Disambiguation in Wikipedia is the process of resolving the conflicts that arise when a single term is ambiguous, and so may refer to more than one topic which Wikipedia covers. For example, the word "Mercury" can refer to an element, a planet, a Roman god, and many other things. There are three important aspects to disambiguation:
- Naming articles in such a way that each has a unique title. For example, three of the articles dealing with topics ordinarily called "Mercury" are titled Mercury (element), Mercury (planet) and Mercury (mythology).
- Making the links for ambiguous terms point to the correct article title. For example, an editor of an astronomy article may have created a link to Mercury, and this should be corrected to point to Mercury (planet).
- Ensuring that a reader who searches for a topic using a particular term can get to the information on that topic quickly and easily, whichever of the possible topics it might be. For example, the page titled Mercury is a disambiguation page – a non-article page which lists the various meanings of "Mercury" and links to the articles which cover them. (As discussed below, however, ambiguous terms do not always
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require a disambiguation page.)