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I've made a move request at Talk:Korolyov (city), because I feel this should be an exception to WP:RUS; it is named after Sergei Korolev (for which I've also made a move request, which appears unopposed), so I think it should be called Korolev (city); comments on the talk page would be welcome. Thanks! :) Mlm42 ( talk) 19:42, 7 March 2011 (UTC)
I have made a comment at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (video games) because it seems to go against our general article naming guidelines. Specifically, the practice of moving series articles to the name of the first game, and renaming that game XXX (video game)(like moving Mass Effect (series) to Mass Effect, and Mass Effect to Mass Effect (video game)). It is my feeling that since a series is almost never referred to in reliable sources without a qualifier (series, franchise, universe, history of, etc.), a move like this is never accurate, and we just end up with two articles at the wrong title. If you are so inclined, please comment at the above-mentioned talk page. ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 00:19, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
Parts of it are like a maze: there's a discussion now here as to whether to italicise the titles of opera articles. People just don't know the answers. At WP:TITLE, I find it hard to make my way through Wikipedia:ITALICS#Italic_face (referred to from here); "Do not enclose titles in quotes" (what about the name of an aria within an opera?); this—"Use italics when italics would be used in running text; for example, taxonomic names, the names of ships, the titles of books, films, and other creative works, and foreign phrases are italicized both in ordinary text and in article titles", and the fact that many many article titles do not observe this. I'm confused.
What about a carefully chosen set of brief examples woven into the text, so editors can understand? Tony (talk) 13:09, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
At Talk:Nirmala_Srivastava#2011_proposed_rename_of_article there has been protracted circular discussion over whether the use of Indian-language honorifics is justified by wp:COMMONNAME. Additional perspectives would be helpful. LeadSongDog come howl! 03:48, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
It seems, according to some people, that this policy delegates all matters of the punctuation of those names to guidelines at WP:MOS (see the "See also" section at the end of WP:TITLE). News to me; the See Also link links only to one section of MOS, which has only an - incomplete and inaccurate - summary of our section on special characters.
Did someone intend such a claim by making the link? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:25, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
The Astrohall was built at about the same time as the Astrodome, by a developer/investor (name in unknown) as a Dental Industry Display and Meeting Center. The 250,000 square feet included small permanant display areas, office space and 100,000 sq ft of open exhibit hall.
The intended use never ocurred and the building remained essentially empty until purchased by an Houston investor, Candace Mosler. After another year or so, Ms, Mosler realized that her business manager was unable to locate tenants and she retained my company, Edward Bankers & Associates, to manage and lease the building.
We were able to lease the larger display areas to various engineering firms when they quickly required large space on short term rentals.
Longer term occupancy was initiated by a division of Shell Oil Co., which eventually leased the entire building, creating a "state of the art" computer center in the exhibit hall area. Shell eventually built a new building and vacated this building. By that time I had sold the management company and I have no knowledge of subsequent activities.
Several references in the Wikipedia article give the impression that there were a number of sports and other venues held in this building. Design, especially ceiling heights would have precluded such use.
98.199.217.84 ( talk) 17:04, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
The move is being proposed at Talk:Pi#Requested_move. The issues are to some extent unique, so it might be of interest here. — kwami ( talk) 09:18, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
The 'italics issue' (the italicization of words in article titles), which was the subject of an Rfc here last year, is being reviewed at the Village pump (policy). (There have also been some discussions at the Music project and Classical music project). It is likely that there will be a new Rfc aimed at establishing a much wider consensus.-- Klein zach 07:40, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
This new subsection at Talk:Mexican-American War presents ten summary points for a protracted dispute. Recommended reading: for editors interested in the ways style guidelines at WP:MOS and policy here at WP:TITLE are received at talkpages of articles, and for admins who might be looking to close the two relevant contested requests for move (RMs).
– ⊥¡ɐɔıʇǝoNoetica! T– 23:35, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
Let's put it this way: is there a real dispute in the sources about this? Are there any authors out there that specifically claim aloud to use hyphen, tilde or whatever, specifically opposing the other options? Does any author consider "Mexican-American war" a legitimate name and "Mexican–American war" a faulty one? (or the other way) Because if it is a non-existent dispute, then there is no dispute. Verifiability does not go as far as requiring us to use the same style rules than our sources, we should manage the topics of style with our own set of rules of style (the MOS, and I'm saying "rules" in a broad way) MBelgrano ( talk) 18:57, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
I have referred readers to the articles on en dash and em dash, instead of WP:ENDASH and WP:EMDASH. The recent wave of undiscussed changes by Tony, Noetica, and Kwami is mostly their pique that the recent discussion over Mexican-American War preferred this policy over the guidelines at WP:MOS. However, it also revealed that they disagree with the rest of us (CWenger, Headbomb, Wareh, Hans Adler, and so on) as to what WP:DASH says. It seems undesirable to incorporate so ill-constructed a guideline into policy, no matter how much three dedicated editors want to. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:25, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
Come to think of it, why? There is a case for saying these are never natural; but if so, we don't need this; it's already said. There is a case for ruling out quotes, so that articles on short stories aren't under "The Cask of Amontillado"; but this doesn't mention true quote marks at all. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:33, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
Tsunami is no more accurate than tidal wave.. In Japanese tsunami means "harbor wave", but obviously tsunami are not limited to harbors. This is a bit pedantic, but encyclopedias are supposed to be pedantic, right? Can we find a more accurate example of a more accurate name? Further, tsunami is replacing tidal wave, so the assertion that the latter is more common is probably no longer true. Will Beback talk 03:53, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
I have edited the mention of dashes in the section Special Characters, to restore neutrality with respect to the en dash. (See recent discussion above, and at several other pages.) This is the non-prejudicial version that I have put in place:
(This may well have been altered by another editor as I write.)
I call for comment on this. Wikipedia can only benefit from links to central, highly relevant guidelines from policies. Punctuation is addressed thoroughly for the Project at WP:MOS; so where policy touches on punctuation, link to that resource. The guidelines WP:ENDASH and WP:HYPHEN at WP:MOS are long-established, stable, and subjected to close scrutiny at the relevant talkpage ( WT:MOS). If it is alleged that they include anything inadequate or unfounded, the place to address that is WT:MOS.
It is also unhelpful to prejudice the issue (for a wider political purpose) by repeated asseverations concerning WP:COMMONNAME. Of course it applies; it's there at the top of the page. Including special mention of what is "customary" for the en dash in the section on special characters was never discussed here, as far as I can tell. Usage of the en dash is amply covered at WP:DASH, and does not need supplementing by undiscussed and agenda-driven mention here.
Our policies and our guidelines need to be in harmony. If it is alleged that they are not, let that matter be discussed here also.
– ⊥¡ɐɔıʇǝoNoetica! T– 23:15, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
It looks like this particular disputed started in this Jan. 27 diff where PMAnderson added text to say "such characters should only be used when they are customarily used for the subject in reliable English secondary sources", with respect to non-keyboard characters. Sounds innocent, but since since he's trying to change policy to support his campaign to stamp out en dashes, we should really examine that campaign on its merits, in an appropriate forum. As it stands, he says our MOS is contemptible. I think it's fine as it is. Furthermore, the particular terms he's talking about, Mexican–American War, is not hard to find in good English sources with the en dash; but he seems to want it to be be a vote instead of a logical choice based on a usage guide. I think we're better off leaving it in the form that has worked for a long time. Dicklyon ( talk) 05:30, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
Anderson's edit war was 5RR, so any block should of course apply to him as well, or maybe only to him. One of his edits was also WP:POINTy, [2] which on a policy page is in itself a blockable offense. — kwami ( talk) 19:35, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
I am tired of the edit warring over the hyphen/dash issue. Given that there are ongoing and still heated debates in several locations (here, WP:MOS, WP:ENDASH etc.) it is clear to me that we don't have a clear consensus on the issue (despite the fact that both sides of the debate are claiming there is one). I have therefore taken the BOLD step of removing all mention of the issue from this policy until the debates are settled. It is better to say nothing on the issue that to have it contently change back and forth. Blueboar ( talk) 18:51, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
Actually, I was wrong about PMAnderson starting the current thrashing here. His edit was actually a reaction to this diff in which Tony1 changed the long-standing consensus version:
to try to clarify that dashes are not necessarily not present on standard keyboards; I think that point is pointless, since it brings up the issue of whether a character is "present" if you have to know what to type with the "option" key to get it. In spite of Noetica's attempt in making the neutral version that has now been put back in as "policy", I think it would be better to go back to the long-standing consensus version. I don't think anyone really objects to it, they want to warp it in various ways, and this is not the place for that until we decide on a direction. If any clarification is needed, I think it would be that we mean "ASCII" keyboard characters, as opposed to "English-language", since many standard English-keyboard characters like hyphens and apostrophes and dashes such don't have much to do with English language. It really does mean ASCII, doesn't it? Or is there some other relevant standard that I'm not aware of? Or maybe it meant English-keyboard characters, or English-language–keyboard characters, as opposed to English-language keyboard characters? Wouldn't it be nice if we could be clear on what we mean? Dicklyon ( talk) 02:15, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
We can play with the exact wording, but I think this better explains the issue. Thoughts? Blueboar ( talk) 15:48, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
I therefore propose a merge of the last two versions:
This removes the redundancy in a different way; I will accept any non-substantive tweak. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:58, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
The version proposed above is certainly an improvement, since it does not include anything controversial. But it does miss important provisions. I propose this, which takes the version we have been looking at as a starting point but is more accurate and comprehensive:
Redirects for characters not on a standard keyboard: Sometimes the chosen title will include diacritics (accent marks), dashes, or other characters unobtainable by typical English-language users, so they cannot search for the article directly. Provide redirects that use only standard keyboard characters: Hale-Bopp and Hale Bopp join Hale–Bopp among the many redirects to Comet Hale–Bopp.
- Make articles visible to web search engines. Searching with standard characters will sometimes find titles that include diacritics: "emigre armies" finds Émigré armies of the French Revolutionary Wars, both on Google and within Wikipedia. But some searches for Wikipedia articles succeed only within Wikipedia, and some only on a web search.
(I added the redirect Hale–Bopp just now. And I was wrong in an earlier version of this post! Made some elementary mistakes.)
– ⊥¡ɐɔıʇǝoNoetica! T– 02:20, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
Jeff, we have established that there are separate issues. Looking through the whole page, I see that some of this redirect business is covered elsewhere – not the part about web searches though. That should be taken as a separate matter for integrating into the page, with some rearranging so that all redirect issues are dealt with consistently, and perhaps all linked neatly to a central section. Later!
Focusing on the immediate task again, I rather like "plain typewriter characters" to refer to what we're after. Many editors have no clue about ASCII; references to "common characters" that are "on" keyboards run into trouble with virtuoso pedants and Mac users. So use language everyone follows immediately. And I still say that varying the wording helps. This is often the case in technical writing: if they don't grasp it one way, they probably will the other way. And one wording corrects any false impressions from the other. Try this (adopting your wording for the start; with web searches deferred as an issue; with greater accuracy about diacritics on characters):
Add suitable redirects when the title contains characters not on a standard keyboard: The chosen title may be hard to search for because it includes diacritics (accent marks), dashes, or other characters that are not easy to input. Provide redirects from equivalent titles that use only plain "typewriter" characters: Hale-Bopp and Hale Bopp join Hale–Bopp among the many redirects to Comet Hale–Bopp. On a Wikipedia search, titles with diacritics may be retrieved by prompts to correctly marked forms that appear as the search is typed in. But for reliable searching, include a redirect from a plain typewriter form of the title: Chateau d'Oex redirects to Château-d'Œx.
Noetica Tea? 08:21, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
Noetica's first proposal above goes on at some length, the second one, with the tendentious examples, is even longer; the rest of us have managed to reduce what this portion of the policy should say into a single paragraph based on what originally stood here, and which does not introduce any novel and debatable claim; xer additions are both novel and debatable. As far as I am concerned, any version in this section is acceptable, although I think some better than others. I strongly prefer saying what we need to say, and on which there is general agreement, to bloviating interminably. In short, we have it right. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:54, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
PMAnderson, please do not refactor in a way that is manifestly designed to be prejudicial to my closely argued proposal. I have reverted your blatant intrusion in what was a rational discussion of issues. Please post civilly. Noetica Tea? 02:17, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
Add suitable redirects when the title contains characters not on a standard keyboard: The chosen title may be hard to search for because it includes diacritics (accent marks), dashes, or other characters that are not easy to input. Provide redirects from equivalent titles that use only plain "typewriter" characters. Hale-Bopp and Hale Bopp join Hale–Bopp among the many redirects to Comet Hale–Bopp. Because of its many diacritics, Ököritófülpös has a redirect from Okoritofulpos. In some complex cases more than one redirect may be needed: Château-d'Œx has many redirects pointing to it, including Chateau d'Oex.
Let's re-focus... The following isn't suggested wording... it's a statement of intent (the concept that we are trying to convey to editors in the section under discussion):
Are we all agreed that this is the basic intent of the section under discussion? If so, let's just say this in as few words as possible. Don't try to cover every contingency or every variation on the theme. Blueboar ( talk) 15:28, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
All this began when two editors asked why Mexican–American War, as it then was, had a dash in the title. There was the usual unproductive conversation at the talk-page WT:MOS, but there was no evidence as it was that MOS actually required it. There have since been two move requests at Talk:Mexican-American War, both closed with it ending with a hyphen, and other bizarre and WP:LAME events, including the claim that one closing admin was corrupt, and the claim that delegates all matters of punctuation tp WP:MOS because of the see also linking to a different section of MOS.
Since that didn't fly, three editors have come here to rewrite this policy to their liking. I am not convinced; I hold what we have always held.
If the most reliable sources (ie. RSes from within the field of the topic, as opposed to a general encyclopedia or a news source) do not use the format prescribed by the MOS, doesn't that mean it's
WP:ORIGINALRESEARCH ?
65.93.12.101 (
talk)
09:16, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
This whole section was started as a personalised and biased attack on dedicated editors who bring to the Project their special skills in the area of style. The tone has been set; and with regret, I find it necessary to respond in the same vein. Some responses to what has been said above by PMAnderson (when I use the word section here, I mean top-level section, not subsection; please do not post within what I post; comment after it):
We should discuss policies at their pages, and guidelines at theirs. They should all be in harmony, and that harmony ought not to be disrupted in pursuit of petty ends.
Noetica Tea? 00:25, 12 April 2011 (UTC)
I interpret this as meaning you want to change the current
to the older form
{{ editprotected}}
Endorsements cut and pasted from above.
So the proposed language now reads:
This is acceptable to me. Blueboar ( talk) 19:48, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
Done.
Sandstein
19:11, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
There is a proposal to change List of South African municipalities to List of municipalities of South Africa. Is there a preferred title format for articles that list entities belonging to a place? My gut feel is that "List of <entities> of <place>" looks better. Roger ( talk) 16:31, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
I've seen several scattered comments during the last month that indicate ongoing confusion about the difference between "Article title" and "key words in the first sentence". The incomplete footnote is apparently not sufficient for us.
So as the regulars here know, this page deals with the former, which is:
WP:LEAD deals with which words you put in the first sentence. Often, these match, but occasionally, they don't, as in words that have multiple meanings.
Here's my thought: Let's add a picture. Specifically, let's get a screenshot of a page like the one shown on the right here. Let's put a big green oval around the two places where the title appears—at the top of the browser window itself, circling the bit that reads "Celilo Falls", but not "– Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia", and also the =Level 1= heading. Then let's put a red box around the non-title in the lead ("Celilo Falls", and possibly also "Wyam").
With that graphic, we can then explain that the stuff in the green oval is the title, and if you're fighting over the stuff in the red box, you follow the MOS, not AT.
I'd like to suggest a page like Mercury (element) for the screenshot, because a dab'd article title should make the distinction clearer to the average editor.
What do you think? WhatamIdoing ( talk) 15:48, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
I'm interested in opinions on disambiguating articles on Western orchestral music, specifically in cases where a work shares a name with a non-musical entity. If you care, please discuss it at WT:NCM. — AjaxSmack 14:59, 19 April 2011 (UTC)
There has been a recent move by the mathematics project to reinstate article titles using the Pi symbol "π"
This came to my attention as one move ( Liu Hui's pi algorithm → Liu Hui's π algorithm) amongst a group of moves.
The discussions are here and here
Is π a symbol? (Used to represent the number 3.XXXXX)
As such is it exempt from the guideline "* Do not use symbols:"?
The situation is getting a little out of hand as IAR is being applied by members and admins in the mathematics project, where they claim "obvious consensus" which is only in their project, rather than taking it here for wider discussion or asking in an RfC.
They also have mentioned "There was even talk about updating MATHMOS to reflect this" which means that they are also not even following their own MOS on this matter. Chaosdruid ( talk) 17:02, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
Until only recently, the "Do not use symbols" section used to read
It's unclear exactly what problem the new wording is supposed to avoid. The only discussion I could find about the matter is here. From that discussion, it is clear that "symbol" is supposed to mean Unicode symbols, which is a special block of unicode characters (one that, incidentally, does not include Greek letters). Anyway, the issues discussed there are so peripheral to the question of including π that I think it is safe to say that we should not extrapolate from that discussion that it meant also to exclude Greek letters from article titles. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 18:01, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
As a courtesy, I wanted to point out the discussion that is taking place on
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style. Specifically,
WT:MOS#Avoiding redirects is moving (me, mostly) in the direction of starting an RfC here in order to adjust the
WP:TITLE#Article title format section to include (or not) something about the use of dashes. I wanted to give those of you who watch this page and not
WT:MOS an opportunity to speak up before hand. Regards,
—
V = IR (
Talk •
Contribs)
03:13, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
I'm putting this question here because I'm not sure where else it would go. There doesn't appear to be one place, exactly, where it is specified how to handle foreign names of persons, places, and things (or specified that it's not specified.) There is:
The types of things that have names that I am thinking of are: persons, places, (geographical entities (rivers, mountains) and geopolitical entities (towns, provinces)) and things (organizations, individual buildings, and so forth).
For persons and places I am having some disagreements, but don't want to get into that now.
But things? Should they not be translated? I raise this question because I recently came across the articles Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (actually a redirect to just Rijksakademie) and École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and Park Pobedy (Moscow Metro).
Well, now see here. This is gibberish. These names mean nothing to me. Is this Wikipedia not supposed to be intelligible to English speakers? In fact, as near as I can make out (not being conversant in the first two languages) the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten is actually the Royal Academy of Visual Arts, the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts is the National Superior School of Fine Arts (or maybe National University of Fine Arts or something -- search me) and the Park Pobedy station is the Victory Park station.
Would it kill us to render the names of these entities in such a way that an English speaker will say "Oh, OK, I understand what that is" as opposed to "What the heck is that"? I would think that that former response would be the more desirable, n'est-ce pas?
The lead of Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English) is unclear on this. For notable names, it prescribes (For instance) "Eiffel Tower" rather than "La Tour Eiffel", but for unnotable entities it kind of coughs and shuffles its feet. Wikipedia:Naming conventions (geographic names) seems considerably less concerned with helping the reader understand the material than with with avoiding bickering among the staff, which seems rather an odd ordering of priorities.
So I guess my question is... is an article title like École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts just a mistake? Can we clarify the guidelines so it's clear that we shouldn't be doing stuff like this? Or is this title according to the guidelines (in which case it's the guidelines that need to be reformed, one would think). Herostratus ( talk) 18:33, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
Well... hmmm. I mean, my point is that École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts is gibberish, so what do we need to do to fix that? If there is a rule "use what most sources use" and this results in gibberish then we need to change the rule. Right? If there was some rule that (this is a thought experiment) resulted in article titles such as werpiogj32cs09cxlkm3q091q, we would say Well this rule, however well-intentioned, is not working.
Perhaps we could adopt a "Swiss solution"? In Switzerland, everything has three names (I guess), and so we have nicely-titled articles such as Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property instead of Eidgenössisches Institut für Geistiges Eigentum. It seems to work OK. I haven't seen anyone saying OMG the articles on Swiss entities are an impossible mess. We could pretend that everyplace is Switzerland or something.
There are a couple of objections. One is, translation is a bit of an art. One person might translate École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts as "National Superior School of Fine Arts" and another as "National University of Fine Arts" (I guess, I don't know French). But I mean, so what? That's true of all terms. Should "croiseur" be translated as just "cruiser" or "battlecruiser" or "heavy cruiser" or what? Would we just leave in the article as "croiseur" because its a hard question? I would hope not. Either "National Superior School of Fine Arts" or "National University of Fine Arts" are greatly superior to "École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts". Why do proper names have a no-translation exception that doesn't apply to regular nouns?
The second is, OK, if they want to look up more about the entity elsewhere, they are going to find a lot more refs under the untranslated name (for entities that are not much covered in English sources). This is rather weak tea in my opinion. Wouldn't it be better that the average reader understand what the entity is than that, for those few are doing more extended research, the article title match their search term (and for them, the untranslated name is given in the lead; serious researchers are presumable able to figure out how to handle this).
An objection that untranslated name is more accurate would not be too valid I don't think. First of all, they're not necessarily more accurate. "Beaux-Arts" actually refers (to people to whom its not gibberish) to a particular architectural style if I recall correctly, so in this particular example the name is actually misleading. Second of all, if all or most of the refs are in French, then the article should be in French also if you're going to take this view. But we don't post articles in French, here. We translate. Herostratus ( talk) 16:35, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
No. Forza Italia is not "gibberish", it is the only correct name of the party. Would you translate it as "forward Italy" (as the article currently claims", or as "Strength Italy", or any of the other meanings of Forza? Unless something is routinely translated in English, we should keep the original form. That doesn't mean that the more descriptional parts of names can't be translated, so Castle instead of Chateau or Schloss (if they are about a castle), but Châteauneuf-du-Pape, not "the pope's new castle". Fram ( talk) 15:18, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
Per previous discussion, now archived, I have added an image that differentiates between the article title itself and the names appearing in the first sentence. If anyone feels inspired to make a better image, then please feel free. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 17:49, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
You know what we probably do need is a better intro (or lead, lede, opening, whatever you want to call it). The current intro is only three sentences, and they don't summarize the policy at all. We could, and should, mention "use nouns", along with engvar, commonname, precision, etc... within the intro paragraph(s).
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V = IR (
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18:18, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
I changed all instances of [article] subject to [article] topic for consistency with other guidelines (I am confident that topic is the predominent term in most of our guidelines). Indeed they are synonyms in most contexts, but I was recently asked by a WP newbie who was reading our policies for the first time--What's the difference between an Article subject and an Article topic? We want consistency in our titles, we ought to demand simple consistency in our guidelines. One may refer to an article's subject in discussion without confusion, but our guidelines ought to use consistent terminology, and article topic seems to be the best terminology. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 07:58, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
Per this guideline, all article titles are (wherever at all possible) to be nouns.
I added it to the nutshell; but it has been taken out for no good reason I can tell.
I wish to put it back again, it's in no way specific, all article titles are to be nouns of one form or another, per the guideline, and this is what we are summarizing in the nutshell. Rememberway ( talk) 21:31, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
The reasons behind this are discussed quite well here, but it predates that by quite a long way. Rememberway ( talk) 21:39, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
Also, not that it's really pertinent to this topic, but Wikipedia:Article titles is a policy, not a guideline.
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V = IR (
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23:26, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
I've boldly put noun phrases instead. Is that more acceptable? Or are there exceptions to this that we need to consider? Dicklyon ( talk) 22:36, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
As someone just reading this debate I'm genuinely baffled. Here's how this looks to the outside observer: The policy currently says article titles "should be nouns", but some editors are objecting to repeating that fact in a summary of the policy. I simply don't understand how the objection that on rare occasions another part of speech is necessary applies with any more force to the summary than to the policy. If the objection is that whatever bit of nuance exists is lost in the summarization, only an idiot would think that the summary contains every detail of the policy, and we needn't worry ourselves about idiots. If we did, we wouldn't be able to have a summary in the first place. So what am I missing? - Rrius ( talk) 04:15, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
I'm still not sure I understand the objection. At first it seemed to be something about the policy itself, but now it seems adding "nouns" will somehow detract from the summary. At this point I'm not not sanguine about getting a satisfactory answer, but I'll ask anyway: how does adding three words hurt? Why do you think noting the heavy preference for nouns in passing does such damage to the summary? To both sides, why is this so bloody important? It does seem that WP:NOUN is one of the only parts of the policy that isn't summarized by the old version of the heading, but who actually reads the nutshell summary anyway? - Rrius ( talk) 23:41, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
This page identifies what its chief principles are: Recognizability, naturalness, shortness, precision, and consistency; some of them are not in the nutshell. WP:NOUN is a reasonable idea, but largely because it helps keep different articles being written on the same subject, one phrasing it as a noun, another as a verb. If it conflicts with any of the five principles in a given case, it can and should be jettisoned. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 05:30, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
(PS.: This isn't a bad subject to discuss, in my opinion. As I said, I'm open to suggestions here. Examples of the use of
WP:NOUN in practice might be compelling, one way or another.)
