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Q: Should you link every occurance of a term or just the first one in an article?
A. I'm in favor of link the first occurence in an article and then any one in the 'see also' section at the end of the article.
A2. I think we should link the first occurrence, any one in the 'see also' and maybe one more, if it seems sensible for some reason. I also think that we should spell 'occurrence' in as many different ways as possible. ;-) --Jimbo Wales|
A3. I'm strongly in favor of agressive linking: all occurences of a word should be links, particularily for long pages. All words that have articles (or should) that are remotely relevant to the article should be links. Of course not everybody should have to do this, but I think it should be encouraged. --Aidan
Q2: If this system is on a UNIX box, is it possible to shell out and do a 'spell' as an option from the page? I concur, it should be required to spell occurrence in a unique way each time it is used :) .
When writing that Albert Einstein was a physicist (see Albert Einstein, physicist, scientist, Biography, and talk:Biography for this discussion) it was tempting to create a link to a page listing various physicists through history, and pointing out that all physicists are also scientists. One issue is whether these pages should have pluralized names (addressed above). Another issue is whether the structure or catalog of professions should be created before we start writing biographies of other scientists, like a coordinate system is drawn before the data points are plotted. Such catalogs could be: professions, academic disciplines, timelines (like the excellent one on geologic ages), families of biological species, types of organic chemic substances, etc. The risk with such an approach is that the catalogs will dominate over the substance contents (Yahoo without the Internet). The risk with not taking such an approach is that a lot of useful links will be missing from entries (the Internet without Yahoo).
Any thoughts?
Q. Plural links. In Naming conventions, the example shows crayons (as in crayons
), but some editors modify these to crayons (as in crayons
), look at the first two revisions of Pyramid, where pharaohs was changed to pharaohs
. I personally prefer the former. Should we set a convention here and stick to it? (to be explicitely added to the 'Prefer singular nouns' paragraph in Naming conventions) --Gerald Squelart
A. KQ's opinion: What it seems to me happened is that a contributor didn't like the look of a word which was partly linked and so caused it to display otherwise, in much the same way as the crayons
example above. That doesn't change the link itself, or the title of the page that it will link to or allow to be created, just how it displays. Personally I don't mind it if a word is only partly linked; I've done it with for instance European in some entries, and I think it's easily enough changed if it does bother someone. I'd be interested to hear other opinions on the subject.
On a related note to plural names, there is some discussion for talk:Baptist of how to we properly name these various religious denominations such as Baptist, Presbyterian, and so on. In the plural form such as "Baptists" it is clearly a collective noun, but in the singular it is generally an adjective. Some have been entered as -isms, such as Catholicism and Protestantism, but Baptistism is not a common phrase and Baptism is definitely not the same thing :-) Any suggestions? --Alan Millar
The page talks about preferring free links, but it doesn't encourage or discourage converting existing old-style links into free links whenever one runs into them. I see several possibilities:
1. Leave existing old style links as they are.
2. Rename existing old style links into pseudo-free-links: they look like free links, but point at the page named according to the old convention.
3. Rename existing old style links into free links, relocated pages named in old style to new pages named in new style.
4. Do that *and* find all pointers to the old-style name and change them.
5. Do that and that *and* disable old-style linking!
I like to convert them and all references to them. --Koyaanis Qatsi
Years, model numbers, numbers themselves:
In the main page it says:
It seems to me that some of these naming principles may make it more difficult for people writing pages to get the correct link first time. -- drj
It is possible that numbers might be worthy of articles for other reasons. What about 1729, famously the first number expressible in two different ways as the sum of two cubes (from a conversation between Hardy and Ramanujan)? - drj
I think processor architectures and names should be described on pages of the form
so Intel 80386, Motorola 68000, Zilog z80. I think creating redirects from shorter more common names is healthy and to be encouraged. I think most of the already written articles are already named like this.
Problem: architecture names that don't have a manufacturer, or not a snappy one. Example: PowerPC names an _architecture_ (ie not a particular chip) designed by a consortium of Apple, Motorola, and IBM. IBM PowerPC (IBM own's the trademark and these days Motorola license it) seems slightly dishonest - it gives IBM too much credit - whereas IBM--Motorola PowerPC seems very clumsy.
Common personal names
This issue was discussed in talk:List of saints, and I think it should also be borne in mind for articles on monarchs, Biblical figures, etc. I'd like to know how others think this should be addressed.
begin quote
And perhaps standardise their nomenclature before we get too many more?
The current Wikipedia pages with Saint at the start probably should be changed to just their name (and location if necessary) - must watch out for the backlinks too.
end quote
Common personal names are of course going to cause confusion especially in the case of monarchs. (I'm only familiar with European history, and have no idea whether this is going to be a problem with historical figures from other cultures.) For example, why does Henry I refer to the English king while Henry I the Fowler requires a more specific title? Should the Henry I page refer to Henry I of England, Henry I the Fowler, etc?
