Back in December, there was discussion about needing a better method of identifying disambiguation pages programmatically (bug 6754). I wrote some core code to accomplish this, but was informed that disambiguation functions should reside in extensions rather than in core, per bug 35981. I abandoned the core code and wrote an extension instead (https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/41043/). Now, however, it has been suggested that this code needs to reside in core after all (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Suggestions_for_extensions_to_be_integrated#E...).

Personally, I don't mind implementing it either way, but would like to have consensus on where this code should reside. The code is pretty clean and lightweight, so it wouldn't increase the footprint of core MediaWiki (it would actually decrease the existing footprint slightly since it replaces more hacky existing core code). So core bloat isn't really an issue. The issue is: Where does it most make sense for disambiguation features to reside? Should disambiguation pages be supported out of the box or require an extension to fully support?

The specific disambiguation features I'm talking about are: 1. Make it easy to identify disambiguation pages via a page property in the database (set by a templated magic word) 2. Provide a special page (and corresponding API) for seeing what pages are linking to disambiguation pages 3. Assign a unique class to disambiguation links so that gadgets can allow them to be uniquely colored or have special UI (not yet implemented)

Ryan Kaldari