User:Jeff02/How we disambiguate on Wikipedia

Naming an article on Wikipedia is not always easy. The name must conform to Wikipedia's naming conventions, and even if it does, it can still cause a naming conflict. One common type of naming conflict is when two or more things share the same name. When this occurs, disambiguation is necessary, but the question is: How is disambiguation supposed to be done on Wikipedia? By looking at many articles, the answer may seem to be simple: Disambiguate by putting a term inside a set of parentheses after the title. An example of this being Gay Street (Baltimore), which uses "(Baltimore)" to distinguish it from other streets named Gay Street. However, according to Wikipedia's guidelines, this isn't the only, nor even the primary way to disambiguate the titles of articles.

According to guidelines

According to WP:DAB#Naming_the_specific_topic_articles, if a more complete name exists for something, that name should be used. Failing that, a term inside parentheses should be placed after the ambiguous name. Another option is to use an adjective to clarify the article title. The guideline also states that it is generally preferred to reword the title in some way to avoid the parenthetical method.

Examples

For an example of this style of disambiguation used on Wikipedia, consider the title Bay Bridge. Since there are a number of bridges that are commonly called the Bay Bridge, the link goes to a disambiguation page. To simplify this example, consider only the bridges in Maryland and California. Both have more complete names: Chesapeake Bay Bridge and San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, so there is no need to resort to calling them Bay Bridge (Maryland) and Bay Bridge (California). Per Wikipedia's guidelines, both articles are located at the more complete names as opposed to the parenthesized names. Other examples of this include bread roll instead of roll (bread), William C. C. Claiborne instead of William Claiborne (governor), Maryland Route 2 instead of Route 2 (Maryland), and Wilmington, Delaware instead of Wilmington (Delaware). Gay Street (Baltimore) is an example of an article which has a title (Gay Street) that does not have a common convention for disambiguation, so we resort to using parentheses.

Rationale

Article titles on Wikipedia should strive to be consistent with names used elsewhere for the same topics. If the town in Maryland called "Columbia" is commonly disambiguated against other things named "Columbia" by calling it Columbia, Maryland, then Wikipedia should follow that convention instead of calling it Columbia (Maryland). The reason is that since a common convention for disambiguating the names of towns already exists, it looks more natural to the reader for the title to be consistent with that convention instead of using parentheses. In general, we should try to use whatever name, and style of disambiguation is most natural, rather than try to create and impose a universal disambiguation style across all topics. In a way, attempting to introduce parentheses as a universal style of disambiguation could even be seen as a form of original research.

Conclusion

When trying to find out a way to disambiguate the name of a topic, see how that topic's name is commonly disambiguated against other things that have the same name as it. If there is such a common unambiguous name, use that name; if there is no such name, use parenthetical disambiguation.