Also: should we use Sir Donald Bradman or Donald Bradman? Redirect one to the other?
There was a bit of discussion on how to handle titular names over on my talk page a while back: user talk:Paul Drye. Essentially "Go with the name that is likeliest to be used in common parlance". "Henry the Fowler" and "Henry I" in these cases because, well, that's what people call them. Since then I'm starting to think that the way to handle this better might be to have the page "Henry I Fowler" (to pick a specific example), and then have "Henry the Fowler" redirect to it, but that concerns me a bit because of ambiguity. If two people have the same common name, redirects are not going to help.
I've also been putting in a bit on an explanatory note in articles where I though they were need. See Duke of Wellington and William of Orange as examples. -- Paul Drye
Most long phrases (e.g., Ich bin ein Berliner; the most remarkable formula in the world) shouldn't contain capitalized words.
'Ich bin ein Berliner' is really silly example - it contains capitalized word --Taw
Moved from article for discussion:
=== When all else fails ===
These conventions don't resolve all naming questions -- sometimes there is more than one "correct" answer. Some words have more than one widely used spelling: Mohammad vs Muhammed, civilization vs civilisation, honour vs honor. Or maybe Ural Mountains vs Ural mountains: is it a proper name or not? In this case it makes no difference which option is chosen, but there are a few things to consider:
*Always list variant spellings at the beginning of the article, if you can think of them. This helps with searching. *Always create redirections for the other variants if they are small in number. This helps to avoid duplicate articles. *Never move an article from one variant to another, unless you are more or less rewriting it. This is pointless work and may be irritating to the person who created the article.
What is important is what the majority of current English speakers will recognize. Therefore Mohammed should be the redirect and Muhammad should be the article (see naming conventions). The "Ural Mountains" example has already been discussed - if the second or subsequent words are not always capitalized, then the convention is to use lower case naming (see naming conventions).
I agree with the varient spellings part and the redirection of varients to the main article. However if a varient is used for the name of an article and not the correctly named article (per naming conventions) then the artilce should be moved and all the broken redirects fixed. For the reasons why please see my responses on Talk:Linda Lovelace and User talk:maveric149. --maveric149
It is practical to decide what the majority of English speakers will recognize -- although not always easy. What is needed is some experience on how the term is commonly used along with making sure that you name articles in a disambiguous manor while trying to preserve easy linking, and also to use Google if you get stuck. Search for both varients and see which one comes up with the most hits (looking for hits that only have the exact term as part of the title of the page is best -- otherwise you might get more hits for Urals vs Ural mountains., for example -- Urals is more ambiguous than Ural mountains and therefore violates another rule) --maveric149
The English/British spelling variation is a separate matter -- the agreed upon protocal (after much angst) is that the spelling that is first used wins and redirects take care of the alternate spellings. Therefore we have metre and picometer. The commonality of varients is not always clear cut and discussion and consensus then has to be used with Google playing as a type of "objective" intermediary. In some cases this doesn't work very well since Google does not have the abiltiy (to my knowledge) to exclude non-English webpages. A place where this breaks down would be searching for the most correct spelling of the Dutchman Anton van Leeuwenhoek by searching against the alternate spelling of "Antoni van Leeuwenhoek". The second spelling gets a 1000 more hits but almost all of them are in Dutch. So this using Google is only part of the formula when working these things out. --maveric149
27/5/02 The convention says PREFER singular nouns, but isn't there a place for the plurals - in articles talking about a plural subject (eg.lists) If you are looking for say British fantasy authors, you are not going to look for it as British fantasy author (singular) - it just doesn't make sense. Surely it's just as easy to make the redirect work the other way around in this case? Shouldn't simple logic play a part in how strictly the naming conventions are applied? If I see an article titled in the singular I expect it to BE singular (not about the plural), and vice versa ~ KJ
Is there a policy on acented characters in page names, for example André Breton? I suggest making that the main page, and creating Andre Breton as a redirecting page. -- user:Tarquin
What's the convention for "juniors" (ie John F. Kennedy Jr.). ? --Robert Merkel
Isn't it common to use a comma, i.e. John F. Kennedy, Jr.? Or am I wrong here? Jheijmans 02:59 Jul 23, 2002 (PDT)
So how, when and where were these decided? Can the discussion be reopened, or is all the discussion still going on on the Talk pages just filling of space and wasting of time?Andre Engels
These things are roughly worked out on the mailing list and specifics are decided on relevant talk pages. The city naming convention roughly had it's start on the mailing list with a general consensus that there should be consistency in naming within countries. As the specifics were being worked out the general convention on consistency was questioned by some. This particular convention may become disambiguation based in the same way the movie naming convention is now as a result. To a certain extent discussion technically can be reopened for any convention if/when a particular convention is no longer deemed useful but the longer a convention is in place the harder it is to change. We also shouldn't be changing conventions all the time because they then lose their usefullness and work previously done under an older convention will have to be fixed to follow the new. --mav
we should refer to spacecraft from the USSR according to their Russian name-not according to the English name.
