Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/Guide

A guide to dealing with disambiguation pages with links, applied at Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links and Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages maintenance.

This is a collection of tips and tricks discovered by experienced disambiguators in their bitter rounds. Anyone is welcome to add to it: none of us knows it all except BD2412.

What to do if the link doesn't appear on the page

If you find a page that simply doesn't contain the name of the linked article, go ahead and hit Edit anyway, then try to find the link in the edit box. The cause is usually piped links. If you are disambiguating Vatican, for example, and the page doesn't have the word Vatican in a link anywhere, do your ctrl+F again in the edit box and you'll find the culprit is something like Holy See - which does link to Vatican on closer examination ( [[Vatican|Holy See]] ).

What to do if the link doesn't appear in the edit box

It may be part of a template that the linking page is transcluding; you'll have to work out which template it is and edit the template accordingly.
It may be linked via a redirect; the What Links Here page should tell you about this, and you'll need to search for the link to the redirect instead.
Very occasionally, the links database seems to get confused, and will insist that a page links to another when demonstrably it doesn't. If this is the case, try saving an unchanged version of the page; this usually fixes the problem. If the phony link remains, skip the page and leave a note on dam page.
Links occasionally appear in hidden sections (search for click show)
A last resort is to view HTML source (ctrl-U in most browsers), search for /Example" (or occasionally /Example#), as in <a href="/enwiki/wiki/Example">, note surrounding text, and search for that in the edit box.
[[John Doe]] has been linked as [[John_Doe]].
Some templates don't make it clear that they are linking automatically. See Disambiguating links made by templates below for a non-exhaustive list.
Some templates split human names into given name and surname. You have to search for one or other part to find what's generating the link. Examples include:
- {{sortname|John|Doe}} creates the link [[John Doe]]. A third parameter is needed to correct the bad link; e.g., {{sortname|John|Doe|John Doe (anonymous)}}.
- {{sortname}} has a special trap. {{sortname|John|Doe||John Doe (anonymous)}} ignores the fourth parameter, and links to [[John Doe]]. Just remove the double pipe.
- American football player templates. These often split names into |first= and |last=. The solution is usually |d= American football (or, position played) or |dab= John Doe (qualifier). Check before saving.
- Basketball player templates. These often split names into |first= and |last=. The solution is usually |dab= basketball (or, basketball, born XXXX). Check before saving.

Caveats

If a large number of links to a single disambiguation page appear all of a sudden, this is usually a sign of a recent event like a page move, topic restructuring or the retargetting of a prominent redirect. Often enough these get reverted, so it's best not to hurry fixing the links. If after a few days this no reverts have occurred, and there are no indications on the involved articles' talk pages of ongoing discussions that could lead to a revert, then you can proceed to fix the links.
It's best to allow a week or so before fixing a dablink found within newly contributed text. Very often such text turns out to be problematic in more fundamental ways (e.g. it might not be reliably sourced or it might represent a partisan point of view) and it takes time for editors with subject expertise to review such additions. There's no need to waste time fine-tuning a piece of text that will end up getting thrown away.

Tools

Tools to make fixing the disambiguation pages easier and more efficient.

Bots

m:Solve disambiguation.py exists under the m:Pywikipedia bot framework.
In the event of a dab link on a template being cleared, there will exist many "false positives" - "What links here" entries that don't actually link to the dab. Blank saving can fix this and the bot m:Touch.py can automate the process. Request for false positives to be cleared on the talk.

Editor's techniques

Below is a collection of various methods utilised by WP:DPL contributors.

Guide To Efficient Disambiguation

The following Guide to Efficient Disambiguation was originally established on the main project talk page by Agentsoo. It was then greatly enhanced by contributions by Veledan and Flowerparty, and continuing contributions from Agentsoo.

Use CorHomo (or Wikipedia Cleaner) if possible, it will make everything much easier. The following suggestions only apply if you are doing the editing without its help.
Clear your cache. Now visit the disambiguation page, and read it carefully. The more of the options you can remember, the easier it will be to disambiguate, so it's worth reading it several times. You may also wish to keep the disambiguation page open as a separate page, if your browser supports this. Your objective is efficient but correct disambiguation. The latter criterion is the more important.
Click 'What Links Here' in the toolbox on the left, and it will show you the first 50 pages that link here. Often, a fair number of these will be redirects, or User:, Talk: or Wikipedia: pages. Whether you want to fix User pages is up to you; typically we don't, because they are of lesser importance and do not count towards the project's statistics. We don't fix Talk pages.
For the next stage, it is worth using a browser that supports tabs (such as Firefox or Opera), as this will save you quite a bit of time. Click down the list of pages, opening each in a new tab. It's up to you how many pages you are going to fix in one batch. 25 to 50 is reasonable, although your browser may become sluggish if you open too many. In Firefox, the "Mouse Gestures" extension, which allows you to open a large number of links in tabs simultaneously, may be useful.
By the time you finish opening those tabs, the first one should have finished loading. Scan the first paragraph; often you will see the link you are trying to fix right there. If so, click the Edit This Page link or (more efficiently) change your preferences to enable "Edit pages on double click" (under the Edit section), then just double click. The link should be distinctive as the only visited link on the page; it will be purple in the default skin. If you don't see it immediately, use your browser's Find function (probably Ctrl+F) to search for the relevant word. Once you find it, click the Edit button for the particular section. Editing only the relevant section is easier on the servers and will likely cause the page to load faster.
While the first edit page is loading, switch to the next tab, and again find the relevant link. Repeat this along the list of tabs. By the time you start loading the last Edit page, the first one should have finished loading, so switch back to it.
Now you have to find the link inside the edit box. This can be harder than it sounds. Internet Explorer's Find function will find the relevant term inside the edit box; Firefox's won't, although the Highlight feature will (for some reason). In Firefox, you can hold Ctrl and hit F and then Enter to quickly enable highlighting; the link should now leap out at you.
Now for the fun part! You have to decide where to send the link to. Most of the time, this is not difficult, although sometimes it will require some thought. If you are unsure where to link to, leave a note on the Talk page - I am continually surprised at how quickly other Wikipedians respond to these notes and make the appropriate fix.
If the link is unsolvable - this is, if the context provided on the page leaves no cues from which it can be solved, and a search of external sources provides no help - consider whether the link is necessary to the page at all. It is perfectly acceptable to unlink a term if the link itself serves no encyclopedic purpose.
Keeping the "disambiguation link repair (You can help!)" message on your clipboard, ready to paste into the Edit Summary box, can be really helpful. This is probably the way that we recruit the greatest number of helpers, so it's well worth doing, and it saves you the trouble of summarising your edit yourself. For the user in a hurry: In Firefox, you can edit the article, hit Tab, End, then hold Ctrl and rapidly hit V, Enter, Tab, F, Enter; this will paste the message into the Edit Box, submit the page, switch to the next tab and highlight the appropriate links.
Work your way through the tabs, editing each one appropriately.
Once you're done, close all the tabs, refresh the What Links Here tab, and enjoy that wonderful feeling of altruism! Occasionally, you will see the same page appear again; this means that the page linked to the disambiguation page more than once. This is quite rare, so just open the page again and fix any other links.

Use more than one buffer

If you have access to more than one clipboard buffer use them. One buffer will probably have the "You can help!" message in it. But if your system supports a secondary buffer (or more), keeping the most common option from the disambiguation page there can also save a lot of time. For instance if you use Firefox under the X Window System, the browser has one buffer and text copied with the mouse another.

Again the most important thing here is to choose the best option, so take care not to let the presence of one option in the buffer influence your choice.

