Wikipedia:Broad-concept article

This page documents an English Wikipedia editing guideline. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though occasional exceptions may apply. Any substantive edit to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

Shortcuts WP:BCA WP:BROAD WP:BROADCONCEPT WP:BROADSUBJECT

This page in a nutshell: A term with many related meanings should be presented as an article on the broadest understanding of the term, rather than as a disambiguation page merely listing variations on that meaning.

A broad-concept article is an article that addresses a concept that may be difficult to write about because it is abstract, or because it covers the sometimes-amorphous relationship between a wide range of related concepts. Due to the difficulty of explaining this relationship (and the comparative ease of merely listing articles to which the title relates), editors often create disambiguation pages for such titles, even though there is an unambiguous meaning that can be discerned from the relationship between the listed topics.

However, if the primary meaning of a term proposed for disambiguation is a broad concept or type of thing that is capable of being described in an article, and a substantial portion of the links asserted to be ambiguous are instances or examples of that concept or type, then the page located at that title should be an article describing it, and not a disambiguation page. Where the primary topic of a term is a general topic that can be divided into subtopics, such as chronologically (e.g., History of France) or geographically (e.g., Rugby union in the British Isles), the unqualified title should contain an article about the general topic rather than a disambiguation page.

A disambiguation page should not be created just because it is difficult to write an article on a topic that is broad, vague, abstract, or highly conceptual. Where there are additional meanings that are not instances or examples of a "Foo" primary concept or type, those should be included on a "Foo (disambiguation)" page.