GamerWiki:Disambiguation
From GamerWiki
Despite the creativity exhibited in the games industry, when it comes to game names clashes can occur.
For example, Dead or Alive is the title of a 3D fighting game, but also the name of two different Spectrum games.
GamerWiki contains disambiguation pages:
- to help people find the correct game that they're searching for.
- to seperate out the pages for each format for any particular game (for example see Timesplitters: Future Perfect)
- at the head of each series, so that all games in a series can be found from a basic search
Disambiguation is the process of resolving ambiguity. This means resolving confusion over GamerWiki articles which may appear under the same title. For example, searching for Tetris, the system is not automatically able to know whether the reader meant to search for Tetris (Game Boy), Tetris (ZX Spectrum), Tetris DX (Game Boy Color), or Tetris (A.N. Other Platform). In order to help the reader, we create disambiguation pages which point to all possible variations of a common term. In the case of GamerWiki, we are most likely to create disambiguation pages for game titles which appear on more than one platform. Multi-Platform titles are becoming increasingly common and for this reason, we need a structured disambiguation system.
When to use Disambiguation
'Only use disambiguation to provide the reader with a choice between several articles which intuitively fall under the same name. Do not disambiguate, or add a link to a disambiguation page, if there is no risk of confusion. Ask yourself: When a reader enters this term and pushes "Go", would they expect to view any of the articles listed on the disambiguation page? Disambiguation pages are not search indices -- do not add links that merely contain part of the page title where there is no significant risk of confusion.
Creating a Disambiguation Page and Disambiguation Structure
This section is a description of how the disambiguation process works in terms of the pages in GamerWiki. We will use the Tetris example in this section.
Let's say that a reader enters Tetris as the term in the search box and presses Go. There are now two scenarios.
1) The first is that the page they are presented with is the Tetris (Game Boy) page. This is the most commonly anticipated result for a search on Tetris, given that it is the most widely recognised version of the game. This decision should be reached through discussion on the relevant game Talk page. However, at the top of this article should be an entry in the form:
For other uses, see Tetris (disambiguation).
where Tetris (disambiguation) takes the reader to a page which displays links to all versions of Tetris in GamerWiki.
2) The second scenario is where there is not an identifiable common occurance of Tetris. In this case, the reader should be automatically redirected to a Tetris disambiguation page where a list of all versions of Tetris is displayed.
The format of the disambiguation page should be the most basic form possible. For example, the disamiguation page should be found at Tetris or [[Timesplitters: Future Perfect. ALL disambiguation pages should be tagged with {{disambig}}. This will insert the following text and add the page to the Disambiguation category:
External Wiki Links on Disambiguation
See Disambiguation at Wikipedia for more information.
