There are three important aspects to disambiguation:
This page discusses the standard ways of handling the above issues. For detailed advice about the format of disambiguation pages, see the style manual.
There are three principal disambiguation scenarios, of which the following are examples:
For how to decide which of these scenarios is appropriate in a given case, see the following two sections:
If the primary meaning of a term proposed for disambiguation is a broad concept or type of thing that is capable of being described in an article, and a substantial portion of the links asserted to be ambiguous are instances or examples of that concept or type, then the page located at that title should be an article describing it, and not a disambiguation page. Where the primary topic of a term is a general topic that can be divided into subtopics, such as chronologically (e.g., History of France) or geographically (e.g., Rugby union in the British Isles), the unqualified title should contain an article about the general topic rather than a disambiguation page. A disambiguation page should not be created just because it is difficult to write an article on a topic that is broad, vague, abstract, or highly conceptual. Where there are additional meanings that are not instances or examples of a "Foo" primary concept or type, those should be included on a "Foo (disambiguation)" page.
For example:
In writing articles on these subjects, it is useful to directly address the scope of the term, and the history of how the concept has developed. Each of the examples of the concept or type of thing should be included at some point in the article, possibly in a list, so that no information is lost from what would have been presented in the disambiguation page format. Consider using summary style to incorporate information about the subtopics into the main article.
Pages needing to be expanded to describe the concept may be tagged with {{}}
.
Although a word, name or phrase may refer to more than one topic, it is sometimes the case that one of these topics is the primary topic. This is the topic to which the term should lead, serving as the title of (or a redirect to) the relevant article. If there is no primary topic, the term should be the title of a disambiguation page (or should redirect to a disambiguation page on which more than one term is disambiguated). The primary topic might be a broad-concept article, as mentioned above.