All The Tropes:Creating Disambiguation Pages: Difference between revisions

We follow Wikipedia's lead in resolving these conflicts by appending media types or other distinguishing information to the individual pages' names, and then listing all those pages on another page created under the common, "natural" name they share. This page is called a ''Disambiguation Page'' -- a non-article page containing links and information allowing the reader to distinguish between all the pages which share a name, and find the one he/she wants. (However, '''and this is important''', unlike Wikipedia we ''do not'' append "(disambiguation)" or anything similar to the name of the disambiguation page -- one of its purposes is to catch any unspecific links that exist in the wiki. Making it distinct from the "common name" would defeat that purpose.)

Unlike Wikipedia, we treat all cases of disambiguation equally; we do not select specific works or tropes as the "primary topic" (AKA the "main" page) for a given name and use [[Wikipedia:Hatnote|hatnotes]] to redirect to alternatives. The closest we come to this practice would be pages created for entire franchises, which although they are in themselves [[Works|works pages]], also include (or should, at least) a list of links to the individual works that make up the franchise. And even in cases like these, there can and should still be a disambiguation page created -- see [[Starship Troopers]] for an example. If you absolutely must consider one page to be the primary topic, then please treat the disambiguation page itself as the primary topic.

Although [[All The Tropes:Style Guide#Hatnotes|All The Tropes does not use Wikipedia-style hatnotes]], we do sometimes incorporate similar linking to alternate page choices in the main text of an article, usually just before the trope or example list, in a form like "If you're looking for the video game of the same name, go [[:Category:Video Game|here]]" or the infamous "Not to be confused with". Be careful with the latter usage, though, because it is often employed [[I Thought It Meant|for humorous purposes]]. These are sometimes referred to as "beltnotes", because they are halfway between hatnotes and footnotes.

If you see a hatnote on All The Tropes, feel free to change it to a "If you're looking for..." commentbeltnote. Even if a mod added the hatnote. (The mod should know better.)