Making the right choice

Making the right choice for a disambiguation link repair does not always mean selecting one of the options presented on the disambiguation page. If a link is not helpful in an article it can be de-linked. On disambiguation pages themselves, excess wikilinks are undesirable (not least because they make using a bot to fix the disambiguations more difficult) and should be removed anyway. Useful guideline:

Wikipedia:Only make links that are relevant to the context

Disambiguating links made by templates

Some templates generate wikilinks from their parameters in a way which works in most cases but requires special care for qualified titles. This page details some techniques which can be used to fix incorrectly generated links, especially those which lead to disambiguation pages.

Linked text can often be replaced by a piped link, even if the original text was not formatted as a link. This works because the template surrounds the text by square brackets only if matches a page title, leaving it as plain text otherwise. We can abuse this feature by making the "plain" text a piped wikilink. Example fix: Bids for the 2006 Winter Olympics.

Countries

{{Infobox country}} links to related articles in a consistent but complicated way. The resulting title is not always occupied by the desired article, especially when multiple countries share a common name such as "Virgin Islands".

For national flags and symbols, the target can be overridden with |flag_type_article= and |symbol_type_article=. Example fix: British Virgin Islands. The "Government" link can be changed with |politics_link=. That subtitle cannot easily be unlinked. If there is no relevant article than one option is a harmless target such as Government. Example fix: Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea.

Infobox country is also used via several redirects such as Infobox former country.

Hatnotes and the like

More-or-less justifiable links to DAB pages are often found in hatnotes and other common templates such as {{main}}. All seem to accept the pseudo-pipe {{!}}, e.g. {{other people|John Doe (disambiguation){{!}}John Doe}}. And if they don't, they should. Report any that don't at Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation pages with links.

Journals

The |abbreviation= field in {{Infobox journal}} looks for a page with that name. If it finds it, it doesn't link to it; but instead creates a blacklink in the subject article and a spurious link in Special/What links here in the target DAB page. Solution: add the undocumented field |bypass-rcheck=yes to the infobox.

Languages

Several templates assumes that X language is an article about, or a redirect to, the language named X. This assumption is generally true, and Module:Lang/data now handles the sole exception: Ligurian. It is coded flexibly so that other exceptions can be added by a template editor. Some templates accept an ISO 639 code rather than a name, e.g. lij for Ligurian.

Railway stations

Railway station templates deal well with disambiguation. Although they make assumptions about the exact format of article titles, those assumptions are generally true, or at least there is a redirect from the assumed title. Simple example: {{Rws|Newport}} → Newport but {{Rws|Newport|Essex}} → Newport.

Dab solver

The Dab solver tool may automatically replace station templates by simple wikilinks, without making it obvious that the original text used templates. Rail editors are particularly keen that their templates not be expanded in that way. To avoid conflict when using Dab solver for railway stations, please view changes before saving, as well as using a preview.

Station

Template {{Station}}, usually abbreviated to stn, takes one unnamed parameter in the obvious way: {{Stn|Richmond}} → Richmond. Unusually, disambiguation is provided by the third parameter, e.g. {{Stn|Richmond||London}} → Richmond. Beware that adding any value as the second parameter capitalises the word Station instead: {{Stn|Richmond|London}} → Richmond.

Adjacent stations

Many station articles show the next and previous station on each line using {{S-line}}. This template accepts |state1= to disambiguate the left station and |state2= to disambiguate the right station.

{{s-rail-start}}
{{s-rail|title=National Rail}}
{{s-line|system=National Rail |line=Without state |previous=Ashford |next=Swinton}}
{{s-line|system=National Rail |line=With state |previous=Ashford |next=Swinton |state1=Surrey |state2=Greater Manchester }}
{{s-end}}

Preceding station		National Rail		Following station
Ashford		Without state		Swinton
Ashford		With state		Swinton

The UK variant {{S-rail-national}} behaves similarly except that its disambiguation parameters are called |county1= and |county2=.