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V = IR (
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18:14, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
I object fairly strongly ro this edit; Rememberway is pushing his POV that nouns are a "must-do", which has received no real support in this discussion. As a statement of fact, the claim that we always use "nouns and noun-phrases" is exaggerated; having it as a rule, it misses the point of Wikipedia space; it's sound advice, but not beyond exception. I am very tired of people who make policies and guidelines into arbitrary "rules", which they can enforce without rationale; I am reverting, and will dispute any further efforts on this enthusiast's part. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:20, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
Having just read the conversation to which Rememberway links, I observe that he is misreading it. Using nouns is an example of consistency, and use of nouns like Monophyly is an example of that. But there is consensus that consistency should yield to a strong enough case based on the other four principles; and when there is a sufficiently strong counter-consistency (call a work of literature by its title) that is sufficient in itself. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:41, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
Tony's back to adding his obscure jargon. AFAICT, "nominal group" is just Halliday's term for "noun phrase". If it is a synonym, then it's worse than useless, as it's obscure and the relatively few people who are familiar with it will know the normal English term "noun phrase" anyway. If it's not a synonym, as Tony (and the article) has argued but never explained or supported, then we should not present it as if it were a synonym. Either way it doesn't belong. — kwami ( talk) 13:18, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
The first two criteria (Recognizably and Naturalness) are directly connected to WP:COMMONNAME (which I think is the single most important provision of this policy) So I think they are a step above the others in importance. I have been bold and divided the criteria into two sections (diff here... I was logged out when I made the edit, but it's mine. If you think the edit too bold, please revert and we can discuss. Blueboar ( talk) 22:55, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
I have read this sentence may be a dozen times. I do see the intent, from the word "recognizability". However may be I drank too much beer yesterday, but I fail to grasp its logic (too much beer yesterday?). (The second sentence is clear.)
I tried to do some analysis. The phrase says connects four pieces: title, topic, article, and the reader. It is constructed in the way that the actor is the title, i.e., the title must confirm to the reader that the article is about the topic. Now, the question is how does the reader know what the topic is in the first place? Did he learn it from the title? If yes, then it is the article text that makes the reader confirm that he indeed reads about the topic defined in the title and not some vandalistic hoax. On the other hand, if the reader learns the topic from the article, and he is "familiar with it" then what is the high importance of confirmation coming from the title so that it is "Rule #1" here?
The second sentence of the description excludes the following scenario: the reader sees the title " Leopold Theophuck Eugentric, 1st baron Hausmaus, duke of balbla...", wonders, starts reading and then in dawns upon him: heck, it is about Leon "Iron Ass" Hausmaus!
But again, to an extent the title "Leopold Theophuck ..." does give some extra affirmation that the article indeed about the topic, because from "See also" section we learn that there was one Leon "Iron Arse" Hausmaus, who was not baron, so that the title indeed confirms that we are reading about the correct Hausmaus. Still again, most probably we have already seen this from the article text...
So, what else does the first sentence serve for? (there is something, as implied by the words "One important aspect of this..."; so what are other aspects?)
I do have some ideas how to phrase this differently, but without knowing the full extent of the purpose of the rule I cannot suggest its summary. (I would like to be constructive, not just bitching.)
By the way, what's the deal with "ideal"? We know there are no such thing. I.e., it is of purposeless bell and whistle. Kaligelos ( talk) 21:27, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
Fairest_of_the_Fair—the title is clearly The Fairest_of_the_Fair. What's the practice in these cases? Tony (talk) 07:22, 22 May 2011 (UTC)
The section Precision and disambiguation (shortcut WP:PRECISION) does not seem clear to me;
Whether or not two articles which differ only in capitalization need a parenthetical disambiguation.
It gives two examples, which seem contradictory, viz.
I particularly think this can cause confusion in the predictive search text.
The issue recently arose through a request regarding a movie, Jumping the Broom, and confusion with the marital custom Jumping the broom - discussion can be seen on Talk:Jumping the Broom#Change This Article Title.
Therefore, can we discuss this and try to arrive at consensus, and clarify the guideline - to explicitly state the recommendation in such cases, whether or not it is appropriate to rename one article to add a parenthetic clarification, e.g. "Jumping the Broom (film).
I'd like the guideline to quite simply state that Articles whose titles differ only in capitalization should/should not be renamed to have a clarifier in parenthesis in the article title (with examples).
Thanks in anticipation, Chzz ► 02:06, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
I don't think the primary articles need a parenthetical Dab in the title. The Jumping the broom example works very well as is. It is, however, very useful to create those pages as redirects (which I see is already done in that example). Maybe that should be the guideline, because I suspect a lot of people don't bother to capitalize anything when searching. Keep in mind that people who type in Jumping the Broom, or any other capitalized title probably know they're looking for a proper name. And if they have their caps lock on, well, they probably deserve to go to the wrong page. LRT24 ( talk) 17:46, 22 May 2011 (UTC)
Why must the page use wishy-washy language? If Article titles "prefers" something, this already gives latitude to editors. How exactly does "generally prefers" differ? Is there some great thirst for article titles that are not nouns or nominal groups? Where, please? Why don't we add "generally" all over the place, such as "titles are generally expected to use names and terms that readers are most likely to look for to find the article", then? Tony (talk) 13:50, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
Few things are less useful than the habit of demanding that our policies say something specific and "enforceable" when a categorical statement would be simply wrong a significant proportion of the time. Tony, Wikipedia policy is not a set of laws which can be "violated," and need to be "enforced" – not to mention that rational real-world legislation often has weasel-words like "reasonable" or "excessive" too.
In this case, we have five principles, all of which have claims on our attention; sometimes (and much of the time when this page needs to be consulted) they disagree. When they disagree, some will be right, some will be wrong (or rather, less important in that instance). Therefore all of them are generally true; none of them is exactly true.
"I don't care what we demand as long as we demand something" is an avenue to bad policy. Wikipedia would work better if it were a banning offense. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 04:13, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
Rememberway's latest conribution contains:
That's a claim of fact; I don't believe it. Let's have a citation. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:34, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
Let's get our terminology correct. Previously Rememberway argued "Try to Remember" and the like are
noun phrases. They're not, really; a noun phrase consists of a noun plus modifiers (or a pronoun standing in for a noun plus modifiers.) Now he's shifted to say that they are
proper names. This is correct; it's a name for a distinct entity (a particular song). Proper names are nouns and are always acceptable as article titles.
It gets a little dodgier - slightly - for words, phrases, proverbs, etc.
A rolling stone gathers no moss and
gay are not really proper names, and when used in a sentence they are not nouns. However, by the
use-mention distinction, when you mention them in a sentence as opposed to using them, they function as nouns as they are the
subject of the sentence. They can be presented as "'A rolling stone gathers no moss' is a proverb..." and "'Gay' is a term"; as such they are also appropriate article titles.
As I said before, the purpose of this policy point is to say that articles should be presented in a particular way. We don't use verbs-as-verbs ("To swim is to move the body through water") or adjectives-as-adjectives ("Red objects reflect a particular wavelength of light"), we use noun constructions. "Try to remember" and "gay" can be presented in that type of construction. That's what the policy is intended to say, and whether we consciously pick up on it, the vastest majority of Wikipedia articles follow suit.--
Cúchullain
t/
c
14:46, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
'although "Try to Remember", so capitalized, is a proper name, it is not a proper noun' - Pmanderson
Here's the lead as it is now:
Three queries:
"Wikipedia's design requires an article title must be unique to distinguish it from other titles. A title need not be the name of the subject; many article titles are descriptions of the subject. Generally, article titles are based on what the subject is called in reliable sources; when this offers multiple possibilities, Wikipedia chooses among them by considering five principles: the ideal article title will resemble titles for similar articles, precisely identify the subject, and be short, natural, and recognizable. Tony (talk) 16:42, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
I'd like to suggest an addition of another caveat in Google Books search: make sure that the term in question is sought in reasonably recent books. The reason is that Google&Co OCRed a huge number so-old-as-out-of-copyright books, which may sometimes totally skew the statistics on terminology. Like, in honor of my favorite beer:-):: Plzeň: 87,700 results against Pilsen: 209,000 results, Kaligelos ( talk) 00:27, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
As expected, opening the floodgates allowing italics in article titles has produced cases of overuse. Many titles that are nominally about works whose titles would be italicized (like newspapers, for instance), are now entirely italicized, even if the article title includes words that are not part of the work's title. I never understood why the encyclopedia had to be complicated in this way for an extremely minor formatting benefit. Powers T 01:27, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
The problem is not with the italicization, but with the article title. if the Rochester Times-Union is actually the Times-Union, then the article should be at Times-Union (Rochester) (displayed as Times-Union (Rochester)), just like e.g. the Times Union (Albany) is. Fram ( talk) 13:21, 6 June 2011 (UTC)
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Can somebody add a hanging hyphen after Latin in the "Foreign names and anglicization" section?
For Latin- or Greek-derived words, use e or ae/oe, depending on modern usage and the national variety of English used in the article.
Thanks. – CWenger ( ^ • @) 20:33, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
If anyone doesn't know, there's a comprehensive RfC on hyphen and dash use happening at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/dash drafting. Since this is likely to affect article titles as well, I draw it to people's attention.-- Kotniski ( talk) 07:17, 6 June 2011 (UTC)
There was a referal to this page and a cursory remark that unmitigated titling of articles with derogatory slang was supposedly "in line with" naming conventions. However, it does not seem that there are any for this type of entry.
Those articles are really articles about words and rarely crop up. But when they do, they trash Wikipedia's reputation. WP should IMHO rectify this reprehensible situation by adopting a naming convention which would go on this page, to wit:
The proposal as it now standsIt is believed that the goals of WMF are undermined by loss of editors and readers, and loss of recommendations by academic faculty, because Wikpedia naming conventions depart dramatically from general English-speaking literate usage by allowing derogatory slang words as encyclopedia article titles. The proposal has a maximum and minimum, to wit: minimally, that the convention be that article titles be in this form:
Expletive (Slang) or
Expletive (Slang word) Maximally, the proposal is that the convention be
Expletive (Derogatory slang) or
Expletive (Prejudicial slang) Note that this is not a proposal to censor or ban the content of such articles but merely an editorial policy for naming them.
The formal RFC is for better or for worse situated on this page
here.
Bard गीता 01:50, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
I have started this RfC to determine whether or not the Romanization of Russian guideline actually reflects consensus. Comments there would be greatly appreciated; thanks. Mlm42 ( talk) 17:37, 9 June 2011 (UTC)
OK, I've had it with this user. The list so far is edit warring, massive numbers of tendentious edits, subject line insults, AFD tag blanking, various arguments that I don't think even he believes that black is white. I'm pretty sure there's quite a few bad faiths as well.
So I intend to create an RFC on him, do I have anyone that will second the RFC? Rememberway ( talk) 21:42, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
Just to add my agreement with PMA's analysis at the top of this subthread - that's exactly how I see it, and I'm not sure what the problem or objection is (or even if there is one) regarding the current wording. -- Kotniski ( talk) 06:16, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
Consensus is not unanimity; we do not have the liberum veto, which destroyed Poland. There are two options here: either the view which everyone but Rememberway supports is consensus, or there is none. The first case is the present text; the second choice implies silence on the subject at issue. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:45, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
I've been traveling and haven't followed all the details, but I support the idea that we should roll back to the stable version and not make changes until we have consensus. I don't think there's a hint of consensus that adding "generally" is an improvement, or that weirdly punctuated non-parallel summaries like "Wikipedia chooses among them by considering five principles: the ideal article title will resemble titles for similar articles, precisely identify the subject, be short, be natural, and recognizable" can be tolerated in the lead. Dicklyon ( talk) 08:25, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
Is there actually some substantial disagreement here - an article that some people think should be titled using a noun while others think it should not be - or are we just talking about how best to describe our practices? I can't really see why this issue should have developed into a big and ugly dispute.-- Kotniski ( talk) 11:51, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
Why not just say, titles are generally names or noun phrases? That would cover "Try to Remember", which is a name but not a noun phrase. (Though we'd need to explain that a simple noun is a (minimal) noun phrase.) —Nah, that still leaves out quotations. I see nothing wrong with the current wording,
[3] which IMO captures things just fine. —
kwami (
talk)
19:25, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
I'm talking about the sentence construction. "To swim is to move the body through the water" is written based on a verb construction, and therefore doesn't follow the policy; "swim" should not be the title of the article ( swimming should/is). "'Gay' is a term referring to people with a homosexual orientation" is based on a noun construction, and does follow the policy. " Gay" is the appropriate title of the article, even though the word itself is an adjective. Of course there are relatively few adjectives, verbs, phrases, etc. that are notable enough to have their own articles; those that are still written in this construction.
Additionally,
proper nouns like "
Try to Remember" are, well, proper nouns, and are always appropriate for article titles. The current wording implies they are an exception to standard practice, when they aren't.--
Cúchullain
t/
c
13:36, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
OK, so by my count the change that was made to WP:NOUN is still clearly non consensus, 3 versus 3, which isn't even a majority, and I therefore revert to the version that has stood for multiple years. If you want to change away from the long-standing version you need to get consensus. - Rememberway ( talk) 17:05, 11 June 2011 (UTC)
Enhancing level of quick knowledge by adding into names of articles about real persons their occupation in brackets;without any need to read an article to get an idea about who these people were-in cases when person has a little time or need the information about occupation of certain person(s) right now; without actually reading lines in that article that are saying it. Please consider the significance of this change and be ready to discuss it.
(Please do not delete my contribution on this talk page-as I do not know where to write suggestions and proposals for Wikipedia!)--D.M: 20:05, 12 June 2011 (UTC) [User:Pieceofpeper] — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pieceofpeper ( talk • contribs)
Yes,but you need to make sense of informations you read in infobox and orientate in it,so it may take up more amount of time than it would if there were occupations of people written in names of articles;if people needed to find quckly only that information.--D.M: 20:42, 12 June 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pieceofpeper ( talk • contribs)
Plus not all articles needing infobox(as they deal with historical person that lived in past centuries or are still living) do,in fact,have infobox. And infobox is lot harder to do than to write occupation in brackets. Plus infobox looks messy,if there are too many bits of information;so people cannot orientate as quickly as they need.--D.M: 20:56, 12 June 2011 (UTC)Pieceofpeper — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pieceofpeper ( talk • contribs)
I am not saying we should get rid of infoboxes-I´m saying:"Enhancing names of articles with this information would be very beneficial to people searching through Wikipedia".--D.M: 20:59, 12 June 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pieceofpeper ( talk • contribs)
Not all articles needing infobox(as they deal with historical or contemporary persons)do,in fact,have infobox. For example: Mary Shelley,influential writer does not have an infobox,or should I ask:Is it not considered necessary to make infobox for her? Though there are lots of infoboxes being made everyday to B-class actors and actresses,she does not have infobox,because no one dare to bother. So viewers have a bad luck if they want to find out who she was in short amount of given time;they must read through her full name and lengthy dates of birth and death until they find information they so desperately needed. Another example is Günter Brus ,one of the most important figures of Viennese Actionism,creator of revolutionary book Irrwisch,coiner of "Bild-Dichtungen(Picture-poems) and first pioneer of Body painting-even before Yves Klein.(And has such short article that it is such a shame to have the article on Wikipedia.) And so on... We definitely should include multiple occupations in brackets as long as it is in the name of article and written in thick font,so people can easily see it and it helps to orientate better as they know what kind of person is it about. We should write non-occupational information person is known for in brackets also,like in case of Charles Manson we should write [serial murderer] and so on. There should be no article about person who is not famous or notable for something. Remark about"western cultural bias" is not on the right place,since I do not care whether we write Bill Gates [American business magnate, philanthropist, author and chairman of Microsoft] or Bill Gates [creator of Microsoft] as long as we will write the thing he is most notable for in the name of the article and in thick font for better visibility. Pieceofpeper--D.M: 13:25, 13 June 2011 (UTC)
You may be interested in my proposal here. -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 20:41, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
Editors may be interested in this RFC, along with the discussion of its implementation:
Should all subsidiary pages of the Manual of Style be made subpages of WP:MOS?
It's big; and it promises huge improvements. Great if everyone can be involved. Noetica Tea? 00:53, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
Howdy. There's a wonderful move request currently open, or re-closed, or re-re-opened, over at Talk:Côte d'Ivoire. It's kind of a pretty big, long-embattled titling dispute, and it has the potential to stand as a strong precedent for future titles. Anyone interested might want to check in there, and make sure we're not missing any important considerations.
Thanks in advance for any interest and/or participation. - GTBacchus( talk) 05:52, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
As you know, back in January of 2010 we moved the title of this page from its old title of WP:Naming conventions to its current title of WP:Article titles (the discussion took place here). We did this primarily because the word "Name" carries with it religious, political, and other emotional baggage that the word "Title" does not have. Since then, the policy has remained fairly stable. The endless debates and arguments that we used to get have died off.
Or so it seemed... as it turns out, they didn't die off, they simply moved to the various "Naming conventions" guidelines and sub-pages that fall under this Policy. For a current example, see: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)/Diacritics RfC.
Looking at these debates, I am detecting the same underlying problem that we used to have here ... people are getting hung up over the word "name", and can not get past all the baggage that come with it. (In the example above, the issue centers on "names" that are spelled with diacritics in the subject's native language.)
I think the time has come to conform all of our "naming conventions" to the current terminology ... and change their titles to something that drops the the word "name" and uses "Title" instead. ("Title conventions"?... "Titling conventions"?). Blueboar ( talk) 15:10, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
This has been proposed and discussed before and I think it is a bad idea to name them "Article titles (xxx)". When "Article titles" page was named "Naming conventions" people were confused where policy stopped and guidance began, specifically when the Naming conventions policy referred to "Naming conventions" some people assumed that it encompassed guidance as policy because the phrase was then ambiguous. I think that policy and guidance is an important distinction and useful distinction that should not be lost again. Article titles and its guidelines are different from the MOS where all, including WP:MOS are guidelines. -- PBS ( talk) 09:07, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
I suggest it would be useful and helpful to include the principal naming criteria in other pages in a way that avoids having to update it on those pages every time it is changed here.
It seems to me the obvious solution is to create a subpage, WP:Title/PrincipalNamingCriteria, and include that in WP:Title as well as in any other page in which listing them could be helpful. Example: WP:How2title.
So, I did that. But it has been reverted with the unhelpful comment, "you can copy it to another page, but please leave it in the policy". Yes, I know I can copy it (duh), but then we have to main 2 (or 20, or whatever) copies of the criteria, which is exactly what I'm trying to avoid! What's the harm is maintaining this separately in a subpage? It looks the same when you view the policy page, and it's obvious what's going on if you need to edit them. We can put the policy tag on the subpage, if concern for it losing the "policy" status is the issue. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 17:38, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
But first, I still don't understand your objection. You do realize that when you go to WP:TITLE the criteria remain listed right there on that page, don't you? What difference does it make whether they're physically contained on that actual source page or separate source subpage, as long as it's rendered as one coherent policy?
Actually, the wording does evolve on this list. Yesterday I discovered that a few months ago the wording recognizability wording was changed, which used to explicitly clarify that we were referring about someone familiar with the topic. Anyway, that's a wording change that would have to be updated in upteen places, if this criteria was copied in upteen places as you suggest. By containing the source for the criteria in a transcluded subpage, all those updates are automatically and immediately made simultaneously. One less thing for editors to worry about. Isn't that a good thing? Plus, it means we can easily list that important criteria in any discussion, simply by typing: {{WP:Title/PrincipalNamingCriteria}}, like this:
Now that you mention it, it might be useful to structure the primary topic section - at least the part that defines it fundamentally since so many people seem to think it means "most important" (by whatever standard they have in mind) - in a way that makes it easy to include the fundamental definition elsewhere. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 02:30, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
Blueboar, I honestly thought this was such a non-controversial (after all, it changes nothing about what the policy says) and self-explanatory thing, it didn't occur to me to explain and ask first. Changes for that section will continue to be discussed here on this talk page, since the talk page for the subpage is now a redirect to this one. You make edits to it on it - the subpage. I'm not sure why this is difficult to understand. Are you simply unfamiliar with transclusion? If so, I suggest you read WP:TRANSCLUSION. Do you object transclusion in general, or just in this case?
I believe watching a parent page means you're automatically watching any subpages of that parent, but I'm not sure about that. You might have to put the subpage on watch independently. Maybe somebody else knows? -- Born2cycle ( talk) 17:28, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
As a point of comparison, WP:RM has 1384 watchers [4], while the transcluded Wikipedia:Requested moves/Header has only 30. Yet the Header subpage is where the "rules" about RM are contained. Since those changes are discussed on the main (watched by 1384) talk page, and 30 appears more than enough to enforce it, it's not an issue there, so I don't see why it would be an issue here. If nothing else, as the creator of the subpage I will be particularly diligent about watching for undiscussed changes made to it.
As far as the transclusions being difficult to understand for newer editors, I don't expect them to be trying to edit policy. For legitimate changes to the criteria by experienced editors who are confused by the transclusion, all they have to do is ask.
As to the advantages, I've now transcluded the criteria and the definition of primary topic definition into WP:How2title, which is in a process of being steadily refined and (hopefully) improved. I'm sure there other essays, and perhaps even guidelines and policies, that could be made more useful and helpful if they actually listed the naming criteria and stated the primary topic definition (via transclusion to guarantee being current), instead of linking to it.
It has been only a day. As did Ohm's Law above, I suggest we give it more time to see if any real problems actually arise, or if the advantages becomes more obvious. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 19:03, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
There is a move request at Talk:China that could use the opinions of editors involved with Wikipedia naming issues and not invested in intra-China politics. SchmuckyTheCat ( talk)
Suggestion. If this subpaging is agreed on, the section name should be part of the subpage. That way, editing the section on the main page automatically edits the subpage, as do transcluded pages on WP:AfD and WP:RfD.
BTW, what probably should have been done was to move the main page to the subpage, and back, before actually copying the subpage. Then watchlists would have automatically been updated. But that's water under the bridge; it can't easily be done that way without first deleting the page, and starting over. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 22:58, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
I added a heading to the subpage and indeed that makes it editable directly from the parent page. It's seamless. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 01:35, 16 July 2011 (UTC)
I created the PrincipalNamingCriteria subpage by copying the principal criteria from what was then the current version: [5]. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 17:09, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
By putting the criteria into a transcludable separate page, now the criteria can be explicitly listed in a manner that remains current and up-to-date. That seems very helpful to me, in terms of making it possible for editors of other pages to accurately inform their readers regarding exactly what the criteria are.
I understand your concern about someone changing the criteria without others noticing, but by adding the criteria subpage to your watchlist, you can almost completely solve that problem yourself. I've explained above how it should take only a few of us watching the new subpage to completely solve the problem, since requiring any changes to be discussed first on this talk page (so that anyone who watches this page is informed) is all that is required. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 19:14, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
What problems? All the problems you suggest are purely imagined and hypothetical. I promise I will be at the head of the list support undoing the transclusion if any of it actually manifests in reality. Of course. I think you're really exaggerating how many people have to watch the subpage to keep the potential problems potential.
