Help:Disambiguation

Disambiguation pages are used as a process of resolving conflicts in article titles that occur when a single term can be associated with more than one topic, making that term likely to be the natural title for more than one article. In other words, disambiguations are paths leading to different articles which could, in principle, have the same title.

Suppose the user was searching for 'Parent'. He could be seeking the Parent property, but he should also be seeking information about parent accounts. In this case, because of technical restrictions explained below, the page would have to redirect to the parent property's page, but if we had ignored this restriction, we would have created a disambiguation page.

There are three principal disambiguation scenarios:

• A page is a disambiguation page, leading to all the alternative uses of the title.
• The page is about one usage, or redirects to a page that is about one usage, which is called the primary topic. In such cases, the {{redirect}} or the {{rellink}} template should be used at the top of the page to guide readers to a disambiguation page that lists alternative uses. (disambiguation pages usually end with "(disambiguation)")
• The page is about the primary topic or redirects to a page that is about the primary topic and there is only one other use. The other use, since there is only one, is linked directly to using the {{redirect}} or the {{rellink}} template without any disambiguation page.

Occasionally, readers may follow a link which ends up at a disambiguation page rather than at one of the links shown on that page. The original page can be edited to ensure the link goes directly to its intended destination.

Technical restrictions

Because of the way the object documentation system is currently set up in this wiki and because of the amount of pages that will assume API names to redirect to their documentation page, all the names of objects and of members of objects must redirect to their documentation page, and this, even if they are unlikely to be what the user is searching for. In all cases where the user could have been seeking another page, the {{redirect}} template should be used to indicate the other article to the user.

Technical limitations

Because of the way the object documentation system and the templates that it is composed of are currently set up, there is nothing which can be done if, for example, a property and an object have the same name, or if a method and an event have the same name. This is a limitation which fixing would require changing lots of pages; not much can be done about it. However, if there are two properties, methods or events with the same name, they should be separated in subpages of the property, event or method page, and the method page should present them both. The object documentation system currently has ways of supporting such particularities, and it is currently possible to make it give different links than the usual links to make it give a link to the correct page.