NamingConventions
Well, pretty obviously, we should be using the new Free Links style of linking.
For everything? I'm not opposed, I'm just asking for
opinions. It will be a big job, but not that big, for us to go
back through the existing pages and uncram the words. Should we?
Or perhaps we should just start out by trying mostly to use the new convention, and slowly but surely fix the old pages as we feel like it. --JimboWales, or is it Jimbo Wales
We need to rewrite the help pages!!!
Well, there might be a few links where it will seem more appropriate (e.g., WikiPedia and WikiWiki), but for the main content, I don't see any reason not to consistently use free linking.
What this page might become, as a result, is a list of general policies on how to name pages, given that we are using free linking. Let me start this list of topics:
Names of persons
In most cases, probably, we should use a person's full name, or enough of the name so as to avoid confusing it with anyone else's. So we might have John F. Kennedy but not [Kennedy]]. We could even have JFK since that's unique.
''John F. Kennedy is somewhat unusual in that people generally refer to him using his middle initial. I don't
know why. For many famous people, the middle initial is
not widely known. Oprah Winfrey, Abraham Lincoln,
etc. It seems that with the current President, he will be known as George W Bush or George W. Bush, and that his father
will be known as George Bush'' --JimboWales
There are many very famous people who are often referred to by their last names only: Descartes, Newton, Rembrandt, etc. Even though it's more to type, I think it would be best to have the full name, unless the name really is pretty much unique. I mean, how many famous Descartes are there? So we could repoint ReneDescartes to Descartes.
I can't think of any good reasons to list names first.
Names of works
Larry Sanger wrote about the original Dune page: This page demonstrates a problem about movie page titles: some movie titles describe things about which we want articles. E.g., An American in Paris is a Gershwin musical piece, and Dune is a novel as well as a movie. Perhaps we should call this DuneFilms (since it was remade as a made-for-cable miniseries).
Philosophy
Name your pages precisely. If you want to discuss a particular version of realism, e.g., Platonic realism, then don't call your page realism; call it, e.g., Platonic realism or Platonism (though the latter, too, is ambiguous) or even just Platonic theories of universals.
In general, famous philosophers, for brevity, can be referred to by their last names. E.g., Socrates, Plato; but cf. James Mill and J. S. Mill, or R. W. Sellars and Wilfrid Sellars. Remember that there are famous non-philosophers who might have the name in question, about whom we might eventually want to have articles! Best to do a Google ( http://www.google.com ) search first.
Maybe others could add similar suggestions to this list, e.g., for history, literature, etc.