Battlestar Wiki:Standards and Conventions/Disambiguations

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This part of the standards and guidelines project covers disambiguations, as well as the disambiguation page aids used on Battlestar Wiki.

Article Disambiguation

Because each of the Battlestar Galactica TV series reuses ship names, character names, episode titles and other terminology, it is occasionally necessary to write articles covering the same thing in different continuities.

When this is the case, an individual article should be used for each series.

Articles should be namespaced according to the following schema:

• (TOS) - Original Series
• (1980) - Galactica 1980
• (RDM) - Re-imagined Series & Caprica
• (2003 Video Game) - 2003 Video Game
• (2007 Video Game) - 2007 Video Game
• (SDS) - Ill-fated Singer/DeSanto continuation project
• (TSC) - Richard Hatch's "Second Coming" attempt

The names of the two TV series themselves can be differentiated by:

• [[Re-imagined Series]], for the 2004 Battlestar Galactica series
• [[Original Series]], for the original 1978 series

On the Battlestar Wiki, "Re-imagined Series" and "Original Series" are considered proper names for easier cross-reference and clarification, and should be capitalized as shown. Two other variations are "re-imagined Battlestar Galactica" and "original Battlestar Galactica, which should not be capitalized, since they are not proper nouns.

Because of the popularity of the new series as well as the volume of articles related to the Re-imagined Series, the use of the link [[Galactica]] will lead to the Galactica (RDM) article on the new series' battlestar. A disambiguation header always appears on this article for the two other ship articles on Galactica. The same is true for Pegasus.

The non-namespaced article should serve as a disambiguation page, pointing to the related articles.

Examples of this in use are:

• Pegasus (TOS) vs. Pegasus (RDM) (disambiguation at Pegasus)
• Adama (TOS) vs. William Adama vs. Lee Adama (disambiguation at Adama)

Pages for characters that appear in more than one series should reserve the name in common for disambiguation (Cf. Adama, Baltar, etc.), but individual pages need not be tagged with the series name if there is sufficient information in the title otherwise so as to be disambiguous (Cf. Gaius Baltar vs. Baltar (TOS) or William Adama vs. Adama (TOS)).

Child articles of a disambiguation page should have a note applied at the top of the page (before everything, even the character template, etc.) linking back to the disambiguation page and its most relevant sister disambiguations. Keep the disambiguation links literal to make them distinctive. That is, don't change [[Baltar (TOS)]] to [[Baltar (TOS)|Baltar]]. This note should be preceded by a single tab and be in all italics. An example from Gaius Baltar's article:

This page discusses the unwitting betrayer of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol in the Re-imagined Series. For information on the Original Series character that intentionally betrays the Twelve Colonies of Man, see Baltar (TOS).

Disambiguation Pages

Disambiguation pages are navigational aids that typically list terms with the same name, or similar name, such as this one on the name "Adama".

Disambiguation pages follow a basic format: an introductory sentence, with the disambiguation term boldfaced, followed by one-sentence bullet points about each article that shares that name, and ended with the {{disambig}} template.

If such disambiguation pages cover multiple articles that are in two or more series, then each series should have its own section headers, with the appropriate terms underneath.

All bullet points must end in a full stop, namely a period.

Further, disambiguation pages should not be categorized in any way, shape or form since they are only navigational aids, and not articles themselves!