I understand that this is new and different, and thus the reluctance. But give it a chance. I was confused the first time I tried to edit WP:RM, but I quickly figured it out. It can, and will, happen here too. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 20:42, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
Maybe you have to be a programmer to appreciate it? -- Born2cycle ( talk) 22:54, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
I have read through all of this. I advise strongly against using transclusions in this way. It was attempted at WP:MOS a couple of years ago, and brought nothing but chaos and confusion. Ideally, we could indeed manage policies and guidelines in a systematic modular fashion. But in practice it alienates editors, creating a rift between those who can handle the tricky technical aspects and those who give up when faced with it. Compare the situation here, where an admin wanted to make a requested change, but was defeated by technical complexity. That's the last thing we want in a participatory project. Noetica Tea? 23:41, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
I suggest to remove modify these phrases from the policy: "Wikipedia has many naming conventions relating to specific subject domains (as listed in the box at the top of this page). Sometimes these recommend the use of titles that are not strictly the common name (as in the case of the conventions for flora and medicine)." Let's remove it. Such arbitrary exceptions may be used to bypass the WP:Common name, as should be clear from
this discussion. Using naming conventions that contradict majority of RS is highly questionable at best.
Biophys (
talk)
12:36, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
There will often be several possible alternative titles for any given article;
the choice between them is made by consensus.
One problem that I just ran across was the use of the term "defrocking" (or "unfrocking") for laicization of a member of the clergy. This is essentially an "informal" semi-derogatory term. It is most common in English-speaking countries, but laicization is often (less often) used as well. A name change was proposed and lost, following the rules of this policy. It is a bit Protestant-oriented IMO. Clergy "defrocked" are most often Catholic.
I'm sure this isn't the first time that something English-centric has turned out to be some other centric as well, a little less defensible. Not sure what to offer as a workable alternative for a general rule, but did want to point that out. Student7 ( talk) 18:14, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
This was discussed here earlier, Ganga/Ganges isn't a settled fact. (1)Earlier the argument was that it is Ganges not Ganga because there was divided local use. It was demonstrated that it was not the case, which resulted in the example being taken off. (2)Now the argument is international intelligiblity, which is again disputable. Please see the archives of this page, where it was demonstrated that, Ganga is more popular than Ganges, internationally, in English, whereas even a 10-20% acceptance would have been enough. (3)There was a move proposal; that Ganges be moved to Ganga, though the move has been closed, since the dispute is not settled, it cannot be considered as an example, as it is used to influence the Ganga move debate. (5)Though one particular move proposal was closed, if you watch the pages the debate is on-going and another move proposal will come up any time. In that case the statement "Ganges not Ganga", takes sides on a controversial issue, which it shouldn't. So please find another example. Yogesh Khandke ( talk) 10:37, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
(od)( edit conflict)od)(1)That is your opinion, but Wikipedia has two castes, one of POV pushers who push their agenda, and another who can evaluate over 400 edits, and the hundreds of sources they quote, in minutes. (2)I don't, that cannot be an excuse to keep Ganges not Ganga. Yogesh Khandke ( talk) 13:45, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
(od)(1)That it is reasonable is your imagination. (2)What is the meaning of our, and who qualifies as your?. (3)A case that isn't settled cannot be used as an example. (4)The moment the move would be proposed we would have National Varieties quoted, which would make the argument circular, Wikipedia English has millions of pages, another example should be found, pending which no example should work fine. Yogesh Khandke ( talk) 14:33, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
(od)As Quigley said this page isn't for content disputes, the issue is whether an example that is contentious should be here? Obviously not. Save your breath folks. Yogesh Khandke ( talk) 10:42, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
As often happens, we have a disagreement as to what a previous consensus actually was... but it does not really matter whether the previous consensus was to use or not to use Ganges/Ganga as the example, since consensus can change (whatever it was). What we need to determine is what the current consensus is. From the discussion above, it appears that the current consensus is to use it... but this appearance this can be confirmed by taking a quick poll:
Do we currently have a consensus to a) continue to use the Ganges article to illustrate the statement: "However, sometimes a form which represents only minority local usage is chosen because of its greater intelligibility to English-speaking readers worldwide" - or b) should we find another example?
Unless and until the main English reliable sources change from using Ganges to using Ganga, neither will Wikipedia, as that is very strong evidence supporting the notion that "Ganges" is more recognizable to, and expected by, our readers, than is "Ganga". And this remains a good example for illustrating how much actual usage in English reliable sources is given more preference in deciding titles than does "official" use. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 17:25, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
All: This was when Ganges not Ganga was taken off, [9] after a long discussion (see link above), this is when Ganges not Ganga was inserted without discussion [10], disregarding earlier consensus to take it off. Quigley: Stop whining. Don't forget the not democracy part here. Yogesh Khandke ( talk)
It's important to realize what the consensus favors that's relevant to this issue, as it's not just about Ganges v. Ganga. First, there is a view that Ganga should be the title because Ganga is the "official" name. Consensus does not support the view that Ganga is the "official" name - certainly not outside of India, and it's arguable even within India. Second, that view depends on the premise that if something is an "official" name, it should be the title of the respective article. Consensus does not support that view either; there is certainly no support for it in policy or guidelines. Finally, consensus clearly supports the view that the name most commonly used in reliable English sources should be the title, and that's why the title of this article is and should remain Ganges.
I think it's important for everyone to realize that consensus has to change on each of these points before we can say that consensus has changed about this title. Does anyone seriously think that might happen within the foreseeable future? Nothing seems to ever change that dramatically in Wikipedia. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 17:55, 21 July 2011 (UTC)
A proposal to change this title, one of our examples, is being made at Talk:Fixed-wing_aircraft#Requested_move_2011; it doesn't seem to have been mentioned here. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:28, 22 July 2011 (UTC)
In a recent close at Talk:United_States_Declaration_of_Independence#Requested_move_based_on_above_discussion the closing admin stated " Wikipedia's precision and disambiguation guidelines support natural modes of disambiguation over parenthetical disambiguation."
Based on this statement, the closer concluded that consensus (meaning that of the community, not those participating, who were in favor of the version with parentheses) was that "United States Declaration of Independence" was a "natural mode of disambiguation" and thus preferred over the parenthetic disambiguation, "Declaration of Independence (United States)".
Does anyone else get that meaning -- from the actual words of WP:PRECISION? Here is what it currently states:
When additional precision is necessary to distinguish an article title from other uses of the topic name, over-precision should be avoided. Be precise, but only as precise as necessary. For example, it would be inappropriate to title an article "United States Apollo program (1961–75)" over Apollo program (given that the year range refers to the whole of the program, not a portion of it); or "Queen (London, England rock band)" over Queen (band). Remember that concise titles are preferred.
However, because pages cannot share the same title, it is not always possible to use the exact title that may be desired for an article, as that title may have another meaning. As a general rule:
- If the topic of the article is the primary topic (or only topic) for a desired title, then the article can take that title without modification.
- Otherwise that title cannot be used for the article without disambiguation. This is often done by adding a disambiguating tag in parentheses (or sometimes after a comma); however in certain cases it may be done by choosing a different form of the title in order to achieve uniqueness. If there is a natural mode of disambiguation in standard English, as with Cato the Elder and Cato the Younger, use that instead.
Often there is no alternative to parenthetical disambiguation, and it does have the advantage that the non-parenthesized part of the title may most clearly convey what the subject is called in English. On the other hand, such disambiguations may be longer or less natural than an alternate but unambiguous form, when there is one.
Keep in mind that the two titles in question in this case were:
Since neither choice is significantly more concise than the other, the key statements relevant to this particular case in the guideline are:
Of these, the only statement that might be construed to support the closer's contention that this guideline supports "natural modes of disambiguation over parenthetical disambiguation" is (3). But the meaning of that statement, and in particular what is meant by "natural modes of disambiguation", is clarified by the examples, Cato the Elder and Cato the Younger, which are disambiguations commonly used in reliable sources. "United States Declaration of Independence" is not commonly used in reliable sources, and does not at all meet the "natural" criteria defined above on this policy page:
titles are expected to use names and terms that readers are most likely to look for in order to find the article (and to which editors will most naturally link from other articles). As part of this, a good title should convey what the subject is actually called in English.
What readers are likely to look for "United States Declaration of Independence" to find the article? Yes, they are also not likely to look for "Declaration of Independence (United States)", but they are likely to look for "Declaration of Independence", which is conveyed only by the use of parenthetic disambiguation. That is, the title United States Declaration of Independence does not "convey what the subject is actually called in English" ("Declaration of Independence)", but Declaration of Independence (United States) does convey that (because it's understood that the United States in parentheses is not part of what it is actually called).
That was the point of the objection. That is ultimately why the majority of those participating in that poll, 7 vs. 4, disfavored it.
On the other hand (1), (2) and (4) all clearly support the opposite notion, that parenthetic disambiguation is preferred over simply adding precision to the name of the topic, unless adding such precision without parentheses results in a "natural disambiguation", like Cato the Elder. That is, (1) notes that the parenthetic form is often used, and that's mentioned first. (2) notes that disambiguation can also be done by choosing a different form in the title, but no preference of that over parenthetic is even implied. (3) points out the advantages of using the parenthetic form.
I put to you two questions:
Thanks. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 03:54, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
Whether the "no consensus" decision is reasonable on some other grounds (as you apparently suggest by seemingly justifying it based on the lack of coherency in a couple of the support votes, a point the closer did not even hint at) is beside the point.
All that should matter in evaluating a close is the reason given by the closer, and whether that is "coherent". That's my issue. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 06:39, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
Your reliance on this point indicates you either did not read or did not understand my analysis, which was based on what "natural disambiguation" means, and, in particular, whether "United States Declaration of Independence" is a "natural disambiguation".
Now, if your disagreement with my analysis is on that point, then how about saying that, and explaining what you find faulty in my reasoning? If you would actually quote statements from my analysis with which you disagree, and explain why, then I believe we would come to an understanding - at least an agreement to disagree - much more quickly. Thanks. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 17:47, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
This is an interesting issue. I tentatively agree with Born2cycle, but I think it worth nothing that "Cato the Whatever" is a useless and potentially deceptive example, because it is not the case that the two topics are most commonly referred to as "Cato" and therefore we have to disambiguate them and we choose to follow reliable sources in doing so. Rather, in this case, we have two topics, one of which is most commonly known as "Cato the Elder", the other most commonly known as "Cato the Younger", and no disambiguation is necessary.
Is there an example where reliable sources both affirm that a term is the most commonly used name of two topics, and offer a commonly used scheme for resolving the ambiguity? If so, then let's hear it; if not, then it is not possible to defer to reliable sources when disambiguating, and this discussion may end. Hesperian 06:49, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
On the particulars of B2C's question #2, the assertion that "United States Declaration of Independence" is not commonly used in reliable sources is fallacious and was disproven by evidence provided by Jim Wae in the move discussion. The questions whether that is the MOST common name for the document or whether the U.S. DOI is unambiguously the primary topic for the term "Declaration of Independence" are distinct issues, but it is incorrect to claim that the phrase "United States Declaration of Independence" is not common or not a natural language disambiguation. As for question #1, I do not think the policy should indicate a preference for parenthetical disambiguators. The policy currently simply summarizes current practice: disambiguation is often done by adding a disambiguating tag in parentheses (or sometimes after a comma); however in certain cases it may be done by choosing a different form of the title in order to achieve uniqueness [emphasis added]. I don't think any clarification is necessary. older ≠ wiser 15:16, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
...Otherwise that title cannot be used for the article without disambiguation. This is often done by adding a disambiguating tag in parentheses (or sometimes after a comma); however in certain cases it may be done by choosing a different form of the title in order to achieve uniqueness avoid the ambiguity presented by the most common title. Such other title should be a recognized alternate that the subject is actually called in English and, while less common than the preferred title, should not be obscure. If there is such a natural mode of disambiguation in standard English, as with Cato the Elder and Cato the Younger [insert better example], use that instead.
--
Fuhghettaboutit (
talk)
23:10, 18 July 2011 (UTC)Possibly a suitable example is English language and English people. I think we can all agree that both are usually referred to simply as "English"; and that when it is necessary to distinguish between the two, "the English language" is an overwhelmingly common and familiar phrase, and "The English people" is pretty common too. Hesperian 23:37, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
...Otherwise that title cannot be used for the article without disambiguation. This is often done by adding a disambiguating tag in parentheses (or sometimes after a comma); however in certain cases it may be done by choosing a different form of the title in order to
achieve uniqueness avoid the ambiguity presented by the most common name. Such other title should still reflect a recognized name that the subject is actually commonly called in English reliable sources and, while less common than the name preferred for the title, should not be obscure. If there is such a natural mode of disambiguation in standard English, as with Cato the Elder and Cato the Younger
English language and
English people, as opposed to just English, use that instead.
-- Born2cycle ( talk) 00:25, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
If there is such a natural mode of disambiguation in standard English, use that instead. In this regard, the word English, alone, commonly refers to both English People and to the English language. Because of the ambiguity seen between those two topics, we use the nevertheless common titles,
English language and
English people, to provide natural disambiguation. On the other hand, for the three major topics "mercury" might refer to, there are no sufficiently alternate common alternate names, so the articles are disambiguated using parenthetical, viz:
Mercury (element),
Mercury (mythology) and
Mercury (planet). The last of these has a potential natural disambiguator of Planet Mercury, but it is not commonly used as a an alternate title but simply as a noun phrase.
As an alternative approach...
To my mind this outlines the various options, but does not imply that one of them is "better" than the others. Blueboar ( talk) 01:00, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
It is very common to prepend a geographic or political entity as context for an ambiguous title. I would not want to change this policy in a way that would discourage that "natural mode of disambiguation". Powers T 13:58, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
This is the current wording of the section we're discussing above and below.
*** PLEASE DO NOT EDIT THIS SECTION. ***
*Otherwise that title cannot be used for the article without disambiguation. This is often done by adding a disambiguating tag in parentheses (or sometimes after a comma); however in certain cases it may be done by choosing a different form of the title in order to achieve uniqueness. If there is a natural mode of disambiguation in standard English, as with Cato the Elder and Cato the Younger, use that instead.
The following section is a transclusion of a subpage, Wikipedia talk:Article titles/precision, which originated as a current copy of WP:PRECISION, and has been pared down to an edited version of the paragraph in question. If you click "edit" on the following header, you will be editing the subpage.
If you are participating here, you may want to add Wikipedia talk:Article titles/precision to your watch list.
*** PLEASE DO EDIT THIS SECTION. ***
If the topic has a name (some topics, like List of countries, do not have set names), then any alternative title should still reflect a name that the subject is commonly called in English. While a name may be chosen that is less common than the (ambiguous) preferred name, avoid choosing an obscure name, or making up a new name. Where such an alternate common name exists in standard English, it should be used instead of the most common name, as a "natural" disambiguator.
For example, the word "English" commonly refers to either the people or the language. Because of the ambiguity, we use the alternate but still common titles, English language and English people, allowing natural disambiguation.
On the other hand, "mercury" has distinct meanings that do not have sufficiently common alternate names, so we use instead parenthetical disambiguation: Mercury (element), Mercury (mythology) and Mercury (planet). Note that the planet has the potential natural disambiguation title: "planet Mercury". However, although the phrase "planet Mercury" appears in some contexts, it is not what the planet is actually called, so it's not an appropriate title.
In summary: Use names that are commonly used in reliable sources; do not invent neologisms. For topics without names, like List of countries, more latitude is allowed to form descriptive and unique titles.
Explain your edits to the consensus version here.
On to substance - I'm not sure "noun phrase" tells us anything, because a noun phrase may or may not be something the subject is called. I'm tempting to say it has to be a name, but there was some objection to that in the past. One thing I tried to do at WP:How2title is distinguish named entities from unnamed entities. If we did that here, then we could say that named entities must have a commonly used named for their title, or the most common name must be disambiguated with parenthetic disambiguation. It's the unnamed entities, like List of countries in Asia, that have descriptive names that are not names. What we want to avoid is giving a descriptive title to an article about something that has a name, but that name (alone) is unavailable. We should disambiguate that name, parenthetically, not come up with a different descriptive title. How do we say that? -- Born2cycle ( talk) 05:27, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
After: When a topic's most commonly used name is ambiguous (refers to more than one topic covered in Wikipedia), and the topic is not primary, ... -- Born2cycle ( talk) 17:30, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
After: If the topic has a name (some topics, like List of countries, don't have set names), then any alternative title should still reflect a name that the subject is commonly called in English. While we may choose a name that is less common than the (ambiguous) preferred name, we avoid choosing an obscure name, or making up a new name. Such an alternative name is used instead of the most common name as it is a natural mode of disambiguation in standard English.
The alternative is to do as you suggest, which is effectively to provide no guidance at all, because everyone is free to prioritize the factors any way they wish, and vary the priorities according to whim from one decision to the next. That's what I, for one, am trying to get away from, because it makes deciding titles a coin tossing process and ultimately responsible for the unnecessarily long WP:RM backlog. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 17:40, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
The point is that before you can decide on title C or title D, or title E over title F, you have to decide whether to prefer factor A over factor B, or vice versa, and then apply that consistently to both cases. That's the point of WP:How2title. It's about interpreting the criteria as consistently as possible from one case to the next, which, if adopted, should greatly reduce the backlog. That doesn't mean there are no judgement calls, it just clarifies many of the calls. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 18:33, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
Yeah. I disagree that a reduced backlog and a consistent priority order for naming conventions are part of our goal-set at all. If the community decides on consistency, consistently and on a case-by-case basis, then consistency becomes a priority. I haven't seen that happen. - GTBacchus( talk) 19:03, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
Let me put it this way, isn't providing guidance a goal here? If not, what is the point of, well, policy and guidelines?
Now, the issue here is deciding what a title should be. We can identify the factors that go into deciding titles, but is that guidance? I mean, when all the factors indicate the same title, the answer is obvious; there is no need for guidance. When guidance is needed is for those cases where some factors indicate one title, and others indicate another title. When that happens, what do we do? It seems to me that that is the question that needs to be answered to meet the goal of providing guidance for the task of deciding titles. And to answer that question, the guidance can and must be more formulaic, as demonstrated by WP:How2title. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 19:43, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
(tangent discussion moved to Wikipedia Talk:How2title#Should deciding titles be somewhat formulaic?)
We draw the line on a case-by-case basis, and it's okay to just say that. Some illustrative examples are helpful, but we're not trying to list a comprehensive set of precedents for people to follow. All that example does is say that we only use natural language disambiguation if it really is "natural language". It's inherent in the word "natural" that we don't use stilted, little-used phrases that will make people say "what the heck?!". - GTBacchus( talk) 04:53, 21 July 2011 (UTC)
Do we need that example to show that we use the names of things to title articles? That's a pretty fundamental point; is it not made anywhere other than this putative paragraph? - GTBacchus( talk) 05:17, 21 July 2011 (UTC)
I've seen the article titles of I'm Holdin' On to Love (To Save My Life) and Thank You Baby! (For Makin' Someday Come So Soon). Although "to" and "for" aren't words normally capitalized in titles because they are prepositions, they are here. It has been brought to my attention that it might be because they are the first words in the parenthesis. I have checked the Wikipedia guidelines for titling and there seems to be no policy for titles that have parenthesis. Something should be done about this. Should they be titled or not? -- ipodnano05 * leave@message 19:31, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
Okay, following Arthur's first suggestion above, the transcluded section in a separate subpage is now directly editable from the main policy page
a demo copy of the page. Assuming no one reverts it again, y You can try it for yourself. Just go to
Wikipedia:Title#Principal_naming_criteria
User:Born2cycle/Titles#Principal naming criteria and have your cursor hover over "Edit". You will see "Wikipedia:Title/PrincipalNamingCriteria" floating above the cursor. Indeed, if you click on "Edit", that's what it will edit.
Presuming we go ahead and do Arthur's move trick above (perhaps by using a subpage named NamingCriteria instead of PrincipalNamingCriteria to not have to worry about deleting the existing one first) to address the lost watchlist problem, are there any remaining objections? -- Born2cycle ( talk) 02:06, 16 July 2011 (UTC)
My point is that are pros and cons, and this particular one is very minor, and a wash between the two approaches. I'm sorry, but these "objections" really do seem to be WP:JDLI arguments that are mostly about being uncomfortable with change, not anything substantive. But I can see how you might not realize that and your objections would seem real and important to you. That's human nature. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 16:16, 16 July 2011 (UTC)
By the way, anyone who went on vacation on, say, July 1, would presumably come back and do a diff, seeing prominently near the top the replacement of the criteria with the transclusion to the new sub page, alerting them to add that to their watch list, if specific changes to the criteria is something they want to watch. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 18:02, 16 July 2011 (UTC)
Transcluding the entire page into the other page, but limiting what is transcluded with "onlyinclude" works but is not a good general solution since it limits what can be transcluded to only that which is so tagged. However, the need and utility of a general solution, if it exists, is apparently not recognized at this time. Even I can't think of any particular case for transcluding anything on this page other than the principal naming criteria.
Since the page is locked from editing, can some admin please add <onlyinclude> </onlyinclude> tags around the principal criteria section as I did on the test page in my user area [12]? Thanks. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 15:33, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
I'm still not convinced it's necessary, but I've figured out how to do selective transclusion and can demonstrate with the demo page, User:Born2cycle/Titles, which is essentially a copy of this page.
Here are the basic instructions, along with some explanation of how and why it works.
Selective TransclusionSelective transclusion is the process of transcluding only part of a page. If only one section of a page is to be transcluded, this can be done by simply surrounding the section of interest with <onlyinclude> </onlyinclude> tags, and transcluding the whole page. But if you want to transclude one section into one page, and another section into another page, that's selective transclusion, and you need a way to uniquely mark each section to be transcluded, and a way to specify which section you want to transclude.
So, the key is to think of a section name for each section you want to transclude, and add the following line at the beginning all such sections, substituting SECTIONNAME (twice) with the unique name of your section:
- <onlyinclude>{{#ifeq:{{{transcludesection|SECTIONNAME}}}|SECTIONNAME|
First, by adding an <onlyinclude> tag to the file that means anything that transcludes will see only what is inside <onlyinclude></onlyinclude> tags.
Second, the "ifeq" statement checks for a parameter named transcludesection. If it doesn't find one, it sets it to the default value of SECTIONNAME - this is so that the section will be displayed when the document is normally/directly viewed. In any case, it checks to see if transcludesection is is equal to SECTIONNAME, and, if it is, it renders the text that follows up to the next double-curly brace. Thus, the text will be rendered if the parameter is not originally set, or if it is set to that section name.
For example, if we want to transclude the principal criteria section, we just add this above the first line to transclude:
- <onlyinclude>{{#ifeq:{{{transcludesection|principalcriteria}}}|principalcriteria|
And, above the common name section, we put this:
- <onlyinclude>{{#ifeq:{{{transcludesection|commonname}}}|commonname|
Also, each such transcludable section needs to end with this:
- }}</onlyinclude>
That's it! Then, to transclude the principalcriteria section from another page, use the following line, substituting FILENAME for the document to be transcluded and SECTIONNAME with the name of the section you want to transclude:
- {{FILENAME|transcludesection=SECTIONNAME}}
So, to transclude the principal naming criteria section from the demonstration page in my user space:
- {{User:Born2cycle/Titles|transcludesection=principalcriteria}}
Or, to transclude the common name section:
- {{User:Born2cycle/Titles|transcludesection=commonname}}
Of course, the same page can translude two or more sections this way by including multiple such lines. There is no limit to how many selectable sections for transclusion a document can have. The only requirement is that each be given a unique keyword name.
A sample document - a copy of WP:AT - containing marked sections is here: User:Born2cycle/Titles. You can diff it with this page to see what was added to implement this. A simple test that transcludes both sections from this page, but rendering common names before principal naming criteria to demonstrate that each is selected separately, is here: User:Born2cycle/testtranscluder. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 23:48, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
{{quotation|{{Wikipedia:Article titles|transcludesection=principalcriteria}}}}
- Recognizability – article titles are expected to be a recognizable name or description of the topic.
- Naturalness – titles are expected to use names and terms that readers are most likely to look for in order to find the article (and to which editors will most naturally link from other articles). As part of this, a good title should convey what the subject is actually called in English.
- Precision – titles are expected to use names and terms that are precise, but only as precise as is necessary to identify the topic of the article unambiguously. For technical reasons, no two Wikipedia articles can have the same title. For information on how ambiguity is avoided in titles, see the Precision and disambiguation section below and the disambiguation guideline.
- Conciseness – titles are expected to be shorter rather than longer.
- Consistency – titles are expected to follow the same pattern as those of similar articles. Many of these patterns are documented in the naming guidelines listed in the Specific-topic naming conventions box above, and ideally indicate titles that are in accordance with the principal criteria above.
- Recognizability – The title is a name or description of the subject that someone familiar with, although not necessarily an expert in, the subject area will recognize.
- Naturalness – The title is one that readers are likely to look or search for and that editors would naturally use to link to the article from other articles. Such a title usually conveys what the subject is actually called in English.
- Precision – The title unambiguously identifies the article's subject and distinguishes it from other subjects.
- Concision – The title is no longer than necessary to identify the article's subject and distinguish it from other subjects.
- Consistency – The title is consistent with the pattern of similar articles' titles. Many of these patterns are listed (and linked) as topic-specific naming conventions on article titles, in the box above.
- Recognizability – article titles are expected to be a recognizable name or description of the topic.
- Naturalness – titles are expected to use names and terms that readers are most likely to look for in order to find the article (and to which editors will most naturally link from other articles). As part of this, a good title should convey what the subject is actually called in English.
- Precision – titles are expected to use names and terms that are precise, but only as precise as is necessary to identify the topic of the article unambiguously. For technical reasons, no two Wikipedia articles can have the same title. For information on how ambiguity is avoided in titles, see the Precision and disambiguation section below and the disambiguation guideline.
- Conciseness – titles are expected to be shorter rather than longer.
- Consistency – titles are expected to follow the same pattern as those of similar articles. Many of these patterns are documented in the naming guidelines listed in the Specific-topic naming conventions box above, and ideally indicate titles that are in accordance with the principal criteria above.
I have removed a link to Born2Cycle's newly written essay WP:How to Determine a Wikipedia Article Title in the See Also section (link added by Born2). I think adding it was premature. I don't have any problem including essays in the See Also section, but they do need to have some degree of consensus before we do so. At the moment, Born2's essay essentially only reflects one editor's views. So far, it has gained very little actual support (and some serious criticism). In fact, unless it does gain some support, I think there is a realistic possibility that it could be moved to User Space as a "personal essay". ... In any case, I don't think it should be added yet. It needs a lot of work and more people saying "yeah, I basically agree with this" before we add it. Blueboar ( talk) 21:49, 21 July 2011 (UTC)
Essays are the opinion or advice of an editor or group of editors, for which widespread consensus has not been established. They do not speak for the entire community and may be created and written without approval.
The way to get around the catch-22 is to leave notification that the essay exists on the talk page (and at places like the Pump) inviting them to comment and edit. Again, my objection was to adding it at this point in time... not to adding it at all. Blueboar ( talk) 00:05, 22 July 2011 (UTC)
The issue of the meaning of the Conciseness criterion is being discussed in a subsection of an AN discussion here. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 17:06, 26 July 2011 (UTC)
Maybe we need a provision to say that titles shouldn't be changed just to get a small improvement in one of conciseness, recognizability, consistency, etc., unless there's a good reason. This could knock down the amount of churn and noise that B2C generates. Dicklyon ( talk) 17:47, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
Per the suggestion of several people, including the admin who closed the above referenced AN discussion, I'm bringing this issue to this talk page.
Based on the AN discussion mentioned/linked above, I have formulated the True/False statements below for anyone who is willing to participate. My main concern is that apparently very different interpretations exist regarding two criteria, and how they apply to various situations. So I'm curious how everyone interprets and applies them in these situations too. If these criteria are not understood the same by all of us, we won't have much of a chance achieving consensus regarding how they are applied and weighed. So, the statements below are based on the following criteria which is listed at WP:TITLE:
- Recognizability – article titles are expected to be a recognizable name or description of the topic.
- Naturalness – titles are expected to use names and terms that readers are most likely to look for in order to find the article (and to which editors will most naturally link from other articles). As part of this, a good title should convey what the subject is actually called in English.
- Precision – titles are expected to use names and terms that are precise, but only as precise as is necessary to identify the topic of the article unambiguously. For technical reasons, no two Wikipedia articles can have the same title. For information on how ambiguity is avoided in titles, see the Precision and disambiguation section below and the disambiguation guideline.
- Conciseness – titles are expected to be shorter rather than longer.
- Consistency – titles are expected to follow the same pattern as those of similar articles. Many of these patterns are documented in the naming guidelines listed in the Specific-topic naming conventions box above, and ideally indicate titles that are in accordance with the principal criteria above.
Just list the statement numbers and for each either a T if you think it's entirely true, otherwise an F. Of course, any clarifications you think might be necessary are welcome.
Finally, a question... do you think we need to make any changes/clarifications to how we explain what the Concise and Natural criteria mean? If so, what do you suggest?
Thanks! -- Born2cycle ( talk) 08:06, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
First, "Shorter rather than longer" does not necessarily mean "shortest possible"... Second, Conciseness (like all of our criteria) has to be balanced against the other criteria. These are broad principles... NOT firm and fast "rules". Which of these broad principles is given more or less weight changes from article to article. Each article is a unique situation... Sometimes the principle of conciseness will be given more weight and is the key to determining the best article title... but at other times it is given hardly any weight at all, and one or more of the other criteria is the key. Blueboar ( talk) 12:27, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
We agree, I think, that if concision were the only consideration, Gandhi is shorter, and would be preferred. We also agree that it isn't the only consideration. So what is all this in aid of? To say that Bacchus should have said that is a samll difference between one full name and another? Perhaps he should, but he would have reached the reached the same closure. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:38, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
I just edited the concision criterion, and then I noticed this discussion here. Perhaps it's clearer now?
I think it might be a good idea to reiterate on the policy page that these criteria are not rules, but observations of criteria that Wikipedians seem to use in the field. We could also note that the list is not exhaustive. Another point would be that the criteria do not have well-defined relative weights, because some will outweigh others in some situations, but not in others. The specifics are decided by Wikipedians, in context, and decisions that we make the same way over and over again are eventually distilled into principles and recorded here. Any thoughts? - GTBacchus( talk) 01:58, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
There's a new discussion about the capitalization of article titles at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Original titles for works in foreign languages. As it has already been moved, please join the discussion there. Specifically, the question is whether a non-translated, non-English book title should be capitalized according to the rules of the non-English language, or the usual English-language rules. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 15:38, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
What's the practical difference between recognizability and naturalness? They both have to do with WP:COMMONNAME, it would seem, as well as the Principle of Least Astonishment. Can anyone provide an example where these two criteria indicate different titles? - GTBacchus( talk) 17:39, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
I find this page to be a bit sprawling and random, and I'm thinking of ways to organize it. One idea, which Born2cycle and I have both been mulling over, is for the page structure, or at least part of it, to reflect the 5 naming criteria. I'm imagining something like:
The general "Deciding on an article title" lists the criteria, as it currently does, and then we'd have subsections going into more detail about each one. Some of those we've already got, in one form or another. In particular, the "Common names" section addresses the first two criteria, the section on Precision addresses that criterion, and the section about explicit naming conventions speaks to the Consistency criterion.
Another point: we've got sections addressing neutrality in titles, but neutrality is not listed as one of the Primary Naming Criteria. Should it be? I think it would be an accurate observation that neutrality is a criterion that Wikipedians use in titling questions.
Well, I guess I've said a lot of stuff now. Any thoughts? - GTBacchus( talk) 17:50, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
Okay, very little content has changed, but a lot of sections moved. That makes it a little tricky to see just what changed. Here are the content changes since I started this section:
Everything else is just shuffling of sections. The easiest way to see all the changes is to compare the tables of contents before and after. I don't think I've got any more big edits in the wings, so I'm ready to sit back and see what others do with it. I like that there are fewer top-level headers, anyway.
Regarding the question of sections explicating each of the 5 criteria: It seems that Recognizability and Naturalness are discussed under "Common names", and perhaps under "Article title format". Precision has its section, Conciseness doesn't really need one, and Consistency is addressed by "Article title format" and "Explicit conventions". I don't think the relation of each criterion to the rest of the page needs to be made more explicit, or would that be helpful? - GTBacchus( talk) 23:23, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
The policy says: "In discussing the appropriate title of an article, remember that the choice of title is not dependent on whether a name is "right" in a moral or political sense." That sounds great, but isn't political and moral "rightness" precisely why we've got an article at Burma and not at Myanmar? - GTBacchus( talk) 20:25, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
There's a discussion on naming scripts here. At issue as I see it is whether we use the word "alphabet" for scripts that are familiar or prestigious, for all segmental scripts, or only for 'true' alphabets. I don't much care as long as it isn't the first (Hebrew 'alphabet' but Phoenician 'script', or Western 'alphabets' and Eastern 'scripts', etc).
I think if we decide to be consistent, it should be summarized in our naming conventions somewhere, though I'm not sure where. NC (languages) seems to be the closest. At one point we had decided to call everything apart from Greek-type 'true' alphabets 'scripts', but as one editor put it, good luck trying to move Hebrew alphabet and Arabic alphabet back to that name.
(For those who aren't familiar with the terminology, Greek, Hebrew, and Thai are all "alphabets" in the broad sense. This is defined by having letters that transcribe individual segments (consonants and/or vowels), as opposed to scripts like Japanese kana and Cherokee which do not. There is a narrower and more specialized use of 'alphabet' to mean Greek-type scripts which give consonants and vowels equal status, as opposed to writing vowels with diacritics or not at all. In this convention, Greek is a 'true' alphabet, Thai is an abugida (writes vowels with diacritics), and Hebrew is an abjad (doesn't write vowels). The broad sense may be justifiable per COMMONNAME, the narrow sense per academic precision. (In an even broader sense, any writing system may be called an "alphabet", but there has never been support for being that imprecise on WP.) — kwami ( talk) 19:14, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
These two discussions are both about how we decide what terms to use based on neutrality, in case anyone is interesting in reading, or contributing to, the discussions.
The first one is not an RM or title discussion, but it's about how to decide whether to use the most commonly used name, or a more neutral term, in article content, and much of the discussion arguably applies to neutrality judgments in title selection as well. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 23:09, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
In the interest of making the determination of the common name easier, can't we give some weight to what name people type in the Search box when they're looking for an article? This statistic, if we're able to collect it, should count for something, shouldn't it? -- Kenatipo speak! 19:37, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
Higher up on this page a proposed rewrite of WP:PRECISION was discussed. That discussion is now quite sprawling, including off-topic section discussions (and appears stalled), so I think we need a fresh start. I think some good clarification ideas emerged. However, proposed language was addressed only to an existing portion of the policy section, and when I took a look at how it would appear integrated into the whole section, it just did not work: Too verbose; not flowing; hard to follow. I have taken what was done, tried to keep the sense and clarity of the language proposed, but tighten it up a lot and reorganize and format for understandability, as well as clarifying the surrounding language. Below is a collapsed box containing the current language of WP:PRECISION for comparison, and below that, the proposed rewrite.
When additional precision is necessary to distinguish an article title from other uses of the topic name, over-precision should be avoided. Be precise, but only as precise as necessary. For example, it would be inappropriate to title an article "United States Apollo program (1961–75)" over Apollo program (given that the year range refers to the whole of the program, not a portion of it); or "Queen (London, England rock band)" over Queen (band). Remember that concise titles are preferred.
However, because pages cannot share the same title, it is not always possible to use the exact title that may be desired for an article, as that title may have another meaning. As a general rule:
Often there is no alternative to parenthetical disambiguation, and it does have the advantage that the non-parenthesized part of the title may most clearly convey what the subject is called in English. On the other hand, such disambiguations may be longer or less natural than an alternate but unambiguous form, when there is one.
The disambiguation guideline also contains advice on how to title disambiguation pages when they need to be created.
Sometimes titles of separate articles have different forms, but with only minor differences.
Examples:
In such cases, remember that a reader who enters one term might in fact be looking for the other, so use appropriate disambiguation techniques (such as hatnotes or disambiguation pages) to ensure that readers can find all possible target articles.
Rewrite:
When additional precision is necessary to distinguish an article title from other uses of the topic name, over-precision should be avoided. Be precise, but only as precise as necessary. For example, it would be inappropriate to title an article "United States Apollo program (1961–75)" over Apollo program (given that the year range refers to the whole of the program, not a portion of it); or "Queen (London, England rock band)" over Queen (band). Remember that concise titles are preferred.
However, because pages cannot share the same title, it is not always possible to use the exact title that may be desired for an article, as that title may have another meaning. Where there is more than one existing Wikipedia article for another meaning of a desired title, as a general rule:
ii) Parenthetical disambiguation: Add a disambiguating term in parentheses (or sometimes after a comma), directly after the ambiguous name.
Where there is no set name for a topic, so a title of our own conception is necessary, e.g., List of birds of Nicaragua and Campaign history of the Roman military, more latitude is allowed to form descriptive and unique titles.
Sometimes titles of separate articles have different forms, but with only minor differences.
In such cases, while the name is already precise without the need for natural or parenthetical disambiguation, a reader who enters one term might in fact be looking for the other, so use appropriate disambiguation techniques, such as adding hatnotes to the affected articles or creating disambiguation pages, to ensure that readers can find all possible target articles.
The WP:POVTITLE section of this page currently states:
When a significant majority of English-language reliable sources all refer to the topic or subject of an article by a given name, Wikipedia should follow the sources and use that name as our article title (subject to the other naming criteria). Sometimes that common name will include non-neutral words that Wikipedia normally avoids (Examples include Boston Massacre, Rape of Belgium, and Teapot Dome scandal). In such cases, the commonality of the name overrides our desire to avoid passing judgment (see below). This is acceptable because the non-neutrality and judgment is that of the sources, and not that of Wikipedia editors. True neutrality means we do not impose our opinions over that of the sources, even when our opinion is that the name used by the sources is judgmental. Further, even when a neutral title is possible, creating redirects to it using documented but non-neutral terms is sometimes acceptable; see WP:RNEUTRAL.
My concern is with the first sentence. My reading of "When a significant majority of English-language reliable sources all refer to the topic or subject of an article by a given name" is that it is intended to mean the same as WP:COMMONNAME, but others interpret it more literally, arguing that it means POVTITLE applies only if the name in question is used by "a significant majority" ("like 9 out of 10") of sources, allowing them to disregard this section altogether in any case that doesn't involve a term that is practically the only name used to refer to the topic in question. Surely that cannot be the intent here.
What is a more accurate reflection of how our titles actually use POV terms? How best to say this? Any suggestions?
My interpretation of this section overall is that in order to be neutral when deciding titles, we (ironically) simply do not give neutrality any direct consideration, and only look objectively at usage and commonality (and the other criteria), and follow that. If it's the term indicated by that process, then we use it; if another term is indicated, then we use that, without regard to how "neutral" these terms are... that's how we remain neutral. So, I propose we be more clear about it:
Titles should be decided without regard to the "neutrality" of a given name or term. Simply follow usage and commonality in the sources and use that name as our article title (subject to the other naming criteria). Sometimes a name commonly used in sources will include non-neutral words that Wikipedia normally avoids (Examples include Boston Massacre, Rape of Belgium, and Teapot Dome scandal). In such cases, the commonality of the name overrides our desire to avoid passing judgment (see below). This is acceptable because the non-neutrality and judgment is that of the sources, and not that of Wikipedia editors. True neutrality means we do not impose our opinions over that of the sources, even when our opinion is that the name used by the sources is judgmental. Further, even when a neutral title is possible, creating redirects to it using documented but non-neutral terms is acceptable; see WP:RNEUTRAL.
-- Born2cycle ( talk) 18:54, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
According to the reasoning of this section, as I understand it, taking neutrality into account when deciding titles is, ironically, not being neutral. I think explaining this (authoritatively) is the point of this section, not to reflect what really happens, or dictate what should happen. I mean, if people take neutrality into consideration because of mistakenly thinking that they need to do so to comply with our neutrality pillar, isn't WP most improved if we explain why the opposite is true? But perhaps we explain this by being more authoritative and less authoritarian, like this?
Titles are decided neutrally by disregarding the "neutrality" of any given names or terms under consideration. We are being neutral when we simply follow usage and commonality in the sources and use that name as our article title (subject to the other naming criteria). Sometimes a name commonly used in sources will include non-neutral words that Wikipedia normally avoids (Examples include Boston Massacre, Rape of Belgium, and Teapot Dome scandal). In such cases, the commonality of the name overrides our desire to avoid passing judgment (see below). This is acceptable because the non-neutrality and judgment is that of the sources, and not that of Wikipedia editors. True neutrality means we do not impose our opinions over that of the sources, even when our opinion is that the name used by the sources is judgmental. Further, even when a neutral title is possible, redirects to it using documented but non-neutral terms are often created; see WP:RNEUTRAL.
I disagree with the premise; and with the tactic. If there's a neutral title with significant usage, we should choose that over a non-neutral title with majority usage. That's at least within the range of the present guideline, and within what we actually do, at least sometimes. And proposing to change the guideline, in the middle of an argument that it pertains to, to gain an advantage in that argument, without mentioning that argument, is probably not a good thing to do. Dicklyon ( talk) 01:11, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
Since you agree with Dicklyon, perhaps you could explain how you see a preference for a less commonly used neutral title over a most commonly used non-neutral title in the current wording, when it seems to say the opposite (as I explained above). -- Born2cycle ( talk) 02:06, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
Regardless, let's try again. In regard to what is "within the range of the present guideline", you wrote: "If there's a neutral title with significant usage, we should choose that over a non-neutral title with majority usage. " Doesn't that mean "you see a preference for a less commonly used neutral title over a most commonly used non-neutral title in the present guideline? -- Born2cycle ( talk) 07:29, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
I have just backed out Born2Cycle's changes of today and yesterday, since they bear specifically on this argument that he is in. I'm in it a bit, too, having expressed my opinion against his, but I'm pretty sure it's not an OK tactic to rewrite applicable guidelines during such a dispute without even letting it be known that that's what you're doing. If there's a consensus to accept his changes, that will be OK, but probably this particular dispute doesn't need to leave it's tracks in the MOS this way. Dicklyon ( talk) 04:25, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
I've got a question for Born2cycle. Have you observed that Wikipedians truly don't use neutrality as a naming criterion? How can you observe something like that? I feel that I've observed that Wikipedians do use neutrality as a naming criterion, which gives it completely equal status with the other naming criteria that are already written down at WP:CRITERIA, which have never been anything more than observations - not rules. What's the basis for your claim that neutrality is not a criterion that Wikipedians use?
I like your use of "authoritative" versus "authoritarian". What makes your claim that neutrality is not a naming criterion authoritative? - GTBacchus( talk) 06:08, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
The issue of neutrality in deciding titles is confusing because in order to be neutral we need to engage our opinions about the neutrality of the various terms we are considering when we are inventing descriptive titles, but we need to avoid considering our opinions about the neutrality of names and terms when choosing names based on commonality and the other principal criteria. But yes, I've observed Wikipedians use neutrality as a naming criteria even when common names are involved, unfortunately. I've also observed Wikipedians engaged in acts of vandalism, incivility, supporting or opposing articles moves and deletions based on WP:JDLI and countless other unfortunate activities. That doesn't mean we endorse these behaviors in policy, does it?
So, I'm not claiming that neutrality is not a criterion that Wikipedians use. The authoritative claim I'm making is that WP:POVTITLE is correct in essentially saying that Wikipedians who use neutrality as a criterion, usually to avoid some particular name despite it being most common, when deciding titles based on commonality are in conflict with NPOV (though they probably don't realize it). That claim is authoritative because the judgement that a given term should not be used because it's not "neutral" obviously stems from a non-neutral opinion about whether that term should not be used due to neutrality concerns. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 06:29, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
But when we're inventing a descriptive title, we're not relying on sources, so neutrality requires us to think about neutrality and use our own neutrality judgement so that our titles are neutral. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 06:38, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
If you're constructing or inventing a title because it's an artificial topic to which RS don't refer directly, then, yes, you need to judge what is more or less neutral, and relying on what RS say about neutrality regarding the terms and names being considered can certainly be part of choosing a neutral title in such a process. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 07:03, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
Born2cycle, I think I understand your argument. Would you say that a consensus of the Wikipedia community has shown that the best way to be neutral is by not trying to be neutral, or is that your argument? Where has the community said that, "when choosing a title based on usage in sources, neutrality requires us to not think about neutrality, because we're relying on the neutrality judgement of the sources, and if we impose our own opinions about whether this or that is more or less neutral than the other, we're no longer being neutral". You say it's "obvious", but is it supported by consensus?
More: "the judgement that a given term should not be used because it's not "neutral" obviously stems from a non-neutral opinion about whether that term should not be used due to neutrality concerns." To whom is this obvious? If it really is "obvious", then why aren't at least 3 or 4 other people agreeing that it's obvious? I think that, on the contrary, editors are expected to use their own judgment, plus consensus, to determine what is or is not neutral. This doctrine that neutrality can only be achieved by not trying to be neutral seems new and original to me. I don't think I've seen it before. (I may be wrong about that.)
A good sign that you're reflecting consensus is the presence of others supporting your claims. Should we be advertising this discussion at, for example, WT:NPOV? - GTBacchus( talk) 17:33, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
Sometimes that's not possible and we do have to rely on our own judgement about what is neutral (particularly when the topic at issue is "artificial", like "List of X", sources don't refer to it, so we can't look to sources for guidance), but ideal neutrality is simply following the sources, and the closer we get to that, the better we're complying with NPOV. My proposal here in general isn't about changing it to say this, but is about saying what it already says more clearly. It's a clarification edit, not a change edit, so while I wouldn't object to advertising this, it seems like a pretty minor thing to advertise like that.
I have to laugh about the one objection to the proposal above that specifically objects to a phrase that's in the current wording, not in anything I'm proposing to change. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 19:06, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
It might be good to also examine the history of the section in question. Who added it, when? What discussion was there about it, that might support an interpretation or intent? Is there evidence of a consensus in favor of it, or did it just get stuck in and seemed innocuous enough that nobody objected? Apparently, strengthening it to support B2C's preferred outcome in a dispute is meeting some pushback, so maybe these are worth looking into. Dicklyon ( talk) 20:25, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
There are a few things in danger of getting mixed together here.
Wikipedians in general are passionately attached to NPOV. In the past week or so I've seen reactions to B2C's arguments and I think it's fair to say people see his approach as weakening our commitment to NPOV. VsevolodKrolikov ( talk) 09:45, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
That said, this is not currently consensus at WP. To the contrary, people use NPOV all the time to rationalize imposing their own opinion on what they believe to be "neutral" in a given situation. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 21:53, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
Blueboar, if you're arguing that in the absence of bias concerns, COMMONNAME is the best way of following NPOV, I would totally agree. No one here is arguing against that. NPOV is defined as being "fair, proportionate and as far as possible without bias", and clearly COMMONNAME is the proportionate part of that. On the other hand, COMMONNAME (measured by low-threshold google hits) is not the be all and end all of NPOV in article titling - but B2C is effectively arguing it is. It is simply not the case that a term that receives one more google hit than any other individual term is automatically considered to be the only NPOV candidate. For that to be the case we would have to completely ignore anything to the contrary regarding:
And this is clearly not what common practice is, right up to the most experienced and respected editors. We *do* care who uses the term, not just how many people use it (that's why Obamacare is not a title, obviously). This has been clear in every debate I've ever witnessed about naming of articles. It is simply not true that unless we use google hits we have to fall back on our own judgement - something that unfortunately keeps getting repeated here. If we have a lot of RS stating that a term is not neutral, then it's not relying on our own judgement at all. I would be very happy for a sentence stating that editors with neutrality concerns must produce evidence that the term's neutrality is disputed in reliable sourcing, just to make it clear that vague bellyaching or blogosphere chatter isn't admissible. POVTITLE as it stands basically means when usage is clearly very high across all mainstream media and scholarly work, we can basically ignore neutrality concerns; we presume it is the best neutral term from the extensive use, if you want to phrase it like that. What I find interesting is that people don't seem to produce many examples of POVTITLES that we have, and certainly none for recent events. Jack the Ripper doesn't impress me as a particularly controversial choice. (As an aside WP:NPOV#Naming reads a little more generously about the occasional use of descriptive titles to avoid taking sides (a practice that ARBCOM has also recognised as permissible) than the absolutist position one or two seem to take here. I wonder if there has been an unnecessary conflation of neologism and description on this talkpage.)
