Dungeons and Dragons Wiki:DnDWiki/Policies and guidelines/Disambiguation

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Template:Popng Disambiguation in D&D Wikia is the process of resolving ambiguity, when a single term, name, title, word of phrase would be the same natural title for different articles on (perhaps even unrelated) topics. A typical example would be a book that was updated and published years after the original release under the same title, or a race name that describes completely different species in different campaign settings. Acronyms often deserve to be disambiguated. In other words, disambiguations are paths leading to different topic pages that share essentially the same term in their title. They help people to locate the needed data faster.

Full disambiguations[edit]

A full disambiguation page generally contains a list of the articles that would otherwise all be on the same page. A template {{disambig}} should be inserted on top or at the bottom of the page, showing:

For example, take a look at Arcana, which is a name of several settings and several books.

Disambiguating other uses[edit]

When one of the meanings is obviously many times more important than all the others, it can be located in its natural place, with a list of articles with similar title having the name like Page (disambiguation). A template {{otheruses}} should be inserted on top of such a page, showing:

Template:Otheruses

Distinguishing[edit]

When two terms are similar, but not identical, each should get a small notice for confused readers. A template {{distinguish}} should be inserted on top of such a page, showing:

Template:Distinguish

For example, character class is a game term, but Character Class is a series of articles.

When not to use the templates[edit]

Even if the page contains nothing more than a list of links to other articles, it is not the reason to mark it as a disambiguation page. It can just as easily be a stub list or a portal.

Disambiguations as orphans[edit]

An orphan is a page that has no links from other pages. While for most other pages being an orphan means being useless (or at least not used), for the full disambiguations it is perfect if no other pages link to them. The following links are used to fetch a list of all disambiguation pages: