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I'm wondering what might be done so as to coordinate issues relating to the above mentioned topics to the effect of ensuring that peoples' most commonly recognised names get fair representation in title/article contents.
There may be better examples that I might have looked at but I've just been taking a look at the article for Sarah Joy Brown which, after one failed attempted move , was moved to the new title from Sarah Brown (actress) as a result of this discussion.
The effect is that the article now presents:
Sarah Joy Brown
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sarah Joy Brown | |
---|---|
Born | Sarah Joy Brown ... |
Website |
www |
Sarah Joy Brown (born February 18, 1975) is an American actress. ...
Despite "Sarah Joy Brown" not being the subject's most commonly recognisable name the move was arguably justified by the current provisions presented in
WP:NATURAL which presents: Natural disambiguation: If it exists, choose an alternative name that the subject is also commonly called in English
reliable sources, albeit not as commonly as the preferred-but-ambiguous title. Do not, however, use obscure or
made-up names.
However, in real world practicality, this means that (as in the example presented) the most commonly recognized name will/may not be used at all. I personally regard this as a significant failure in encyclopedic presentation.
Other editors can do their own research if they so choose but: within a 107 page content [1] at www.sarahbrown.net , "Sarah Joy Brown" appears on just 20 pages [2].
IMDB presents "Sarah Brown" [3].
Here is an abridged version of the relatively extensive filmography from that page showing title of production, character name, alternative credit name when applicable and no of episodes when applicable).
|
---|
Youthful Daze (TV Series) Monica Reynolds ... 15 episodes 2015 Monster Hunters USA and Day Care Center (Short) Zara Daily 2014 Beacon Hill (TV Series) Katherine Wesley 2012 CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (TV Series) Marla Louie (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2011-2012 Days of Our Lives (TV Series) Madison James Show all 110 episodes 2011 The Lamp Deb 2009-2011 The Bold and the Beautiful (TV Series) Agnes Jones (as Sarah Joy Brown) Sandy Sommers (as Sarah Joy Brown) Show all 113 episodes 2011 Flashpoint (TV Series) Woman in Sedan No Promises (2011) ... Woman in Sedan 2010 Castle (TV Series) Amanda Livingston The Third Man (2010) ... Amanda Livingston 1996-2009 General Hospital (TV Series) Claudia Zacchara / Carly Benson Corinthos / Carly Benson / ... Show all 417 episodes 2007 K-Ville (TV Series) Eileen McGillis Flood, Wind, and Fire (2007) ... Eileen McGillis 2007 It Was One of Us (TV Movie) Emily Winstead (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2007 The Closer (TV Series) Kristen Shafer 2007 A.M.P.E.D. (TV Movie) Katerina Cabrera 2007 Company Man (TV Movie) Laura Brooks 2006 Monk (TV Series) Mandy Bronson 2006 Big Momma's House 2 Constance (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2005 Heart of the Beholder Diane Howard 2005 Cold Case (TV Series) Josie Sutton 2003-2005 Without a Trace (TV Series) Katherine Michaels / Tess Balkin John Michaels (2005) ... Katherine Michaels (as Sarah Joy Brown) Kam Li (2003) ... Tess Balkin (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2004-2005 As the World Turns (TV Series) Julia Larrabee Jackson Show all 17 episodes 2004 The Perfect Husband: The Laci Peterson Story (TV Movie) Kate Vignatti (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2004 Strong Medicine (TV Series) Perry Touched by an Idol (2004) ... Perry (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2004 Dragnet (TV Series) Nicole Harrison Frame of Mind (2004) ... Nicole Harrison (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2004 Crossing Jordan (TV Series) Susan Mayo Dead or Alive (2004) ... Susan Mayo (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2003 Karen Sisco (TV Series) Harmony Nostalgia (2003) ... Harmony (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2003 10-8: Officers on Duty (TV Series) Astrid Fonseca (as Sarah Joy Brown) Astrid (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2003 The Lyon's Den (TV Series) Hubris (2003) ... Amanda Beacon Manning 2003 For the People (TV Series) Zoe Constantine Power Play (2003) ... Zoe Constantine 2002 Birds of Prey (TV Series) Lucy (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2001 Mysterious Ways (TV Series) Emma Shepard 1997 Hostile Force (TV Movie) Rachel 1996 Power Rangers Zeo (TV Series) Heather 1994-1995 V.R. Troopers (TV Series) Kaitlin Star Show all 44 episodes 2015 A Million Happy Nows (videographer) (post-production) Hide Hide Self (7 credits) 2013 SoapBox with Lilly and Martha (TV Series) Guest as "Sarah Brown" 2012 Dislecksia: The Movie (Documentary) 2010 The 37th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards (TV Special) Herself as "Sarah Brown" 2008 The 35th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards (TV Special) Herself - Presenter as "Sarah Brown" 2000 The 27th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards (TV Special) Herself - Nominee as "Sarah Brown" 1999 The 26th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards (TV Special) Herself - Nominee: Outstanding Younger Actress in a Drama Series as "Sarah Brown" 1998 The 25th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards (TV Special) Herself - Winner: Outstanding Younger Actress in a Drama Series as "Sarah Brown" |
Personally I would prefer not to be required to go to this kind of length of research in presenting an RM especially in a context in which a Wikipedia convention such as WP:NATURAL may automatically trump any commonname objections.
The subject's twitter account [4] presents: Sarah Brown @sarahjoybrown and, in with some similarity, she presents herself as "Sarah Brown Actor/Director", at https://www.facebook.com/iSarahJoyBrown .
In all these references both names, "Sarah Brown" and "Sarah Joy Brown", are presented. It is only Wikipedia that fails in this regard.
Thoughts?
Greg Kaye 11:54, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
U.S. President". What advantage, in any circumstances, is there in the use of the title William Jefferson Clinton?
formal name".
generalized policy" is there to support the smooth running of general practice. Please consider getting better in touch with this. At times I have found various theoretically generated perspectives here to be quite helpful but when I have seen vetos, oppositions and reverts for the sake of reverts I have had to wonder whether people here have had any clue as to what they were doing or why. I personally do not think that Wikipedia is a place for armchair generals. If this fits, please be involved. Greg Kaye 13:41, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
Is the point that GregKaye is the best and his opinions should be given the most weight?– LOL! Hmm, there's a big un-LOL here, too: Almost half of GK's total edits are to RM discussions. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 11:07, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
The above is just one example of a WP:BLP where the person concerned is predominantly known by one name and yet Wikipedia predominantly (or, in this place, consistently) presents that person by another name. In my view we move away from encyclopedic presentation of content due to WP:BUREAUCRACY and, as mentioned, I think this is a significant failure in encyclopedic presentation. We consistently present people in ways in which they are less commonly known. Greg Kaye 08:43, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
Greg Kaye 09:43, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
Talk:Sarah Joy Brown#Requested move 2 made me aware that "If it exists, choose an alternative name that the subject is also commonly called in English, albeit not as commonly as the preferred-but-ambiguous title" (bolding added) can be used in a fashion that it supersedes WP:CRITERIA. There are many examples where such alternative names "exist", but weren't chosen for natural disambiguation, e.g. both "renaming" examples in the second paragraph of WP:SMALLDETAILS. Hence I removed the inconsistency from the policy page [8] -- Francis Schonken ( talk) 10:32, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
Natural disambiguation:".If it exists, choosean alternative name that the subject is also commonly called in English reliable sources, albeit not as commonly as the preferred-but-ambiguous title.Do not, however, use oObscure or made-up names can however never be used for natural disambiguation
Obscure or made-up names should not be used in natural disambiguation." A major facility of natural disambiguation is that it permits a qualifier to be added to a title so as to naturally provide topic clarity.
In all these cases a commonly known content remains in the title and yet additional wording, I think, appropriately removes potential ambiguity. Greg Kaye 12:59, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
There is a huge difference in the Wikipedia titling of a subject between making an internal change from the format of the subjects designation that is most commonly used and the adding of a qualifier.
In other words it seems to me that a use of John Lucian Smith as a title for John Smith (flying ace) is not encyclopedic while uses such as of British White cattle in place of the highly ambiguous British White make perfect sense. In the second case a useful qualification/clarification is given in regard to subject matter in a form that can only help the reader. Greg Kaye 09:20, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
... it seems to me that a use of John Lucian Smith as a title for John Smith (flying ace) is not encyclopedic". I have also said "
a title like John Maynard Keynes is" encyclopedic. What might and what might not be used is typically decided on consensus in RM discussions.
Editors must take particular care when adding information about living persons to any Wikipedia page. Such material requires a high degree of sensitivity,..." In this I think that a priority can be to faithfully present a subject in the way that they most commonly present themselves and in line with the way that they are generally presented. WP:Bureaucracy regarding cosmetic priorities such as editor desire to remove parenthesis have to be discarded. We are meant to be writing an encyclopedia that faithfully presents content. Greg Kaye 01:29, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
If an article title has been stable for a long time, and there is no good reason to change it, it should not be changed.(Of course, when someone proposes a change of title, they almost always think they have a "good reason"... it's up to everyone else to decide whether that reason is good enough or not). Blueboar ( talk) 13:29, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
This, I guess is another can of worms.
This situation takes things to an even further extreme to that of:
The ratio of use between "George W. Bush" and "George Walker Bush" (based on the raw google statistics 27,600,000 / 138,000) is 200:1.
My main point in the above is that a BLP related application of WP:NATURAL (so as to add content such as middle names and middle initials as additions to a most commonly recognizable form of name) presents the issue of a potential to completely remove the commonname of the person from the article.
We could end up with:
George Walker Bush
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
editor chosen designation but this will only be added in articles in which the infobox is used |
---|
George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician and businessman
...
Greg Kaye 07:23, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
Following a Request for Comment on the matter of ship article disambiguation, I have drafted an updated version of Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ships). The proposed text can be found at User:Saberwyn/Proposed ship naming and disambiguation conventions update. Your project is being notified because the proposal is a major change to a topic-specific naming conventions guideline.
The most significant change to the guideline is that the only form of disambiguation for articles on ships is the year of launch, expressed in the format "(yyyy)". All other forms of disambiguation are depreciated, such as pennant/hull number, ship prefix, or ship type. Using ship prefixes in article titles for civilian/merchant ships is also depreciated, unless part of the ship's "common name". Examples have been updated as a result of the RFC and other recent discussions, and in some cases, elaborated on. A list of other changes can be found at User:Saberwyn/Proposed ship naming and disambiguation conventions update#Summary of changes for proposal.
Discussion and comments are welcomed at User talk:Saberwyn/Proposed ship naming and disambiguation conventions update. -- saberwyn 03:55, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
Due to "no consensus" discussions at Talk:Gangsta., how would this as a precedent affect the likes of Janet (album), Shakira (album), and Melody (Japanese singer)? -- George Ho ( talk) 18:44, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
I would like to use the preexisting thread, #Using a . to distinguish an article, but it's getting older and larger. Therefore, a fresher discussion might be needed. -- George Ho ( talk) 18:44, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
The Gangsta. RMs were confused by being a multi-horse race. As per the last close, the decision is clearly between "Gangsta." and "Gansta (manga)". "Gangsta. (manga)" title has been fairly well rejected. Multiple participants, myself included, only came around to rejecting "Gangsta. (manga)" in the process of that last discussion. As that was the formal proposal, and many !voters were not explicit as to multi-choice options, it would have been a stretch for a closer to find other than "no consensus". Another RM will be needed. Probably it is best to wait a while. Until then, talk of precedent is premature. I don't think this is a well formulated RfC. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 06:13, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Confusion on differing Arabic apostrophe like symbols. Apparently Sha'ban/ Sha`ban, Shaaban and Shaban are three different pages: is an apostrophe(-like character) enough to distinguish article titles on topics that are frequently indicated with the name without the apostrophe(-like character)? And without proper hatnote disambiguation for the first no less? -- Francis Schonken ( talk) 05:45, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
I've made a proposal to change the naming conventions for sports teams so that they fall in line more closely with general naming convertions. Participation would be appreciated at this page. -- ArmstrongJulian ( talk) 11:03, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
"However, when this can be done without wandering from WP:CRITERIA, renaming to a less ambiguous page name should be considered.
" Under
WP:SMALLDETAILS, shouldn't "can" be "cannot" instead, or am I misinterpreting something here?—
Bagumba (
talk) 22:01, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
In the absence of an objection or explanation, I'm semi-boldly changing it to "cannot", which seems to make more sense.— Bagumba ( talk) 05:53, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
With the recent rewording, probably the statement meant renaming to less ambiguous title without violating or failing WP:CRITERIA. Isn't that right? As for changing to "cannot", that would have meant using a title that would have violated or failed WP:CRITERIA. George Ho ( talk) 05:15, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
In the section on "Italics and other formatting" we say:
This recent edit added science articles to the exception. I have reverted because I am not sure if the addition has consensus or not (there has been no discussion on it)... so, please discuss. Blueboar ( talk) 12:39, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
I started a WP:RfC that is stunted, presumably due to the bickering and WP:Too long; didn't read nature of it. It concerns fictional characters that are primarily known by their first names (or rather solely known by their first names to the general public). In cases such as these, is it best to go with the official full names or with the sole name and a disambiguation to assist it (if the disambiguation is needed), such as in the case of Faith (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)? In the case of Faith, she is primarily known simply by that first name, and it was only years later that her last name was revealed and used for subsequent material. It's a similar matter for The Walking Dead characters at the center of of the WP:RfC I started; see Talk:Sasha Williams (The Walking Dead)#Requested move discussion. And in some cases, their last names are only revealed in the comics or in the television series, meaning that the last names may be known in one medium but not in the another, and that the only way that readers would know the last name is if they Googled it or heard it on television via an interview. So we are commonly left with this and this type of wording that is commonly altered or removed. And since general readers do not know the full names, they won't be typing the full names into the Wikipedia search bar. So if The Walking Dead character articles are to have their full names in the titles of their articles, what does that mean for character articles like Faith (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)? WP:CRITERIA states, "Consistency – The title is consistent with the pattern of similar articles' titles."
I ask that you consider commenting in the Talk:Sasha Williams (The Walking Dead)#Requested move discussion to help resolve this. Flyer22 ( talk) 17:02, 29 September 2015 (UTC)
An RFC has been opened at Manual_of_Style/Words_to_watch to discuss the use of the word "Stampede" in article titles and content and may be of interest to editors interested in Title issues.-- Mike Cline ( talk) 16:15, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
This appears to suggest verbs should redirect to noun forms. WP:ADJECTIVE ? In ictu oculi ( talk) 12:03, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
An editor has initiated an RFC at: WP:Words to Watch regarding the use of the term "Vulture fund" as an article title as it may be considered pejorative despite being a COMMONNAME. Editors interested in title policy may want to participate. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 23:51, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
So, is Michael Howard (Witch) correctly named? I'd have expected at least Michael Howard (witch), if not Michael Howard (practitioner of Witchcraft). I'm all for people being allowed to self-declare their identity, but this seems strange. -- Zanimum ( talk) 15:51, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
Blueboar, my addition to Treatmenmt of alternative names, the section where I made my paragraph-two edit, may perhaps be as you say "instructions", but to me my addition was not instructions "creep". What I have to offer is a simple rounding out and fulfillment of the description, i.e. completing the sphere of "information" concerning "how to" use the set of alternative names.
As treatments of alternative names it made mention only of using them to create redirects and if necessary a dab page. These are both navigation moves from the search box. But it is also necessary to know, not necessarily to do, or to understand, that when those navigations fail, (and they do), and search results appear instead, a page score that makes the top twenty pages is just as good (almost) as a redirect, and just as good as a dab page. So I just added the missing search box cause.
Granted it is highly technical, and perhaps too much to ask users to do, but "instruction creep"? Have I answered that well enough? There is actually a use for alternative names that was not mentioned? It solves the search aspect as well as the navigational aspects?
I learned from Village pump that some users are frustrated with search results, and I felt I had to contribute that experience here that I learned there: PrimeHunter's answer to "how to lessen the frustration of searching for an article" is what taught me. I have since advocated for Search, which is often misunderstood. I await your opinion on my answer to you "instruction creep" question, and ask that you would allow my addition about Search to stand.
Firmly, — Cpiral Cpiral 23:49, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
See Talk:JIRA#Requested move 30 October 2015 for a discussion relevant to WP:TITLETM, currently flagged as under discussion but that discussion seems to have stalled. I propose that we add JIRA to the section (and also to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Trademarks) as a perfect example of a case where capitalisation is appropriate although the name is not an acronym.
I have posted a heads-up [16] at the MOS talk page. Andrewa ( talk) 16:32, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
(Ahem) I seem to be posting this a lot, but see WP:mxt, and if you disagree (or feel it needs to be clarified etc), start a discussion at Help talk:Using talk pages. Andrewa ( talk) 20:06, 8 November 2015 (UTC)
Please post discussion at the RM that is relevant to that particular case. I see no reason that discussion relevant to the wider issues raised at the RM should not commence here immediately, nor any problem with putting heads-ups to that important case here and at the MOS talk page. Best not to clutter the RM with the more general issues, nor this talk page with the specifics. Each in their place, please. (And all please see WP:mxt.)
Comments on that subissue welcome here (and responses from Blueboar and Walter Görlitz especially of course). Andrewa ( talk) 19:50, 8 November 2015 (UTC)
The RM at Talk:Twentse Landgans#Requested move 10 November 2015 has been relisted for lack of participation. It involves conflicting interpretations of WP:NATURALDAB, WP:COMMON, WP:OFFICIALNAME, WP:USEENGLISH, and several other policy points all at once. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 13:21, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
WP:AT (and
WP:MOS, and
WP:RM) are frequently beset by language change
advocacy, and we'll shortly have something to use against this particular form of
PoV pushing. The upcoming ArbCom decision at
Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Genetically modified organisms/Proposed decision: The purpose of Wikipedia is to create a high-quality, free-content encyclopedia in an atmosphere of cameraderie [sic] and mutual respect among the contributors. In particular, it is not the purpose of Wikipedia to right great wrongs; Wikipedia can only record what sources conclude has been the result of social change, but it cannot catalyze that change.
While that's not an AT/MOS case in particular, this is a general statement of principle, and its reasoning obviously applies broadly, including to various sorts of campaigning that are brought to AT and MOS. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 01:38, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
Articles starting with W: are currently exclusively reserved for Wikipedia technical pages. What to do with such articles which should be titled the same way? For example W. Crichton Shipyard (Okhta) should be renamed W:m Crichton & C:o Okhta shipyard. I am also working on an article about W:m Crichton & C:o. What to do with these cases, is there any chance to use the real names as titles? -- Gwafton ( talk) 00:23, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
Why is it that a title formatted as First "nickname" Last like Ed "Too Tall" Jones" is discouraged by WP:NICKNAME? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Prisencolin ( talk • contribs)
Too Tall Joneswithout "Ed" (and without quotations marks or parentheses), and the rest of the results show various formats, just as I said they would, even when they use the long version:
Ed Too Tall Jones,
Ed 'Too Tall' Jones,
Ed (Too Tall) Jones,
Ed "Too Tall" Jones, all on the first page of results. The subject himself appears to prefer
Ed Too Tall Joneswithout any markup, judging from his official website (though I know as a Web developer that sometimes such decisions are left up to the developer – if we ask about some typographic question of this sort and don't get an answer, we insert what we prefer and get back to work, allowing the client to correct it later). — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 15:40, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
( ←) I added a short clarification. While I'm wary of instruction creep, I think the issue has been raised frequently enough to deserve a coverage in the guideline. For example, it was raised at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (people)#Use of quotation marks in names back in April. No such user ( talk) 11:17, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
I move that:
Thoughts? DK qwerty 07:24, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
(A yoga instructor that goes by "DeRose". The history of the article title is Master DeRose, Luis DeRose, Master DeRose, Professor DeRose, Master DeRose, and currently Professor DeRose. There appear to be no independent, reliable, English sources about him. English sources typically are pr pieces such as [21] and [22] (which brings up the issue that for the English encyclopedia, DeRose Method yoga may be more notable than the person). Since DeRose is a disambiguation page, it's unclear whether we should use an honorific ( Master DeRose or Professor DeRose), his first name ( Luis DeRose), or a description ( DeRose (DeRose Method), DeRose (yogi), or DeRose (yoga teacher)) for the article title. Others' help would be greatly appreciated. (Discussion here. -- Ronz ( talk) 19:54, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
Is it possible to change the Title of an Article once it has been created?
The article in question was based on the spelling of a medieval word and it now seems that as slightly different spelling is the more commonly used version, so I would like to amend the spelling of the word to reflect the more common usage.
Armond Dean ( talk) 17:23, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Korean League of Legends player Lee "Faker" Sang-hyeok is typically referred to as his "real" name (Lee Sang-hyeok/이상혁) in Korean language sources, but in Western media he is usually referred to as his gamer name, "Faker". Since WP:NICKNAME guidelines discourage the use of the current format with the nickname in quotation marks, my question is what should the article title be?-- Prisencolin ( talk) 00:26, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
This has probably been covered before, buy I can't seem to find a definite answer. For buildings in non-English-speaking countries, on Wikipedia should its name be translated into English, or should the native name be used? For example, should the article on the
Castello di Milazzo in Sicily be named as such, or should it be
Milazzo Castle?
Note: This does not apply for places which have a common name in English (eg.
Fort Saint Elmo should not be
Il-Fortizza ta' Sant'Iermu) or places where the foreign name is commonly used even when writing in English (eg.
Torre dello Standardo should not be
Tower of the Standard).
Xwejnusgozo (
talk) 20:28, 23 December 2015 (UTC)
What happened to the discussion to restore this section of the guideline to warning against making inconsistent stylisms the basis of titling? The current examples and text actually encourage a bad practice. And maybe the shortcut can be changed to WP:BEWARESMALLDETAILS? In ictu oculi ( talk) 08:49, 21 January 2016 (UTC)
"The number of experienced editors there who don't seem to get this" is an indication that most people don't read it as B2C does. That section contains no "clearly stated policy"; rather, it points out that such minimal title distinctions can leave ambiguity, and suggests ways to avoid them, without saying that they are either a good or a bad idea. Personally, I think they're a bad idea, and would support a move to clarify that, but still without prohibiting them. Dicklyon ( talk) 05:30, 22 January 2016 (UTC)
Dicklyon, "many" in this case is far from "most". While many experienced editors don't seem to get it, most do. The recent results at Talk:Woman_in_the_Dunes#Requested_move_5_January_2016 exemplify this. -- В²C ☎ 21:23, 25 January 2016 (UTC)
Does WP:UE apply to the naming of cars? see Talk:Lada Riva -- 70.51.200.135 ( talk) 06:16, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (events) is a guideline which needs some TLC. I have just removes some of the more outlandish statements from it eg "Articles not in compliance with these guidelines will be renamed". It is mainly describing how to put descriptive titles together, but in a very prescriptive way, which is not necessarily in harmony with other guidance. For example it suggests that when disambiguating with a year, rather than placing the year in brackets at the end, the year should come before the rest of the description. I think a few more eyes on the guideline might help. -- PBS ( talk) 00:01, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
PBS, regarding this, it needs a tweak. I think the reason that Blueboar added "a significant majority" is because sources are very likely to continue using both the old and new name; rarely is the new name used exclusively. I also think that's why this bit was in the policy. Also see this discussion I had with Prayer for the wild at heart at Talk:Angelina Jolie about what "routinely" is supposed to mean and the question of when to retitle an article. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 21:56, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
We need to do something to make it even clearer that WP:COMMONNAME ( WP:UCRN) applies to article titles only, and names (e.g. it's Alien 3, not Alien Three or Alien III), and does not cover typographic stylization (Alien3 vs. Alien 3), which is a MOS:TM matter. It is not enough that this page is called "Article titles". Virtually every discussion about in-paragraph usage of stylized trademarks has multiple respondents citing WP:COMMONNAME in favor of things like Alien3, because they don't remember that it's part of WP:AT and that AT is a titles policy. Day in, day out, year after year, all of these discussions get bogged down in trying to get editors to understand that the two documents cover different things, and have different rationales, and in particular that COMMONNAME does not apply to typography in running prose. And many simply will not believe COMMONNAME doesn't regulate article content, simply because COMMONNAME itself doesn't spell that out, right there in its section, and they believe "policy trumps guidelines", which translates into "my misunderstanding of policy trumps your explanation of the relationship between that policy and these guidelines because yours has something to do with guidelines to shut up". I cannot even begin to estimate the amount of editorial productivity flushed down the toilet because of circular "debates" of this sort. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 18:40, 6 February 2016 (UTC)
Let's try this again. John Doe is a name. COMMONNAME tells us whether that's the correct name, vs. J. M. Doe, or Janet Doe, or John Florbelheimer-Sanchez. Once in a blue moon, we even accept something with simple, transparent substitutions, e.g. J0hn Do3, or simple case changes, e.g. john doe, or (really rarely) extraneous punctuation, as in John Doe!, as a name, iff the whole rest of the world does (i.e. the stylization has transitioned from style on a name to a actual, unitary proper name in the philosophy sense, with the style an intrinsic part of virtually all public perception of the name. J0hN d•3!!! is not a name, it is a stylization of a name, and even if John Doe spends $57 billion promoting that as his real name, down to every style detail, no one in the world, much less WP, should take that seriously for five seconds, other than the designers paid to work on his logo. If this seems like a silly example, strip out every stylization except one, other than the non-confusing substitutions – pick one of: super script, italics, jumbling the case inconsistently, font face, color, use of dingbats, excessive extraneous punctuation, or underlining – and you'll see that the result would still be the same: WP would never and should not accept that as part of the name, as such, except we'd entertain some normal non-alphanumerics that are conventional in typography if they appeared in the title of a published work and RS accepted them as part of the formal title. We'd also accept superscripting or subscripting if it were semantic and not decorative (e.g. a company pronounced "Ideas Squared" iff they were virtually always referred to as "Ideas3" even in their corporate documentation, in press, etc., called "Ideas Squared" in rudimentary ASCII, and never called "Ideas Three"). All the rest of the stylized John Doe example is not part of the name, in any conceptualization anyone care about outside a philosophy class. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 22:46, 8 February 2016 (UTC)
When there is no single obvious term that is obviously the most frequently used for the topic, as used by a significant majority of reliable English language sources, editors should reach a consensus as to which title is best by considering the criteria listed above." People just tend not to notice that part because of where it's placed in the section. I'm also going to fix the "obvious term that is obviously" redundancy. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 20:01, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
Greetings! I have recently relisted a requested move discussion at Talk:43rd Canadian federal election#Requested move 9 February 2016, regarding a page relating to this WikiProject. Discussion and opinions are invited. Thanks, AusLondonder ( talk) 04:52, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
Why is the subtitles naming convention in the books guideline rather than the main guideline? My understanding is that it applies to all forms of media with subtitles, as it follows from the five naming criteria points. czar 16:59, 6 February 2016 (UTC)
As written it only applies to books.That's not what the first sentence says:
czar 23:07, 8 February 2016 (UTC)Usually, a Wikipedia article on a book (or other medium, such as a movie, TV special or video game) does not include its subtitle in the Wikipedia page name, per WP:CONCISE.
Proposed addition to Wikipedia:Article_titles#Conciseness:
Article titles usually omit the subject's subtitle.
ALT: Titles for articles about books, film, and other media usually do not include their subtitles.
— Paraphrased from WP:SUBTITLES, which refers to WP:CONCISE
This page was renamed to " Article titles" from " Naming conventions" years ago, but we've still got a bunch of pages titled "Naming conventions (xxxx)". I think this situation is unnecessarily confusing, and that it is about time that the naming conventions pages were brought into line with the main policy. Would anyone be opposed to moving all the pages in the relevant category to either Wikipedia:Article titles/xxxx or Wikipedia:Article titles (xxxx)? As it stands, the link between this policy and its subpages is not clear unless one knows the history of the page move, which I don't think is appropriate. RGloucester — ☎ 06:14, 7 February 2016 (UTC)
OK... let me start this discussion by noting the first sentence of the second paragraph of NCCaps... "This convention often also applies within the article body"... I think that sentence refutes RGloucester's argument that NCCaps is only about article titles (while MOS:CAPS is about article text). It is fairly clear to me that we do actually have two guidelines dealing with capitalization... and that both deal with the issue in both title and text. I think that is a ridiculous situation.
Now... a question... does NCCaps currently conflict with MOS:CAPS? I think there is a potential for it, but I would like to know if that potential has been realized or not.
Blueboar (
talk) 20:48, 7 February 2016 (UTC)
It seems clear that all NCCaps needs to say is to use sentence case for titles. The MOS covers the details about when to capitalize in a sentence, and titles should do the same. But then a lot of topic-specific guidelines came about under naming conventions, probably because the discussions that get advertised are the requested moves, which are about titles. Pretty silly that is has gone on this way for so long. Should we fix it? Step one would be for everyone to agree to stop calling these conventions "policy". Dicklyon ( talk) 05:21, 8 February 2016 (UTC)
Simple question on this one... Why isn't it an MOS guideline? Blueboar ( talk) 20:56, 7 February 2016 (UTC)
RGloucester above mentioned this, but responding to it where he posted it would disrupt the ongoing thread there, so I'll break it off.
It would be feasible to merge AT and certain core aspects of MOS into a WP style policy with a broader scope than title. It would need a distinct name (perhaps Manual of Style itself) that distinguished it from MoS sub-guidelines (which could be renamed, e.g. "style sheets") and the NC guidelines. There are very few MoS items that I think would rise to policy level; those that might are broad principles, not nit-picky line items. WP:PMC (principle of minimal change, i.e. don't monkey with quotations any more than necessary) is an obvious one. Some of them are in MoS subpages: We have (in regular prose) two and only two acceptable date formats (30 January 2016, and January 30, 2016), per MOS:NUM; history has demonstrated that people are more apt to get into style conflict over date formatting than anything else, if allowed to do so. Certain article sections go in a particular order, per MOS:LAYOUT, and we do in fact enforce this. Leads should be summaries not teasers or one-liner defnitions, per MOS:LEAD, and we try to enforce that as well. There's probably only 10-20 MOS principles that are truly policy-level. All the rest is applied best practices that produce a consistent and (when the content is good) professional quality product, but have little to do with whether the project will function well, which is where policy territory is.
Historically, people have flipped out at the mention of such an idea of merging AT into MoS or making any of MoS into a policy, but who knows. Consensus can change, as we say. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 22:23, 8 February 2016 (UTC)
The actual naming criteria (i.e. WP:CRITERIA + WP:COMMONNAME) could be a separate guideline at WP:Naming conventions (and it really is guideline material, since it's all a judgment call about how to balance these conflicting factors, and we routinely make exceptions to each and every one of those "rules"). Another of AT's pointless content-forks from other WP:POLICY, the WP:AT#Disambiguation material, could be merged back into WP:DISAMBIGUATION.
The remaining AT material would be very concise, with a nutshell like "Do not name or rename articles in ways that conflict with WP:NPOV, or other policies and guidelines. For how to determine an appropriate name, see WP:NC. For all style matters regarding the name, see the "Article titles" sections at MOS and its subpages. For topical conventions, see the various topical NC pages. If a title is ambiguous, see WP:DAB. Avoid move-warring and other disruption over article titles (see WP:DE); use proper procedures like WP:RM to resolve disputes. A wikiproject cannot randomly assert new 'naming conventions' without the community accepting them via a WP:PROPOSAL." Short, sweet, and not commingling policy-level material with a bunch of redundant and sometimes conflicting style material.
If this were done, the conflict level at WP:RM should drop significantly, because it would totally eliminate the confused "rename this to Foo because it's the most common name and that's policy, and all guidelines can just [expletive] off, because no other concern in the world could possibly trump that one line in a policy I over-rely on" nonsense. It would also remove various other negative effects of pretending that guidelines apply to everything except titles because they're off in their own little magical universe. To the extent there is a distinction between guidelines and policy, it was never intended to be WP:GAMEd this way. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 15:37, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
SmokeyJoe wrote, in the thread above: "One problem with the MOS is its style of asserting rules by fiat." But all of WP:POLICY asserts rules by fiat (that of the consensus of editors who care enough over time to participate in shaping the policy/guideline). That's how policy works; these are internal decisions for how to run Wikipedia, based on WP editors' crowd wisdom on how to best do something here, and these often have little to do with how someone else in a different context might insist it should be done. All of policy is an internal, consensus-based compromise between different goals, values, and needs/desires, multiple of which may be valid and (except for WP:OFFICE legal matters) are not imposed on WP from outside. When compromise is not practical but we need to decide on something, an arbitrary decision is made so we can move on. That's true of everything here, from what to do about sockpuppets to what the cut-off % is for an unsuccessful RfA, to how to format initials in people's names. There's a reason we're not governed by Robert's Rules of Order and we don't do everything by an ayes-and-nays vote. The nature of both compromise and, when that fails, an arbitrary rule to stop the conflict and get back to work, is that some parties will not be 100% satisfied with the result. This is true of life in general, and has nothing to do with WP or with MOS especially. And consensus is not fiat; it's a guideline, not a dictated law. If MoS is "fiat" so is all of WP:POLICY. (If the objection is just to its often imperative do-or-do-not wording, that was mostly changed from earlier wishy-washy wording by a single editor, who is now topic-banned for MOS-related disruption; however, that particular series of changes has actually had a positive effect, resulting in fewer disputes and more work getting done.)
On the prepositions and linking-verbs matters, which are off-topic here, probably
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The distinction between long uncommon prepositions and short common ones was not invented by MoS at all, but can be found in almost all style guides. They simply differ on exactly where to draw the line: 3 letters? 4? 5? MoS just picked one. If someone thinks it's too short, they can start an RfC about changing it. Various parties keep insisting that MoS has to be based on external sourcing as if WP:CCPOL applied to WP:POLICY material as well as encyclopedic content (it does not), then bizarrely pretending that MoS doesn't already, in fact, comply with this imaginary requirement to begin with. The problem is in failing to understand the distinct between "has a rule that doesn't agree with what I learned in school or use at work" and "made up some bullshit out of nowhere" It's entirely valid, even necessary, for MOS to note that there are multiple ways of doing something, and then choose the way that we want to apply to WP based on this project's needs and that of its ultra-generalized audience. This is how all WP policy works. Yes, there will always be some disagreements over particular cases, and sometimes exceptions have to be made; that's why these are guidelines, not policies. WP is not disrupted and in danger of failing if "Do It like a Dude" is picked over "Do It Like a Dude" or "Do It Like A Dude"; it's trivia. There's a trend in the entertainment press to capitalize all prepositions, and now even words like "a" and "the" in mid-sentence. WP:NOT#NEWS, much less entertainment news, so we have little reason to care about that trend, and we are absolutely not bound to follow it, since it's considered substandard writing in virtually all other contexts. The linking verbs thing is the same kind of case. We capitalize them because most style guides do, most real-world usage does, and WP has no internal need to not go along with this (if you think there is one, you know how to do an RfC). Should an exception be made for "A Boy was Born?", on the basis of convention with regard to that specific title? Maybe. But that would be a debate no matter what, because it's an outlying case. I'm unaware of any style guide anywhere that categorically recommends lower-casing in that type of circumstance. And we can either have "A Boy was Born" and "Do It like a Dude", or "A Boy Was Born" and "Do It Like a Dude", but it's mutually incompatible to mix these models. Virtually every "rule" in MoS (and those hijacked from it into AT) are similar arbitrary choices between conflicting rules in off-WP style guides. People just want to argue about this kind of one more than average because fandom is emotional about things like song titles. If you track WP style disputes as long as I have, you'll see that there's a direct and very strong correlation between the heat and frequency of the "screw the MoS" campaigning, and whether the matter in question is the subject of external publications with insider jargon styles, either fandom-based or professional-specialization-based. I
wrote this up in detail several years ago. The fact that they come up more than once and some people get angry doesn't make them different kinds of cases from style matters people don't argue about as much, nor obligate us to negotiate exceptions we should not make. Our present MOS:CAPS and MOS:TM rules of permitting an exception when the vast majority of independent reliable secondary sources also do it that way, is precisely the general, no-favoritism, common sense approach we should be taking. Otherwise, every fanbase and every geeky specialization everywhere is going to lobby until the end of time to get every single style nitpick they want, from putting a ! in
Pink (singer)'s name, to all-capitalizing Sony to match its logo, to dropping all compound adjective hyphenation in medical articles, to never giving the name of a Unix/Linux program except in |
An actual threat to WP's wellbeing is the amount of conflict generated by people on a WP:SOAPBOX mission to force things like the overcapitalization of "Do It Like A Dude", on a faulty policy analysis that, since that spelling is common in the music press, it must be used on WP as a matter of AT policy. Another example was the 8-year campaign to force capitalization of the common names of species, on the basis of some external "standard" in one field that isn't even actually a standard. I can rattle off 20 other examples if you want. All of this disruption, which sucks away editorial energy, and actually drives editors off the system, is directly generated by AT being incrementally WP:POVFORKed from MoS in a "long game" as a conflicting anti-MoS style guide with a {{ Policy}} tag on it, so certain WP:CIVILPOV, slow-editwar agendas can WP:WIN at RM on particular pet peeves.
Finally, stating that one of our longest-standing WP:POLICY pages is incompatible with WP:POLICY does not compute. What I can detect in that sentiment is the same old "MoS should be sourced like an article because the
core content policies must somehow apply to it" meme. But they don't apply to projectpage content, only to article content. And it wouldn't matter anyway, since MoS is written in consultation with sources. There are nearly zero style matters about which there are not conflicting views in reliable sources. MoS may say nothing on a matter, if it's not important, or say to defer to national dialect style if there is one and there's no compelling reason not to. But if there's consensus that we need a rule on it, MoS just has to pick one, based on what we think serves our needs best not on what is "most common" . Picking one is not the same as making one up. Some of these will never change, just as a matter of common sense, like "do not use capitalization for emphasis"; some may, like what the cut-off is for preposition capitalization in titles of works. The fact that style perceptions (sourceable ones) differ right now, as well as change over time on the whole, and so our rules adjust, is a simple reality. It's not a "credibility" problem that our house style guide simply advises "do this here, not that", choosing between one of multiple available ways to approach something, when a consistent result is desirable and/or conflict keeps erupting about a matter. That's what house style guides exist for, and they're all prescriptive (in the sense of actually advising something; when it comes to what to advise, ours is probably the most
linguistically descriptive not prescriptive style guide of any seriousness that exists). Part of why people probably get confused and worked up about this and keep trying to treat MoS like an article is the failure to remember that it's a house style guide for WP editors; it is not a general-public work of style advice for how to write papers or business correspondence, and efforts to "source the MoS" to be more like such a work are both
WP:NOTHERE and
WP:NOT#HOWTO problems. Every dispute people start about MoS line-items and MoS's "authority" as a guideline is time stolen, from multiple other editors, away from writing the encyclopedia. So is every pointless "my fetishized COMMONNAME policy trumps every guideline you can cite" junk-waving display at
WP:RM.
—
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 18:39, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
SmokeyJoe wrote, in the thread above: "99% of the percieved conflicts between MOS and other policies and guidelines could be resolved if the MOS simply adopted a "COMMON STYLE" type "exception clause". There are no "other policies and guidelines" involved. The perceived conflicts is only between MOS and AT (plus its spin-off NC pages, the majority of which are actually wikiproject WP:PROJPAGE {{ Essay}}s that have wrongly been tagged with {{ Guideline}}) – and even these conflicts only arise because the AT and NC pages have been usurping MOS's role, and are trying to be competing, contrary style guidance .
However, MOS:TM and MOS:CAPS already use the same standard as WP:COMMONNAME: They all want to see a strong super-majority of independent, reliable, English-language sources. Most people just missed this in COMMONNAME because it was at the bottom of the section. I've merged this into the top of it to reduce confusion on the issue [27]. . But this does not automatically mean that something that passes overwhelming commonness tests for what the name is also passes MOS tests for the overwhelming commonness of a particular stylization of it; different analyses. There is nothing but the most superficial similarity between the concepts of "common name" and "common style". I use all kinds of style on my sig here. If I change it all, or delete it, my username has not changed. See? The notion of them being comparable is a Korzybski fallacy. Style is not a name, it's something applied to a name. Are you your suit? Is your house the paint job you applied to it? Style is not substance. The proposal that WP be forced to accept a style quibble used in the simple "majority" of sources attempts to apply a rule – that doesn't even exist! – about a title (substance) to an area of abstract style. The proposition ignores everything else important in the policy when it's convenient to do so ...
...in over a dozen ways:
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At any rate, the broader WP:NPOV policy is also pretty clear that we should not be favoring promotionalism.
If MOS followed the "most common style" (assuming this could be determined in an accurate, objective way, which it usually can't), even when it wasn't overwhelmingly consistent across the sources, WP would be written like marginally professional journalism, and our article titles would look like newspaper headline. If it followed the most common style in academic publishing, it would be impenetrable to most anyone without a masters degree. If we followed the topical journalism that surrounds subjects like movie stars, albums, tech companies and products, and other areas where over-stylization is rampant, the result would be the acceptance of virtually all stylizations as official and required, from [insert Prince symbol here] to LaTeX. There are compelling reasons we do not accept style wankery like this (except perhaps once per article, in a "stylized as" lead statement), except for the rarest exceptions like "k.d. lang" and "iPhone". Accepting all stylization demands would be a WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE problem, and we already know from experience that it's unworkable in other ways (cf. the species capitalization war that went on for 8 years. Style is trivia, but some individuals' "never give up, never surrender" attitude about their peeves is not, and can have serious anti-collaborative consequences on the project). This is all an MoS matter, not an AT matter. It's style (typographic effects, etc.) applied to names, not what the names are ("Macy's" and "Alien 3", versus "Maycees'" and "Alien: Part III"). We only, really rarely, treat style as an integral part of the name when pretty much the entire world has assimilated it that way, through the exact same linguistic process that turned the acronym "LASER" into the word "laser" and the French word "rôle" into the English word "role". Guess what the criterion is, on WP and off, for whether that has happened? Overwhelming super-majority acceptance in reliable sources, across registers, including the most formal. This is descriptive linguistics, not something MoS just made up one day.
We don't consider it indiscriminate to include limited stylization info in some places, but even the top of the
eBay article reads: eBay Inc. (stylized as "ebay" since late 2012) is..."; it does not say: ebay (stylized as ebaY prior to late 2012) is...". There are many stylization points we would not accept no matter how many external sources did (cf LaTeX example), because they're superfluous attention-hogging, inappropriately dumped into an encyclopedic register and context.
—
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 22:51, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
It seems that some titles for professional novelists use the disambiguation word "author", but some use "writer". What is the difference and what is the WP standard, or is everything arbitrary? Timmyshin ( talk) 03:00, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
I'm creating an article for Natalie Lauren Sims. She used to go by the stage name Suzy Rock, but now is known as Natalie Lauren as a recording artist. Most sources use the name Suzy Rock and now Natalie Lauren. However, as a song-writer, she is credited on recordings as Natalie Sims. Some of her credits include high-profile songs such as Iggy Azalea's " Work", Change Your Life", and Bounce". So my question is, which name should the article be titled under, "Natalie Lauren" or "Natalie Sims?" Which is the more common name?-- 3family6 ( Talk to me | See what I have done) 02:04, 2 March 2016 (UTC)
As of the 2nd of March, 2016 DB Schenker Rail (UK) has become DB Cargo UK. Additionally, DB Schenker Rail has become DB Cargo. According to the press release linked above,
Furthermore, the domain listed for both of these (www.rail.dbschenker.de / www.rail.dbschenker.co.uk) now redirect to [dbcargo.com]. Should these pages, alongside the Subsidaries listed in the former's infobox that have pages, have their name changed to DB Cargo (Country)? Thanks. ∫ A Y ™ 17:56, 17 March 2016 (UTC)
Unusual case: Talk:National Highway 26 (India)#Requested move 16 March 2016. Summary: The proposal is to move it to "National Highway 26 (India)(old numbering)". — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 21:22, 21 March 2016 (UTC)
Are Cyrillic lettered titles acceptable? see Talk:Choba B CCCP -- 70.51.46.39 ( talk) 07:17, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
Does the WP:TITLECHANGES section on changing the national variety of English in an article title need to be clarified?
Article titles which have to choose between two national varieties of English (Yogurt vs. Yoghurt, Color vs. Colour, Humor vs. Humour, and so on) are often subject to perennial move discussions which are often lengthy, contentious, and brutal wastes of time as they rarely resolve anything. Our manual of style currently says, "If an article title has been stable for a long time, and there is no good reason to change it, it should not be changed. [...] If it has never been stable, or it has been unstable for a long time, and no consensus can be reached on what the title should be, default to the title used by the first major contributor after the article ceased to be a stub." I think the point that needs to be clarified is what makes a title "stable": editors disagree whether stable means "not moved" versus "no move discussions". Or perhaps "default to the title used by the first major contributor..." is being interpreted as a "good reason to change it", absent any other reasons.
The problem this creates is being exemplified in yet another move discussion at Talk:Humour where it's been suggested that the title is unstable because of the repeated move discussions over a long period (the page has actually been at this title since 13 May 2007), and as a result it's being argued that the "default to the title used by the first major contributor after the article ceased to be a stub" applies, and then there is debate about which version is the first non-stub version. I would like to see that confusion resolved one way or the other, but I'm not sure how to do it, and I don't know what the original intent was.
I suggest these changes (marked up as best I could):
I think these changes will help to resolve conflicts about which variety to use, so that we don't go back and forth endlessly and have editors repeatedly bringing up the same move proposals over and over again. Thoughts? Ivanvector 🍁 ( talk) 17:21, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
The suggestion to discourage retitling if the page hasn't been moved for a long time isn't bad and avoids some of the subjectivity of what "stable" means, but I'd be concerned that users who support a move for which there's no good basis might take that as a motivation to preemptively retitle a page, even if it gets immediately reverted, simply in order to destabilize the article and claim standing under the letter of the guideline. ╠╣uw [ talk 14:14, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
An editor has been going around putting {{ lowercase title}} on articles whose names start "Untitled", and I don't understand his explanation. Please join the discussion at Talk:Untitled Amazon motoring show. – Smyth\ talk 11:34, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
The following debate may be of interest to editors at this page: I am currently involved in a dispute at Talk:The Minjoo Party of Korea. The matter of contention is whether WP:COMMONNAME overrules a foreign party's official preference to translate its name using "The", when the majority of English-language sources do not treat "The" as a part of the proper noun. I would appreciate third-party opinions either way from editors familiar with this set of policies/guidelines to see whether I am interpreting them correctly. (Hopefully this isn't forum-shopping—the only other place I've posted a separate note is at WikiProject Korea, which seemed reasonable, and the topic is obscure enough that I have little confidence in people participating otherwise.) — Nizolan (talk) 04:36, 30 March 2016 (UTC)
Re: Names of songs and titles of short stories. Why do these not have any quotation marks in their Wikipedia article titles? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro ( talk) 20:15, 2 April 2016 (UTC)
Please comment at WP:VPP#RfC: MOS vs COMMONNAME. -- Izno ( talk) 13:09, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
Opinions are needed on the following matter: Talk:Genderqueer#Requested move 4 June 2016. A WP:Permalink for it is here. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 18:57, 4 June 2016 (UTC)
When a song or album is the only song or album to have a standalone article on Wikipedia, but other songs or albums of the same name are listed on the disambiguation page for that name per MOS:DABMENTION, should the article title of the notable song or album include the artist name?
Some songs and albums are the only song or album with its name to meet notability guidelines and have an article on Wikipedia, but other songs or albums of the same name are listed on the disambiguation page per
MOS:DABMENTION. The current situation on the inclusion of artist names in article titles is inconsistent. A few examples of no artist names in article titles include
Umbrella (song),
Pillowtalk (song), and
Anti (album); they are the only songs and albums of their names to be notable enough for a standalone article on Wikipedia, although there are other non-notable songs/albums of the same name listed at
Umbrella (disambiguation)#Songs,
Pillow talk (disambiguation)#Songs, and
Anti#Music respectively. A few examples of artist names in article titles include
Chandelier (Sia song),
Blackstar (David Bowie song), and
Title (Meghan Trainor album); similarly, they are the only songs and albums of their names to be notable enough for a standalone article on Wikipedia, but
Chandelier (song),
Blackstar (song) and
Title (album) redirect to disambiguation pages, where other non-notable songs/albums of the same name are listed.
WP:PRECISION states According to the above-mentioned precision criterion, when a more detailed title is necessary to distinguish an article topic from another, use only as much additional detail as necessary.
WP:NCM states Use further disambiguation only when needed (for example X (American band), X (Australian band)).
The dispute arises on whether non-notable songs and albums that lack standalone articles can be considered "article topics". I think we can all agree that the current inconsistency is not ideal, and I am starting a request for comment for a result that should apply to most usual cases.
sst✈ 15:21, 20 March 2016 (UTC)
I don't think too many people would dispute that a non-notable song should not be considered when disambiguating some other song that is notable.That does not seem to be the case currently at RM discussions. sst✈ 11:39, 21 March 2016 (UTC)
Is starting an article title with a slash permitted? I don't see it addressed here. I'm asking because an editor moved Drive (web series) to /DRIVE and it causes an obvious problem. -- AussieLegend ( ✉) 20:53, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
The present name of the article (on a general topic, professional video-gaming competition) coincides with a commercial trademark (in that market sector).
Over the last year, there have been 6 or so requested moves and other renaming discussions at what is presently Talk:ESports, most of them poorly attended, with mostly WP:ILIKEIT votes, mis-citations of policy where any was mentioned at all, and closure reasoning problems (while only one was an admin close), resulting in the name flipping around all over the place.
I've opened a multi-option, RfC-style requested move at:
Talk:ESports#Broadly-announced and policy-grounded rename discussion
It presents four potential names, all with some rationale outlines provided.
Input is sought from the community to help arrive at a long-term stable name for this article, based on actual policy and guideline wording, and on treatment in reliable and independent sources (i.e. not blogs or "eSports" marketing). — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 15:38, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
It is here: Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation#Request for Comment: Disambiguation and inherently ambiguous titles.
BTW some people are of the opinion that, since it directly affects titling, it should be here at WP:AT where it can be folded in with guidance provided by the Five Virtues.
Other people of are of the opinion that, since it is about disambiguation specifically, it should be at WP:Disambiguation (which FWIW is technically a guideline not a policy) and this is where I have placed it. Herostratus ( talk) 17:35, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
A discussion is underway about moving New York to New York (state) and placing either the city, the dab page or a broad-concept article at the "New York" base name. Please contribute at Talk:New York/July 2016 move request. Note that the move was first approved on June 18 then overturned on July 7 and relisted as a structured debate to gather wider input. Interested editors might want to read those prior discussions to get a feel for the arguments. (Be sure to have your cup of tea handy!) — JFG talk 23:11, 19 July 2016 (UTC)
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edit request to
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Sai Noom Khay ( talk) 07:00, 23 July 2016 (UTC)
Please visit and comment here:
Many thanks.
Anna Frodesiak ( talk) 06:55, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
The guideline, "British nobility" appears to conflict with "Use commonly recognizable names". The policy says, "Wikipedia does not necessarily use the subject's "official" name as an article title; it generally prefers to use the name that is most frequently used to refer to the subject in English-language reliable sources." But the guideline says, "Members of the British peerage, whether hereditary peers or life peers, usually have their articles titled "Personal name, Ordinal (if appropriate) Peerage title", e.g. Alun Gwynne Jones, Baron Chalfont; Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington."
The British field marshall is universally referred to as the " Duke of Wellington," and that page redirects to Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, a name that I suspect few if any readers would type in. The name of the article for the British admiral, Lord Nelson, is " Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson." Lord Nelson is a redirect to the article.
Similarly, some peers are better known for their common names. We had this discussion with John Buchan, a well known writer who was elevated to the peerage when he was appointed Governor General of Canada. The article had been named, " John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir."
I recommend in keeping with policy, the guideline request that we use the simplest name as the article name rather than as a re-direct.
TFD ( talk) 06:04, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
The simple reason that this guideline exists is that all British peers are commonly known as either "Duke of [Title]" (if they are a Duke) or "Lord [Title]" (if they are not). Every holder of the Dukedom of Norfolk, for example, is and has been known simply as "the Duke of Norfolk", and (as far as I can see) every single one of them has an article. So if we followed the common name policy blindly we'd have to have a whole string of articles called Duke of Norfolk (19th century politician), Duke of Norfolk (15th century soldier), etc. For a lot of peers there wouldn't be obvious disambiguators (in some families generation after generation had political or military careers), so you'd end up with lots of the even messier Duke of Norfolk (1628-1684), etc. (You couldn't even use 1st Duke of Norfolk, etc., because that doesn't distinguish between different creations of the same title, in this case Thomas de Mowbray, 1st Duke of Norfolk and John Howard, 1st Duke of Norfolk.) Your alternative would therefore be far messier and confusing (for both editors and readers) than the current system, which is the system encyclopaedias and scholarly works pretty much always use to solve this problem. It would make article titles simpler for a few peers who are far more famous than the other holders of their title (like the Duke of Wellington and Lord Nelson), but far messier for all the others, and knowing Wikipedia would create endless disputes as to precisely who fits into which category. Proteus (Talk) 10:01, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
Hi everyone,
I have an issue with the following line on WP:CONCISE.
The goal of conciseness is to balance brevity with sufficient information to identify the topic to a person familiar with the subject area.
Wikipedia is written for a large audience; we're trying to write encyclopedic articles for the general reader. That we should keep article titles as concise as possible makes sense to me, and that by itself doesn't need any explanation. So why have "to identify the topic to a person familiar with the subject area" there? It also makes me wonder, how can a person "identify the topic" just by its title? For instance, I'm mostly concerned with editing video game-related articles; there are big budget video games like the Assassin's Creed series, the Call of Duty series or classics like Super Mario Bros., but there are also hundreds of small-time indie games, with titles like I Am Bread, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity or The Binding of Isaac; even if someone is familiar with the subject area of video games, they might not've heard of these types of games. So how can we assume the general reader would? soetermans. ↑↑↓↓←→←→ B A TALK 09:01, 15 July 2016 (UTC)
It leads to John Barnes (Australian rules footballer) - unambiguous - being moved to this John Barnes (Australian footballer) - what brand of football does he play? I fail to see the advantage.
There is a move request on the Murder of JonBenét Ramsey page to move it to Death of JonBenét Ramsey. Another suggestion is to simplify it to her name, making it JonBenét Ramsey, which was the article name until November 2012.
Would you mind weighing on the discussion at Talk:Murder of JonBenét Ramsey#Requested move 20 September 2016 regarding this and any standard that this project may have for naming articles when someone has been murdered or died?
Thanks so much!-- CaroleHenson (talk) 18:41, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
I'd like some clarification on a tilting issue that doesn't seem to be addressed in the article. Oftentimes, related products are covered in one article. Is it acceptable to title the article with both product names, or is that practice specifically excluded somewhere?
For a specific example, the Gulfstream IV article covers several related variants of Gulfstream Aerospace aircraft. These include the GIV, the G350, the G400, and the G450, along with several US military variants designated in the C-20 series.
I recently moved Gulfstream G500 (2015), which also covers the G600, to Gulfstream G500/G600, as both aircraft are closely related, and per the discussion at Talk:Gulfstream G500/G600#Renaming. (Confusingly, there is an earlier model called the G500, covered at Gulfstream G550.) Did I violate a specific naming guideline with this move? Thanks. - BilCat ( talk) 07:31, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
Is this accurate?
The article's talk page doesn't appear to have ever hosted an RM, and the oldest version of the page, as written by someone who has apparently been (all but) inactive since 2011, used the current title. Saying that it was selected for this purpose is a little weird, because there are a bunch of arguably better reasons not to use any of the "nation-specific" alternatives: fizzy drink is WP:INFORMAL, pop is WP:INFORMAL and soda is WP:AMBIGUOUS and possibly also WP:INFORMAL. WP:COMMONALITY actually ranks somewhat down the list.
Anyone mind if I change this to "for example, soft drink is preferable to nation-specific terms such as..."?
Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 11:17, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
An essay I'm working on currently reads in part:
If there is a primary topic this article receives the base name, or if there is no primary topic the base name is used for a disambiguation page.
This seems to me to be exactly what WP:ATDIS and related guidelines say, but perhaps not so clearly, and entirely consistent with our current practice (with the possible exception of New York, which is how this all came up of course). However it has been challenged as entirely inaccurate and WP:UNDUE, as many facets other than primary topic may and likely will be involved in a particular page's naming. [28]
Questions:
1. Apart from New York, are there any exceptions to this general rule?
2. Does this rule accurately reflect the intent of the policy, and if so, would it be good to incorporate it into the policy and/or guidelines?
All comments welcome. TIA Andrewa ( talk) 22:21, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
OK, but as we have not yet come up with a single example of a page where the result of applying "my" rule would be any different to the existing policy and guidelines (which are spread over more than eighty current policy, guideline and MOS pages, I might add), I still ask, what is the difference? Other than clarity, that is?
It's an honest question. I accept that others may have a different and valid interpretation. And maybe you're right, maybe it's my fault that I can't see the difference. An example would solve that. Andrewa ( talk) 05:11, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
Station1, Andrewa, etc., the issues of determining whether there is a primary topic for a given title and what to do with if there is are related but separate issues. Station1 in particular seems to be objecting to Andrewa's wording mostly on the grounds that people don't always agree about primary topic. I suggest that's not objecting to the wording, as the wording presupposes that there is a primary topic, and therefore that there is consensus about that. If there is no consensus about primary topic, then the wording would not apply. -- В²C ☎ 22:00, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
I'd like to thank User:Station1 for the detailed anaylsis above and give an equally detailed reply. I think it addresses the issues very well.
No, that's not quite it. My objection is best expressed in the first 2 sentences I wrote in this section.
OK. Those read As WP:AT currently reads, there are many factors in deciding on a page name, including recognizability, conciseness, naturalness, precision, consistency and neutrality. When titles require disambiguation, there are often competing concerns and no black and white answer. Agree with the first. Unsure just what the second sentence means, but if it means that these article naming criteria are in any way bypassed by my proposal, disagree. They are unaffected.
In my hypothetical, even if there is complete consensus that the second John Doe is the primary topic, under current policy we can still choose to name his article "John A. Doe" Agree. (And similarly under my proposal.)
... and put a hatnote on the first John Doe No. Or at least, not if you're assuming that we've used the base name John Doe for this other John Doe. Under our current policy, we can't do that. If the primary topic of John Doe is this John A. Doe, then John Doe redirects to John A. Doe, with a hatnote there. And we need to find a way to disambiguate this other John Doe.
(or choose among several other options, including a dab page if that works best). Maybe. What other options exactly? If you mean that John Doe could be the title of this DAB page, no, it couldn't be.
Conversely, if there is complete consensus that there is no primary topic, under current policy we can still choose to name one "John Doe" and the other "John A. Doe" No. John Doe is ambiguous and must either be a DAB page or a redirect to one. That's the current policy.
(or several other options). Again, what specifically?
The choice would be based on reason applied to the several article-titling criteria mentioned in the policy. The choice of article title certainly depends on many criteria. Over eighty pages of them at last count.
Under the proposal, we would be straightjacketed into slavishly following a rule. No more than we are now.
If there was consensus that the second John Doe was the primary topic, under this rule we must title his article "John Doe" and nothing else; No. We choose the article title according to the article naming conventions. All of them that are relevant. Same as now.
we must not have a dab page. Not at a base name of a term which has a primary topic, if that's what you mean. Same as now.
Conversely, if there was consensus that there was no primary topic, we must have a dab page and no other solution will do. Yep. Subject to IAR and commonsense of course. Same as now.
This is a change in policy, not a clarification. How?
Using the example of New York, even if everyone were to agree that the city is the primary topic, under current policy there are still legitimate arguments for keeping things the way they are: conciseness, consistency, naturalness, to name just three (I'm not saying they would or should prevail in a discussion, but when enough editors put forth reasoned argument based on current policy, lack of consensus for a move would result. And that's the real issue. That is exactly what has happened. But at least some of these arguments are based on a misunderstanding of the policy.
Under the proposed rule, the only factor allowed to be considered would be 'primary topic' ... No more so than now. It would just be clearer.
...and the result would be different... So I hope, yes. Very glad you think that! I'm not so confident as that, and there are other issues to address as well, but I am hopeful, particularly in view of the subsequent RfC that found consensus that New York State is not the primary topic for New York.
(I don't know if that's the motivation for this rule or not) It was the reason for my initial interest in clarifying WP:AT, and is still part of it, I make no secret of that. But I don't expect that it will be the only article title that it affects, not by a long way. The misunderstanding of the current rule is both strong, as this discussion shows, and common, as the last NY RM demonstrated.
that is not a clarification of current policy, it is a change.
It's certainly not my intent to change the current policy. There is no need to do that. We just need to understand it better.
For the policies and guidelines on which the above reply is based, see the short form here or the much longer one with examples at WP:SIMPLEDAB. Andrewa ( talk) 11:15, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
I just had a look back at
Talk:New York/July 2016 move request#Oppose and it seems to me that the majority of oppose !voters would agree with
User:Station1 (who was one of them of course) that if the primary topic of John Doe is John A. Doe, but the article on him is given the title John A. Doe, then the title John Doe becomes available for an article on a less prominent John Doe.
It doesn't. WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT reads in part The title of the primary topic article may be different from the ambiguous term. This may happen when the topic is primary for more than one term, when the article covers a wider topical scope, or when it is titled differently according to the naming conventions. When this is the case, the term should redirect to the article (or a section of it). The fact that an article has a different title is not a factor in determining whether a topic is primary. (my emphasis) That's the existing guideline.
And as Station1 points out, this is directly applicable to the NYS/NYC discussion. Many of the oppose camp argued that New York City, not New York, should be the name of the article on the city (as it is now). That is fair enough. But they then assumed like Station1 that this then mads the base name New York available for the article on the state.
It doesn't. The guideline is clear. But obviously not clear enough. Unless the primary topic of New York is New York State (and consensus has now been achieved that it is not), to keep NYS at the base name they need to argue for a very big exception to be made.
Which they still might do successfully. That's a different issue. This is just about clarifying the existing policy position. Andrewa ( talk) 04:09, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
Although the example of Talk:David Zimmer#Requested move 19 May 2015 may not be directly relevant to the discussion, it still illustrates cases in which a relatively low notability subject becomes the primary topic of one or more WP:DABMENTIONs. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Myrna Williams has only one entry and one redirect. Ralph Barton (disambiguation) has one primary topic and one WP:DABMENTION. —Roman Spinner (talk)(contribs) 02:45, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
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I'm wondering what might be done so as to coordinate issues relating to the above mentioned topics to the effect of ensuring that peoples' most commonly recognised names get fair representation in title/article contents.
There may be better examples that I might have looked at but I've just been taking a look at the article for Sarah Joy Brown which, after one failed attempted move , was moved to the new title from Sarah Brown (actress) as a result of this discussion.
The effect is that the article now presents:
Sarah Joy Brown
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sarah Joy Brown | |
---|---|
Born | Sarah Joy Brown ... |
Website |
www |
Sarah Joy Brown (born February 18, 1975) is an American actress. ...
Despite "Sarah Joy Brown" not being the subject's most commonly recognisable name the move was arguably justified by the current provisions presented in
WP:NATURAL which presents: Natural disambiguation: If it exists, choose an alternative name that the subject is also commonly called in English
reliable sources, albeit not as commonly as the preferred-but-ambiguous title. Do not, however, use obscure or
made-up names.
However, in real world practicality, this means that (as in the example presented) the most commonly recognized name will/may not be used at all. I personally regard this as a significant failure in encyclopedic presentation.
Other editors can do their own research if they so choose but: within a 107 page content [1] at www.sarahbrown.net , "Sarah Joy Brown" appears on just 20 pages [2].
IMDB presents "Sarah Brown" [3].
Here is an abridged version of the relatively extensive filmography from that page showing title of production, character name, alternative credit name when applicable and no of episodes when applicable).
|
---|
Youthful Daze (TV Series) Monica Reynolds ... 15 episodes 2015 Monster Hunters USA and Day Care Center (Short) Zara Daily 2014 Beacon Hill (TV Series) Katherine Wesley 2012 CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (TV Series) Marla Louie (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2011-2012 Days of Our Lives (TV Series) Madison James Show all 110 episodes 2011 The Lamp Deb 2009-2011 The Bold and the Beautiful (TV Series) Agnes Jones (as Sarah Joy Brown) Sandy Sommers (as Sarah Joy Brown) Show all 113 episodes 2011 Flashpoint (TV Series) Woman in Sedan No Promises (2011) ... Woman in Sedan 2010 Castle (TV Series) Amanda Livingston The Third Man (2010) ... Amanda Livingston 1996-2009 General Hospital (TV Series) Claudia Zacchara / Carly Benson Corinthos / Carly Benson / ... Show all 417 episodes 2007 K-Ville (TV Series) Eileen McGillis Flood, Wind, and Fire (2007) ... Eileen McGillis 2007 It Was One of Us (TV Movie) Emily Winstead (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2007 The Closer (TV Series) Kristen Shafer 2007 A.M.P.E.D. (TV Movie) Katerina Cabrera 2007 Company Man (TV Movie) Laura Brooks 2006 Monk (TV Series) Mandy Bronson 2006 Big Momma's House 2 Constance (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2005 Heart of the Beholder Diane Howard 2005 Cold Case (TV Series) Josie Sutton 2003-2005 Without a Trace (TV Series) Katherine Michaels / Tess Balkin John Michaels (2005) ... Katherine Michaels (as Sarah Joy Brown) Kam Li (2003) ... Tess Balkin (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2004-2005 As the World Turns (TV Series) Julia Larrabee Jackson Show all 17 episodes 2004 The Perfect Husband: The Laci Peterson Story (TV Movie) Kate Vignatti (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2004 Strong Medicine (TV Series) Perry Touched by an Idol (2004) ... Perry (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2004 Dragnet (TV Series) Nicole Harrison Frame of Mind (2004) ... Nicole Harrison (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2004 Crossing Jordan (TV Series) Susan Mayo Dead or Alive (2004) ... Susan Mayo (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2003 Karen Sisco (TV Series) Harmony Nostalgia (2003) ... Harmony (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2003 10-8: Officers on Duty (TV Series) Astrid Fonseca (as Sarah Joy Brown) Astrid (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2003 The Lyon's Den (TV Series) Hubris (2003) ... Amanda Beacon Manning 2003 For the People (TV Series) Zoe Constantine Power Play (2003) ... Zoe Constantine 2002 Birds of Prey (TV Series) Lucy (as Sarah Joy Brown) 2001 Mysterious Ways (TV Series) Emma Shepard 1997 Hostile Force (TV Movie) Rachel 1996 Power Rangers Zeo (TV Series) Heather 1994-1995 V.R. Troopers (TV Series) Kaitlin Star Show all 44 episodes 2015 A Million Happy Nows (videographer) (post-production) Hide Hide Self (7 credits) 2013 SoapBox with Lilly and Martha (TV Series) Guest as "Sarah Brown" 2012 Dislecksia: The Movie (Documentary) 2010 The 37th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards (TV Special) Herself as "Sarah Brown" 2008 The 35th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards (TV Special) Herself - Presenter as "Sarah Brown" 2000 The 27th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards (TV Special) Herself - Nominee as "Sarah Brown" 1999 The 26th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards (TV Special) Herself - Nominee: Outstanding Younger Actress in a Drama Series as "Sarah Brown" 1998 The 25th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards (TV Special) Herself - Winner: Outstanding Younger Actress in a Drama Series as "Sarah Brown" |
Personally I would prefer not to be required to go to this kind of length of research in presenting an RM especially in a context in which a Wikipedia convention such as WP:NATURAL may automatically trump any commonname objections.
The subject's twitter account [4] presents: Sarah Brown @sarahjoybrown and, in with some similarity, she presents herself as "Sarah Brown Actor/Director", at https://www.facebook.com/iSarahJoyBrown .
In all these references both names, "Sarah Brown" and "Sarah Joy Brown", are presented. It is only Wikipedia that fails in this regard.
Thoughts?
Greg Kaye 11:54, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
U.S. President". What advantage, in any circumstances, is there in the use of the title William Jefferson Clinton?
formal name".
generalized policy" is there to support the smooth running of general practice. Please consider getting better in touch with this. At times I have found various theoretically generated perspectives here to be quite helpful but when I have seen vetos, oppositions and reverts for the sake of reverts I have had to wonder whether people here have had any clue as to what they were doing or why. I personally do not think that Wikipedia is a place for armchair generals. If this fits, please be involved. Greg Kaye 13:41, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
Is the point that GregKaye is the best and his opinions should be given the most weight?– LOL! Hmm, there's a big un-LOL here, too: Almost half of GK's total edits are to RM discussions. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 11:07, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
The above is just one example of a WP:BLP where the person concerned is predominantly known by one name and yet Wikipedia predominantly (or, in this place, consistently) presents that person by another name. In my view we move away from encyclopedic presentation of content due to WP:BUREAUCRACY and, as mentioned, I think this is a significant failure in encyclopedic presentation. We consistently present people in ways in which they are less commonly known. Greg Kaye 08:43, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
Greg Kaye 09:43, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
Talk:Sarah Joy Brown#Requested move 2 made me aware that "If it exists, choose an alternative name that the subject is also commonly called in English, albeit not as commonly as the preferred-but-ambiguous title" (bolding added) can be used in a fashion that it supersedes WP:CRITERIA. There are many examples where such alternative names "exist", but weren't chosen for natural disambiguation, e.g. both "renaming" examples in the second paragraph of WP:SMALLDETAILS. Hence I removed the inconsistency from the policy page [8] -- Francis Schonken ( talk) 10:32, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
Natural disambiguation:".If it exists, choosean alternative name that the subject is also commonly called in English reliable sources, albeit not as commonly as the preferred-but-ambiguous title.Do not, however, use oObscure or made-up names can however never be used for natural disambiguation
Obscure or made-up names should not be used in natural disambiguation." A major facility of natural disambiguation is that it permits a qualifier to be added to a title so as to naturally provide topic clarity.
In all these cases a commonly known content remains in the title and yet additional wording, I think, appropriately removes potential ambiguity. Greg Kaye 12:59, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
There is a huge difference in the Wikipedia titling of a subject between making an internal change from the format of the subjects designation that is most commonly used and the adding of a qualifier.
In other words it seems to me that a use of John Lucian Smith as a title for John Smith (flying ace) is not encyclopedic while uses such as of British White cattle in place of the highly ambiguous British White make perfect sense. In the second case a useful qualification/clarification is given in regard to subject matter in a form that can only help the reader. Greg Kaye 09:20, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
... it seems to me that a use of John Lucian Smith as a title for John Smith (flying ace) is not encyclopedic". I have also said "
a title like John Maynard Keynes is" encyclopedic. What might and what might not be used is typically decided on consensus in RM discussions.
Editors must take particular care when adding information about living persons to any Wikipedia page. Such material requires a high degree of sensitivity,..." In this I think that a priority can be to faithfully present a subject in the way that they most commonly present themselves and in line with the way that they are generally presented. WP:Bureaucracy regarding cosmetic priorities such as editor desire to remove parenthesis have to be discarded. We are meant to be writing an encyclopedia that faithfully presents content. Greg Kaye 01:29, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
If an article title has been stable for a long time, and there is no good reason to change it, it should not be changed.(Of course, when someone proposes a change of title, they almost always think they have a "good reason"... it's up to everyone else to decide whether that reason is good enough or not). Blueboar ( talk) 13:29, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
This, I guess is another can of worms.
This situation takes things to an even further extreme to that of:
The ratio of use between "George W. Bush" and "George Walker Bush" (based on the raw google statistics 27,600,000 / 138,000) is 200:1.
My main point in the above is that a BLP related application of WP:NATURAL (so as to add content such as middle names and middle initials as additions to a most commonly recognizable form of name) presents the issue of a potential to completely remove the commonname of the person from the article.
We could end up with:
George Walker Bush
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
editor chosen designation but this will only be added in articles in which the infobox is used |
---|
George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician and businessman
...
Greg Kaye 07:23, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
Following a Request for Comment on the matter of ship article disambiguation, I have drafted an updated version of Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ships). The proposed text can be found at User:Saberwyn/Proposed ship naming and disambiguation conventions update. Your project is being notified because the proposal is a major change to a topic-specific naming conventions guideline.
The most significant change to the guideline is that the only form of disambiguation for articles on ships is the year of launch, expressed in the format "(yyyy)". All other forms of disambiguation are depreciated, such as pennant/hull number, ship prefix, or ship type. Using ship prefixes in article titles for civilian/merchant ships is also depreciated, unless part of the ship's "common name". Examples have been updated as a result of the RFC and other recent discussions, and in some cases, elaborated on. A list of other changes can be found at User:Saberwyn/Proposed ship naming and disambiguation conventions update#Summary of changes for proposal.
Discussion and comments are welcomed at User talk:Saberwyn/Proposed ship naming and disambiguation conventions update. -- saberwyn 03:55, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
Due to "no consensus" discussions at Talk:Gangsta., how would this as a precedent affect the likes of Janet (album), Shakira (album), and Melody (Japanese singer)? -- George Ho ( talk) 18:44, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
I would like to use the preexisting thread, #Using a . to distinguish an article, but it's getting older and larger. Therefore, a fresher discussion might be needed. -- George Ho ( talk) 18:44, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
The Gangsta. RMs were confused by being a multi-horse race. As per the last close, the decision is clearly between "Gangsta." and "Gansta (manga)". "Gangsta. (manga)" title has been fairly well rejected. Multiple participants, myself included, only came around to rejecting "Gangsta. (manga)" in the process of that last discussion. As that was the formal proposal, and many !voters were not explicit as to multi-choice options, it would have been a stretch for a closer to find other than "no consensus". Another RM will be needed. Probably it is best to wait a while. Until then, talk of precedent is premature. I don't think this is a well formulated RfC. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 06:13, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Confusion on differing Arabic apostrophe like symbols. Apparently Sha'ban/ Sha`ban, Shaaban and Shaban are three different pages: is an apostrophe(-like character) enough to distinguish article titles on topics that are frequently indicated with the name without the apostrophe(-like character)? And without proper hatnote disambiguation for the first no less? -- Francis Schonken ( talk) 05:45, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
I've made a proposal to change the naming conventions for sports teams so that they fall in line more closely with general naming convertions. Participation would be appreciated at this page. -- ArmstrongJulian ( talk) 11:03, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
"However, when this can be done without wandering from WP:CRITERIA, renaming to a less ambiguous page name should be considered.
" Under
WP:SMALLDETAILS, shouldn't "can" be "cannot" instead, or am I misinterpreting something here?—
Bagumba (
talk) 22:01, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
In the absence of an objection or explanation, I'm semi-boldly changing it to "cannot", which seems to make more sense.— Bagumba ( talk) 05:53, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
With the recent rewording, probably the statement meant renaming to less ambiguous title without violating or failing WP:CRITERIA. Isn't that right? As for changing to "cannot", that would have meant using a title that would have violated or failed WP:CRITERIA. George Ho ( talk) 05:15, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
In the section on "Italics and other formatting" we say:
This recent edit added science articles to the exception. I have reverted because I am not sure if the addition has consensus or not (there has been no discussion on it)... so, please discuss. Blueboar ( talk) 12:39, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
I started a WP:RfC that is stunted, presumably due to the bickering and WP:Too long; didn't read nature of it. It concerns fictional characters that are primarily known by their first names (or rather solely known by their first names to the general public). In cases such as these, is it best to go with the official full names or with the sole name and a disambiguation to assist it (if the disambiguation is needed), such as in the case of Faith (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)? In the case of Faith, she is primarily known simply by that first name, and it was only years later that her last name was revealed and used for subsequent material. It's a similar matter for The Walking Dead characters at the center of of the WP:RfC I started; see Talk:Sasha Williams (The Walking Dead)#Requested move discussion. And in some cases, their last names are only revealed in the comics or in the television series, meaning that the last names may be known in one medium but not in the another, and that the only way that readers would know the last name is if they Googled it or heard it on television via an interview. So we are commonly left with this and this type of wording that is commonly altered or removed. And since general readers do not know the full names, they won't be typing the full names into the Wikipedia search bar. So if The Walking Dead character articles are to have their full names in the titles of their articles, what does that mean for character articles like Faith (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)? WP:CRITERIA states, "Consistency – The title is consistent with the pattern of similar articles' titles."
I ask that you consider commenting in the Talk:Sasha Williams (The Walking Dead)#Requested move discussion to help resolve this. Flyer22 ( talk) 17:02, 29 September 2015 (UTC)
An RFC has been opened at Manual_of_Style/Words_to_watch to discuss the use of the word "Stampede" in article titles and content and may be of interest to editors interested in Title issues.-- Mike Cline ( talk) 16:15, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
This appears to suggest verbs should redirect to noun forms. WP:ADJECTIVE ? In ictu oculi ( talk) 12:03, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
An editor has initiated an RFC at: WP:Words to Watch regarding the use of the term "Vulture fund" as an article title as it may be considered pejorative despite being a COMMONNAME. Editors interested in title policy may want to participate. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 23:51, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
So, is Michael Howard (Witch) correctly named? I'd have expected at least Michael Howard (witch), if not Michael Howard (practitioner of Witchcraft). I'm all for people being allowed to self-declare their identity, but this seems strange. -- Zanimum ( talk) 15:51, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
Blueboar, my addition to Treatmenmt of alternative names, the section where I made my paragraph-two edit, may perhaps be as you say "instructions", but to me my addition was not instructions "creep". What I have to offer is a simple rounding out and fulfillment of the description, i.e. completing the sphere of "information" concerning "how to" use the set of alternative names.
As treatments of alternative names it made mention only of using them to create redirects and if necessary a dab page. These are both navigation moves from the search box. But it is also necessary to know, not necessarily to do, or to understand, that when those navigations fail, (and they do), and search results appear instead, a page score that makes the top twenty pages is just as good (almost) as a redirect, and just as good as a dab page. So I just added the missing search box cause.
Granted it is highly technical, and perhaps too much to ask users to do, but "instruction creep"? Have I answered that well enough? There is actually a use for alternative names that was not mentioned? It solves the search aspect as well as the navigational aspects?