A final point: Following a basic form of google hits without any right to question also opens up wikipedia to manipulation from political groups. We are a massively important information source, whether we like it or not. if we decide to rely on general google hits, we'll just influence the rhetoric more, not less. Being "on message" with your group's key phrase to get the media to frame stories according to your agenda is part and parcel of politics now. We could just make that worse. VsevolodKrolikov ( talk)
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I've made a move request at Talk:Korolyov (city), because I feel this should be an exception to WP:RUS; it is named after Sergei Korolev (for which I've also made a move request, which appears unopposed), so I think it should be called Korolev (city); comments on the talk page would be welcome. Thanks! :) Mlm42 ( talk) 19:42, 7 March 2011 (UTC)
I have made a comment at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (video games) because it seems to go against our general article naming guidelines. Specifically, the practice of moving series articles to the name of the first game, and renaming that game XXX (video game)(like moving Mass Effect (series) to Mass Effect, and Mass Effect to Mass Effect (video game)). It is my feeling that since a series is almost never referred to in reliable sources without a qualifier (series, franchise, universe, history of, etc.), a move like this is never accurate, and we just end up with two articles at the wrong title. If you are so inclined, please comment at the above-mentioned talk page. ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 00:19, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
Parts of it are like a maze: there's a discussion now here as to whether to italicise the titles of opera articles. People just don't know the answers. At WP:TITLE, I find it hard to make my way through Wikipedia:ITALICS#Italic_face (referred to from here); "Do not enclose titles in quotes" (what about the name of an aria within an opera?); this—"Use italics when italics would be used in running text; for example, taxonomic names, the names of ships, the titles of books, films, and other creative works, and foreign phrases are italicized both in ordinary text and in article titles", and the fact that many many article titles do not observe this. I'm confused.
What about a carefully chosen set of brief examples woven into the text, so editors can understand? Tony (talk) 13:09, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
At Talk:Nirmala_Srivastava#2011_proposed_rename_of_article there has been protracted circular discussion over whether the use of Indian-language honorifics is justified by wp:COMMONNAME. Additional perspectives would be helpful. LeadSongDog come howl! 03:48, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
It seems, according to some people, that this policy delegates all matters of the punctuation of those names to guidelines at WP:MOS (see the "See also" section at the end of WP:TITLE). News to me; the See Also link links only to one section of MOS, which has only an - incomplete and inaccurate - summary of our section on special characters.
Did someone intend such a claim by making the link? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:25, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
The Astrohall was built at about the same time as the Astrodome, by a developer/investor (name in unknown) as a Dental Industry Display and Meeting Center. The 250,000 square feet included small permanant display areas, office space and 100,000 sq ft of open exhibit hall.
The intended use never ocurred and the building remained essentially empty until purchased by an Houston investor, Candace Mosler. After another year or so, Ms, Mosler realized that her business manager was unable to locate tenants and she retained my company, Edward Bankers & Associates, to manage and lease the building.
We were able to lease the larger display areas to various engineering firms when they quickly required large space on short term rentals.
Longer term occupancy was initiated by a division of Shell Oil Co., which eventually leased the entire building, creating a "state of the art" computer center in the exhibit hall area. Shell eventually built a new building and vacated this building. By that time I had sold the management company and I have no knowledge of subsequent activities.
Several references in the Wikipedia article give the impression that there were a number of sports and other venues held in this building. Design, especially ceiling heights would have precluded such use.
98.199.217.84 ( talk) 17:04, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
The move is being proposed at Talk:Pi#Requested_move. The issues are to some extent unique, so it might be of interest here. — kwami ( talk) 09:18, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
The 'italics issue' (the italicization of words in article titles), which was the subject of an Rfc here last year, is being reviewed at the Village pump (policy). (There have also been some discussions at the Music project and Classical music project). It is likely that there will be a new Rfc aimed at establishing a much wider consensus.-- Klein zach 07:40, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
This new subsection at Talk:Mexican-American War presents ten summary points for a protracted dispute. Recommended reading: for editors interested in the ways style guidelines at WP:MOS and policy here at WP:TITLE are received at talkpages of articles, and for admins who might be looking to close the two relevant contested requests for move (RMs).
– ⊥¡ɐɔıʇǝoNoetica! T– 23:35, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
Let's put it this way: is there a real dispute in the sources about this? Are there any authors out there that specifically claim aloud to use hyphen, tilde or whatever, specifically opposing the other options? Does any author consider "Mexican-American war" a legitimate name and "Mexican–American war" a faulty one? (or the other way) Because if it is a non-existent dispute, then there is no dispute. Verifiability does not go as far as requiring us to use the same style rules than our sources, we should manage the topics of style with our own set of rules of style (the MOS, and I'm saying "rules" in a broad way) MBelgrano ( talk) 18:57, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
I have referred readers to the articles on en dash and em dash, instead of WP:ENDASH and WP:EMDASH. The recent wave of undiscussed changes by Tony, Noetica, and Kwami is mostly their pique that the recent discussion over Mexican-American War preferred this policy over the guidelines at WP:MOS. However, it also revealed that they disagree with the rest of us (CWenger, Headbomb, Wareh, Hans Adler, and so on) as to what WP:DASH says. It seems undesirable to incorporate so ill-constructed a guideline into policy, no matter how much three dedicated editors want to. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:25, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
Come to think of it, why? There is a case for saying these are never natural; but if so, we don't need this; it's already said. There is a case for ruling out quotes, so that articles on short stories aren't under "The Cask of Amontillado"; but this doesn't mention true quote marks at all. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:33, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
Tsunami is no more accurate than tidal wave.. In Japanese tsunami means "harbor wave", but obviously tsunami are not limited to harbors. This is a bit pedantic, but encyclopedias are supposed to be pedantic, right? Can we find a more accurate example of a more accurate name? Further, tsunami is replacing tidal wave, so the assertion that the latter is more common is probably no longer true. Will Beback talk 03:53, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
I have edited the mention of dashes in the section Special Characters, to restore neutrality with respect to the en dash. (See recent discussion above, and at several other pages.) This is the non-prejudicial version that I have put in place:
(This may well have been altered by another editor as I write.)
I call for comment on this. Wikipedia can only benefit from links to central, highly relevant guidelines from policies. Punctuation is addressed thoroughly for the Project at WP:MOS; so where policy touches on punctuation, link to that resource. The guidelines WP:ENDASH and WP:HYPHEN at WP:MOS are long-established, stable, and subjected to close scrutiny at the relevant talkpage ( WT:MOS). If it is alleged that they include anything inadequate or unfounded, the place to address that is WT:MOS.
It is also unhelpful to prejudice the issue (for a wider political purpose) by repeated asseverations concerning WP:COMMONNAME. Of course it applies; it's there at the top of the page. Including special mention of what is "customary" for the en dash in the section on special characters was never discussed here, as far as I can tell. Usage of the en dash is amply covered at WP:DASH, and does not need supplementing by undiscussed and agenda-driven mention here.
Our policies and our guidelines need to be in harmony. If it is alleged that they are not, let that matter be discussed here also.
– ⊥¡ɐɔıʇǝoNoetica! T– 23:15, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
It looks like this particular disputed started in this Jan. 27 diff where PMAnderson added text to say "such characters should only be used when they are customarily used for the subject in reliable English secondary sources", with respect to non-keyboard characters. Sounds innocent, but since since he's trying to change policy to support his campaign to stamp out en dashes, we should really examine that campaign on its merits, in an appropriate forum. As it stands, he says our MOS is contemptible. I think it's fine as it is. Furthermore, the particular terms he's talking about, Mexican–American War, is not hard to find in good English sources with the en dash; but he seems to want it to be be a vote instead of a logical choice based on a usage guide. I think we're better off leaving it in the form that has worked for a long time. Dicklyon ( talk) 05:30, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
Anderson's edit war was 5RR, so any block should of course apply to him as well, or maybe only to him. One of his edits was also WP:POINTy, [2] which on a policy page is in itself a blockable offense. — kwami ( talk) 19:35, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
I am tired of the edit warring over the hyphen/dash issue. Given that there are ongoing and still heated debates in several locations (here, WP:MOS, WP:ENDASH etc.) it is clear to me that we don't have a clear consensus on the issue (despite the fact that both sides of the debate are claiming there is one). I have therefore taken the BOLD step of removing all mention of the issue from this policy until the debates are settled. It is better to say nothing on the issue that to have it contently change back and forth. Blueboar ( talk) 18:51, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
Actually, I was wrong about PMAnderson starting the current thrashing here. His edit was actually a reaction to this diff in which Tony1 changed the long-standing consensus version:
to try to clarify that dashes are not necessarily not present on standard keyboards; I think that point is pointless, since it brings up the issue of whether a character is "present" if you have to know what to type with the "option" key to get it. In spite of Noetica's attempt in making the neutral version that has now been put back in as "policy", I think it would be better to go back to the long-standing consensus version. I don't think anyone really objects to it, they want to warp it in various ways, and this is not the place for that until we decide on a direction. If any clarification is needed, I think it would be that we mean "ASCII" keyboard characters, as opposed to "English-language", since many standard English-keyboard characters like hyphens and apostrophes and dashes such don't have much to do with English language. It really does mean ASCII, doesn't it? Or is there some other relevant standard that I'm not aware of? Or maybe it meant English-keyboard characters, or English-language–keyboard characters, as opposed to English-language keyboard characters? Wouldn't it be nice if we could be clear on what we mean? Dicklyon ( talk) 02:15, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
We can play with the exact wording, but I think this better explains the issue. Thoughts? Blueboar ( talk) 15:48, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
I therefore propose a merge of the last two versions:
This removes the redundancy in a different way; I will accept any non-substantive tweak. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:58, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
The version proposed above is certainly an improvement, since it does not include anything controversial. But it does miss important provisions. I propose this, which takes the version we have been looking at as a starting point but is more accurate and comprehensive:
Redirects for characters not on a standard keyboard: Sometimes the chosen title will include diacritics (accent marks), dashes, or other characters unobtainable by typical English-language users, so they cannot search for the article directly. Provide redirects that use only standard keyboard characters: Hale-Bopp and Hale Bopp join Hale–Bopp among the many redirects to Comet Hale–Bopp.
- Make articles visible to web search engines. Searching with standard characters will sometimes find titles that include diacritics: "emigre armies" finds Émigré armies of the French Revolutionary Wars, both on Google and within Wikipedia. But some searches for Wikipedia articles succeed only within Wikipedia, and some only on a web search.
(I added the redirect Hale–Bopp just now. And I was wrong in an earlier version of this post! Made some elementary mistakes.)
– ⊥¡ɐɔıʇǝoNoetica! T– 02:20, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
Jeff, we have established that there are separate issues. Looking through the whole page, I see that some of this redirect business is covered elsewhere – not the part about web searches though. That should be taken as a separate matter for integrating into the page, with some rearranging so that all redirect issues are dealt with consistently, and perhaps all linked neatly to a central section. Later!
Focusing on the immediate task again, I rather like "plain typewriter characters" to refer to what we're after. Many editors have no clue about ASCII; references to "common characters" that are "on" keyboards run into trouble with virtuoso pedants and Mac users. So use language everyone follows immediately. And I still say that varying the wording helps. This is often the case in technical writing: if they don't grasp it one way, they probably will the other way. And one wording corrects any false impressions from the other. Try this (adopting your wording for the start; with web searches deferred as an issue; with greater accuracy about diacritics on characters):
Add suitable redirects when the title contains characters not on a standard keyboard: The chosen title may be hard to search for because it includes diacritics (accent marks), dashes, or other characters that are not easy to input. Provide redirects from equivalent titles that use only plain "typewriter" characters: Hale-Bopp and Hale Bopp join Hale–Bopp among the many redirects to Comet Hale–Bopp. On a Wikipedia search, titles with diacritics may be retrieved by prompts to correctly marked forms that appear as the search is typed in. But for reliable searching, include a redirect from a plain typewriter form of the title: Chateau d'Oex redirects to Château-d'Œx.
Noetica Tea? 08:21, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
Noetica's first proposal above goes on at some length, the second one, with the tendentious examples, is even longer; the rest of us have managed to reduce what this portion of the policy should say into a single paragraph based on what originally stood here, and which does not introduce any novel and debatable claim; xer additions are both novel and debatable. As far as I am concerned, any version in this section is acceptable, although I think some better than others. I strongly prefer saying what we need to say, and on which there is general agreement, to bloviating interminably. In short, we have it right. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:54, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
PMAnderson, please do not refactor in a way that is manifestly designed to be prejudicial to my closely argued proposal. I have reverted your blatant intrusion in what was a rational discussion of issues. Please post civilly. Noetica Tea? 02:17, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
Add suitable redirects when the title contains characters not on a standard keyboard: The chosen title may be hard to search for because it includes diacritics (accent marks), dashes, or other characters that are not easy to input. Provide redirects from equivalent titles that use only plain "typewriter" characters. Hale-Bopp and Hale Bopp join Hale–Bopp among the many redirects to Comet Hale–Bopp. Because of its many diacritics, Ököritófülpös has a redirect from Okoritofulpos. In some complex cases more than one redirect may be needed: Château-d'Œx has many redirects pointing to it, including Chateau d'Oex.
Let's re-focus... The following isn't suggested wording... it's a statement of intent (the concept that we are trying to convey to editors in the section under discussion):
Are we all agreed that this is the basic intent of the section under discussion? If so, let's just say this in as few words as possible. Don't try to cover every contingency or every variation on the theme. Blueboar ( talk) 15:28, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
All this began when two editors asked why Mexican–American War, as it then was, had a dash in the title. There was the usual unproductive conversation at the talk-page WT:MOS, but there was no evidence as it was that MOS actually required it. There have since been two move requests at Talk:Mexican-American War, both closed with it ending with a hyphen, and other bizarre and WP:LAME events, including the claim that one closing admin was corrupt, and the claim that delegates all matters of punctuation tp WP:MOS because of the see also linking to a different section of MOS.
Since that didn't fly, three editors have come here to rewrite this policy to their liking. I am not convinced; I hold what we have always held.
If the most reliable sources (ie. RSes from within the field of the topic, as opposed to a general encyclopedia or a news source) do not use the format prescribed by the MOS, doesn't that mean it's
WP:ORIGINALRESEARCH ?
65.93.12.101 (
talk)
09:16, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
This whole section was started as a personalised and biased attack on dedicated editors who bring to the Project their special skills in the area of style. The tone has been set; and with regret, I find it necessary to respond in the same vein. Some responses to what has been said above by PMAnderson (when I use the word section here, I mean top-level section, not subsection; please do not post within what I post; comment after it):
We should discuss policies at their pages, and guidelines at theirs. They should all be in harmony, and that harmony ought not to be disrupted in pursuit of petty ends.
Noetica Tea? 00:25, 12 April 2011 (UTC)
I interpret this as meaning you want to change the current
to the older form
{{ editprotected}}
Endorsements cut and pasted from above.
So the proposed language now reads:
This is acceptable to me. Blueboar ( talk) 19:48, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
Done.
Sandstein
19:11, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
There is a proposal to change List of South African municipalities to List of municipalities of South Africa. Is there a preferred title format for articles that list entities belonging to a place? My gut feel is that "List of <entities> of <place>" looks better. Roger ( talk) 16:31, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
I've seen several scattered comments during the last month that indicate ongoing confusion about the difference between "Article title" and "key words in the first sentence". The incomplete footnote is apparently not sufficient for us.
So as the regulars here know, this page deals with the former, which is:
WP:LEAD deals with which words you put in the first sentence. Often, these match, but occasionally, they don't, as in words that have multiple meanings.
Here's my thought: Let's add a picture. Specifically, let's get a screenshot of a page like the one shown on the right here. Let's put a big green oval around the two places where the title appears—at the top of the browser window itself, circling the bit that reads "Celilo Falls", but not "– Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia", and also the =Level 1= heading. Then let's put a red box around the non-title in the lead ("Celilo Falls", and possibly also "Wyam").
With that graphic, we can then explain that the stuff in the green oval is the title, and if you're fighting over the stuff in the red box, you follow the MOS, not AT.
I'd like to suggest a page like Mercury (element) for the screenshot, because a dab'd article title should make the distinction clearer to the average editor.
What do you think? WhatamIdoing ( talk) 15:48, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
I'm interested in opinions on disambiguating articles on Western orchestral music, specifically in cases where a work shares a name with a non-musical entity. If you care, please discuss it at WT:NCM. — AjaxSmack 14:59, 19 April 2011 (UTC)
There has been a recent move by the mathematics project to reinstate article titles using the Pi symbol "π"
This came to my attention as one move ( Liu Hui's pi algorithm → Liu Hui's π algorithm) amongst a group of moves.
The discussions are here and here
Is π a symbol? (Used to represent the number 3.XXXXX)
As such is it exempt from the guideline "* Do not use symbols:"?
The situation is getting a little out of hand as IAR is being applied by members and admins in the mathematics project, where they claim "obvious consensus" which is only in their project, rather than taking it here for wider discussion or asking in an RfC.
They also have mentioned "There was even talk about updating MATHMOS to reflect this" which means that they are also not even following their own MOS on this matter. Chaosdruid ( talk) 17:02, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
Until only recently, the "Do not use symbols" section used to read
It's unclear exactly what problem the new wording is supposed to avoid. The only discussion I could find about the matter is here. From that discussion, it is clear that "symbol" is supposed to mean Unicode symbols, which is a special block of unicode characters (one that, incidentally, does not include Greek letters). Anyway, the issues discussed there are so peripheral to the question of including π that I think it is safe to say that we should not extrapolate from that discussion that it meant also to exclude Greek letters from article titles. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 18:01, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
As a courtesy, I wanted to point out the discussion that is taking place on
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style. Specifically,
WT:MOS#Avoiding redirects is moving (me, mostly) in the direction of starting an RfC here in order to adjust the
WP:TITLE#Article title format section to include (or not) something about the use of dashes. I wanted to give those of you who watch this page and not
WT:MOS an opportunity to speak up before hand. Regards,
—
V = IR (
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03:13, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
I'm putting this question here because I'm not sure where else it would go. There doesn't appear to be one place, exactly, where it is specified how to handle foreign names of persons, places, and things (or specified that it's not specified.) There is:
The types of things that have names that I am thinking of are: persons, places, (geographical entities (rivers, mountains) and geopolitical entities (towns, provinces)) and things (organizations, individual buildings, and so forth).
For persons and places I am having some disagreements, but don't want to get into that now.
But things? Should they not be translated? I raise this question because I recently came across the articles Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (actually a redirect to just Rijksakademie) and École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and Park Pobedy (Moscow Metro).
Well, now see here. This is gibberish. These names mean nothing to me. Is this Wikipedia not supposed to be intelligible to English speakers? In fact, as near as I can make out (not being conversant in the first two languages) the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten is actually the Royal Academy of Visual Arts, the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts is the National Superior School of Fine Arts (or maybe National University of Fine Arts or something -- search me) and the Park Pobedy station is the Victory Park station.
Would it kill us to render the names of these entities in such a way that an English speaker will say "Oh, OK, I understand what that is" as opposed to "What the heck is that"? I would think that that former response would be the more desirable, n'est-ce pas?
The lead of Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English) is unclear on this. For notable names, it prescribes (For instance) "Eiffel Tower" rather than "La Tour Eiffel", but for unnotable entities it kind of coughs and shuffles its feet. Wikipedia:Naming conventions (geographic names) seems considerably less concerned with helping the reader understand the material than with with avoiding bickering among the staff, which seems rather an odd ordering of priorities.
So I guess my question is... is an article title like École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts just a mistake? Can we clarify the guidelines so it's clear that we shouldn't be doing stuff like this? Or is this title according to the guidelines (in which case it's the guidelines that need to be reformed, one would think). Herostratus ( talk) 18:33, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
Well... hmmm. I mean, my point is that École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts is gibberish, so what do we need to do to fix that? If there is a rule "use what most sources use" and this results in gibberish then we need to change the rule. Right? If there was some rule that (this is a thought experiment) resulted in article titles such as werpiogj32cs09cxlkm3q091q, we would say Well this rule, however well-intentioned, is not working.
Perhaps we could adopt a "Swiss solution"? In Switzerland, everything has three names (I guess), and so we have nicely-titled articles such as Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property instead of Eidgenössisches Institut für Geistiges Eigentum. It seems to work OK. I haven't seen anyone saying OMG the articles on Swiss entities are an impossible mess. We could pretend that everyplace is Switzerland or something.
There are a couple of objections. One is, translation is a bit of an art. One person might translate École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts as "National Superior School of Fine Arts" and another as "National University of Fine Arts" (I guess, I don't know French). But I mean, so what? That's true of all terms. Should "croiseur" be translated as just "cruiser" or "battlecruiser" or "heavy cruiser" or what? Would we just leave in the article as "croiseur" because its a hard question? I would hope not. Either "National Superior School of Fine Arts" or "National University of Fine Arts" are greatly superior to "École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts". Why do proper names have a no-translation exception that doesn't apply to regular nouns?
The second is, OK, if they want to look up more about the entity elsewhere, they are going to find a lot more refs under the untranslated name (for entities that are not much covered in English sources). This is rather weak tea in my opinion. Wouldn't it be better that the average reader understand what the entity is than that, for those few are doing more extended research, the article title match their search term (and for them, the untranslated name is given in the lead; serious researchers are presumable able to figure out how to handle this).
An objection that untranslated name is more accurate would not be too valid I don't think. First of all, they're not necessarily more accurate. "Beaux-Arts" actually refers (to people to whom its not gibberish) to a particular architectural style if I recall correctly, so in this particular example the name is actually misleading. Second of all, if all or most of the refs are in French, then the article should be in French also if you're going to take this view. But we don't post articles in French, here. We translate. Herostratus ( talk) 16:35, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
No. Forza Italia is not "gibberish", it is the only correct name of the party. Would you translate it as "forward Italy" (as the article currently claims", or as "Strength Italy", or any of the other meanings of Forza? Unless something is routinely translated in English, we should keep the original form. That doesn't mean that the more descriptional parts of names can't be translated, so Castle instead of Chateau or Schloss (if they are about a castle), but Châteauneuf-du-Pape, not "the pope's new castle". Fram ( talk) 15:18, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
Per previous discussion, now archived, I have added an image that differentiates between the article title itself and the names appearing in the first sentence. If anyone feels inspired to make a better image, then please feel free. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 17:49, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
You know what we probably do need is a better intro (or lead, lede, opening, whatever you want to call it). The current intro is only three sentences, and they don't summarize the policy at all. We could, and should, mention "use nouns", along with engvar, commonname, precision, etc... within the intro paragraph(s).
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V = IR (
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18:18, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
I changed all instances of [article] subject to [article] topic for consistency with other guidelines (I am confident that topic is the predominent term in most of our guidelines). Indeed they are synonyms in most contexts, but I was recently asked by a WP newbie who was reading our policies for the first time--What's the difference between an Article subject and an Article topic? We want consistency in our titles, we ought to demand simple consistency in our guidelines. One may refer to an article's subject in discussion without confusion, but our guidelines ought to use consistent terminology, and article topic seems to be the best terminology. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 07:58, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
Per this guideline, all article titles are (wherever at all possible) to be nouns.
I added it to the nutshell; but it has been taken out for no good reason I can tell.
I wish to put it back again, it's in no way specific, all article titles are to be nouns of one form or another, per the guideline, and this is what we are summarizing in the nutshell. Rememberway ( talk) 21:31, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
The reasons behind this are discussed quite well here, but it predates that by quite a long way. Rememberway ( talk) 21:39, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
Also, not that it's really pertinent to this topic, but Wikipedia:Article titles is a policy, not a guideline.
—
V = IR (
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23:26, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
I've boldly put noun phrases instead. Is that more acceptable? Or are there exceptions to this that we need to consider? Dicklyon ( talk) 22:36, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
As someone just reading this debate I'm genuinely baffled. Here's how this looks to the outside observer: The policy currently says article titles "should be nouns", but some editors are objecting to repeating that fact in a summary of the policy. I simply don't understand how the objection that on rare occasions another part of speech is necessary applies with any more force to the summary than to the policy. If the objection is that whatever bit of nuance exists is lost in the summarization, only an idiot would think that the summary contains every detail of the policy, and we needn't worry ourselves about idiots. If we did, we wouldn't be able to have a summary in the first place. So what am I missing? - Rrius ( talk) 04:15, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
I'm still not sure I understand the objection. At first it seemed to be something about the policy itself, but now it seems adding "nouns" will somehow detract from the summary. At this point I'm not not sanguine about getting a satisfactory answer, but I'll ask anyway: how does adding three words hurt? Why do you think noting the heavy preference for nouns in passing does such damage to the summary? To both sides, why is this so bloody important? It does seem that WP:NOUN is one of the only parts of the policy that isn't summarized by the old version of the heading, but who actually reads the nutshell summary anyway? - Rrius ( talk) 23:41, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
This page identifies what its chief principles are: Recognizability, naturalness, shortness, precision, and consistency; some of them are not in the nutshell. WP:NOUN is a reasonable idea, but largely because it helps keep different articles being written on the same subject, one phrasing it as a noun, another as a verb. If it conflicts with any of the five principles in a given case, it can and should be jettisoned. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 05:30, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
(PS.: This isn't a bad subject to discuss, in my opinion. As I said, I'm open to suggestions here. Examples of the use of
WP:NOUN in practice might be compelling, one way or another.)
