Clashing Names

In an ideal world pages are set up so that a link to a page always takes you right to the intended page. So a page might say

Blah, blah, blah [[Jack Speer]], etc., etc.

and the link will take you to the important early fan, Jack Speer, that you expected. But what if there are multiple things with the same name? (E.g., "Minicon" is the name of at least five different things.)

Here's how we deal with that problem:

Naming Pages

First, each item gets its own page (except Grouped Things). The page names following the format name (modifier). The name is just the unadorned name. The modifier follows a fixed set of choices depending on what we're dealing with. (It's important for the modifier to be standardized, so that people can guess the right one the first time.)

For things which are geographical (Prozines, Conventions, Clubs, Locales, etc.) use the country or, for the US, the state. E.g., 'Unicon (UK)', 'Unicon (Australia)', 'Unicon (MD)'.

For a fanzine or apazine, use the last name of the primary editor. For a prozine, semiprozine, convention or a club use the area E.g., 'BEM (Ashworth)', 'BEM (Australia)', 'BEM (MA)'

Then page BEM (Ashworth) might start

{{DISPLAYTITLE:BEM}}

The DISPLAYTITLE is what appears at the top of the page and in links, so you just refer to [[BEM (Ashworth)]] and it will show BEM on the page.

In general, we use the unadorned name for whichever article happens to be entered here first. However, there are times when it makes more sense to rename the first entry because far more other pages link to another page.

It’s common for fanzines, clubs and other fannish institutions to take their names from fanspeak terms. In those instances, it’s best to arrange things so that the explanation of the word is titled with the plain term, while the things named after it get parenthetical modifiers. For example, Fanac, the fanzine, was changed to 'Fanac (Carr)' so that 'fanac', a common term, didn’t have to be written as 'fanac (fanspeak)' every time somebody used it.

Disambiguation

Even if we have 3 similar pages, one page (the most popular, or least easy to give a readable modifier to) can have the unadorned name, and each page can point to 2 others by adding

{{DISPLAYTITLE:BEM}}
(Did you mean a [[BEM (Ashworth)|Mal Ashworth fanzine]] or a [[BEM (Australia)|Australian clubzine]]?)

text...

to the top of the page.

Disambiguation Pages

But if there are 4 similar pages the above method is definitely too clumsy, and we make the unadorned name (just plain "Unicon") point to a disambiguation page, like this:

Did you mean:

* [[Unicon (UK)|British convention]]
* [[Unicon (Australia)|Australian convention]]
* [[Unicon (MD)|Maryland convention]]
* [[Unicon (CA)|Californian convention]]
* [[Unicon (KC)|Kansas City convention]]
* [[Unicon (FL)|Florida convention]]

Or do you know of yet another one!
{{choice}}

A disambiguation page will show all the incoming links to that page. We would like to correct all of the links to the disambiguation page to link directly to the proper destination page. This needs to be done by hand.

Then each entry can start with

{{DISPLAYTITLE:Unicon}}
(Did you mean a different [[Unicon]]?)

Grouped Things

If a club called Icarus published a clubzine called Icarus, or a fanzine called Icarus was published for a bit, then restarted with a different editor, just have one page and explain it all.