I learned from Village pump that some users are frustrated with search results, and I felt I had to contribute that experience here that I learned there: PrimeHunter's answer to "how to lessen the frustration of searching for an article" is what taught me. I have since advocated for Search, which is often misunderstood. I await your opinion on my answer to you "instruction creep" question, and ask that you would allow my addition about Search to stand.
Firmly, — Cpiral Cpiral 23:49, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
See Talk:JIRA#Requested move 30 October 2015 for a discussion relevant to WP:TITLETM, currently flagged as under discussion but that discussion seems to have stalled. I propose that we add JIRA to the section (and also to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Trademarks) as a perfect example of a case where capitalisation is appropriate although the name is not an acronym.
I have posted a heads-up [16] at the MOS talk page. Andrewa ( talk) 16:32, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
(Ahem) I seem to be posting this a lot, but see WP:mxt, and if you disagree (or feel it needs to be clarified etc), start a discussion at Help talk:Using talk pages. Andrewa ( talk) 20:06, 8 November 2015 (UTC)
Please post discussion at the RM that is relevant to that particular case. I see no reason that discussion relevant to the wider issues raised at the RM should not commence here immediately, nor any problem with putting heads-ups to that important case here and at the MOS talk page. Best not to clutter the RM with the more general issues, nor this talk page with the specifics. Each in their place, please. (And all please see WP:mxt.)
Comments on that subissue welcome here (and responses from Blueboar and Walter Görlitz especially of course). Andrewa ( talk) 19:50, 8 November 2015 (UTC)
The RM at Talk:Twentse Landgans#Requested move 10 November 2015 has been relisted for lack of participation. It involves conflicting interpretations of WP:NATURALDAB, WP:COMMON, WP:OFFICIALNAME, WP:USEENGLISH, and several other policy points all at once. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 13:21, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
WP:AT (and
WP:MOS, and
WP:RM) are frequently beset by language change
advocacy, and we'll shortly have something to use against this particular form of
PoV pushing. The upcoming ArbCom decision at
Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Genetically modified organisms/Proposed decision: The purpose of Wikipedia is to create a high-quality, free-content encyclopedia in an atmosphere of cameraderie [sic] and mutual respect among the contributors. In particular, it is not the purpose of Wikipedia to right great wrongs; Wikipedia can only record what sources conclude has been the result of social change, but it cannot catalyze that change.
While that's not an AT/MOS case in particular, this is a general statement of principle, and its reasoning obviously applies broadly, including to various sorts of campaigning that are brought to AT and MOS. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 01:38, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
Articles starting with W: are currently exclusively reserved for Wikipedia technical pages. What to do with such articles which should be titled the same way? For example W. Crichton Shipyard (Okhta) should be renamed W:m Crichton & C:o Okhta shipyard. I am also working on an article about W:m Crichton & C:o. What to do with these cases, is there any chance to use the real names as titles? -- Gwafton ( talk) 00:23, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
Why is it that a title formatted as First "nickname" Last like Ed "Too Tall" Jones" is discouraged by WP:NICKNAME? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Prisencolin ( talk • contribs)
Too Tall Joneswithout "Ed" (and without quotations marks or parentheses), and the rest of the results show various formats, just as I said they would, even when they use the long version:
Ed Too Tall Jones,
Ed 'Too Tall' Jones,
Ed (Too Tall) Jones,
Ed "Too Tall" Jones, all on the first page of results. The subject himself appears to prefer
Ed Too Tall Joneswithout any markup, judging from his official website (though I know as a Web developer that sometimes such decisions are left up to the developer – if we ask about some typographic question of this sort and don't get an answer, we insert what we prefer and get back to work, allowing the client to correct it later). — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 15:40, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
( ←) I added a short clarification. While I'm wary of instruction creep, I think the issue has been raised frequently enough to deserve a coverage in the guideline. For example, it was raised at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (people)#Use of quotation marks in names back in April. No such user ( talk) 11:17, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
I move that:
Thoughts? DK qwerty 07:24, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
(A yoga instructor that goes by "DeRose". The history of the article title is Master DeRose, Luis DeRose, Master DeRose, Professor DeRose, Master DeRose, and currently Professor DeRose. There appear to be no independent, reliable, English sources about him. English sources typically are pr pieces such as [21] and [22] (which brings up the issue that for the English encyclopedia, DeRose Method yoga may be more notable than the person). Since DeRose is a disambiguation page, it's unclear whether we should use an honorific ( Master DeRose or Professor DeRose), his first name ( Luis DeRose), or a description ( DeRose (DeRose Method), DeRose (yogi), or DeRose (yoga teacher)) for the article title. Others' help would be greatly appreciated. (Discussion here. -- Ronz ( talk) 19:54, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
Is it possible to change the Title of an Article once it has been created?
The article in question was based on the spelling of a medieval word and it now seems that as slightly different spelling is the more commonly used version, so I would like to amend the spelling of the word to reflect the more common usage.
Armond Dean ( talk) 17:23, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Korean League of Legends player Lee "Faker" Sang-hyeok is typically referred to as his "real" name (Lee Sang-hyeok/이상혁) in Korean language sources, but in Western media he is usually referred to as his gamer name, "Faker". Since WP:NICKNAME guidelines discourage the use of the current format with the nickname in quotation marks, my question is what should the article title be?-- Prisencolin ( talk) 00:26, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
This has probably been covered before, buy I can't seem to find a definite answer. For buildings in non-English-speaking countries, on Wikipedia should its name be translated into English, or should the native name be used? For example, should the article on the
Castello di Milazzo in Sicily be named as such, or should it be
Milazzo Castle?
Note: This does not apply for places which have a common name in English (eg.
Fort Saint Elmo should not be
Il-Fortizza ta' Sant'Iermu) or places where the foreign name is commonly used even when writing in English (eg.
Torre dello Standardo should not be
Tower of the Standard).
Xwejnusgozo (
talk) 20:28, 23 December 2015 (UTC)
What happened to the discussion to restore this section of the guideline to warning against making inconsistent stylisms the basis of titling? The current examples and text actually encourage a bad practice. And maybe the shortcut can be changed to WP:BEWARESMALLDETAILS? In ictu oculi ( talk) 08:49, 21 January 2016 (UTC)
"The number of experienced editors there who don't seem to get this" is an indication that most people don't read it as B2C does. That section contains no "clearly stated policy"; rather, it points out that such minimal title distinctions can leave ambiguity, and suggests ways to avoid them, without saying that they are either a good or a bad idea. Personally, I think they're a bad idea, and would support a move to clarify that, but still without prohibiting them. Dicklyon ( talk) 05:30, 22 January 2016 (UTC)
Dicklyon, "many" in this case is far from "most". While many experienced editors don't seem to get it, most do. The recent results at Talk:Woman_in_the_Dunes#Requested_move_5_January_2016 exemplify this. -- В²C ☎ 21:23, 25 January 2016 (UTC)
Does WP:UE apply to the naming of cars? see Talk:Lada Riva -- 70.51.200.135 ( talk) 06:16, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (events) is a guideline which needs some TLC. I have just removes some of the more outlandish statements from it eg "Articles not in compliance with these guidelines will be renamed". It is mainly describing how to put descriptive titles together, but in a very prescriptive way, which is not necessarily in harmony with other guidance. For example it suggests that when disambiguating with a year, rather than placing the year in brackets at the end, the year should come before the rest of the description. I think a few more eyes on the guideline might help. -- PBS ( talk) 00:01, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
PBS, regarding this, it needs a tweak. I think the reason that Blueboar added "a significant majority" is because sources are very likely to continue using both the old and new name; rarely is the new name used exclusively. I also think that's why this bit was in the policy. Also see this discussion I had with Prayer for the wild at heart at Talk:Angelina Jolie about what "routinely" is supposed to mean and the question of when to retitle an article. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 21:56, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
We need to do something to make it even clearer that WP:COMMONNAME ( WP:UCRN) applies to article titles only, and names (e.g. it's Alien 3, not Alien Three or Alien III), and does not cover typographic stylization (Alien3 vs. Alien 3), which is a MOS:TM matter. It is not enough that this page is called "Article titles". Virtually every discussion about in-paragraph usage of stylized trademarks has multiple respondents citing WP:COMMONNAME in favor of things like Alien3, because they don't remember that it's part of WP:AT and that AT is a titles policy. Day in, day out, year after year, all of these discussions get bogged down in trying to get editors to understand that the two documents cover different things, and have different rationales, and in particular that COMMONNAME does not apply to typography in running prose. And many simply will not believe COMMONNAME doesn't regulate article content, simply because COMMONNAME itself doesn't spell that out, right there in its section, and they believe "policy trumps guidelines", which translates into "my misunderstanding of policy trumps your explanation of the relationship between that policy and these guidelines because yours has something to do with guidelines to shut up". I cannot even begin to estimate the amount of editorial productivity flushed down the toilet because of circular "debates" of this sort. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 18:40, 6 February 2016 (UTC)
Let's try this again. John Doe is a name. COMMONNAME tells us whether that's the correct name, vs. J. M. Doe, or Janet Doe, or John Florbelheimer-Sanchez. Once in a blue moon, we even accept something with simple, transparent substitutions, e.g. J0hn Do3, or simple case changes, e.g. john doe, or (really rarely) extraneous punctuation, as in John Doe!, as a name, iff the whole rest of the world does (i.e. the stylization has transitioned from style on a name to a actual, unitary proper name in the philosophy sense, with the style an intrinsic part of virtually all public perception of the name. J0hN d•3!!! is not a name, it is a stylization of a name, and even if John Doe spends $57 billion promoting that as his real name, down to every style detail, no one in the world, much less WP, should take that seriously for five seconds, other than the designers paid to work on his logo. If this seems like a silly example, strip out every stylization except one, other than the non-confusing substitutions – pick one of: super script, italics, jumbling the case inconsistently, font face, color, use of dingbats, excessive extraneous punctuation, or underlining – and you'll see that the result would still be the same: WP would never and should not accept that as part of the name, as such, except we'd entertain some normal non-alphanumerics that are conventional in typography if they appeared in the title of a published work and RS accepted them as part of the formal title. We'd also accept superscripting or subscripting if it were semantic and not decorative (e.g. a company pronounced "Ideas Squared" iff they were virtually always referred to as "Ideas3" even in their corporate documentation, in press, etc., called "Ideas Squared" in rudimentary ASCII, and never called "Ideas Three"). All the rest of the stylized John Doe example is not part of the name, in any conceptualization anyone care about outside a philosophy class. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 22:46, 8 February 2016 (UTC)
When there is no single obvious term that is obviously the most frequently used for the topic, as used by a significant majority of reliable English language sources, editors should reach a consensus as to which title is best by considering the criteria listed above." People just tend not to notice that part because of where it's placed in the section. I'm also going to fix the "obvious term that is obviously" redundancy. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 20:01, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
Greetings! I have recently relisted a requested move discussion at Talk:43rd Canadian federal election#Requested move 9 February 2016, regarding a page relating to this WikiProject. Discussion and opinions are invited. Thanks, AusLondonder ( talk) 04:52, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
Why is the subtitles naming convention in the books guideline rather than the main guideline? My understanding is that it applies to all forms of media with subtitles, as it follows from the five naming criteria points. czar 16:59, 6 February 2016 (UTC)
As written it only applies to books.That's not what the first sentence says:
czar 23:07, 8 February 2016 (UTC)Usually, a Wikipedia article on a book (or other medium, such as a movie, TV special or video game) does not include its subtitle in the Wikipedia page name, per WP:CONCISE.
Proposed addition to Wikipedia:Article_titles#Conciseness:
Article titles usually omit the subject's subtitle.
ALT: Titles for articles about books, film, and other media usually do not include their subtitles.
— Paraphrased from WP:SUBTITLES, which refers to WP:CONCISE
This page was renamed to " Article titles" from " Naming conventions" years ago, but we've still got a bunch of pages titled "Naming conventions (xxxx)". I think this situation is unnecessarily confusing, and that it is about time that the naming conventions pages were brought into line with the main policy. Would anyone be opposed to moving all the pages in the relevant category to either Wikipedia:Article titles/xxxx or Wikipedia:Article titles (xxxx)? As it stands, the link between this policy and its subpages is not clear unless one knows the history of the page move, which I don't think is appropriate. RGloucester — ☎ 06:14, 7 February 2016 (UTC)
OK... let me start this discussion by noting the first sentence of the second paragraph of NCCaps... "This convention often also applies within the article body"... I think that sentence refutes RGloucester's argument that NCCaps is only about article titles (while MOS:CAPS is about article text). It is fairly clear to me that we do actually have two guidelines dealing with capitalization... and that both deal with the issue in both title and text. I think that is a ridiculous situation.
Now... a question... does NCCaps currently conflict with MOS:CAPS? I think there is a potential for it, but I would like to know if that potential has been realized or not.
Blueboar (
talk) 20:48, 7 February 2016 (UTC)
It seems clear that all NCCaps needs to say is to use sentence case for titles. The MOS covers the details about when to capitalize in a sentence, and titles should do the same. But then a lot of topic-specific guidelines came about under naming conventions, probably because the discussions that get advertised are the requested moves, which are about titles. Pretty silly that is has gone on this way for so long. Should we fix it? Step one would be for everyone to agree to stop calling these conventions "policy". Dicklyon ( talk) 05:21, 8 February 2016 (UTC)
Simple question on this one... Why isn't it an MOS guideline? Blueboar ( talk) 20:56, 7 February 2016 (UTC)
RGloucester above mentioned this, but responding to it where he posted it would disrupt the ongoing thread there, so I'll break it off.
It would be feasible to merge AT and certain core aspects of MOS into a WP style policy with a broader scope than title. It would need a distinct name (perhaps Manual of Style itself) that distinguished it from MoS sub-guidelines (which could be renamed, e.g. "style sheets") and the NC guidelines. There are very few MoS items that I think would rise to policy level; those that might are broad principles, not nit-picky line items. WP:PMC (principle of minimal change, i.e. don't monkey with quotations any more than necessary) is an obvious one. Some of them are in MoS subpages: We have (in regular prose) two and only two acceptable date formats (30 January 2016, and January 30, 2016), per MOS:NUM; history has demonstrated that people are more apt to get into style conflict over date formatting than anything else, if allowed to do so. Certain article sections go in a particular order, per MOS:LAYOUT, and we do in fact enforce this. Leads should be summaries not teasers or one-liner defnitions, per MOS:LEAD, and we try to enforce that as well. There's probably only 10-20 MOS principles that are truly policy-level. All the rest is applied best practices that produce a consistent and (when the content is good) professional quality product, but have little to do with whether the project will function well, which is where policy territory is.
Historically, people have flipped out at the mention of such an idea of merging AT into MoS or making any of MoS into a policy, but who knows. Consensus can change, as we say. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 22:23, 8 February 2016 (UTC)
The actual naming criteria (i.e. WP:CRITERIA + WP:COMMONNAME) could be a separate guideline at WP:Naming conventions (and it really is guideline material, since it's all a judgment call about how to balance these conflicting factors, and we routinely make exceptions to each and every one of those "rules"). Another of AT's pointless content-forks from other WP:POLICY, the WP:AT#Disambiguation material, could be merged back into WP:DISAMBIGUATION.
The remaining AT material would be very concise, with a nutshell like "Do not name or rename articles in ways that conflict with WP:NPOV, or other policies and guidelines. For how to determine an appropriate name, see WP:NC. For all style matters regarding the name, see the "Article titles" sections at MOS and its subpages. For topical conventions, see the various topical NC pages. If a title is ambiguous, see WP:DAB. Avoid move-warring and other disruption over article titles (see WP:DE); use proper procedures like WP:RM to resolve disputes. A wikiproject cannot randomly assert new 'naming conventions' without the community accepting them via a WP:PROPOSAL." Short, sweet, and not commingling policy-level material with a bunch of redundant and sometimes conflicting style material.
If this were done, the conflict level at WP:RM should drop significantly, because it would totally eliminate the confused "rename this to Foo because it's the most common name and that's policy, and all guidelines can just [expletive] off, because no other concern in the world could possibly trump that one line in a policy I over-rely on" nonsense. It would also remove various other negative effects of pretending that guidelines apply to everything except titles because they're off in their own little magical universe. To the extent there is a distinction between guidelines and policy, it was never intended to be WP:GAMEd this way. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 15:37, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
SmokeyJoe wrote, in the thread above: "One problem with the MOS is its style of asserting rules by fiat." But all of WP:POLICY asserts rules by fiat (that of the consensus of editors who care enough over time to participate in shaping the policy/guideline). That's how policy works; these are internal decisions for how to run Wikipedia, based on WP editors' crowd wisdom on how to best do something here, and these often have little to do with how someone else in a different context might insist it should be done. All of policy is an internal, consensus-based compromise between different goals, values, and needs/desires, multiple of which may be valid and (except for WP:OFFICE legal matters) are not imposed on WP from outside. When compromise is not practical but we need to decide on something, an arbitrary decision is made so we can move on. That's true of everything here, from what to do about sockpuppets to what the cut-off % is for an unsuccessful RfA, to how to format initials in people's names. There's a reason we're not governed by Robert's Rules of Order and we don't do everything by an ayes-and-nays vote. The nature of both compromise and, when that fails, an arbitrary rule to stop the conflict and get back to work, is that some parties will not be 100% satisfied with the result. This is true of life in general, and has nothing to do with WP or with MOS especially. And consensus is not fiat; it's a guideline, not a dictated law. If MoS is "fiat" so is all of WP:POLICY. (If the objection is just to its often imperative do-or-do-not wording, that was mostly changed from earlier wishy-washy wording by a single editor, who is now topic-banned for MOS-related disruption; however, that particular series of changes has actually had a positive effect, resulting in fewer disputes and more work getting done.)
On the prepositions and linking-verbs matters, which are off-topic here, probably
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The distinction between long uncommon prepositions and short common ones was not invented by MoS at all, but can be found in almost all style guides. They simply differ on exactly where to draw the line: 3 letters? 4? 5? MoS just picked one. If someone thinks it's too short, they can start an RfC about changing it. Various parties keep insisting that MoS has to be based on external sourcing as if WP:CCPOL applied to WP:POLICY material as well as encyclopedic content (it does not), then bizarrely pretending that MoS doesn't already, in fact, comply with this imaginary requirement to begin with. The problem is in failing to understand the distinct between "has a rule that doesn't agree with what I learned in school or use at work" and "made up some bullshit out of nowhere" It's entirely valid, even necessary, for MOS to note that there are multiple ways of doing something, and then choose the way that we want to apply to WP based on this project's needs and that of its ultra-generalized audience. This is how all WP policy works. Yes, there will always be some disagreements over particular cases, and sometimes exceptions have to be made; that's why these are guidelines, not policies. WP is not disrupted and in danger of failing if "Do It like a Dude" is picked over "Do It Like a Dude" or "Do It Like A Dude"; it's trivia. There's a trend in the entertainment press to capitalize all prepositions, and now even words like "a" and "the" in mid-sentence. WP:NOT#NEWS, much less entertainment news, so we have little reason to care about that trend, and we are absolutely not bound to follow it, since it's considered substandard writing in virtually all other contexts. The linking verbs thing is the same kind of case. We capitalize them because most style guides do, most real-world usage does, and WP has no internal need to not go along with this (if you think there is one, you know how to do an RfC). Should an exception be made for "A Boy was Born?", on the basis of convention with regard to that specific title? Maybe. But that would be a debate no matter what, because it's an outlying case. I'm unaware of any style guide anywhere that categorically recommends lower-casing in that type of circumstance. And we can either have "A Boy was Born" and "Do It like a Dude", or "A Boy Was Born" and "Do It Like a Dude", but it's mutually incompatible to mix these models. Virtually every "rule" in MoS (and those hijacked from it into AT) are similar arbitrary choices between conflicting rules in off-WP style guides. People just want to argue about this kind of one more than average because fandom is emotional about things like song titles. If you track WP style disputes as long as I have, you'll see that there's a direct and very strong correlation between the heat and frequency of the "screw the MoS" campaigning, and whether the matter in question is the subject of external publications with insider jargon styles, either fandom-based or professional-specialization-based. I
wrote this up in detail several years ago. The fact that they come up more than once and some people get angry doesn't make them different kinds of cases from style matters people don't argue about as much, nor obligate us to negotiate exceptions we should not make. Our present MOS:CAPS and MOS:TM rules of permitting an exception when the vast majority of independent reliable secondary sources also do it that way, is precisely the general, no-favoritism, common sense approach we should be taking. Otherwise, every fanbase and every geeky specialization everywhere is going to lobby until the end of time to get every single style nitpick they want, from putting a ! in
Pink (singer)'s name, to all-capitalizing Sony to match its logo, to dropping all compound adjective hyphenation in medical articles, to never giving the name of a Unix/Linux program except in |
An actual threat to WP's wellbeing is the amount of conflict generated by people on a WP:SOAPBOX mission to force things like the overcapitalization of "Do It Like A Dude", on a faulty policy analysis that, since that spelling is common in the music press, it must be used on WP as a matter of AT policy. Another example was the 8-year campaign to force capitalization of the common names of species, on the basis of some external "standard" in one field that isn't even actually a standard. I can rattle off 20 other examples if you want. All of this disruption, which sucks away editorial energy, and actually drives editors off the system, is directly generated by AT being incrementally WP:POVFORKed from MoS in a "long game" as a conflicting anti-MoS style guide with a {{ Policy}} tag on it, so certain WP:CIVILPOV, slow-editwar agendas can WP:WIN at RM on particular pet peeves.
Finally, stating that one of our longest-standing WP:POLICY pages is incompatible with WP:POLICY does not compute. What I can detect in that sentiment is the same old "MoS should be sourced like an article because the
core content policies must somehow apply to it" meme. But they don't apply to projectpage content, only to article content. And it wouldn't matter anyway, since MoS is written in consultation with sources. There are nearly zero style matters about which there are not conflicting views in reliable sources. MoS may say nothing on a matter, if it's not important, or say to defer to national dialect style if there is one and there's no compelling reason not to. But if there's consensus that we need a rule on it, MoS just has to pick one, based on what we think serves our needs best not on what is "most common" . Picking one is not the same as making one up. Some of these will never change, just as a matter of common sense, like "do not use capitalization for emphasis"; some may, like what the cut-off is for preposition capitalization in titles of works. The fact that style perceptions (sourceable ones) differ right now, as well as change over time on the whole, and so our rules adjust, is a simple reality. It's not a "credibility" problem that our house style guide simply advises "do this here, not that", choosing between one of multiple available ways to approach something, when a consistent result is desirable and/or conflict keeps erupting about a matter. That's what house style guides exist for, and they're all prescriptive (in the sense of actually advising something; when it comes to what to advise, ours is probably the most
linguistically descriptive not prescriptive style guide of any seriousness that exists). Part of why people probably get confused and worked up about this and keep trying to treat MoS like an article is the failure to remember that it's a house style guide for WP editors; it is not a general-public work of style advice for how to write papers or business correspondence, and efforts to "source the MoS" to be more like such a work are both
WP:NOTHERE and
WP:NOT#HOWTO problems. Every dispute people start about MoS line-items and MoS's "authority" as a guideline is time stolen, from multiple other editors, away from writing the encyclopedia. So is every pointless "my fetishized COMMONNAME policy trumps every guideline you can cite" junk-waving display at
WP:RM.
—
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 18:39, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
SmokeyJoe wrote, in the thread above: "99% of the percieved conflicts between MOS and other policies and guidelines could be resolved if the MOS simply adopted a "COMMON STYLE" type "exception clause". There are no "other policies and guidelines" involved. The perceived conflicts is only between MOS and AT (plus its spin-off NC pages, the majority of which are actually wikiproject WP:PROJPAGE {{ Essay}}s that have wrongly been tagged with {{ Guideline}}) – and even these conflicts only arise because the AT and NC pages have been usurping MOS's role, and are trying to be competing, contrary style guidance .
However, MOS:TM and MOS:CAPS already use the same standard as WP:COMMONNAME: They all want to see a strong super-majority of independent, reliable, English-language sources. Most people just missed this in COMMONNAME because it was at the bottom of the section. I've merged this into the top of it to reduce confusion on the issue [27]. . But this does not automatically mean that something that passes overwhelming commonness tests for what the name is also passes MOS tests for the overwhelming commonness of a particular stylization of it; different analyses. There is nothing but the most superficial similarity between the concepts of "common name" and "common style". I use all kinds of style on my sig here. If I change it all, or delete it, my username has not changed. See? The notion of them being comparable is a Korzybski fallacy. Style is not a name, it's something applied to a name. Are you your suit? Is your house the paint job you applied to it? Style is not substance. The proposal that WP be forced to accept a style quibble used in the simple "majority" of sources attempts to apply a rule – that doesn't even exist! – about a title (substance) to an area of abstract style. The proposition ignores everything else important in the policy when it's convenient to do so ...
...in over a dozen ways:
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At any rate, the broader WP:NPOV policy is also pretty clear that we should not be favoring promotionalism.
If MOS followed the "most common style" (assuming this could be determined in an accurate, objective way, which it usually can't), even when it wasn't overwhelmingly consistent across the sources, WP would be written like marginally professional journalism, and our article titles would look like newspaper headline. If it followed the most common style in academic publishing, it would be impenetrable to most anyone without a masters degree. If we followed the topical journalism that surrounds subjects like movie stars, albums, tech companies and products, and other areas where over-stylization is rampant, the result would be the acceptance of virtually all stylizations as official and required, from [insert Prince symbol here] to LaTeX. There are compelling reasons we do not accept style wankery like this (except perhaps once per article, in a "stylized as" lead statement), except for the rarest exceptions like "k.d. lang" and "iPhone". Accepting all stylization demands would be a WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE problem, and we already know from experience that it's unworkable in other ways (cf. the species capitalization war that went on for 8 years. Style is trivia, but some individuals' "never give up, never surrender" attitude about their peeves is not, and can have serious anti-collaborative consequences on the project). This is all an MoS matter, not an AT matter. It's style (typographic effects, etc.) applied to names, not what the names are ("Macy's" and "Alien 3", versus "Maycees'" and "Alien: Part III"). We only, really rarely, treat style as an integral part of the name when pretty much the entire world has assimilated it that way, through the exact same linguistic process that turned the acronym "LASER" into the word "laser" and the French word "rôle" into the English word "role". Guess what the criterion is, on WP and off, for whether that has happened? Overwhelming super-majority acceptance in reliable sources, across registers, including the most formal. This is descriptive linguistics, not something MoS just made up one day.
We don't consider it indiscriminate to include limited stylization info in some places, but even the top of the
eBay article reads: eBay Inc. (stylized as "ebay" since late 2012) is..."; it does not say: ebay (stylized as ebaY prior to late 2012) is...". There are many stylization points we would not accept no matter how many external sources did (cf LaTeX example), because they're superfluous attention-hogging, inappropriately dumped into an encyclopedic register and context.
—
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 22:51, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
It seems that some titles for professional novelists use the disambiguation word "author", but some use "writer". What is the difference and what is the WP standard, or is everything arbitrary? Timmyshin ( talk) 03:00, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
I'm creating an article for Natalie Lauren Sims. She used to go by the stage name Suzy Rock, but now is known as Natalie Lauren as a recording artist. Most sources use the name Suzy Rock and now Natalie Lauren. However, as a song-writer, she is credited on recordings as Natalie Sims. Some of her credits include high-profile songs such as Iggy Azalea's " Work", Change Your Life", and Bounce". So my question is, which name should the article be titled under, "Natalie Lauren" or "Natalie Sims?" Which is the more common name?-- 3family6 ( Talk to me | See what I have done) 02:04, 2 March 2016 (UTC)
As of the 2nd of March, 2016 DB Schenker Rail (UK) has become DB Cargo UK. Additionally, DB Schenker Rail has become DB Cargo. According to the press release linked above,
Furthermore, the domain listed for both of these (www.rail.dbschenker.de / www.rail.dbschenker.co.uk) now redirect to [dbcargo.com]. Should these pages, alongside the Subsidaries listed in the former's infobox that have pages, have their name changed to DB Cargo (Country)? Thanks. ∫ A Y ™ 17:56, 17 March 2016 (UTC)
Unusual case: Talk:National Highway 26 (India)#Requested move 16 March 2016. Summary: The proposal is to move it to "National Highway 26 (India)(old numbering)". — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 21:22, 21 March 2016 (UTC)
Are Cyrillic lettered titles acceptable? see Talk:Choba B CCCP -- 70.51.46.39 ( talk) 07:17, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
Does the WP:TITLECHANGES section on changing the national variety of English in an article title need to be clarified?
Article titles which have to choose between two national varieties of English (Yogurt vs. Yoghurt, Color vs. Colour, Humor vs. Humour, and so on) are often subject to perennial move discussions which are often lengthy, contentious, and brutal wastes of time as they rarely resolve anything. Our manual of style currently says, "If an article title has been stable for a long time, and there is no good reason to change it, it should not be changed. [...] If it has never been stable, or it has been unstable for a long time, and no consensus can be reached on what the title should be, default to the title used by the first major contributor after the article ceased to be a stub." I think the point that needs to be clarified is what makes a title "stable": editors disagree whether stable means "not moved" versus "no move discussions". Or perhaps "default to the title used by the first major contributor..." is being interpreted as a "good reason to change it", absent any other reasons.
The problem this creates is being exemplified in yet another move discussion at Talk:Humour where it's been suggested that the title is unstable because of the repeated move discussions over a long period (the page has actually been at this title since 13 May 2007), and as a result it's being argued that the "default to the title used by the first major contributor after the article ceased to be a stub" applies, and then there is debate about which version is the first non-stub version. I would like to see that confusion resolved one way or the other, but I'm not sure how to do it, and I don't know what the original intent was.
I suggest these changes (marked up as best I could):
I think these changes will help to resolve conflicts about which variety to use, so that we don't go back and forth endlessly and have editors repeatedly bringing up the same move proposals over and over again. Thoughts? Ivanvector 🍁 ( talk) 17:21, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
The suggestion to discourage retitling if the page hasn't been moved for a long time isn't bad and avoids some of the subjectivity of what "stable" means, but I'd be concerned that users who support a move for which there's no good basis might take that as a motivation to preemptively retitle a page, even if it gets immediately reverted, simply in order to destabilize the article and claim standing under the letter of the guideline. ╠╣uw [ talk 14:14, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
An editor has been going around putting {{ lowercase title}} on articles whose names start "Untitled", and I don't understand his explanation. Please join the discussion at Talk:Untitled Amazon motoring show. – Smyth\ talk 11:34, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
The following debate may be of interest to editors at this page: I am currently involved in a dispute at Talk:The Minjoo Party of Korea. The matter of contention is whether WP:COMMONNAME overrules a foreign party's official preference to translate its name using "The", when the majority of English-language sources do not treat "The" as a part of the proper noun. I would appreciate third-party opinions either way from editors familiar with this set of policies/guidelines to see whether I am interpreting them correctly. (Hopefully this isn't forum-shopping—the only other place I've posted a separate note is at WikiProject Korea, which seemed reasonable, and the topic is obscure enough that I have little confidence in people participating otherwise.) — Nizolan (talk) 04:36, 30 March 2016 (UTC)
Re: Names of songs and titles of short stories. Why do these not have any quotation marks in their Wikipedia article titles? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro ( talk) 20:15, 2 April 2016 (UTC)
Please comment at WP:VPP#RfC: MOS vs COMMONNAME. -- Izno ( talk) 13:09, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
Opinions are needed on the following matter: Talk:Genderqueer#Requested move 4 June 2016. A WP:Permalink for it is here. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 18:57, 4 June 2016 (UTC)
When a song or album is the only song or album to have a standalone article on Wikipedia, but other songs or albums of the same name are listed on the disambiguation page for that name per MOS:DABMENTION, should the article title of the notable song or album include the artist name?