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V = IR (
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18:14, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
I object fairly strongly ro this edit; Rememberway is pushing his POV that nouns are a "must-do", which has received no real support in this discussion. As a statement of fact, the claim that we always use "nouns and noun-phrases" is exaggerated; having it as a rule, it misses the point of Wikipedia space; it's sound advice, but not beyond exception. I am very tired of people who make policies and guidelines into arbitrary "rules", which they can enforce without rationale; I am reverting, and will dispute any further efforts on this enthusiast's part. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:20, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
Having just read the conversation to which Rememberway links, I observe that he is misreading it. Using nouns is an example of consistency, and use of nouns like Monophyly is an example of that. But there is consensus that consistency should yield to a strong enough case based on the other four principles; and when there is a sufficiently strong counter-consistency (call a work of literature by its title) that is sufficient in itself. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:41, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
Tony's back to adding his obscure jargon. AFAICT, "nominal group" is just Halliday's term for "noun phrase". If it is a synonym, then it's worse than useless, as it's obscure and the relatively few people who are familiar with it will know the normal English term "noun phrase" anyway. If it's not a synonym, as Tony (and the article) has argued but never explained or supported, then we should not present it as if it were a synonym. Either way it doesn't belong. — kwami ( talk) 13:18, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
The first two criteria (Recognizably and Naturalness) are directly connected to WP:COMMONNAME (which I think is the single most important provision of this policy) So I think they are a step above the others in importance. I have been bold and divided the criteria into two sections (diff here... I was logged out when I made the edit, but it's mine. If you think the edit too bold, please revert and we can discuss. Blueboar ( talk) 22:55, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
I have read this sentence may be a dozen times. I do see the intent, from the word "recognizability". However may be I drank too much beer yesterday, but I fail to grasp its logic (too much beer yesterday?). (The second sentence is clear.)
I tried to do some analysis. The phrase says connects four pieces: title, topic, article, and the reader. It is constructed in the way that the actor is the title, i.e., the title must confirm to the reader that the article is about the topic. Now, the question is how does the reader know what the topic is in the first place? Did he learn it from the title? If yes, then it is the article text that makes the reader confirm that he indeed reads about the topic defined in the title and not some vandalistic hoax. On the other hand, if the reader learns the topic from the article, and he is "familiar with it" then what is the high importance of confirmation coming from the title so that it is "Rule #1" here?
The second sentence of the description excludes the following scenario: the reader sees the title " Leopold Theophuck Eugentric, 1st baron Hausmaus, duke of balbla...", wonders, starts reading and then in dawns upon him: heck, it is about Leon "Iron Ass" Hausmaus!
But again, to an extent the title "Leopold Theophuck ..." does give some extra affirmation that the article indeed about the topic, because from "See also" section we learn that there was one Leon "Iron Arse" Hausmaus, who was not baron, so that the title indeed confirms that we are reading about the correct Hausmaus. Still again, most probably we have already seen this from the article text...
So, what else does the first sentence serve for? (there is something, as implied by the words "One important aspect of this..."; so what are other aspects?)
I do have some ideas how to phrase this differently, but without knowing the full extent of the purpose of the rule I cannot suggest its summary. (I would like to be constructive, not just bitching.)
By the way, what's the deal with "ideal"? We know there are no such thing. I.e., it is of purposeless bell and whistle. Kaligelos ( talk) 21:27, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
Fairest_of_the_Fair—the title is clearly The Fairest_of_the_Fair. What's the practice in these cases? Tony (talk) 07:22, 22 May 2011 (UTC)
The section Precision and disambiguation (shortcut WP:PRECISION) does not seem clear to me;
Whether or not two articles which differ only in capitalization need a parenthetical disambiguation.
It gives two examples, which seem contradictory, viz.
I particularly think this can cause confusion in the predictive search text.
The issue recently arose through a request regarding a movie, Jumping the Broom, and confusion with the marital custom Jumping the broom - discussion can be seen on Talk:Jumping the Broom#Change This Article Title.
Therefore, can we discuss this and try to arrive at consensus, and clarify the guideline - to explicitly state the recommendation in such cases, whether or not it is appropriate to rename one article to add a parenthetic clarification, e.g. "Jumping the Broom (film).
I'd like the guideline to quite simply state that Articles whose titles differ only in capitalization should/should not be renamed to have a clarifier in parenthesis in the article title (with examples).
Thanks in anticipation, Chzz ► 02:06, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
I don't think the primary articles need a parenthetical Dab in the title. The Jumping the broom example works very well as is. It is, however, very useful to create those pages as redirects (which I see is already done in that example). Maybe that should be the guideline, because I suspect a lot of people don't bother to capitalize anything when searching. Keep in mind that people who type in Jumping the Broom, or any other capitalized title probably know they're looking for a proper name. And if they have their caps lock on, well, they probably deserve to go to the wrong page. LRT24 ( talk) 17:46, 22 May 2011 (UTC)
Why must the page use wishy-washy language? If Article titles "prefers" something, this already gives latitude to editors. How exactly does "generally prefers" differ? Is there some great thirst for article titles that are not nouns or nominal groups? Where, please? Why don't we add "generally" all over the place, such as "titles are generally expected to use names and terms that readers are most likely to look for to find the article", then? Tony (talk) 13:50, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
Few things are less useful than the habit of demanding that our policies say something specific and "enforceable" when a categorical statement would be simply wrong a significant proportion of the time. Tony, Wikipedia policy is not a set of laws which can be "violated," and need to be "enforced" – not to mention that rational real-world legislation often has weasel-words like "reasonable" or "excessive" too.
In this case, we have five principles, all of which have claims on our attention; sometimes (and much of the time when this page needs to be consulted) they disagree. When they disagree, some will be right, some will be wrong (or rather, less important in that instance). Therefore all of them are generally true; none of them is exactly true.
"I don't care what we demand as long as we demand something" is an avenue to bad policy. Wikipedia would work better if it were a banning offense. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 04:13, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
Rememberway's latest conribution contains:
That's a claim of fact; I don't believe it. Let's have a citation. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:34, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
Let's get our terminology correct. Previously Rememberway argued "Try to Remember" and the like are
noun phrases. They're not, really; a noun phrase consists of a noun plus modifiers (or a pronoun standing in for a noun plus modifiers.) Now he's shifted to say that they are
proper names. This is correct; it's a name for a distinct entity (a particular song). Proper names are nouns and are always acceptable as article titles.
It gets a little dodgier - slightly - for words, phrases, proverbs, etc.
A rolling stone gathers no moss and
gay are not really proper names, and when used in a sentence they are not nouns. However, by the
use-mention distinction, when you mention them in a sentence as opposed to using them, they function as nouns as they are the
subject of the sentence. They can be presented as "'A rolling stone gathers no moss' is a proverb..." and "'Gay' is a term"; as such they are also appropriate article titles.
As I said before, the purpose of this policy point is to say that articles should be presented in a particular way. We don't use verbs-as-verbs ("To swim is to move the body through water") or adjectives-as-adjectives ("Red objects reflect a particular wavelength of light"), we use noun constructions. "Try to remember" and "gay" can be presented in that type of construction. That's what the policy is intended to say, and whether we consciously pick up on it, the vastest majority of Wikipedia articles follow suit.--
Cúchullain
t/
c
14:46, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
'although "Try to Remember", so capitalized, is a proper name, it is not a proper noun' - Pmanderson
Here's the lead as it is now:
Three queries:
"Wikipedia's design requires an article title must be unique to distinguish it from other titles. A title need not be the name of the subject; many article titles are descriptions of the subject. Generally, article titles are based on what the subject is called in reliable sources; when this offers multiple possibilities, Wikipedia chooses among them by considering five principles: the ideal article title will resemble titles for similar articles, precisely identify the subject, and be short, natural, and recognizable. Tony (talk) 16:42, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
I'd like to suggest an addition of another caveat in Google Books search: make sure that the term in question is sought in reasonably recent books. The reason is that Google&Co OCRed a huge number so-old-as-out-of-copyright books, which may sometimes totally skew the statistics on terminology. Like, in honor of my favorite beer:-):: Plzeň: 87,700 results against Pilsen: 209,000 results, Kaligelos ( talk) 00:27, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
As expected, opening the floodgates allowing italics in article titles has produced cases of overuse. Many titles that are nominally about works whose titles would be italicized (like newspapers, for instance), are now entirely italicized, even if the article title includes words that are not part of the work's title. I never understood why the encyclopedia had to be complicated in this way for an extremely minor formatting benefit. Powers T 01:27, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
The problem is not with the italicization, but with the article title. if the Rochester Times-Union is actually the Times-Union, then the article should be at Times-Union (Rochester) (displayed as Times-Union (Rochester)), just like e.g. the Times Union (Albany) is. Fram ( talk) 13:21, 6 June 2011 (UTC)
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Can somebody add a hanging hyphen after Latin in the "Foreign names and anglicization" section?
For Latin- or Greek-derived words, use e or ae/oe, depending on modern usage and the national variety of English used in the article.
Thanks. – CWenger ( ^ • @) 20:33, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
If anyone doesn't know, there's a comprehensive RfC on hyphen and dash use happening at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/dash drafting. Since this is likely to affect article titles as well, I draw it to people's attention.-- Kotniski ( talk) 07:17, 6 June 2011 (UTC)
There was a referal to this page and a cursory remark that unmitigated titling of articles with derogatory slang was supposedly "in line with" naming conventions. However, it does not seem that there are any for this type of entry.
Those articles are really articles about words and rarely crop up. But when they do, they trash Wikipedia's reputation. WP should IMHO rectify this reprehensible situation by adopting a naming convention which would go on this page, to wit:
The proposal as it now standsIt is believed that the goals of WMF are undermined by loss of editors and readers, and loss of recommendations by academic faculty, because Wikpedia naming conventions depart dramatically from general English-speaking literate usage by allowing derogatory slang words as encyclopedia article titles. The proposal has a maximum and minimum, to wit: minimally, that the convention be that article titles be in this form:
Expletive (Slang) or
Expletive (Slang word) Maximally, the proposal is that the convention be
Expletive (Derogatory slang) or
Expletive (Prejudicial slang) Note that this is not a proposal to censor or ban the content of such articles but merely an editorial policy for naming them.
The formal RFC is for better or for worse situated on this page
here.
Bard गीता 01:50, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
I have started this RfC to determine whether or not the Romanization of Russian guideline actually reflects consensus. Comments there would be greatly appreciated; thanks. Mlm42 ( talk) 17:37, 9 June 2011 (UTC)
OK, I've had it with this user. The list so far is edit warring, massive numbers of tendentious edits, subject line insults, AFD tag blanking, various arguments that I don't think even he believes that black is white. I'm pretty sure there's quite a few bad faiths as well.
So I intend to create an RFC on him, do I have anyone that will second the RFC? Rememberway ( talk) 21:42, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
Just to add my agreement with PMA's analysis at the top of this subthread - that's exactly how I see it, and I'm not sure what the problem or objection is (or even if there is one) regarding the current wording. -- Kotniski ( talk) 06:16, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
Consensus is not unanimity; we do not have the liberum veto, which destroyed Poland. There are two options here: either the view which everyone but Rememberway supports is consensus, or there is none. The first case is the present text; the second choice implies silence on the subject at issue. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:45, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
I've been traveling and haven't followed all the details, but I support the idea that we should roll back to the stable version and not make changes until we have consensus. I don't think there's a hint of consensus that adding "generally" is an improvement, or that weirdly punctuated non-parallel summaries like "Wikipedia chooses among them by considering five principles: the ideal article title will resemble titles for similar articles, precisely identify the subject, be short, be natural, and recognizable" can be tolerated in the lead. Dicklyon ( talk) 08:25, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
Is there actually some substantial disagreement here - an article that some people think should be titled using a noun while others think it should not be - or are we just talking about how best to describe our practices? I can't really see why this issue should have developed into a big and ugly dispute.-- Kotniski ( talk) 11:51, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
Why not just say, titles are generally names or noun phrases? That would cover "Try to Remember", which is a name but not a noun phrase. (Though we'd need to explain that a simple noun is a (minimal) noun phrase.) —Nah, that still leaves out quotations. I see nothing wrong with the current wording,
[3] which IMO captures things just fine. —
kwami (
talk)
19:25, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
I'm talking about the sentence construction. "To swim is to move the body through the water" is written based on a verb construction, and therefore doesn't follow the policy; "swim" should not be the title of the article ( swimming should/is). "'Gay' is a term referring to people with a homosexual orientation" is based on a noun construction, and does follow the policy. " Gay" is the appropriate title of the article, even though the word itself is an adjective. Of course there are relatively few adjectives, verbs, phrases, etc. that are notable enough to have their own articles; those that are still written in this construction.
Additionally,
proper nouns like "
Try to Remember" are, well, proper nouns, and are always appropriate for article titles. The current wording implies they are an exception to standard practice, when they aren't.--
Cúchullain
t/
c
13:36, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
OK, so by my count the change that was made to WP:NOUN is still clearly non consensus, 3 versus 3, which isn't even a majority, and I therefore revert to the version that has stood for multiple years. If you want to change away from the long-standing version you need to get consensus. - Rememberway ( talk) 17:05, 11 June 2011 (UTC)
Enhancing level of quick knowledge by adding into names of articles about real persons their occupation in brackets;without any need to read an article to get an idea about who these people were-in cases when person has a little time or need the information about occupation of certain person(s) right now; without actually reading lines in that article that are saying it. Please consider the significance of this change and be ready to discuss it.
(Please do not delete my contribution on this talk page-as I do not know where to write suggestions and proposals for Wikipedia!)--D.M: 20:05, 12 June 2011 (UTC) [User:Pieceofpeper] — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pieceofpeper ( talk • contribs)
Yes,but you need to make sense of informations you read in infobox and orientate in it,so it may take up more amount of time than it would if there were occupations of people written in names of articles;if people needed to find quckly only that information.--D.M: 20:42, 12 June 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pieceofpeper ( talk • contribs)
Plus not all articles needing infobox(as they deal with historical person that lived in past centuries or are still living) do,in fact,have infobox. And infobox is lot harder to do than to write occupation in brackets. Plus infobox looks messy,if there are too many bits of information;so people cannot orientate as quickly as they need.--D.M: 20:56, 12 June 2011 (UTC)Pieceofpeper — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pieceofpeper ( talk • contribs)
I am not saying we should get rid of infoboxes-I´m saying:"Enhancing names of articles with this information would be very beneficial to people searching through Wikipedia".--D.M: 20:59, 12 June 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pieceofpeper ( talk • contribs)
Not all articles needing infobox(as they deal with historical or contemporary persons)do,in fact,have infobox. For example: Mary Shelley,influential writer does not have an infobox,or should I ask:Is it not considered necessary to make infobox for her? Though there are lots of infoboxes being made everyday to B-class actors and actresses,she does not have infobox,because no one dare to bother. So viewers have a bad luck if they want to find out who she was in short amount of given time;they must read through her full name and lengthy dates of birth and death until they find information they so desperately needed. Another example is Günter Brus ,one of the most important figures of Viennese Actionism,creator of revolutionary book Irrwisch,coiner of "Bild-Dichtungen(Picture-poems) and first pioneer of Body painting-even before Yves Klein.(And has such short article that it is such a shame to have the article on Wikipedia.) And so on... We definitely should include multiple occupations in brackets as long as it is in the name of article and written in thick font,so people can easily see it and it helps to orientate better as they know what kind of person is it about. We should write non-occupational information person is known for in brackets also,like in case of Charles Manson we should write [serial murderer] and so on. There should be no article about person who is not famous or notable for something. Remark about"western cultural bias" is not on the right place,since I do not care whether we write Bill Gates [American business magnate, philanthropist, author and chairman of Microsoft] or Bill Gates [creator of Microsoft] as long as we will write the thing he is most notable for in the name of the article and in thick font for better visibility. Pieceofpeper--D.M: 13:25, 13 June 2011 (UTC)
You may be interested in my proposal here. -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 20:41, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
Editors may be interested in this RFC, along with the discussion of its implementation:
Should all subsidiary pages of the Manual of Style be made subpages of WP:MOS?
It's big; and it promises huge improvements. Great if everyone can be involved. Noetica Tea? 00:53, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
Howdy. There's a wonderful move request currently open, or re-closed, or re-re-opened, over at Talk:Côte d'Ivoire. It's kind of a pretty big, long-embattled titling dispute, and it has the potential to stand as a strong precedent for future titles. Anyone interested might want to check in there, and make sure we're not missing any important considerations.
Thanks in advance for any interest and/or participation. - GTBacchus( talk) 05:52, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
As you know, back in January of 2010 we moved the title of this page from its old title of WP:Naming conventions to its current title of WP:Article titles (the discussion took place here). We did this primarily because the word "Name" carries with it religious, political, and other emotional baggage that the word "Title" does not have. Since then, the policy has remained fairly stable. The endless debates and arguments that we used to get have died off.
Or so it seemed... as it turns out, they didn't die off, they simply moved to the various "Naming conventions" guidelines and sub-pages that fall under this Policy. For a current example, see: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)/Diacritics RfC.
Looking at these debates, I am detecting the same underlying problem that we used to have here ... people are getting hung up over the word "name", and can not get past all the baggage that come with it. (In the example above, the issue centers on "names" that are spelled with diacritics in the subject's native language.)
I think the time has come to conform all of our "naming conventions" to the current terminology ... and change their titles to something that drops the the word "name" and uses "Title" instead. ("Title conventions"?... "Titling conventions"?). Blueboar ( talk) 15:10, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
This has been proposed and discussed before and I think it is a bad idea to name them "Article titles (xxx)". When "Article titles" page was named "Naming conventions" people were confused where policy stopped and guidance began, specifically when the Naming conventions policy referred to "Naming conventions" some people assumed that it encompassed guidance as policy because the phrase was then ambiguous. I think that policy and guidance is an important distinction and useful distinction that should not be lost again. Article titles and its guidelines are different from the MOS where all, including WP:MOS are guidelines. -- PBS ( talk) 09:07, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
I suggest it would be useful and helpful to include the principal naming criteria in other pages in a way that avoids having to update it on those pages every time it is changed here.
It seems to me the obvious solution is to create a subpage, WP:Title/PrincipalNamingCriteria, and include that in WP:Title as well as in any other page in which listing them could be helpful. Example: WP:How2title.
So, I did that. But it has been reverted with the unhelpful comment, "you can copy it to another page, but please leave it in the policy". Yes, I know I can copy it (duh), but then we have to main 2 (or 20, or whatever) copies of the criteria, which is exactly what I'm trying to avoid! What's the harm is maintaining this separately in a subpage? It looks the same when you view the policy page, and it's obvious what's going on if you need to edit them. We can put the policy tag on the subpage, if concern for it losing the "policy" status is the issue. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 17:38, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
But first, I still don't understand your objection. You do realize that when you go to WP:TITLE the criteria remain listed right there on that page, don't you? What difference does it make whether they're physically contained on that actual source page or separate source subpage, as long as it's rendered as one coherent policy?
Actually, the wording does evolve on this list. Yesterday I discovered that a few months ago the wording recognizability wording was changed, which used to explicitly clarify that we were referring about someone familiar with the topic. Anyway, that's a wording change that would have to be updated in upteen places, if this criteria was copied in upteen places as you suggest. By containing the source for the criteria in a transcluded subpage, all those updates are automatically and immediately made simultaneously. One less thing for editors to worry about. Isn't that a good thing? Plus, it means we can easily list that important criteria in any discussion, simply by typing: {{WP:Title/PrincipalNamingCriteria}}, like this:
Now that you mention it, it might be useful to structure the primary topic section - at least the part that defines it fundamentally since so many people seem to think it means "most important" (by whatever standard they have in mind) - in a way that makes it easy to include the fundamental definition elsewhere. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 02:30, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
Blueboar, I honestly thought this was such a non-controversial (after all, it changes nothing about what the policy says) and self-explanatory thing, it didn't occur to me to explain and ask first. Changes for that section will continue to be discussed here on this talk page, since the talk page for the subpage is now a redirect to this one. You make edits to it on it - the subpage. I'm not sure why this is difficult to understand. Are you simply unfamiliar with transclusion? If so, I suggest you read WP:TRANSCLUSION. Do you object transclusion in general, or just in this case?
I believe watching a parent page means you're automatically watching any subpages of that parent, but I'm not sure about that. You might have to put the subpage on watch independently. Maybe somebody else knows? -- Born2cycle ( talk) 17:28, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
As a point of comparison, WP:RM has 1384 watchers [4], while the transcluded Wikipedia:Requested moves/Header has only 30. Yet the Header subpage is where the "rules" about RM are contained. Since those changes are discussed on the main (watched by 1384) talk page, and 30 appears more than enough to enforce it, it's not an issue there, so I don't see why it would be an issue here. If nothing else, as the creator of the subpage I will be particularly diligent about watching for undiscussed changes made to it.
As far as the transclusions being difficult to understand for newer editors, I don't expect them to be trying to edit policy. For legitimate changes to the criteria by experienced editors who are confused by the transclusion, all they have to do is ask.
As to the advantages, I've now transcluded the criteria and the definition of primary topic definition into WP:How2title, which is in a process of being steadily refined and (hopefully) improved. I'm sure there other essays, and perhaps even guidelines and policies, that could be made more useful and helpful if they actually listed the naming criteria and stated the primary topic definition (via transclusion to guarantee being current), instead of linking to it.
It has been only a day. As did Ohm's Law above, I suggest we give it more time to see if any real problems actually arise, or if the advantages becomes more obvious. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 19:03, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
There is a move request at Talk:China that could use the opinions of editors involved with Wikipedia naming issues and not invested in intra-China politics. SchmuckyTheCat ( talk)
Suggestion. If this subpaging is agreed on, the section name should be part of the subpage. That way, editing the section on the main page automatically edits the subpage, as do transcluded pages on WP:AfD and WP:RfD.
BTW, what probably should have been done was to move the main page to the subpage, and back, before actually copying the subpage. Then watchlists would have automatically been updated. But that's water under the bridge; it can't easily be done that way without first deleting the page, and starting over. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 22:58, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
I added a heading to the subpage and indeed that makes it editable directly from the parent page. It's seamless. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 01:35, 16 July 2011 (UTC)
I created the PrincipalNamingCriteria subpage by copying the principal criteria from what was then the current version: [5]. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 17:09, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
By putting the criteria into a transcludable separate page, now the criteria can be explicitly listed in a manner that remains current and up-to-date. That seems very helpful to me, in terms of making it possible for editors of other pages to accurately inform their readers regarding exactly what the criteria are.
I understand your concern about someone changing the criteria without others noticing, but by adding the criteria subpage to your watchlist, you can almost completely solve that problem yourself. I've explained above how it should take only a few of us watching the new subpage to completely solve the problem, since requiring any changes to be discussed first on this talk page (so that anyone who watches this page is informed) is all that is required. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 19:14, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
What problems? All the problems you suggest are purely imagined and hypothetical. I promise I will be at the head of the list support undoing the transclusion if any of it actually manifests in reality. Of course. I think you're really exaggerating how many people have to watch the subpage to keep the potential problems potential.
