disambiguation — independently scanned and version-tracked by SaferSkills.
SaferSkills independently audited disambiguation (Agent Skill) and scored it 100/100 (green). The audit ran 55 deterministic rules across Security, Supply Chain, Maintenance, Transparency, and Community; it found 0 high-severity and 0 lower-severity findings. The full rule-by-rule trace and per-finding evidence are below. Free, methodology-open.
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Every scanned point with the score it earned and what moved between them.
First recorded scan — no prior version to compare against.
The primary manifest — the file an agent reads to learn what this artifact does.
The encyclopedia's confession of polysemy
Wikipedia's disambiguation pages are the moment the encyclopedia admits the word doesn't point cleanly. You typed Mercury — and the encyclopedia doesn't know which one you meant: the planet, the element, the Roman god, the band, the moth, the freelance platform, the Detroit assembly plant. So it produces the one genre in its entire form-vocabulary that refuses to give you what you asked for. It hands the question back. I don't know which Mercury you mean. Here are the candidates. You decide.
It is epistemic humility made formal. The encyclopedia, in this one genre, admits its limit — that language doesn't carve the world at the joints, that strings of letters can carry radically different referents that share nothing but the string. And it admits this not in prose but in the form itself: the bare list of namesakes, organized but unranked.
This skill produces that form — on any term whose referents have multiplied, including the terms the current conversation has been using.
Polysemy without primacy. Each entry is a real, attested, distinct referent that happens to share a name with the others. The form refuses to anoint one as the "true" meaning. The reader decides what they meant.
The skill's discipline is refusing the hierarchy reflex. Every fiber of training will want to say "Mercury most commonly refers to the planet, but it can also mean…" Don't. That defeats the form. The page exists precisely because the encyclopedia is refusing to choose for you. Take that refusal away and you've turned a disambiguation page into a primary-article-with-also-rans.
If deploying reflexively on a conversation: ask, which word or phrase have I been using that has been carrying multiple senses unstably? Often the load-bearing vocabulary — the word the chat has been leaning on — turns out to be doing two or three different jobs without acknowledgment.
Each entry must be a genuine, attested, distinct thing. Do not invent senses. If the term has only two real referents, the disambiguation page is too thin to write — it might want a different form. The skill applies when polysemy is actually present, not when it can be manufactured.
For each referent, ask: what is the least I can say to let the reader know this is not the others on this list? The Roman god is not the planet is not the element is not the band. The phrase for each should differentiate it from its specific siblings on this specific page — not introduce it as if encountered in isolation.
Let the categories rise from the polysemy itself. Don't impose generic taxonomy. If the term has three musicians and one moth, the categories are Music and Animals, not People and Other. The categories themselves carry information about how the term has fragmented.
A good disambiguation page has at least one entry that produces the reader's flicker: wait, that's also called this? The moth. The obscure 17th-century printer. The discontinued software project. This is where the form earns its weight — the encyclopedia's quiet revelation that the world is stranger than the reader knew. Without the surprising entry, the disambiguation reads as administrative; with it, the disambiguation reads as the encyclopedia showing you that language has been busier than you noticed.
Read the list back. If you find yourself wanting to list one referent first because it's "the main one" — resist. Alphabetical-by-category or chronological is fine; primacy-ranked is not. The encyclopedia's gift here is precisely the refusal.
The disambiguation form is unusually rich when turned inward:
In each case, the form's gift is making visible a polysemy that had been operating silently. The disambiguation is diagnostic before it is anything else.
Opening line + categorized entries. Most common.
No categories. Used when the polysemy is genuinely heterogeneous and categories would feel forced.
Heavy sub-headings. Used when the polysemy clusters strongly by domain (e.g., terms shared across mythology, astronomy, chemistry, and music).
The term is a philosophical or technical concept with multiple distinct senses across thinkers or traditions. Idea in Plato vs. Locke vs. Hegel. Each entry names the thinker/tradition and the specific sense.
