This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. |
By the end of 2008, there were around 157,000 disambiguation pages in Wikipedia.[1] Disambiguation pages are a very useful tool on Wikipedia, but articles they are not.[2] While they are slightly encyclopedic (i.e. offering a short summary of the pages they disambiguate), they are certainly less so than images or portals, both of which are far more encyclopedic and offer a discussion of a defined, specific topic, which is much more in-line with the spirit of the Wikipedia article. Yet they both lie outside of the Article namespace. Almost 6% of pages in the Article namespace are disambiguation pages.[3]
The MediaWiki software should not class disambiguation pages as articles.