I understand that this is new and different, and thus the reluctance. But give it a chance. I was confused the first time I tried to edit WP:RM, but I quickly figured it out. It can, and will, happen here too. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 20:42, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
Maybe you have to be a programmer to appreciate it? -- Born2cycle ( talk) 22:54, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
I have read through all of this. I advise strongly against using transclusions in this way. It was attempted at WP:MOS a couple of years ago, and brought nothing but chaos and confusion. Ideally, we could indeed manage policies and guidelines in a systematic modular fashion. But in practice it alienates editors, creating a rift between those who can handle the tricky technical aspects and those who give up when faced with it. Compare the situation here, where an admin wanted to make a requested change, but was defeated by technical complexity. That's the last thing we want in a participatory project. Noetica Tea? 23:41, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
I suggest to remove modify these phrases from the policy: "Wikipedia has many naming conventions relating to specific subject domains (as listed in the box at the top of this page). Sometimes these recommend the use of titles that are not strictly the common name (as in the case of the conventions for flora and medicine)." Let's remove it. Such arbitrary exceptions may be used to bypass the WP:Common name, as should be clear from
this discussion. Using naming conventions that contradict majority of RS is highly questionable at best.
Biophys (
talk)
12:36, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
There will often be several possible alternative titles for any given article;
the choice between them is made by consensus.
One problem that I just ran across was the use of the term "defrocking" (or "unfrocking") for laicization of a member of the clergy. This is essentially an "informal" semi-derogatory term. It is most common in English-speaking countries, but laicization is often (less often) used as well. A name change was proposed and lost, following the rules of this policy. It is a bit Protestant-oriented IMO. Clergy "defrocked" are most often Catholic.
I'm sure this isn't the first time that something English-centric has turned out to be some other centric as well, a little less defensible. Not sure what to offer as a workable alternative for a general rule, but did want to point that out. Student7 ( talk) 18:14, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
This was discussed here earlier, Ganga/Ganges isn't a settled fact. (1)Earlier the argument was that it is Ganges not Ganga because there was divided local use. It was demonstrated that it was not the case, which resulted in the example being taken off. (2)Now the argument is international intelligiblity, which is again disputable. Please see the archives of this page, where it was demonstrated that, Ganga is more popular than Ganges, internationally, in English, whereas even a 10-20% acceptance would have been enough. (3)There was a move proposal; that Ganges be moved to Ganga, though the move has been closed, since the dispute is not settled, it cannot be considered as an example, as it is used to influence the Ganga move debate. (5)Though one particular move proposal was closed, if you watch the pages the debate is on-going and another move proposal will come up any time. In that case the statement "Ganges not Ganga", takes sides on a controversial issue, which it shouldn't. So please find another example. Yogesh Khandke ( talk) 10:37, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
(od)( edit conflict)od)(1)That is your opinion, but Wikipedia has two castes, one of POV pushers who push their agenda, and another who can evaluate over 400 edits, and the hundreds of sources they quote, in minutes. (2)I don't, that cannot be an excuse to keep Ganges not Ganga. Yogesh Khandke ( talk) 13:45, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
(od)(1)That it is reasonable is your imagination. (2)What is the meaning of our, and who qualifies as your?. (3)A case that isn't settled cannot be used as an example. (4)The moment the move would be proposed we would have National Varieties quoted, which would make the argument circular, Wikipedia English has millions of pages, another example should be found, pending which no example should work fine. Yogesh Khandke ( talk) 14:33, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
(od)As Quigley said this page isn't for content disputes, the issue is whether an example that is contentious should be here? Obviously not. Save your breath folks. Yogesh Khandke ( talk) 10:42, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
As often happens, we have a disagreement as to what a previous consensus actually was... but it does not really matter whether the previous consensus was to use or not to use Ganges/Ganga as the example, since consensus can change (whatever it was). What we need to determine is what the current consensus is. From the discussion above, it appears that the current consensus is to use it... but this appearance this can be confirmed by taking a quick poll:
Do we currently have a consensus to a) continue to use the Ganges article to illustrate the statement: "However, sometimes a form which represents only minority local usage is chosen because of its greater intelligibility to English-speaking readers worldwide" - or b) should we find another example?
Unless and until the main English reliable sources change from using Ganges to using Ganga, neither will Wikipedia, as that is very strong evidence supporting the notion that "Ganges" is more recognizable to, and expected by, our readers, than is "Ganga". And this remains a good example for illustrating how much actual usage in English reliable sources is given more preference in deciding titles than does "official" use. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 17:25, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
All: This was when Ganges not Ganga was taken off, [9] after a long discussion (see link above), this is when Ganges not Ganga was inserted without discussion [10], disregarding earlier consensus to take it off. Quigley: Stop whining. Don't forget the not democracy part here. Yogesh Khandke ( talk)
It's important to realize what the consensus favors that's relevant to this issue, as it's not just about Ganges v. Ganga. First, there is a view that Ganga should be the title because Ganga is the "official" name. Consensus does not support the view that Ganga is the "official" name - certainly not outside of India, and it's arguable even within India. Second, that view depends on the premise that if something is an "official" name, it should be the title of the respective article. Consensus does not support that view either; there is certainly no support for it in policy or guidelines. Finally, consensus clearly supports the view that the name most commonly used in reliable English sources should be the title, and that's why the title of this article is and should remain Ganges.
I think it's important for everyone to realize that consensus has to change on each of these points before we can say that consensus has changed about this title. Does anyone seriously think that might happen within the foreseeable future? Nothing seems to ever change that dramatically in Wikipedia. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 17:55, 21 July 2011 (UTC)
A proposal to change this title, one of our examples, is being made at Talk:Fixed-wing_aircraft#Requested_move_2011; it doesn't seem to have been mentioned here. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:28, 22 July 2011 (UTC)
In a recent close at Talk:United_States_Declaration_of_Independence#Requested_move_based_on_above_discussion the closing admin stated " Wikipedia's precision and disambiguation guidelines support natural modes of disambiguation over parenthetical disambiguation."
Based on this statement, the closer concluded that consensus (meaning that of the community, not those participating, who were in favor of the version with parentheses) was that "United States Declaration of Independence" was a "natural mode of disambiguation" and thus preferred over the parenthetic disambiguation, "Declaration of Independence (United States)".
Does anyone else get that meaning -- from the actual words of WP:PRECISION? Here is what it currently states:
When additional precision is necessary to distinguish an article title from other uses of the topic name, over-precision should be avoided. Be precise, but only as precise as necessary. For example, it would be inappropriate to title an article "United States Apollo program (1961–75)" over Apollo program (given that the year range refers to the whole of the program, not a portion of it); or "Queen (London, England rock band)" over Queen (band). Remember that concise titles are preferred.
However, because pages cannot share the same title, it is not always possible to use the exact title that may be desired for an article, as that title may have another meaning. As a general rule:
- If the topic of the article is the primary topic (or only topic) for a desired title, then the article can take that title without modification.
- Otherwise that title cannot be used for the article without disambiguation. This is often done by adding a disambiguating tag in parentheses (or sometimes after a comma); however in certain cases it may be done by choosing a different form of the title in order to achieve uniqueness. If there is a natural mode of disambiguation in standard English, as with Cato the Elder and Cato the Younger, use that instead.
Often there is no alternative to parenthetical disambiguation, and it does have the advantage that the non-parenthesized part of the title may most clearly convey what the subject is called in English. On the other hand, such disambiguations may be longer or less natural than an alternate but unambiguous form, when there is one.
Keep in mind that the two titles in question in this case were:
Since neither choice is significantly more concise than the other, the key statements relevant to this particular case in the guideline are:
Of these, the only statement that might be construed to support the closer's contention that this guideline supports "natural modes of disambiguation over parenthetical disambiguation" is (3). But the meaning of that statement, and in particular what is meant by "natural modes of disambiguation", is clarified by the examples, Cato the Elder and Cato the Younger, which are disambiguations commonly used in reliable sources. "United States Declaration of Independence" is not commonly used in reliable sources, and does not at all meet the "natural" criteria defined above on this policy page:
titles are expected to use names and terms that readers are most likely to look for in order to find the article (and to which editors will most naturally link from other articles). As part of this, a good title should convey what the subject is actually called in English.
What readers are likely to look for "United States Declaration of Independence" to find the article? Yes, they are also not likely to look for "Declaration of Independence (United States)", but they are likely to look for "Declaration of Independence", which is conveyed only by the use of parenthetic disambiguation. That is, the title United States Declaration of Independence does not "convey what the subject is actually called in English" ("Declaration of Independence)", but Declaration of Independence (United States) does convey that (because it's understood that the United States in parentheses is not part of what it is actually called).
That was the point of the objection. That is ultimately why the majority of those participating in that poll, 7 vs. 4, disfavored it.
On the other hand (1), (2) and (4) all clearly support the opposite notion, that parenthetic disambiguation is preferred over simply adding precision to the name of the topic, unless adding such precision without parentheses results in a "natural disambiguation", like Cato the Elder. That is, (1) notes that the parenthetic form is often used, and that's mentioned first. (2) notes that disambiguation can also be done by choosing a different form in the title, but no preference of that over parenthetic is even implied. (3) points out the advantages of using the parenthetic form.
I put to you two questions:
Thanks. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 03:54, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
Whether the "no consensus" decision is reasonable on some other grounds (as you apparently suggest by seemingly justifying it based on the lack of coherency in a couple of the support votes, a point the closer did not even hint at) is beside the point.
All that should matter in evaluating a close is the reason given by the closer, and whether that is "coherent". That's my issue. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 06:39, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
Your reliance on this point indicates you either did not read or did not understand my analysis, which was based on what "natural disambiguation" means, and, in particular, whether "United States Declaration of Independence" is a "natural disambiguation".
Now, if your disagreement with my analysis is on that point, then how about saying that, and explaining what you find faulty in my reasoning? If you would actually quote statements from my analysis with which you disagree, and explain why, then I believe we would come to an understanding - at least an agreement to disagree - much more quickly. Thanks. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 17:47, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
This is an interesting issue. I tentatively agree with Born2cycle, but I think it worth nothing that "Cato the Whatever" is a useless and potentially deceptive example, because it is not the case that the two topics are most commonly referred to as "Cato" and therefore we have to disambiguate them and we choose to follow reliable sources in doing so. Rather, in this case, we have two topics, one of which is most commonly known as "Cato the Elder", the other most commonly known as "Cato the Younger", and no disambiguation is necessary.
Is there an example where reliable sources both affirm that a term is the most commonly used name of two topics, and offer a commonly used scheme for resolving the ambiguity? If so, then let's hear it; if not, then it is not possible to defer to reliable sources when disambiguating, and this discussion may end. Hesperian 06:49, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
On the particulars of B2C's question #2, the assertion that "United States Declaration of Independence" is not commonly used in reliable sources is fallacious and was disproven by evidence provided by Jim Wae in the move discussion. The questions whether that is the MOST common name for the document or whether the U.S. DOI is unambiguously the primary topic for the term "Declaration of Independence" are distinct issues, but it is incorrect to claim that the phrase "United States Declaration of Independence" is not common or not a natural language disambiguation. As for question #1, I do not think the policy should indicate a preference for parenthetical disambiguators. The policy currently simply summarizes current practice: disambiguation is often done by adding a disambiguating tag in parentheses (or sometimes after a comma); however in certain cases it may be done by choosing a different form of the title in order to achieve uniqueness [emphasis added]. I don't think any clarification is necessary. older ≠ wiser 15:16, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
...Otherwise that title cannot be used for the article without disambiguation. This is often done by adding a disambiguating tag in parentheses (or sometimes after a comma); however in certain cases it may be done by choosing a different form of the title in order to achieve uniqueness avoid the ambiguity presented by the most common title. Such other title should be a recognized alternate that the subject is actually called in English and, while less common than the preferred title, should not be obscure. If there is such a natural mode of disambiguation in standard English, as with Cato the Elder and Cato the Younger [insert better example], use that instead.
--
Fuhghettaboutit (
talk)
23:10, 18 July 2011 (UTC)Possibly a suitable example is English language and English people. I think we can all agree that both are usually referred to simply as "English"; and that when it is necessary to distinguish between the two, "the English language" is an overwhelmingly common and familiar phrase, and "The English people" is pretty common too. Hesperian 23:37, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
...Otherwise that title cannot be used for the article without disambiguation. This is often done by adding a disambiguating tag in parentheses (or sometimes after a comma); however in certain cases it may be done by choosing a different form of the title in order to
achieve uniqueness avoid the ambiguity presented by the most common name. Such other title should still reflect a recognized name that the subject is actually commonly called in English reliable sources and, while less common than the name preferred for the title, should not be obscure. If there is such a natural mode of disambiguation in standard English, as with Cato the Elder and Cato the Younger
English language and
English people, as opposed to just English, use that instead.
-- Born2cycle ( talk) 00:25, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
If there is such a natural mode of disambiguation in standard English, use that instead. In this regard, the word English, alone, commonly refers to both English People and to the English language. Because of the ambiguity seen between those two topics, we use the nevertheless common titles,
English language and
English people, to provide natural disambiguation. On the other hand, for the three major topics "mercury" might refer to, there are no sufficiently alternate common alternate names, so the articles are disambiguated using parenthetical, viz:
Mercury (element),
Mercury (mythology) and
Mercury (planet). The last of these has a potential natural disambiguator of Planet Mercury, but it is not commonly used as a an alternate title but simply as a noun phrase.
As an alternative approach...
To my mind this outlines the various options, but does not imply that one of them is "better" than the others. Blueboar ( talk) 01:00, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
It is very common to prepend a geographic or political entity as context for an ambiguous title. I would not want to change this policy in a way that would discourage that "natural mode of disambiguation". Powers T 13:58, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
This is the current wording of the section we're discussing above and below.
*** PLEASE DO NOT EDIT THIS SECTION. ***
*Otherwise that title cannot be used for the article without disambiguation. This is often done by adding a disambiguating tag in parentheses (or sometimes after a comma); however in certain cases it may be done by choosing a different form of the title in order to achieve uniqueness. If there is a natural mode of disambiguation in standard English, as with Cato the Elder and Cato the Younger, use that instead.
The following section is a transclusion of a subpage, Wikipedia talk:Article titles/precision, which originated as a current copy of WP:PRECISION, and has been pared down to an edited version of the paragraph in question. If you click "edit" on the following header, you will be editing the subpage.
If you are participating here, you may want to add Wikipedia talk:Article titles/precision to your watch list.
*** PLEASE DO EDIT THIS SECTION. ***
If the topic has a name (some topics, like List of countries, do not have set names), then any alternative title should still reflect a name that the subject is commonly called in English. While a name may be chosen that is less common than the (ambiguous) preferred name, avoid choosing an obscure name, or making up a new name. Where such an alternate common name exists in standard English, it should be used instead of the most common name, as a "natural" disambiguator.
For example, the word "English" commonly refers to either the people or the language. Because of the ambiguity, we use the alternate but still common titles, English language and English people, allowing natural disambiguation.
On the other hand, "mercury" has distinct meanings that do not have sufficiently common alternate names, so we use instead parenthetical disambiguation: Mercury (element), Mercury (mythology) and Mercury (planet). Note that the planet has the potential natural disambiguation title: "planet Mercury". However, although the phrase "planet Mercury" appears in some contexts, it is not what the planet is actually called, so it's not an appropriate title.
In summary: Use names that are commonly used in reliable sources; do not invent neologisms. For topics without names, like List of countries, more latitude is allowed to form descriptive and unique titles.
Explain your edits to the consensus version here.
On to substance - I'm not sure "noun phrase" tells us anything, because a noun phrase may or may not be something the subject is called. I'm tempting to say it has to be a name, but there was some objection to that in the past. One thing I tried to do at WP:How2title is distinguish named entities from unnamed entities. If we did that here, then we could say that named entities must have a commonly used named for their title, or the most common name must be disambiguated with parenthetic disambiguation. It's the unnamed entities, like List of countries in Asia, that have descriptive names that are not names. What we want to avoid is giving a descriptive title to an article about something that has a name, but that name (alone) is unavailable. We should disambiguate that name, parenthetically, not come up with a different descriptive title. How do we say that? -- Born2cycle ( talk) 05:27, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
After: When a topic's most commonly used name is ambiguous (refers to more than one topic covered in Wikipedia), and the topic is not primary, ... -- Born2cycle ( talk) 17:30, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
After: If the topic has a name (some topics, like List of countries, don't have set names), then any alternative title should still reflect a name that the subject is commonly called in English. While we may choose a name that is less common than the (ambiguous) preferred name, we avoid choosing an obscure name, or making up a new name. Such an alternative name is used instead of the most common name as it is a natural mode of disambiguation in standard English.
The alternative is to do as you suggest, which is effectively to provide no guidance at all, because everyone is free to prioritize the factors any way they wish, and vary the priorities according to whim from one decision to the next. That's what I, for one, am trying to get away from, because it makes deciding titles a coin tossing process and ultimately responsible for the unnecessarily long WP:RM backlog. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 17:40, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
The point is that before you can decide on title C or title D, or title E over title F, you have to decide whether to prefer factor A over factor B, or vice versa, and then apply that consistently to both cases. That's the point of WP:How2title. It's about interpreting the criteria as consistently as possible from one case to the next, which, if adopted, should greatly reduce the backlog. That doesn't mean there are no judgement calls, it just clarifies many of the calls. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 18:33, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
Yeah. I disagree that a reduced backlog and a consistent priority order for naming conventions are part of our goal-set at all. If the community decides on consistency, consistently and on a case-by-case basis, then consistency becomes a priority. I haven't seen that happen. - GTBacchus( talk) 19:03, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
Let me put it this way, isn't providing guidance a goal here? If not, what is the point of, well, policy and guidelines?
Now, the issue here is deciding what a title should be. We can identify the factors that go into deciding titles, but is that guidance? I mean, when all the factors indicate the same title, the answer is obvious; there is no need for guidance. When guidance is needed is for those cases where some factors indicate one title, and others indicate another title. When that happens, what do we do? It seems to me that that is the question that needs to be answered to meet the goal of providing guidance for the task of deciding titles. And to answer that question, the guidance can and must be more formulaic, as demonstrated by WP:How2title. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 19:43, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
(tangent discussion moved to Wikipedia Talk:How2title#Should deciding titles be somewhat formulaic?)
We draw the line on a case-by-case basis, and it's okay to just say that. Some illustrative examples are helpful, but we're not trying to list a comprehensive set of precedents for people to follow. All that example does is say that we only use natural language disambiguation if it really is "natural language". It's inherent in the word "natural" that we don't use stilted, little-used phrases that will make people say "what the heck?!". - GTBacchus( talk) 04:53, 21 July 2011 (UTC)
Do we need that example to show that we use the names of things to title articles? That's a pretty fundamental point; is it not made anywhere other than this putative paragraph? - GTBacchus( talk) 05:17, 21 July 2011 (UTC)
I've seen the article titles of I'm Holdin' On to Love (To Save My Life) and Thank You Baby! (For Makin' Someday Come So Soon). Although "to" and "for" aren't words normally capitalized in titles because they are prepositions, they are here. It has been brought to my attention that it might be because they are the first words in the parenthesis. I have checked the Wikipedia guidelines for titling and there seems to be no policy for titles that have parenthesis. Something should be done about this. Should they be titled or not? -- ipodnano05 * leave@message 19:31, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
Okay, following Arthur's first suggestion above, the transcluded section in a separate subpage is now directly editable from the main policy page
a demo copy of the page. Assuming no one reverts it again, y You can try it for yourself. Just go to
Wikipedia:Title#Principal_naming_criteria
User:Born2cycle/Titles#Principal naming criteria and have your cursor hover over "Edit". You will see "Wikipedia:Title/PrincipalNamingCriteria" floating above the cursor. Indeed, if you click on "Edit", that's what it will edit.
Presuming we go ahead and do Arthur's move trick above (perhaps by using a subpage named NamingCriteria instead of PrincipalNamingCriteria to not have to worry about deleting the existing one first) to address the lost watchlist problem, are there any remaining objections? -- Born2cycle ( talk) 02:06, 16 July 2011 (UTC)
My point is that are pros and cons, and this particular one is very minor, and a wash between the two approaches. I'm sorry, but these "objections" really do seem to be WP:JDLI arguments that are mostly about being uncomfortable with change, not anything substantive. But I can see how you might not realize that and your objections would seem real and important to you. That's human nature. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 16:16, 16 July 2011 (UTC)
By the way, anyone who went on vacation on, say, July 1, would presumably come back and do a diff, seeing prominently near the top the replacement of the criteria with the transclusion to the new sub page, alerting them to add that to their watch list, if specific changes to the criteria is something they want to watch. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 18:02, 16 July 2011 (UTC)
Transcluding the entire page into the other page, but limiting what is transcluded with "onlyinclude" works but is not a good general solution since it limits what can be transcluded to only that which is so tagged. However, the need and utility of a general solution, if it exists, is apparently not recognized at this time. Even I can't think of any particular case for transcluding anything on this page other than the principal naming criteria.
Since the page is locked from editing, can some admin please add <onlyinclude> </onlyinclude> tags around the principal criteria section as I did on the test page in my user area [12]? Thanks. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 15:33, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
I'm still not convinced it's necessary, but I've figured out how to do selective transclusion and can demonstrate with the demo page, User:Born2cycle/Titles, which is essentially a copy of this page.
Here are the basic instructions, along with some explanation of how and why it works.
Selective TransclusionSelective transclusion is the process of transcluding only part of a page. If only one section of a page is to be transcluded, this can be done by simply surrounding the section of interest with <onlyinclude> </onlyinclude> tags, and transcluding the whole page. But if you want to transclude one section into one page, and another section into another page, that's selective transclusion, and you need a way to uniquely mark each section to be transcluded, and a way to specify which section you want to transclude.
So, the key is to think of a section name for each section you want to transclude, and add the following line at the beginning all such sections, substituting SECTIONNAME (twice) with the unique name of your section:
- <onlyinclude>{{#ifeq:{{{transcludesection|SECTIONNAME}}}|SECTIONNAME|
First, by adding an <onlyinclude> tag to the file that means anything that transcludes will see only what is inside <onlyinclude></onlyinclude> tags.
Second, the "ifeq" statement checks for a parameter named transcludesection. If it doesn't find one, it sets it to the default value of SECTIONNAME - this is so that the section will be displayed when the document is normally/directly viewed. In any case, it checks to see if transcludesection is is equal to SECTIONNAME, and, if it is, it renders the text that follows up to the next double-curly brace. Thus, the text will be rendered if the parameter is not originally set, or if it is set to that section name.
For example, if we want to transclude the principal criteria section, we just add this above the first line to transclude:
- <onlyinclude>{{#ifeq:{{{transcludesection|principalcriteria}}}|principalcriteria|
And, above the common name section, we put this:
- <onlyinclude>{{#ifeq:{{{transcludesection|commonname}}}|commonname|
Also, each such transcludable section needs to end with this:
- }}</onlyinclude>
That's it! Then, to transclude the principalcriteria section from another page, use the following line, substituting FILENAME for the document to be transcluded and SECTIONNAME with the name of the section you want to transclude:
- {{FILENAME|transcludesection=SECTIONNAME}}
So, to transclude the principal naming criteria section from the demonstration page in my user space:
- {{User:Born2cycle/Titles|transcludesection=principalcriteria}}
Or, to transclude the common name section:
- {{User:Born2cycle/Titles|transcludesection=commonname}}
Of course, the same page can translude two or more sections this way by including multiple such lines. There is no limit to how many selectable sections for transclusion a document can have. The only requirement is that each be given a unique keyword name.
A sample document - a copy of WP:AT - containing marked sections is here: User:Born2cycle/Titles. You can diff it with this page to see what was added to implement this. A simple test that transcludes both sections from this page, but rendering common names before principal naming criteria to demonstrate that each is selected separately, is here: User:Born2cycle/testtranscluder. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 23:48, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
{{quotation|{{Wikipedia:Article titles|transcludesection=principalcriteria}}}}
- Recognizability – article titles are expected to be a recognizable name or description of the topic.
- Naturalness – titles are expected to use names and terms that readers are most likely to look for in order to find the article (and to which editors will most naturally link from other articles). As part of this, a good title should convey what the subject is actually called in English.
- Precision – titles are expected to use names and terms that are precise, but only as precise as is necessary to identify the topic of the article unambiguously. For technical reasons, no two Wikipedia articles can have the same title. For information on how ambiguity is avoided in titles, see the Precision and disambiguation section below and the disambiguation guideline.
- Conciseness – titles are expected to be shorter rather than longer.
- Consistency – titles are expected to follow the same pattern as those of similar articles. Many of these patterns are documented in the naming guidelines listed in the Specific-topic naming conventions box above, and ideally indicate titles that are in accordance with the principal criteria above.
- Recognizability – The title is a name or description of the subject that someone familiar with, although not necessarily an expert in, the subject area will recognize.