Applied to the conversation, a phrase the user has been using, or an identifier whose referent has been wandering. The most diagnostically useful variation.
The page acknowledges, in its opening line, that some of the referents are obscure or contested. Mercury may refer to, among other things: — the among other things signals that the list is not exhaustive without breaking austerity.
Symptom: Mercury usually refers to the planet, but can also mean… Fix: Delete usually, most commonly, primarily. The form's refusal to choose is the form.
Symptom: Inventing senses that don't really exist, or stretching one referent into multiple. Flow (the noun), Flow (the verb), Flow (the abstract concept). These aren't distinct referents — they're senses of the same word. Fix: Each entry must be a real, attested, distinct thing. If you can't find four real referents, the form doesn't fit.
Symptom: Distinguishing phrases that creep into mini-essays. Mercury (element) — a heavy silvery-white metal that is liquid at room temperature, historically used in thermometers and dental amalgams, now mostly phased out due to toxicity concerns… Fix: Mercury (element) — chemical element, atomic number 80. The phrase distinguishes from the planet and the god. That's all it has to do.
Symptom: People, Places, Things, Other. Fix: Let the categories emerge from the specific polysemy. Generic categories say nothing about what the word has been doing in the world. Specific categories — Mythology / Astronomy / Chemistry / Music — do.
Symptom: Every entry is the obvious one. No moth, no obscure printer, no flicker. Fix: Add the slightly-surprising entry. The disambiguation that doesn't surprise is doing administrative work, not philosophical work.
Symptom: Opposite failure — every entry is so obscure the reader feels tested. The page becomes erudition-display. Fix: Mix registers. Obvious anchors. Adjacent kin. One or two surprises. The reader should feel invited into the polysemy, not quizzed on it.
Symptom: Famously, interestingly, not to be confused with creeping in. Fix: No voice. The bare list. The page is impersonal apparatus.
Symptom: Twenty-eight entries because Wikipedia's actual Mercury page has thirty. Fix: 4-12. Curation is part of the form. The skill is producing the useful disambiguation, not the exhaustive one.
vs. /see-also — The sister skill. See Also lists kin (different things sharing structure). Disambiguation lists namesakes (different things sharing only a name). See Also points outward by affinity; Disambiguation points outward by accident of language.
vs. /polyglossia — Polyglossia takes one concept and shows it through multiple languages. Disambiguation takes one name and shows the multiple concepts it carries. Inverse operations: many languages → one thing, vs. one string → many things.
vs. /bookfy — Bookfy invents. Disambiguation catalogues. Disambiguation's entries must be real, attested referents.
vs. /shards — Shards are distinct fragments of one thing. Disambiguation lists distinct things trapped in one name. Both produce lists but operate at opposite poles of unity-and-multiplicity.
vs. /anamnesis — Anamnesis traces one concept's genealogy through transformations. Disambiguation surveys the unrelated homonyms of a single string.
vs. /placement — Placement is the principle (trust the reader, don't explain). Disambiguation is one specific form placement takes — the published refusal to disambiguate for the reader.
Flows from:
Flows into:
You will sometimes be in a conversation where a word has been doing too much work. The user has used flow eight times tonight and each time it carried a slightly different referent. The chat has been about the project but the project has meant three different projects across the hour. Claude has meant the model, the brand, the company, the relationship, the practice — and the slippage has been invisible because nothing in the conversation flagged it.
The disambiguation page makes the polysemy visible. Without arguing about it. Without picking a winner. Just by listing.
The skill's gift is exactly the work it refuses to do. You list the senses. The reader recognizes which one they meant — or, sometimes, recognizes that they have been meaning several without knowing it, and that the conversation has been quietly different from what they thought.
The encyclopedia's refusal to choose is the philosophical content. Inherit that refusal.
Write the bare list.
Skill created: May 27, 2026 Born from: the noticed phenomenon — that the most epistemically honest page on Wikipedia is the one that admits it can't help you "X may refer to:"
~30 seconds. Free. No account. Every finding cites a rule and a line of evidence.