The newer {{Station link}}, which usually appears as its redirect stl, has a different solution. We need to edit Lua code in "Module:Adjacent stations/X", where X is the code after stl. For example, Line 21 (Guangzhou Metro) was linking to dab Changping station. The cause is {{GZM stations|Changping}}, which is a wrapper around {{stl|GZM|Changping}}. Looking up the code "GZM" gives us Module:Adjacent stations/GZM. That module consists of a require statement (Lua's equivalent of a soft redirect), telling us that this edit fixes the problem.

End of line stations

The station at the end of a line, typically prefixed by "toward" or "towards", may link to a dab. If the article uses s-line, a solution is:

View the article's source and identify the {{s-line|system=σ|line=λ|…}} template corresponding to the rogue link, noting the text represented by σ and λ.
View Template:S-line/σ left/λ or Template:S-line/σ right/λ, depending which end of the line contains the link; its text should be a station abbreviation α.
Edit Template:σ stations, adding or updating the entry beginning with α=. (If appropriate, consider carefully updating a generic entry instead.)

Example fix: Template:MILW stations. Chicago Union Station linked to Tacoma instead of Tacoma, Washington. Here, system σ is "MILW", the bad link was on the left and line λ is "main", so {{S-line/MILW left/main}} reveals the station abbreviation α as "Seattle or Tacoma".

Road junctions

The road junction template {{Jct}} has an undocumented |nolink=y parameter, intended to permit plain text with no wikilink. It can be abused to supply a piped link: |city2=[[Town, Area|Town]]. This technique also works with clones such as {{Jcon}} (JunCtion ONtario). Example fix: Ontario Highway 417.

Sort

{{sort|John Doe}} generates the link [[John Doe]].

To disambiguate the link, add a qualified and linked second parameter: {{sort|John Doe|[[John Doe (anonymous)]]}}.

To blacklink, add a qualified and unlinked second parameter: {{sort|John Doe|John Doe}}

Taxonomy

Each taxon X has a template called {{Taxonomy/X}}, which can be viewed by clicking the red pencil icon on the right side of the "Scientific classification" line of the taxobox. Its |link= parameter is set to the contents of the link, excluding the square brackets. Normally this is a simple name such as |link=Mollusca. It can be set to a piped version such as |link=Kalinga (gastropod)|Kalinga. Example fix: Template:Taxonomy/Kalinga. Note the use of a literal | rather than {{!}}. You might expect this edit to set link to "Kalinga (gastropod)" and add a useless unnamed parameter "Kalinga" but, due to some magic, it works.

Topic and place

Links such as Communism in India and Military of Libya can result from templates which apply similar text manipulation to a category of places. For example, Communism in Korea uses {{Asia topic|Communism in}}, which forms links by prefixing each Asian nation by "Communism in ". Such links usually lead to articles but can exceptionally lead to a dab. In general, this problem is unsolved. Converting the disambiguation page to a BCA or SIA may be appropriate in some cases. Otherwise, this problem is not yet solved.

Wikidata labels

Some templates use Wikidata to identify related items, such as the riders in a cycling race, and attempt to link to the Wikipedia articles associated with those items. Unfortunately, a workaround for a different problem causes some of these links to be incorrect.

A Wikidata item can be associated with a Wikipedia article but not with a redirect. (Wikidata reached a consensus to allow redirects and recently discussed the matter again, but is still configured to prevent redirects from being associated.) Some templates have developed a workaround whereby, if the Wikidata item has no associated article, the item's English label is used. Sometimes that label matches a redirect to the relevant Wikipedia article. Sometimes it matches an unrelated article. Sometimes, as in the case of Q56883920, it leads to a dab.

A fix is to change the Wikidata label to a title not used in Wikipedia, if that can be done without disrupting Wikidata. A more drastic solution, as used at Archaeologist, is to briefly replace the Wikipedia redirect page by a dummy article, associate that article with the item, then revert to the redirect. Certain templates can be fixed in specific ways. However, the general solution to this problem is for Wikidata to implement its decision to unblock redirects so that Wikipedia's template workarounds can be removed.