 | This is an information page. It is not an encyclopedic article, nor one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of the Wikipedia:Disambiguation guideline. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting. |
An ambiguous title is an article title that applies to more than one topic described on Wikipedia. Sometimes one of those topics is considered the primary topic for that ambiguous title, and the article for that use is placed at the plain base name title (e.g., Paris is an article about the capital city of France), or if another title is preferred for the article, the plain base name is made to redirect to the preferred title (e.g., Hurricane redirects to Tropical cyclone). In other cases there is no primary topic, and a disambiguation page is placed at the title (e.g., Thriller is a disambiguation page). Normally the other non-primary uses are placed at titles that are disambiguated naturally (see WP:NATURALDIS), or with a comma (e.g., Paris, Texas), or parenthetically (e.g., Mercury (planet)). Sometimes titles with a commonly used qualifier remain at least somewhat ambiguous. For example, there are 9 different albums and an EP named Thriller that are discussed on Wikipedia, so the name Thriller (album) is somewhat ambiguous. Some editors call these partially disambiguated titles (PDABs), or incompletely disambiguated titles (WP:INCDAB or WP:INCOMPDAB).
The main question about PDABs is whether a PDAB itself can have a primary topic. In the example of Thriller (album), there is one album that is very well known and is considered much more highly notable than the others.
A request for comments concluded on 3 September 2019 that PDABs can have primary topics, but that "the standard for making disambiguated titles such as Foo (bar) a primary topic among all Foo's that are bars should be tougher than the standard for titles that don't have any disambiguator". The Wikipedia guideline section known as WP:INCDAB or WP:INCOMPDAB was modified to reflect this.
WP:INCDAB was previously less specific about this issue. For example, as of December 2017, it said only that "When a more specific title is still ambiguous, but not enough so to call for double disambiguation, it should redirect back to the main disambiguation page (or a section of it). This aids navigation, and helps editors to avoid creating new articles under the ambiguous title by accident. Such redirects should be marked with {{R from incomplete disambiguation}}."
Further back in time, there was a period of a few months in 2013 when the wording of the guidelines included a stronger discouragement of PDABs having primary topics – e.g., at one point it directly said that "Only non-disambiguated terms are eligible to have primary topics."