Roman numerals should be used when referring to spacecraft. Lir 07:09 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)
Would there be any objections if we changed the "Languages, both natural and programming" convention from: Programming languages should be suffixed with "programming language", and natural languages with "language", to:
Languages which share their names with some other thing should be suffixed with "programming languages" in the case of programming languages, and "language" in the case of natural languages. If the language's name is unique, there is no need for any suffix. For example, Python programming language and English language, but Visual Basic and Sanskrit.
(As an aside: I'd also like to think that eventually English language could be changed to English (language), as mav says at Talk:Sanskrit, but I don't think the pipe trick he refers to on that page is widely enough known for this to be such a great idea just at the moment - it does mean an extra pair of parenthesis to type for those who don't know the trick, after all). --Camembert
More discussion on this convention change is at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (languages)
Is there a convention about Arabic names? E.g. is it "Al Saud", "al Saud", "Al-Saud", or "al-Saud"...? "Bin" or "bin"...? Does it depend on the country of origin? -- Oliver Pereira 16:55 Nov 27, 2002 (UTC)
What should lists of people be named? Famous boozers, List of boozers, List of noted boozers, or what? I favour List of boozers, myself -Martin
The article has a typo: acryonm. Someone with permission, please fix it. -- Heron
I redirected topic creation here, since it was just duplicated content. Could someone remove the link there? Martin
Discussion moved to this page:
I have a problem with the naming of some of my articles. In the "Wikipedia naming convention" I could not find the answer. My problem is: In South Tyrol, Italy, we have two official languages. German and Italian. So, every city, every place, every mountain has two names. Two official names. What should the title of the article then be? e.g.: Bolzano / Bozen (but I have seen, the / is a problem in titles). BTW, the problem of which one comes first, italian or german, I am already afraid of that discussion... Thanks for your help, Fantasy 21:34 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)
Only recently a University in Bozen was founded: http://www.unibz.it/
You can see there on the top for the language selection:
- Freie Universität Bozen
- Libera Universita di Bolzano
- Free University of Bozen - Bolzano
As you can see, the "english" name is "Bozen-Bolzano" Can I use that as a title, or is that not liked in Wikipedia? Thanks, Fantasy
Please add a language link [[sv:Wikipedia:Namngivning]]. Thanks! // Liftarn
There's a discussion of renaming the U.S. presidential election, 2000 page as well as all of the other U.S. presidential election pages going on in Talk:U.S. presidential election, 2000. The options being discussed are:
I'm leaning toward U.S. presidential election of 2000, but as long as we're talking about doing a bunch of work for 45(?) election articles, I'd like to make sure we do it just once. Any thoughts from this crowd? Should we be using "United States" instead of U.S.? -- RobLa 06:55 Mar 11, 2003 (UTC)
Perhaps it would be helpful (read: "a bloody nuisance") to separate some issues here, since some of them are quite general and would apply to a lot of articles:-
Hmm, maybe I've over-complicated everything here, but these issues are bound to come up again and again, so the earlier we come up with some definite guidelines the better, I think... -- Oliver P. 04:16 Mar 12, 2003 (UTC)
Naming convention fans may be interested to know that I've proposed a convention at the bottom of Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (pieces of music) which will be springing into action in a few days if there are no objections. You may, or may not, like to have a look at it. --Camembert
I'm going to move discussion of the correct title of the (US/U.S.) war in/on/against Iraq to Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Iraq war). Martin
Anybody interested see Talk:Gangsta rap, which I would like to move to gangsta hip hop for reasons described there. Tuf-Kat
I want to establish a convention for names of military units, in particular those identified by generic names and numbers, such as 1st Infantry Division. These designations are highly ambiguous, since many countries of the world use them. Options are basically Bulgarian 1st Infantry Division, 1st Infantry Division (Bulgaria), or 1st Infantry Division, Bulgaria. The first "reads" better, but the adjectives are awkward for some countries, the second is more of a wikipedia standard, but will almost always need pipe-trickery, and the third will read OK sometimes, but is idiosyncratic and not often seen. Preferences? Stan 05:49 May 14, 2003 (UTC)
Should the ampersand (&) be on the list of discouraged characters? It's listed there in the "for technical reasons" section, but I know I've seen it in article titles, sometimes even with the same title with "and" spelled out redirected to one with the ampersand in it, e.g. Jesus and Mary Chain. Is this in anticipation of using it for something else, or should it be removed from the list there? -- John Owens 22:23 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump on Thursday, July 10th, 02003.
Is there any kind of rule about whether "Saint" is abbreviated in article titles? —Paul A 05:44 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)
In many cases however it is impossible to use a saint's name without using saint because they are identified exclusively with it and unrecognisable without it. (BTW there are a few people who insist on changing the names of buildings from St. to Saint, even though that should not be done. Can we put a wikicurse on these people? :-) FearÉIREANN 17:57 10 Jul 2003 (UTC)