Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/Guide
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A guide to dealing with disambiguation pages with links, applied at Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links and Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages maintenance
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[edit] 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 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]] ).
[edit] What to do if the link doesn't appear in the edit box
- It may be part of a template that the page is transcluding; you'll have to work out which template it is and edit that 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.
[edit] Tools
Tools to make fixing the disambiguation pages easier and more efficient.
[edit] 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 postives to be cleared on the talk.
[edit] Editor's techniques
Below is a collection of various methods utilised by WP:DPL contributors.
[edit] 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 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 simulaneously, 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 this notes and make the appropriate fix.
- 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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:
