Please read through the policy below to familiarize yourself with our common practices and rules.
If you have any questions, suggestions, or complaints, please post them on the talk page.
Disambiguation in Memory Alpha is the process of resolving the conflict that occurs when articles about two or more different topics have the same natural title.
Memory Alpha thrives on the fact that making links is simple and automatic: as you're typing in an edit window, put brackets around Enterprise (like this: [[Enterprise]]) and you'll have a link. But were you intending to link to Enterprise the series or one of the many ships?
See also: Naming conventions for guidelines on naming pages to further avoid ambiguity.
The disambiguation page
A disambiguation page generally contains a list of the articles that would otherwise all be on the same page. A good example of this would be USS Defiant. However, if there is one primary definition of the title, the more important subject should go on the main, simple title, and add brief links to the other special uses of the term. If each of the topics themselves only has a sentence or two, it may be 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.
You should also include a note such as the following boilerplate message (which you can copy and paste) at the bottom the page:
- {{disambig}}
- 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.
If you're not making a whole disambiguation page you can put a notice at the top or bottom of a page (some examples):
- <small>''This article is about the Federation Starfleet. There is another article on the [[Starfleet (Earth)|Earth Starfleet]].''</small>
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Links to disambiguation pages
While it's generally okay for disambiguation pages to be orphans — 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 disambiguating 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).
In addition to the manual list above, the following pages list all disambiguation pages: