RuneScape:Disambiguation

Disambiguation is the process of resolving the conflicts that arise when a single term is ambiguous, and so may refer to more than one topic which the wiki covers. For example, the word "Gold" can refer to coins, an ore, a metal bar, and a rock, and numerous other things. There are three important aspects to disambiguation:


 * Naming articles in such a way that each has a unique title. For example, three of the articles dealing with items ordinarily called "Bucket of water" are titled Bucket of water (blessed), Bucket of water (murky), Bucket of water (stagnant).


 * Making the links for ambiguous terms point to the correct article title. For example, someone writing about the quest Rum Deal may have created a link to  Bucket of water , and this should be corrected to point to Bucket of water (stagnant), an item specific to the quest.


 * Ensuring that someone who searches for a topic using a particular term can get to the information on that topic quickly and easily, whichever of the possible topics it might be. For example, the page Gold is a disambiguation page – a non-article page which lists the various meanings of "Gold" and links to the articles which cover them.

Disambiguation links
Users searching for what turns out to be an ambiguous term may not reach the article they expected. Therefore any article with an ambiguous title should contain helpful links to alternative articles or disambiguation pages, placed at the top of the article using one of the templates shown below.

In some cases there are different templates available, including or omitting information about the topic of the article. The shorter hatnote may be chosen if omitting the information is not likely to confuse the reader.

On the primary page (with no disambiguation page):


 * Use  to produce:
 * This article is about Varrock. For the palace in Varrock, see Varrock Palace.


 * Use  to produce:
 * This article is about coins. For other uses, see Coin (disambiguation).

When the primary topic redirects to another page:


 * If there is a disambiguation page, use:  to produce:
 * "Chaos" redirects here. For other uses, see Chaos (disambiguation).


 * If there is only one secondary topic, use:
 * "Death Plateau" redirects here. For the location, see Death Plateau (location).

Usage guidelines

 * Place disambiguation links at the top of an article. This placement is where they are most visible. For alternatives that are related to the article but are not a source of ambiguity, the section "See also" at the end of the article is more appropriate.
 * Do not pipe disambiguation links. Showing the entire linked article title avoids confusion, which is the reason for the link in the first place.
 * Consolidate (or compress) multiple disambiguation links into as few dablink hatnotes as possible. Link to a disambiguation page instead of adding multiple links in the hatnote.

Naming the disambiguation page
The title of a disambiguation page is the ambiguous term itself, provided there is no primary topic for that term, such as Bob.

If there is a primary topic, then the tag "(disambiguation)" is added to the name of the disambiguation page, as in Cow (disambiguation).

Page style
Each disambiguation page comprises a list (or multiple lists, for multiple senses of the term in question) of similarly-titled links.


 * Link to the primary topic (if there is one):
 * A casket is low-value, tradeable item generally obtained from fishing or as a monster drop.


 * Start each list with a short introductory sentence fragment with the title in bold, and ending with a colon. For example:
 * Juju may refer to:


 * Start each entry in the list with a link to the target page.
 * Each bulleted entry should, in almost every case, have exactly one navigable (blue) link; including more than one link can confuse the reader.
 * Do not pipe the links to the articles being listed.
 * For long lists, use section headers (i.e. Items, NPCs, Weapons, Armour, and so on).
 * Include related subject articles only if the term in question is actually described in the target article. (For example, the Dragon disambiguation page has an entry for K'klik, a fairy dragon.)
 * Include the template  at the bottom (or top?) as an indicator of the page's status.