{{disambig}}, which will display the following text:
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This is a disambiguation page; that is, one that points to other pages that have the same or a similar name. If you followed a link here, you might want to go back and fix that link to point to the appropriate specific page. |
Links to disambiguation pages
While it is generally okay for disambiguation pages to be orphans – it is 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).
When linking to a disambiguation page intentionally, the link should be to a redirect to the disambiguation page from the "(disambiguation)" title; in other words, if "Term ABC" is a disambiguation page, a redirect from "Term ABC (disambiguation)" should be created if it does not already exist. The template {{dislk}} can be used for that purpose. This type of redirect is used to indicate any intentional links to the disambiguation page, to distinguish them from accidental or erroneous incoming links that should be disambiguated to the appropriate article.
Disambiguation links
Disambiguation links are a notice at the top of a page, linking to another meaning of that term, or to a disambiguation page. Direct links are generally only done between terms if there are less than three different meanings and one of them is considered the primary definition. To create disambiguation links, you can use the following templates:
Template:Disambiguation/shortcuts
The following pages list all disambiguation pages: