What's wrong with links to disambiguation pages?

Links to disambiguation pages are generally wrong; they are intended to go to some page with a more specific title that can be found on the disambiguation page.

For example, where an editor writes "Captain [[John Smith]] is remembered for his role in establishing the English settlement of Jamestown", they don't intend to create a link to the disambiguation page John Smith, but to the article John Smith (explorer). This is remedied using piped links: "Captain [[John Smith (explorer)|John Smith]] is remembered for his role in establishing the English settlement of Jamestown"

Does every article that links to a disambiguation page get this template?

No. This template is only placed on articles that have a large number of links to disambiguation pages, currently defined as 7 dablinks or more.

How do I fix dablinks?

Generally, with one of the following tools to help:

Link Classifier is a script that color-codes certain types of wikilinks in an article, such as redirects, disambiguation links, articles up for deletion, etc. By default runs automatically, but can also be set up to run on demand following the usage instructions. Disambiguation links will have a yellow background like this. See the legend for other kinds of links. Note that Link Classifier has been testing extensively only in the MonoBook skin, but may still work fine in the default skin which as of 2020^[update] and since 2010 is Vector.
Navigation popups with the popupFixDabs flag set to true makes it easier to fix disambiguation links in a Wikipedia article. Once you've enabled popups in Special:Preferences, go to your javascript config file and add the following line (but without any leading space).
```
window.popupFixDabs=true;
```
Then, when you mouse over a dablink, the popup will show your options. Pick the correct article from the list of links in green at the bottom of the popup.

What if there's no article to link to?

Let's say your article links to John Smith, yet it should really link to an article about John Smith, who is a ballet dancer, but that article does not exist. To solve this, simply create the redlink John Smith (dancer). (See WP:PRECISION in Article titles for how to best name a redlink.)

But that link is supposed to go to the disambig!

Links should almost always go to an article instead of a disambiguation page. Most exceptions are in the case of See also sections and hatnotes such as ((otheruses)). But in rare cases, an in-article disambiguation link is correct. For example: "Captain [[John Smith (explorer)|John Smith]] is one of many people named [[John Smith]]." In this case, the link to the John Smith disambiguation page is intentional, so we mark it as such by making use of the (disambiguation) redirect: "Captain [[John Smith (explorer)|John Smith]] is one of many people named [[John Smith (disambiguation)|John Smith]]." This would no longer come up in the reports for the DPL project as needing to be fixed.

In the case of a disambiguation page lacking the word "(disambiguation)" in its title, it is impossible for the bot to recognize the link as correct. You can follow the lead of John Smith (disambiguation) redirecting to John Smith and create a link with "(disambiguation)" redirecting to the desired (disambiguation)-lacking disambiguation page.

As a last resort, include the ((bots)) template at the top of the page, and deny access to the DPL bot that activates this text, like so: ((bots|deny=DPL bot)). Please use this sparingly, as this means other links to disambiguation pages on the same page will not be patrolled by the bot.

How do I get rid of the template?

As soon as the number of dablinks drops below 7, you're free to remove the template. If the number of dablinks drops to 4 or fewer, DPL bot will remove it for you. This tool^{[dead link]} will tell you how many disambiguation pages your article links to. This daily report^{[dead link]} lists articles that are eligible to have their ((dablinks)) template removed.

This page has less than 7 dablinks, why is the template still there?

If the number of dablinks drops to fewer than 4, DPL bot will automatically remove the template. If the number of dablinks is between 4 and 7, you can manually remove the template and DPL bot will not try to replace it. Or you can improve those links.