Extension:Disambiguator

MediaWiki extensions manual

Disambiguator Release status: stable
Implementation	Special page
Description	Enables the designation of disambiguation pages with a magic word
Author(s)	Ryan Kaldari (Kaldaritalk)
Latest version	Continuous updates
Compatibility policy	Snapshots releases along with MediaWiki. Master is not backward compatible.
MediaWiki	1.28+
PHP	5.4+
License	MIT License
Download	Download extension Git [?]: Download Git master browse repository (GitHub) commit history repository contributors (GitHub) code review
Help	Help:Extension:Disambiguator
Parameters $wgDisambiguatorIndicateLinks
Hooks used AncientPagesQuery ChangeTagsListActive EditPage::showEditForm:initial GetDoubleUnderscoreIDs GetLinkColours LinksUpdateComplete ListDefinedTags LonelyPagesQuery RandomPageQuery RecentChange_save ShortPagesQuery wgQueryPages
Quarterly downloads	55 (Ranked 85th)
Public wikis using	6,730 (Ranked 31st)
Translate the Disambiguator extension if it is available at translatewiki.net
Issues	Open tasks · Report a bug

The Disambiguator extension is designed to make disambiguation pages easier to work with programmatically. It allows you to designate all disambiguation pages with the __DISAMBIG__ magic word (or an equivalent alias), which then marks them as such in the database. This allows other extensions to optionally handle disambiguation pages as a separate class of page, although they are still considered "normal" pages.

Installation

• Download and move the extracted Disambiguator folder to your extensions/ directory.
  Developers and code contributors should install the extension from Git instead, using:cd extensions/
git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/extensions/Disambiguator
• Add the following code at the bottom of your LocalSettings.php file:

  wfLoadExtension( 'Disambiguator' );
  

• Configure as required.
•  Done – Navigate to Special:Version on your wiki to verify that the extension is successfully installed.

Configuration

The following configuration variables can be set from your LocalSettings.php file.

• $wgDisambiguatorIndicateLinks - whether to add a 'mw-disambig' CSS class to links to disambiguation pages (default is true)
• $wgDisambiguatorNotifications - whether to warn the user when they type a link to a disambiguation page in wikitext editors (default is false)

Features

Disambiguator provides the following features:

• Programmatic identification of disambiguation pages via the __DISAMBIG__ magic word
• New special pages for listing all disambiguation pages and pages linking to disambiguation pages
• New API functions equivalent to the above special pages as well as an API function for querying whether or not a page is a disambiguation page
• Modifies Special:LonelyPages to ignore disambiguation pages
• Modifies Special:Random to ignore disambiguation pages (requires MediaWiki 1.26.0)
• If VisualEditor is enabled, allows marking a page as a disambiguation page via the page properties interface
• If VisualEditor is enabled, shows whether a page is a disambiguation page or not in the link inspector
• If VisualEditor is enabled, shows whether a page is a disambiguation page or not in the link dialog
• If configured, adds a 'mw-disambig' CSS class to links to disambiguation pages (See #Configuration above)
• Warns a WikiEditor user when linking to a disambiguation page, and allows them to fix the link.

Usage

For end-user help, see: Help:Extension:Disambiguator.

On wiki

Once Disambiguator is installed, the best way to use it is to add the __DISAMBIG__ magic word to a template that is then included in all of your disambiguation pages.

Once the magic word is in place, your disambiguation pages will all have the 'disambiguation' page property assigned to them in the database. This property resides in the page_props table.

You will also have two new Special pages :

• Special:DisambiguationPages - which lists all the disambiguation pages on your wiki.
• Special:DisambiguationPageLinks - which lists all of the pages on your wiki that link to disambiguation pages. (This is a replacement for the old Special:Disambiguations page which is deprecated.)

With API

To list all the disambiguation pages:

api.php?action=query&list=querypage&qppage=DisambiguationPages

To list all the disambiguation page links:

api.php?action=query&list=querypage&qppage=DisambiguationPageLinks

Note that on wikis running in MiserMode (all WMF wikis), both the special page and API interface for DisambiguationPageLinks are limited to a certain number of results (typically 1000–5000).

To see if an individual page is a disambiguation page:

api.php?action=query&titles=Bug&prop=pageprops&ppprop=disambiguation

If it is a disambiguation page it will include 'disambiguation' in its pageprops. Note that the disambiguation pageprop, if present, will have its value set to an empty string, so be careful about testing it as a boolean.

SQL

To see if an individual page is a disambiguation page, check the page_props table for the presence of a pp_propname = 'disambiguation'. Pages that are not disambiguation pages will not have this pp_propname. The pp_value isn't important.

SELECT page_title, pp_propname
FROM page
LEFT JOIN page_props ON pp_page = page_id AND pp_propname = 'disambiguation'
WHERE page_namespace = 0
AND page_title IN ('John', 'COVID-19') -- John is a disambiguation page on enwiki, COVID-19 is not

Possible future plans

• Add an option to hide disambiguation pages from: Special:AllPages (task #9936), Special:PrefixIndex (task #11319), Special:WhatLinksHere (task #9935), Special:AncientPages (task #76287)
• Consider extending link dialog in wikitext editor with ability to detect disambigs in search results and pull a list of links
• Complete list of bugs for this extension