Special:Badtitle/NS90:Forum:Wiki Talk/Disambiguation pages/reply

1. In any "create from scratch" option, such as the ATT Page Creator or simply clicking a redlink (or typing the URL for a non-existent page into your browser's address bar), you have the dropdown of page templates -- at the very bottom of the list of templates is one for "Disambiguation Page". Choose that to have the basic markup for a Disambiguation page put into the editor. As for the text, well, that's kind of up to you, but in general I'd say it's good practice to identify each work as clearly as possible. Check out Starship Troopers for an excellent example.

2. We haven't really formulated a strict policy, but following the Wikipedia model is a good idea. If you have multiple works with the exact same name -- see Hair (theatre), for instance -- differentiate between them with the medium. In this case, Hair (theatre) and Hair (film). If you have multiple instances of the same name in the same medium, add the year of release -- like "Name (1997 film)".

There are some cases where a particular page will be considered the "main" or "master" page and itself will contain disambiguation links as part of its text (there's a specific Mediawiki term for this which I'm forgetting), but I personally think pure disambiguation pages work better for our purposes.

3. No. Once again, see Starship Troopers. The idea is that if someone has an unclear idea of what they're looking for they will hit the disambiguation page and find the right thing to go to. So in fact, yes, similar but not identical work names should be there. And despite the two pages I just pointed you at, they don't have to be versions of the same property. They can be completely different things that happen to have similar names -- I know we have pages that link to both tropes and works because of similarities in their names, for example. And we have disambiguation pages for different concepts that share a common root or were part of a now-defunct supertrope -- see Geeky Glasses for an example.

Oh, and it's perfectly fine to create disambiguation entries that are redlinks. They point to things that still need to be covered.

If you want to look at more examples, go here and check as many of the listed pages as you care to.