 | This page documents an English Wikipedia editing guideline. Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. Substantive edits to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on this guideline's talk page. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Disambiguation helps readers quickly find a desired article in cases when a term could reasonably apply to more than one article. |
Disambiguation in Wikipedia is the process of resolving conflicts that arise when a potential article title is ambiguous, most often because it refers to more than one subject covered by Wikipedia, either as the main topic of an article, or as a subtopic covered by an article in addition to the article's main topic. For example, Mercury can refer to a chemical element, a planet, a Roman god, and many other things.
There are three important aspects to disambiguation:
- Naming articles in such a way that each has a unique title. For example, three of the articles dealing with topics ordinarily called "Mercury" are titled Mercury (element), Mercury (planet) and Mercury (mythology).
- Making the links for ambiguous terms point to the correct article title. For example, an editor of an astronomy article may have created a link to Mercury, and this should be corrected to point to Mercury (planet).
- Ensuring that a reader who searches for a topic using a particular term can get to the information on that topic quickly and easily, whichever of the possible topics it might be. For example, the page Mercury is a disambiguation page—a non-article page which lists various meanings of "Mercury" and which links to the articles that cover them. (As discussed below, however, ambiguous terms do not always require a disambiguation page.)
This page discusses the standard ways of handling the above issues. For detailed advice about the format of disambiguation pages, see the style manual.