Terraria Wiki talk:Style guide/Disambiguation
Disambiguation style guide
Most of Wikipedia's style guide already matched most of our pages (which makes sense, since a disambiguation page wouldn't change much across any wiki) but I included some guidelines that aren't applied on this wiki and added some that aren't on the Wikipedia guideline, so here is a brief list of changes that would be applied to all pages.
Changes from the Wikipedia style guide to match our current wiki pages:
- Including the
{{disambig}}template. - Each listed point should include the
{{item}}template, to display the appropriate icon and version icons. - Recommended order for entries based on the game entity type.
New additions to disambiguation pages (to be discussed):
- Similar terms that could be confused but not ambiguous should be under "See also" (e.g Lime Kelp on Seaweed).
- The
{{look from}}and{{in title}}templates to be added in the "See also" section which would link to the search page for all pages which include part of the ambiguous term (see Wikipedia pages for the template documentation). For example, Gold ambiguous term (which would likely only be for the ore, bar, coin and dye - possibly Pot o' Gold) would not list all non-ambiguous terms (all other words which have "gold" in the name) but have a mention in the "see also" section for the search link to all articles about those. - Primary topics to be better assigned, and separated from the list of ambiguations.
- Shortening descriptions - enough description to differentiate the ambiguous terms is enough, source and effects are unnecessary here.
- Removing links on entry descriptions. This is probably the most controversial change, but links in descriptions don't help to disambiguate the listed terms - for example, if someone is searching for seaweed and finds that seaweed could either be a pet summoning item, a background sprite or a junk item, linking to the fishing, pet summoning, jungle crate and ambiant objects is very unnecessary as those are likely not the pages the reader were searching for, and those can be found on the described term's page in the intro line anyways.
Changes to be made to a minority of pages (to add consistency):
- Using the same punctuation for entries (e.g. "Item name, a decorative item").
- Sections (and a proper order) on long pages.
- ...and a few other small changes on some oddball pages.
Note that aside from the first few listed changes, everything else is already a part of and stress tested on Wikipedia. Disambiguation pages shouldn't serve a different purpose just because we are a smaller wiki, so aside the niche usages that really don't match Terraria Wiki which I already dropped, most of these changes I believe would be beneficial here. — Dig494 09:39, 15 July 2020 (UTC)