Wikipedia:Hatnote

Hatnotes are short notes placed at the top of an article or section of an article (hence the name "hat"). Hatnotes help readers locate a different article they might be seeking. Readers may have arrived at the article containing the hatnote because they were redirected, because the sought article uses a more specific, disambiguated title, or because the sought article and the article with the hatnote have similar names. Hatnotes provide links to the possibly sought article or to a disambiguation page.

The five basic rules of hatnotes are:

For more information about methods of disambiguating articles, see .

Hatnotes are placed at the very top of the article or section of an article, before any other items such as images, navigational templates and maintenance templates (like the "cleanup", "unreferenced", and "POV" templates). Text-only browsers and screen readers present the page sequentially. If a reader has reached the wrong page, they typically want to know that first.

In most cases, hatnotes should be created using a standard hatnote template as illustrated below. This permits the form and structure of hatnotes to be changed uniformly across the encyclopedia as needed and the templates to be excluded in print.

When determining the content of the hatnote, keep in mind that it forms part of the user interface rather than the article content. Two applicable user interface design principles are clarity and conciseness. The hatnote should not overload the user with extraneous information, and the content should be imparted quickly and accurately. These design goals are conveyed succinctly in the artistic principle less is more.

As hatnotes separate the reader from the content they are looking for, hatnotes should generally be as concise as possible. Long explanations are generally discouraged; the article's lead text, not the hatnote, should explain what the article is about. In almost all cases, the hatnote is intended only to direct readers to other articles in case they were actually looking for something they will not find in the article containing the hatnote.

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