- Naturalness – The title is one that readers are likely to look or search for and that editors would naturally use to link to the article from other articles. Such a title usually conveys what the subject is actually called in English.
- Precision – The title unambiguously identifies the article's subject and distinguishes it from other subjects.
- Concision – The title is no longer than necessary to identify the article's subject and distinguish it from other subjects.
- Consistency – The title is consistent with the pattern of similar articles' titles. Many of these patterns are listed (and linked) as topic-specific naming conventions on article titles, in the box above.
- Recognizability – article titles are expected to be a recognizable name or description of the topic.
- Naturalness – titles are expected to use names and terms that readers are most likely to look for in order to find the article (and to which editors will most naturally link from other articles). As part of this, a good title should convey what the subject is actually called in English.
- Precision – titles are expected to use names and terms that are precise, but only as precise as is necessary to identify the topic of the article unambiguously. For technical reasons, no two Wikipedia articles can have the same title. For information on how ambiguity is avoided in titles, see the Precision and disambiguation section below and the disambiguation guideline.
- Conciseness – titles are expected to be shorter rather than longer.
- Consistency – titles are expected to follow the same pattern as those of similar articles. Many of these patterns are documented in the naming guidelines listed in the Specific-topic naming conventions box above, and ideally indicate titles that are in accordance with the principal criteria above.
I have removed a link to Born2Cycle's newly written essay WP:How to Determine a Wikipedia Article Title in the See Also section (link added by Born2). I think adding it was premature. I don't have any problem including essays in the See Also section, but they do need to have some degree of consensus before we do so. At the moment, Born2's essay essentially only reflects one editor's views. So far, it has gained very little actual support (and some serious criticism). In fact, unless it does gain some support, I think there is a realistic possibility that it could be moved to User Space as a "personal essay". ... In any case, I don't think it should be added yet. It needs a lot of work and more people saying "yeah, I basically agree with this" before we add it. Blueboar ( talk) 21:49, 21 July 2011 (UTC)
Essays are the opinion or advice of an editor or group of editors, for which widespread consensus has not been established. They do not speak for the entire community and may be created and written without approval.
The way to get around the catch-22 is to leave notification that the essay exists on the talk page (and at places like the Pump) inviting them to comment and edit. Again, my objection was to adding it at this point in time... not to adding it at all. Blueboar ( talk) 00:05, 22 July 2011 (UTC)
The issue of the meaning of the Conciseness criterion is being discussed in a subsection of an AN discussion here. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 17:06, 26 July 2011 (UTC)
Maybe we need a provision to say that titles shouldn't be changed just to get a small improvement in one of conciseness, recognizability, consistency, etc., unless there's a good reason. This could knock down the amount of churn and noise that B2C generates. Dicklyon ( talk) 17:47, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
Per the suggestion of several people, including the admin who closed the above referenced AN discussion, I'm bringing this issue to this talk page.
Based on the AN discussion mentioned/linked above, I have formulated the True/False statements below for anyone who is willing to participate. My main concern is that apparently very different interpretations exist regarding two criteria, and how they apply to various situations. So I'm curious how everyone interprets and applies them in these situations too. If these criteria are not understood the same by all of us, we won't have much of a chance achieving consensus regarding how they are applied and weighed. So, the statements below are based on the following criteria which is listed at WP:TITLE:
- Recognizability – article titles are expected to be a recognizable name or description of the topic.
- Naturalness – titles are expected to use names and terms that readers are most likely to look for in order to find the article (and to which editors will most naturally link from other articles). As part of this, a good title should convey what the subject is actually called in English.
- Precision – titles are expected to use names and terms that are precise, but only as precise as is necessary to identify the topic of the article unambiguously. For technical reasons, no two Wikipedia articles can have the same title. For information on how ambiguity is avoided in titles, see the Precision and disambiguation section below and the disambiguation guideline.
- Conciseness – titles are expected to be shorter rather than longer.
- Consistency – titles are expected to follow the same pattern as those of similar articles. Many of these patterns are documented in the naming guidelines listed in the Specific-topic naming conventions box above, and ideally indicate titles that are in accordance with the principal criteria above.
Just list the statement numbers and for each either a T if you think it's entirely true, otherwise an F. Of course, any clarifications you think might be necessary are welcome.
Finally, a question... do you think we need to make any changes/clarifications to how we explain what the Concise and Natural criteria mean? If so, what do you suggest?
Thanks! -- Born2cycle ( talk) 08:06, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
First, "Shorter rather than longer" does not necessarily mean "shortest possible"... Second, Conciseness (like all of our criteria) has to be balanced against the other criteria. These are broad principles... NOT firm and fast "rules". Which of these broad principles is given more or less weight changes from article to article. Each article is a unique situation... Sometimes the principle of conciseness will be given more weight and is the key to determining the best article title... but at other times it is given hardly any weight at all, and one or more of the other criteria is the key. Blueboar ( talk) 12:27, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
We agree, I think, that if concision were the only consideration, Gandhi is shorter, and would be preferred. We also agree that it isn't the only consideration. So what is all this in aid of? To say that Bacchus should have said that is a samll difference between one full name and another? Perhaps he should, but he would have reached the reached the same closure. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:38, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
I just edited the concision criterion, and then I noticed this discussion here. Perhaps it's clearer now?
I think it might be a good idea to reiterate on the policy page that these criteria are not rules, but observations of criteria that Wikipedians seem to use in the field. We could also note that the list is not exhaustive. Another point would be that the criteria do not have well-defined relative weights, because some will outweigh others in some situations, but not in others. The specifics are decided by Wikipedians, in context, and decisions that we make the same way over and over again are eventually distilled into principles and recorded here. Any thoughts? - GTBacchus( talk) 01:58, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
There's a new discussion about the capitalization of article titles at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Original titles for works in foreign languages. As it has already been moved, please join the discussion there. Specifically, the question is whether a non-translated, non-English book title should be capitalized according to the rules of the non-English language, or the usual English-language rules. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 15:38, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
What's the practical difference between recognizability and naturalness? They both have to do with WP:COMMONNAME, it would seem, as well as the Principle of Least Astonishment. Can anyone provide an example where these two criteria indicate different titles? - GTBacchus( talk) 17:39, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
I find this page to be a bit sprawling and random, and I'm thinking of ways to organize it. One idea, which Born2cycle and I have both been mulling over, is for the page structure, or at least part of it, to reflect the 5 naming criteria. I'm imagining something like:
The general "Deciding on an article title" lists the criteria, as it currently does, and then we'd have subsections going into more detail about each one. Some of those we've already got, in one form or another. In particular, the "Common names" section addresses the first two criteria, the section on Precision addresses that criterion, and the section about explicit naming conventions speaks to the Consistency criterion.
Another point: we've got sections addressing neutrality in titles, but neutrality is not listed as one of the Primary Naming Criteria. Should it be? I think it would be an accurate observation that neutrality is a criterion that Wikipedians use in titling questions.
Well, I guess I've said a lot of stuff now. Any thoughts? - GTBacchus( talk) 17:50, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
Okay, very little content has changed, but a lot of sections moved. That makes it a little tricky to see just what changed. Here are the content changes since I started this section:
Everything else is just shuffling of sections. The easiest way to see all the changes is to compare the tables of contents before and after. I don't think I've got any more big edits in the wings, so I'm ready to sit back and see what others do with it. I like that there are fewer top-level headers, anyway.
Regarding the question of sections explicating each of the 5 criteria: It seems that Recognizability and Naturalness are discussed under "Common names", and perhaps under "Article title format". Precision has its section, Conciseness doesn't really need one, and Consistency is addressed by "Article title format" and "Explicit conventions". I don't think the relation of each criterion to the rest of the page needs to be made more explicit, or would that be helpful? - GTBacchus( talk) 23:23, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
The policy says: "In discussing the appropriate title of an article, remember that the choice of title is not dependent on whether a name is "right" in a moral or political sense." That sounds great, but isn't political and moral "rightness" precisely why we've got an article at Burma and not at Myanmar? - GTBacchus( talk) 20:25, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
There's a discussion on naming scripts here. At issue as I see it is whether we use the word "alphabet" for scripts that are familiar or prestigious, for all segmental scripts, or only for 'true' alphabets. I don't much care as long as it isn't the first (Hebrew 'alphabet' but Phoenician 'script', or Western 'alphabets' and Eastern 'scripts', etc).
I think if we decide to be consistent, it should be summarized in our naming conventions somewhere, though I'm not sure where. NC (languages) seems to be the closest. At one point we had decided to call everything apart from Greek-type 'true' alphabets 'scripts', but as one editor put it, good luck trying to move Hebrew alphabet and Arabic alphabet back to that name.
(For those who aren't familiar with the terminology, Greek, Hebrew, and Thai are all "alphabets" in the broad sense. This is defined by having letters that transcribe individual segments (consonants and/or vowels), as opposed to scripts like Japanese kana and Cherokee which do not. There is a narrower and more specialized use of 'alphabet' to mean Greek-type scripts which give consonants and vowels equal status, as opposed to writing vowels with diacritics or not at all. In this convention, Greek is a 'true' alphabet, Thai is an abugida (writes vowels with diacritics), and Hebrew is an abjad (doesn't write vowels). The broad sense may be justifiable per COMMONNAME, the narrow sense per academic precision. (In an even broader sense, any writing system may be called an "alphabet", but there has never been support for being that imprecise on WP.) — kwami ( talk) 19:14, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
These two discussions are both about how we decide what terms to use based on neutrality, in case anyone is interesting in reading, or contributing to, the discussions.
The first one is not an RM or title discussion, but it's about how to decide whether to use the most commonly used name, or a more neutral term, in article content, and much of the discussion arguably applies to neutrality judgments in title selection as well. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 23:09, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
In the interest of making the determination of the common name easier, can't we give some weight to what name people type in the Search box when they're looking for an article? This statistic, if we're able to collect it, should count for something, shouldn't it? -- Kenatipo speak! 19:37, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
Higher up on this page a proposed rewrite of WP:PRECISION was discussed. That discussion is now quite sprawling, including off-topic section discussions (and appears stalled), so I think we need a fresh start. I think some good clarification ideas emerged. However, proposed language was addressed only to an existing portion of the policy section, and when I took a look at how it would appear integrated into the whole section, it just did not work: Too verbose; not flowing; hard to follow. I have taken what was done, tried to keep the sense and clarity of the language proposed, but tighten it up a lot and reorganize and format for understandability, as well as clarifying the surrounding language. Below is a collapsed box containing the current language of WP:PRECISION for comparison, and below that, the proposed rewrite.
When additional precision is necessary to distinguish an article title from other uses of the topic name, over-precision should be avoided. Be precise, but only as precise as necessary. For example, it would be inappropriate to title an article "United States Apollo program (1961–75)" over Apollo program (given that the year range refers to the whole of the program, not a portion of it); or "Queen (London, England rock band)" over Queen (band). Remember that concise titles are preferred.
However, because pages cannot share the same title, it is not always possible to use the exact title that may be desired for an article, as that title may have another meaning. As a general rule:
Often there is no alternative to parenthetical disambiguation, and it does have the advantage that the non-parenthesized part of the title may most clearly convey what the subject is called in English. On the other hand, such disambiguations may be longer or less natural than an alternate but unambiguous form, when there is one.
The disambiguation guideline also contains advice on how to title disambiguation pages when they need to be created.
Sometimes titles of separate articles have different forms, but with only minor differences.
Examples:
In such cases, remember that a reader who enters one term might in fact be looking for the other, so use appropriate disambiguation techniques (such as hatnotes or disambiguation pages) to ensure that readers can find all possible target articles.
Rewrite:
When additional precision is necessary to distinguish an article title from other uses of the topic name, over-precision should be avoided. Be precise, but only as precise as necessary. For example, it would be inappropriate to title an article "United States Apollo program (1961–75)" over Apollo program (given that the year range refers to the whole of the program, not a portion of it); or "Queen (London, England rock band)" over Queen (band). Remember that concise titles are preferred.
However, because pages cannot share the same title, it is not always possible to use the exact title that may be desired for an article, as that title may have another meaning. Where there is more than one existing Wikipedia article for another meaning of a desired title, as a general rule:
ii) Parenthetical disambiguation: Add a disambiguating term in parentheses (or sometimes after a comma), directly after the ambiguous name.
Where there is no set name for a topic, so a title of our own conception is necessary, e.g., List of birds of Nicaragua and Campaign history of the Roman military, more latitude is allowed to form descriptive and unique titles.
Sometimes titles of separate articles have different forms, but with only minor differences.
In such cases, while the name is already precise without the need for natural or parenthetical disambiguation, a reader who enters one term might in fact be looking for the other, so use appropriate disambiguation techniques, such as adding hatnotes to the affected articles or creating disambiguation pages, to ensure that readers can find all possible target articles.
The WP:POVTITLE section of this page currently states:
When a significant majority of English-language reliable sources all refer to the topic or subject of an article by a given name, Wikipedia should follow the sources and use that name as our article title (subject to the other naming criteria). Sometimes that common name will include non-neutral words that Wikipedia normally avoids (Examples include Boston Massacre, Rape of Belgium, and Teapot Dome scandal). In such cases, the commonality of the name overrides our desire to avoid passing judgment (see below). This is acceptable because the non-neutrality and judgment is that of the sources, and not that of Wikipedia editors. True neutrality means we do not impose our opinions over that of the sources, even when our opinion is that the name used by the sources is judgmental. Further, even when a neutral title is possible, creating redirects to it using documented but non-neutral terms is sometimes acceptable; see WP:RNEUTRAL.
My concern is with the first sentence. My reading of "When a significant majority of English-language reliable sources all refer to the topic or subject of an article by a given name" is that it is intended to mean the same as WP:COMMONNAME, but others interpret it more literally, arguing that it means POVTITLE applies only if the name in question is used by "a significant majority" ("like 9 out of 10") of sources, allowing them to disregard this section altogether in any case that doesn't involve a term that is practically the only name used to refer to the topic in question. Surely that cannot be the intent here.
What is a more accurate reflection of how our titles actually use POV terms? How best to say this? Any suggestions?
My interpretation of this section overall is that in order to be neutral when deciding titles, we (ironically) simply do not give neutrality any direct consideration, and only look objectively at usage and commonality (and the other criteria), and follow that. If it's the term indicated by that process, then we use it; if another term is indicated, then we use that, without regard to how "neutral" these terms are... that's how we remain neutral. So, I propose we be more clear about it:
Titles should be decided without regard to the "neutrality" of a given name or term. Simply follow usage and commonality in the sources and use that name as our article title (subject to the other naming criteria). Sometimes a name commonly used in sources will include non-neutral words that Wikipedia normally avoids (Examples include Boston Massacre, Rape of Belgium, and Teapot Dome scandal). In such cases, the commonality of the name overrides our desire to avoid passing judgment (see below). This is acceptable because the non-neutrality and judgment is that of the sources, and not that of Wikipedia editors. True neutrality means we do not impose our opinions over that of the sources, even when our opinion is that the name used by the sources is judgmental. Further, even when a neutral title is possible, creating redirects to it using documented but non-neutral terms is acceptable; see WP:RNEUTRAL.
-- Born2cycle ( talk) 18:54, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
According to the reasoning of this section, as I understand it, taking neutrality into account when deciding titles is, ironically, not being neutral. I think explaining this (authoritatively) is the point of this section, not to reflect what really happens, or dictate what should happen. I mean, if people take neutrality into consideration because of mistakenly thinking that they need to do so to comply with our neutrality pillar, isn't WP most improved if we explain why the opposite is true? But perhaps we explain this by being more authoritative and less authoritarian, like this?
Titles are decided neutrally by disregarding the "neutrality" of any given names or terms under consideration. We are being neutral when we simply follow usage and commonality in the sources and use that name as our article title (subject to the other naming criteria). Sometimes a name commonly used in sources will include non-neutral words that Wikipedia normally avoids (Examples include Boston Massacre, Rape of Belgium, and Teapot Dome scandal). In such cases, the commonality of the name overrides our desire to avoid passing judgment (see below). This is acceptable because the non-neutrality and judgment is that of the sources, and not that of Wikipedia editors. True neutrality means we do not impose our opinions over that of the sources, even when our opinion is that the name used by the sources is judgmental. Further, even when a neutral title is possible, redirects to it using documented but non-neutral terms are often created; see WP:RNEUTRAL.
I disagree with the premise; and with the tactic. If there's a neutral title with significant usage, we should choose that over a non-neutral title with majority usage. That's at least within the range of the present guideline, and within what we actually do, at least sometimes. And proposing to change the guideline, in the middle of an argument that it pertains to, to gain an advantage in that argument, without mentioning that argument, is probably not a good thing to do. Dicklyon ( talk) 01:11, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
Since you agree with Dicklyon, perhaps you could explain how you see a preference for a less commonly used neutral title over a most commonly used non-neutral title in the current wording, when it seems to say the opposite (as I explained above). -- Born2cycle ( talk) 02:06, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
Regardless, let's try again. In regard to what is "within the range of the present guideline", you wrote: "If there's a neutral title with significant usage, we should choose that over a non-neutral title with majority usage. " Doesn't that mean "you see a preference for a less commonly used neutral title over a most commonly used non-neutral title in the present guideline? -- Born2cycle ( talk) 07:29, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
I have just backed out Born2Cycle's changes of today and yesterday, since they bear specifically on this argument that he is in. I'm in it a bit, too, having expressed my opinion against his, but I'm pretty sure it's not an OK tactic to rewrite applicable guidelines during such a dispute without even letting it be known that that's what you're doing. If there's a consensus to accept his changes, that will be OK, but probably this particular dispute doesn't need to leave it's tracks in the MOS this way. Dicklyon ( talk) 04:25, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
I've got a question for Born2cycle. Have you observed that Wikipedians truly don't use neutrality as a naming criterion? How can you observe something like that? I feel that I've observed that Wikipedians do use neutrality as a naming criterion, which gives it completely equal status with the other naming criteria that are already written down at WP:CRITERIA, which have never been anything more than observations - not rules. What's the basis for your claim that neutrality is not a criterion that Wikipedians use?
I like your use of "authoritative" versus "authoritarian". What makes your claim that neutrality is not a naming criterion authoritative? - GTBacchus( talk) 06:08, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
The issue of neutrality in deciding titles is confusing because in order to be neutral we need to engage our opinions about the neutrality of the various terms we are considering when we are inventing descriptive titles, but we need to avoid considering our opinions about the neutrality of names and terms when choosing names based on commonality and the other principal criteria. But yes, I've observed Wikipedians use neutrality as a naming criteria even when common names are involved, unfortunately. I've also observed Wikipedians engaged in acts of vandalism, incivility, supporting or opposing articles moves and deletions based on WP:JDLI and countless other unfortunate activities. That doesn't mean we endorse these behaviors in policy, does it?
So, I'm not claiming that neutrality is not a criterion that Wikipedians use. The authoritative claim I'm making is that WP:POVTITLE is correct in essentially saying that Wikipedians who use neutrality as a criterion, usually to avoid some particular name despite it being most common, when deciding titles based on commonality are in conflict with NPOV (though they probably don't realize it). That claim is authoritative because the judgement that a given term should not be used because it's not "neutral" obviously stems from a non-neutral opinion about whether that term should not be used due to neutrality concerns. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 06:29, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
But when we're inventing a descriptive title, we're not relying on sources, so neutrality requires us to think about neutrality and use our own neutrality judgement so that our titles are neutral. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 06:38, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
If you're constructing or inventing a title because it's an artificial topic to which RS don't refer directly, then, yes, you need to judge what is more or less neutral, and relying on what RS say about neutrality regarding the terms and names being considered can certainly be part of choosing a neutral title in such a process. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 07:03, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
Born2cycle, I think I understand your argument. Would you say that a consensus of the Wikipedia community has shown that the best way to be neutral is by not trying to be neutral, or is that your argument? Where has the community said that, "when choosing a title based on usage in sources, neutrality requires us to not think about neutrality, because we're relying on the neutrality judgement of the sources, and if we impose our own opinions about whether this or that is more or less neutral than the other, we're no longer being neutral". You say it's "obvious", but is it supported by consensus?
More: "the judgement that a given term should not be used because it's not "neutral" obviously stems from a non-neutral opinion about whether that term should not be used due to neutrality concerns." To whom is this obvious? If it really is "obvious", then why aren't at least 3 or 4 other people agreeing that it's obvious? I think that, on the contrary, editors are expected to use their own judgment, plus consensus, to determine what is or is not neutral. This doctrine that neutrality can only be achieved by not trying to be neutral seems new and original to me. I don't think I've seen it before. (I may be wrong about that.)
A good sign that you're reflecting consensus is the presence of others supporting your claims. Should we be advertising this discussion at, for example, WT:NPOV? - GTBacchus( talk) 17:33, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
Sometimes that's not possible and we do have to rely on our own judgement about what is neutral (particularly when the topic at issue is "artificial", like "List of X", sources don't refer to it, so we can't look to sources for guidance), but ideal neutrality is simply following the sources, and the closer we get to that, the better we're complying with NPOV. My proposal here in general isn't about changing it to say this, but is about saying what it already says more clearly. It's a clarification edit, not a change edit, so while I wouldn't object to advertising this, it seems like a pretty minor thing to advertise like that.
I have to laugh about the one objection to the proposal above that specifically objects to a phrase that's in the current wording, not in anything I'm proposing to change. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 19:06, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
It might be good to also examine the history of the section in question. Who added it, when? What discussion was there about it, that might support an interpretation or intent? Is there evidence of a consensus in favor of it, or did it just get stuck in and seemed innocuous enough that nobody objected? Apparently, strengthening it to support B2C's preferred outcome in a dispute is meeting some pushback, so maybe these are worth looking into. Dicklyon ( talk) 20:25, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
There are a few things in danger of getting mixed together here.
Wikipedians in general are passionately attached to NPOV. In the past week or so I've seen reactions to B2C's arguments and I think it's fair to say people see his approach as weakening our commitment to NPOV. VsevolodKrolikov ( talk) 09:45, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
That said, this is not currently consensus at WP. To the contrary, people use NPOV all the time to rationalize imposing their own opinion on what they believe to be "neutral" in a given situation. -- Born2cycle ( talk) 21:53, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
Blueboar, if you're arguing that in the absence of bias concerns, COMMONNAME is the best way of following NPOV, I would totally agree. No one here is arguing against that. NPOV is defined as being "fair, proportionate and as far as possible without bias", and clearly COMMONNAME is the proportionate part of that. On the other hand, COMMONNAME (measured by low-threshold google hits) is not the be all and end all of NPOV in article titling - but B2C is effectively arguing it is. It is simply not the case that a term that receives one more google hit than any other individual term is automatically considered to be the only NPOV candidate. For that to be the case we would have to completely ignore anything to the contrary regarding:
And this is clearly not what common practice is, right up to the most experienced and respected editors. We *do* care who uses the term, not just how many people use it (that's why Obamacare is not a title, obviously). This has been clear in every debate I've ever witnessed about naming of articles. It is simply not true that unless we use google hits we have to fall back on our own judgement - something that unfortunately keeps getting repeated here. If we have a lot of RS stating that a term is not neutral, then it's not relying on our own judgement at all. I would be very happy for a sentence stating that editors with neutrality concerns must produce evidence that the term's neutrality is disputed in reliable sourcing, just to make it clear that vague bellyaching or blogosphere chatter isn't admissible. POVTITLE as it stands basically means when usage is clearly very high across all mainstream media and scholarly work, we can basically ignore neutrality concerns; we presume it is the best neutral term from the extensive use, if you want to phrase it like that. What I find interesting is that people don't seem to produce many examples of POVTITLES that we have, and certainly none for recent events. Jack the Ripper doesn't impress me as a particularly controversial choice. (As an aside WP:NPOV#Naming reads a little more generously about the occasional use of descriptive titles to avoid taking sides (a practice that ARBCOM has also recognised as permissible) than the absolutist position one or two seem to take here. I wonder if there has been an unnecessary conflation of neologism and description on this talkpage.)
A final point: Following a basic form of google hits without any right to question also opens up wikipedia to manipulation from political groups. We are a massively important information source, whether we like it or not. if we decide to rely on general google hits, we'll just influence the rhetoric more, not less. Being "on message" with your group's key phrase to get the media to frame stories according to your agenda is part and parcel of politics now. We could just make that worse. VsevolodKrolikov ( talk)