Wikipedia 10K Redux

Reconstructed by Reagle from Starling archive; see blog post for context.

Naming_conventions

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

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.

Names of persons

Names of persons should be the most commonly used name for the following reasons:

''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

Other examples of common names that should instead of formal names are: George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Mozart, Bach, Goethe. Middle names should be avoided unless they are the most common form of a name.

  • We want to maximize the likelihood of being listed in other search engines.

    • Therefore, we should have the main entry for the Jimmy Carter page, for example, at Jimmy Carter rather than James Earl Carter. In any other article where Carter is mentioned, he will almost certainly be refered to as Jimmy Carter. Thus when a link is made on that article, it will point to the correct article page.

    Additionally, the Jimmy Carter page has the string 'Jimmy Carter' in the page title. This is important because other search engines will often give greater weight to the contents of the title than to the body of the page. Since 'Jimmy Carter' is the most common form of the name, it will be searched on more often, and having that exact string in our page title will often mean our page shows up higher in other search engines.

    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).

    I think that the most general solution to namespace collisions would be to have the central page, for example Apollo be simply a pointer page to the pages that a person might be looking for. Apollo Space Program Apollo Greek God. In this way, accidental linking still works, although a person will have to detour through the central page.

    Capitalization

    Aaa! For multiword pages there are two different styles of capitalization: capitalize only the first word, or capitalize all of them except articles and other stupid words like that (the, a, and, in). For names of works obviously the latter should be used, but for everything else both systems are being employed. Anyone want to make a decision?

    I am strongly in favor of leaving as many things uncapitalized as is appropriate. If we capitalize words within a page title, then whenever we want to link (quickly and easily) to that page, we must capitalize the page title. But this results in grammatically incorrect sentences, which is jarring. For example, I would much rather write "Good on potato chips is clam dip" (which points to <nowiki>/Clam_dip</nowiki>) than "Good on potato chips is Clam Dip" which makes it sound like I'm talking about the god of clam dip, or something. Another example: philosophical doctrines are usually lower case: direct realism. If we title a page Direct Realism, then whenever anyone wants to link (quickly and easily) to that page, he'll have to use the words "Direct Realism" capitalized--which might force him into a capitalization style that is uncommon and annoying.

    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.

    I have sofar been stubborn about keeping names in their original language. I think it is time for me to given in to the language origin of the wikipedia. For clarity I will formulate this resignation here. LinusTolke

    The language of the Wikipedia is English

    Name your pages in English! If you are talking about a person, country, town, movie or book use the most used English version of the name for the article (as you would find in other encyclopedias). If you want, you could have an alias for the name of the person in his language, country or town in the there spoken language, original title or the movie or book stating what language it is in and where the actual information is (the article). Example Sweden Sverige.

    Maybe others could add similar suggestions to this list, e.g., for history, literature, etc.

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