{{dablink|text}} formats text into the standard style for a Wikipedia hatnote, a short note placed at the top of an article to provide disambiguation of closely related terms or summarise a topic, explaining its boundaries.
Other disambiguation templates
This template might not be the desired template for your applications. See Wikipedia:Otheruses templates (example usage) for a comparison and index of the alternatives.
Usage and purpose
This template is primarily used to add disambiguation links (dab is Wikipedia shorthand for "disambiguation") to the top of article pages. It places an HTML div- / div block around the material given as its only argument, which provides standardized formatting (contents are indented and italicized in most displays); it also isolates the contained code to make sure that it is interpreted correctly.
This template is also used as the "meta-template" for additional specialized disambiguation link templates; see Wikipedia:Otheruses templates (example usage) for a list.
Contrary to what its name may imply, the template does not automatically create links of any kind. Links and other desired formatting must be explicitly added, using normal Wikipedia markup.
Template contents
<div class="dablink">{{{1}}}</div>