User:Retep998/DisProposal

I propose to overhaul the way pages are disambiguated. Currently we do  and furthermore we only disambiguate when another mod has an item with the same name. My proposal involves changing this to  and to _always_ disambiguate, even if there are no other mods that have items with the same name. Disambiguation pages will still exist when there are two or more mods that have items with the same name.

Advantages

 * Because pages are always disambiguated to begin with, it saves the work of having to disambiguate the page. So many edits to navboxes are just updating links to disambiguated versions every time another mod adds a similarly named item.
 * Many templates currently have to deal with whether a given article is disambiguated. Under this proposal there would be a single consistent scheme and templates would be simpler as a result.
 * It is easy to view all pages with a given prefix.
 * OreDicted tiles (O) always link to the right location. Under the current system, a large portion of OreDict entries link to the wrong location– most often, this is a disambiguation page. For example, links to Toast, when instead each individual entry should link to their proper article.

Disadvantages

 * Involves moving almost every article and updating numerous links and templates and even the extensions.

Steps to enact this proposal
As long as these steps are followed there should be no breakage while the new system is implemented.


 * 1) Move all pages to their new locations leaving redirects behind.
 * 2) Update the tilesheet and oredict extensions to always link to the disambiguated versions using the new system.
 * 3) Update all the templates to the new system.
 * 4) Update all links across the wiki to point to the new locations, and get rid of unused dis parameters and unify NI and NID.
 * 5) Delete the redirects.

Adding a page under the current system

 * 1) Check if   already exists for a different mod. If not, skip steps 2, 3, 4, and 6.
 * 2) Move the existing page to.
 * 3) Create a disambiguation page at.
 * 4) Find all links to   and update them, either by adding , removing  , or changing NI usages to NID.
 * 5) Create.
 * 6) Add About to   and.
 * 7) Check each link on   to see whether it goes to the right place and add   and   as needed.

Adding a page under the proposed system

 * 1) Create.
 * 2) If   does not yet exist, create a redirect to , otherwise change the redirect to a disambiguation page, or add a new entry to the existing disambiguation.
 * 3) If   is a disambiguation page, add About to the   you just created and also the   if you turned a redirect into a disambiguation in the previous step.

It would be possible to write a bot to automatically handle steps 2 and 3 very easily due to the consistent scheme.