Some songs and albums are the only song or album with its name to meet notability guidelines and have an article on Wikipedia, but other songs or albums of the same name are listed on the disambiguation page per
MOS:DABMENTION. The current situation on the inclusion of artist names in article titles is inconsistent. A few examples of no artist names in article titles include
Umbrella (song),
Pillowtalk (song), and
Anti (album); they are the only songs and albums of their names to be notable enough for a standalone article on Wikipedia, although there are other non-notable songs/albums of the same name listed at
Umbrella (disambiguation)#Songs,
Pillow talk (disambiguation)#Songs, and
Anti#Music respectively. A few examples of artist names in article titles include
Chandelier (Sia song),
Blackstar (David Bowie song), and
Title (Meghan Trainor album); similarly, they are the only songs and albums of their names to be notable enough for a standalone article on Wikipedia, but
Chandelier (song),
Blackstar (song) and
Title (album) redirect to disambiguation pages, where other non-notable songs/albums of the same name are listed.
WP:PRECISION states According to the above-mentioned precision criterion, when a more detailed title is necessary to distinguish an article topic from another, use only as much additional detail as necessary.
WP:NCM states Use further disambiguation only when needed (for example X (American band), X (Australian band)).
The dispute arises on whether non-notable songs and albums that lack standalone articles can be considered "article topics". I think we can all agree that the current inconsistency is not ideal, and I am starting a request for comment for a result that should apply to most usual cases.
sst✈ 15:21, 20 March 2016 (UTC)
I don't think too many people would dispute that a non-notable song should not be considered when disambiguating some other song that is notable.That does not seem to be the case currently at RM discussions. sst✈ 11:39, 21 March 2016 (UTC)
Is starting an article title with a slash permitted? I don't see it addressed here. I'm asking because an editor moved Drive (web series) to /DRIVE and it causes an obvious problem. -- AussieLegend ( ✉) 20:53, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
The present name of the article (on a general topic, professional video-gaming competition) coincides with a commercial trademark (in that market sector).
Over the last year, there have been 6 or so requested moves and other renaming discussions at what is presently Talk:ESports, most of them poorly attended, with mostly WP:ILIKEIT votes, mis-citations of policy where any was mentioned at all, and closure reasoning problems (while only one was an admin close), resulting in the name flipping around all over the place.
I've opened a multi-option, RfC-style requested move at:
Talk:ESports#Broadly-announced and policy-grounded rename discussion
It presents four potential names, all with some rationale outlines provided.
Input is sought from the community to help arrive at a long-term stable name for this article, based on actual policy and guideline wording, and on treatment in reliable and independent sources (i.e. not blogs or "eSports" marketing). — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 15:38, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
It is here: Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation#Request for Comment: Disambiguation and inherently ambiguous titles.
BTW some people are of the opinion that, since it directly affects titling, it should be here at WP:AT where it can be folded in with guidance provided by the Five Virtues.
Other people of are of the opinion that, since it is about disambiguation specifically, it should be at WP:Disambiguation (which FWIW is technically a guideline not a policy) and this is where I have placed it. Herostratus ( talk) 17:35, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
A discussion is underway about moving New York to New York (state) and placing either the city, the dab page or a broad-concept article at the "New York" base name. Please contribute at Talk:New York/July 2016 move request. Note that the move was first approved on June 18 then overturned on July 7 and relisted as a structured debate to gather wider input. Interested editors might want to read those prior discussions to get a feel for the arguments. (Be sure to have your cup of tea handy!) — JFG talk 23:11, 19 July 2016 (UTC)
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Sai Noom Khay ( talk) 07:00, 23 July 2016 (UTC)
Please visit and comment here:
Many thanks.
Anna Frodesiak ( talk) 06:55, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
The guideline, "British nobility" appears to conflict with "Use commonly recognizable names". The policy says, "Wikipedia does not necessarily use the subject's "official" name as an article title; it generally prefers to use the name that is most frequently used to refer to the subject in English-language reliable sources." But the guideline says, "Members of the British peerage, whether hereditary peers or life peers, usually have their articles titled "Personal name, Ordinal (if appropriate) Peerage title", e.g. Alun Gwynne Jones, Baron Chalfont; Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington."
The British field marshall is universally referred to as the " Duke of Wellington," and that page redirects to Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, a name that I suspect few if any readers would type in. The name of the article for the British admiral, Lord Nelson, is " Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson." Lord Nelson is a redirect to the article.
Similarly, some peers are better known for their common names. We had this discussion with John Buchan, a well known writer who was elevated to the peerage when he was appointed Governor General of Canada. The article had been named, " John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir."
I recommend in keeping with policy, the guideline request that we use the simplest name as the article name rather than as a re-direct.
TFD ( talk) 06:04, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
The simple reason that this guideline exists is that all British peers are commonly known as either "Duke of [Title]" (if they are a Duke) or "Lord [Title]" (if they are not). Every holder of the Dukedom of Norfolk, for example, is and has been known simply as "the Duke of Norfolk", and (as far as I can see) every single one of them has an article. So if we followed the common name policy blindly we'd have to have a whole string of articles called Duke of Norfolk (19th century politician), Duke of Norfolk (15th century soldier), etc. For a lot of peers there wouldn't be obvious disambiguators (in some families generation after generation had political or military careers), so you'd end up with lots of the even messier Duke of Norfolk (1628-1684), etc. (You couldn't even use 1st Duke of Norfolk, etc., because that doesn't distinguish between different creations of the same title, in this case Thomas de Mowbray, 1st Duke of Norfolk and John Howard, 1st Duke of Norfolk.) Your alternative would therefore be far messier and confusing (for both editors and readers) than the current system, which is the system encyclopaedias and scholarly works pretty much always use to solve this problem. It would make article titles simpler for a few peers who are far more famous than the other holders of their title (like the Duke of Wellington and Lord Nelson), but far messier for all the others, and knowing Wikipedia would create endless disputes as to precisely who fits into which category. Proteus (Talk) 10:01, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
Hi everyone,
I have an issue with the following line on WP:CONCISE.
The goal of conciseness is to balance brevity with sufficient information to identify the topic to a person familiar with the subject area.
Wikipedia is written for a large audience; we're trying to write encyclopedic articles for the general reader. That we should keep article titles as concise as possible makes sense to me, and that by itself doesn't need any explanation. So why have "to identify the topic to a person familiar with the subject area" there? It also makes me wonder, how can a person "identify the topic" just by its title? For instance, I'm mostly concerned with editing video game-related articles; there are big budget video games like the Assassin's Creed series, the Call of Duty series or classics like Super Mario Bros., but there are also hundreds of small-time indie games, with titles like I Am Bread, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity or The Binding of Isaac; even if someone is familiar with the subject area of video games, they might not've heard of these types of games. So how can we assume the general reader would? soetermans. ↑↑↓↓←→←→ B A TALK 09:01, 15 July 2016 (UTC)
It leads to John Barnes (Australian rules footballer) - unambiguous - being moved to this John Barnes (Australian footballer) - what brand of football does he play? I fail to see the advantage.
There is a move request on the Murder of JonBenét Ramsey page to move it to Death of JonBenét Ramsey. Another suggestion is to simplify it to her name, making it JonBenét Ramsey, which was the article name until November 2012.
Would you mind weighing on the discussion at Talk:Murder of JonBenét Ramsey#Requested move 20 September 2016 regarding this and any standard that this project may have for naming articles when someone has been murdered or died?
Thanks so much!-- CaroleHenson (talk) 18:41, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
I'd like some clarification on a tilting issue that doesn't seem to be addressed in the article. Oftentimes, related products are covered in one article. Is it acceptable to title the article with both product names, or is that practice specifically excluded somewhere?
For a specific example, the Gulfstream IV article covers several related variants of Gulfstream Aerospace aircraft. These include the GIV, the G350, the G400, and the G450, along with several US military variants designated in the C-20 series.
I recently moved Gulfstream G500 (2015), which also covers the G600, to Gulfstream G500/G600, as both aircraft are closely related, and per the discussion at Talk:Gulfstream G500/G600#Renaming. (Confusingly, there is an earlier model called the G500, covered at Gulfstream G550.) Did I violate a specific naming guideline with this move? Thanks. - BilCat ( talk) 07:31, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
Is this accurate?
The article's talk page doesn't appear to have ever hosted an RM, and the oldest version of the page, as written by someone who has apparently been (all but) inactive since 2011, used the current title. Saying that it was selected for this purpose is a little weird, because there are a bunch of arguably better reasons not to use any of the "nation-specific" alternatives: fizzy drink is WP:INFORMAL, pop is WP:INFORMAL and soda is WP:AMBIGUOUS and possibly also WP:INFORMAL. WP:COMMONALITY actually ranks somewhat down the list.
Anyone mind if I change this to "for example, soft drink is preferable to nation-specific terms such as..."?
Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 11:17, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
An essay I'm working on currently reads in part:
If there is a primary topic this article receives the base name, or if there is no primary topic the base name is used for a disambiguation page.
This seems to me to be exactly what WP:ATDIS and related guidelines say, but perhaps not so clearly, and entirely consistent with our current practice (with the possible exception of New York, which is how this all came up of course). However it has been challenged as entirely inaccurate and WP:UNDUE, as many facets other than primary topic may and likely will be involved in a particular page's naming. [28]
Questions:
1. Apart from New York, are there any exceptions to this general rule?
2. Does this rule accurately reflect the intent of the policy, and if so, would it be good to incorporate it into the policy and/or guidelines?
All comments welcome. TIA Andrewa ( talk) 22:21, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
OK, but as we have not yet come up with a single example of a page where the result of applying "my" rule would be any different to the existing policy and guidelines (which are spread over more than eighty current policy, guideline and MOS pages, I might add), I still ask, what is the difference? Other than clarity, that is?
It's an honest question. I accept that others may have a different and valid interpretation. And maybe you're right, maybe it's my fault that I can't see the difference. An example would solve that. Andrewa ( talk) 05:11, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
Station1, Andrewa, etc., the issues of determining whether there is a primary topic for a given title and what to do with if there is are related but separate issues. Station1 in particular seems to be objecting to Andrewa's wording mostly on the grounds that people don't always agree about primary topic. I suggest that's not objecting to the wording, as the wording presupposes that there is a primary topic, and therefore that there is consensus about that. If there is no consensus about primary topic, then the wording would not apply. -- В²C ☎ 22:00, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
I'd like to thank User:Station1 for the detailed anaylsis above and give an equally detailed reply. I think it addresses the issues very well.
No, that's not quite it. My objection is best expressed in the first 2 sentences I wrote in this section.
OK. Those read As WP:AT currently reads, there are many factors in deciding on a page name, including recognizability, conciseness, naturalness, precision, consistency and neutrality. When titles require disambiguation, there are often competing concerns and no black and white answer. Agree with the first. Unsure just what the second sentence means, but if it means that these article naming criteria are in any way bypassed by my proposal, disagree. They are unaffected.
In my hypothetical, even if there is complete consensus that the second John Doe is the primary topic, under current policy we can still choose to name his article "John A. Doe" Agree. (And similarly under my proposal.)
... and put a hatnote on the first John Doe No. Or at least, not if you're assuming that we've used the base name John Doe for this other John Doe. Under our current policy, we can't do that. If the primary topic of John Doe is this John A. Doe, then John Doe redirects to John A. Doe, with a hatnote there. And we need to find a way to disambiguate this other John Doe.
(or choose among several other options, including a dab page if that works best). Maybe. What other options exactly? If you mean that John Doe could be the title of this DAB page, no, it couldn't be.
Conversely, if there is complete consensus that there is no primary topic, under current policy we can still choose to name one "John Doe" and the other "John A. Doe" No. John Doe is ambiguous and must either be a DAB page or a redirect to one. That's the current policy.
(or several other options). Again, what specifically?
The choice would be based on reason applied to the several article-titling criteria mentioned in the policy. The choice of article title certainly depends on many criteria. Over eighty pages of them at last count.
Under the proposal, we would be straightjacketed into slavishly following a rule. No more than we are now.
If there was consensus that the second John Doe was the primary topic, under this rule we must title his article "John Doe" and nothing else; No. We choose the article title according to the article naming conventions. All of them that are relevant. Same as now.
we must not have a dab page. Not at a base name of a term which has a primary topic, if that's what you mean. Same as now.
Conversely, if there was consensus that there was no primary topic, we must have a dab page and no other solution will do. Yep. Subject to IAR and commonsense of course. Same as now.
This is a change in policy, not a clarification. How?
Using the example of New York, even if everyone were to agree that the city is the primary topic, under current policy there are still legitimate arguments for keeping things the way they are: conciseness, consistency, naturalness, to name just three (I'm not saying they would or should prevail in a discussion, but when enough editors put forth reasoned argument based on current policy, lack of consensus for a move would result. And that's the real issue. That is exactly what has happened. But at least some of these arguments are based on a misunderstanding of the policy.
Under the proposed rule, the only factor allowed to be considered would be 'primary topic' ... No more so than now. It would just be clearer.
...and the result would be different... So I hope, yes. Very glad you think that! I'm not so confident as that, and there are other issues to address as well, but I am hopeful, particularly in view of the subsequent RfC that found consensus that New York State is not the primary topic for New York.
(I don't know if that's the motivation for this rule or not) It was the reason for my initial interest in clarifying WP:AT, and is still part of it, I make no secret of that. But I don't expect that it will be the only article title that it affects, not by a long way. The misunderstanding of the current rule is both strong, as this discussion shows, and common, as the last NY RM demonstrated.
that is not a clarification of current policy, it is a change.
It's certainly not my intent to change the current policy. There is no need to do that. We just need to understand it better.
For the policies and guidelines on which the above reply is based, see the short form here or the much longer one with examples at WP:SIMPLEDAB. Andrewa ( talk) 11:15, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
I just had a look back at
Talk:New York/July 2016 move request#Oppose and it seems to me that the majority of oppose !voters would agree with
User:Station1 (who was one of them of course) that if the primary topic of John Doe is John A. Doe, but the article on him is given the title John A. Doe, then the title John Doe becomes available for an article on a less prominent John Doe.
It doesn't. WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT reads in part The title of the primary topic article may be different from the ambiguous term. This may happen when the topic is primary for more than one term, when the article covers a wider topical scope, or when it is titled differently according to the naming conventions. When this is the case, the term should redirect to the article (or a section of it). The fact that an article has a different title is not a factor in determining whether a topic is primary. (my emphasis) That's the existing guideline.
And as Station1 points out, this is directly applicable to the NYS/NYC discussion. Many of the oppose camp argued that New York City, not New York, should be the name of the article on the city (as it is now). That is fair enough. But they then assumed like Station1 that this then mads the base name New York available for the article on the state.
It doesn't. The guideline is clear. But obviously not clear enough. Unless the primary topic of New York is New York State (and consensus has now been achieved that it is not), to keep NYS at the base name they need to argue for a very big exception to be made.
Which they still might do successfully. That's a different issue. This is just about clarifying the existing policy position. Andrewa ( talk) 04:09, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
Although the example of Talk:David Zimmer#Requested move 19 May 2015 may not be directly relevant to the discussion, it still illustrates cases in which a relatively low notability subject becomes the primary topic of one or more WP:DABMENTIONs. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Myrna Williams has only one entry and one redirect. Ralph Barton (disambiguation) has one primary topic and one WP:DABMENTION. —Roman Spinner (talk)(contribs) 02:45, 5 October 2016 (UTC)