Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions

Numbers

Years, model numbers, numbers themselves:

In the main page it says:

Only use numbers for years

In my opinion, numbers as page names should only be used for Year in Review entries. So call it Form 1040, not 1040, and Intel 386, not 386?. That way, if we ever want to add a page about what happened in the year 1040 or the year 386, we won't have a collision with the other uses of numbers. -- Simon J Kissane

386 (and 80386) is used as a term to refer to the Intel 80386; people writing articles might create a link to 386. Perhaps they shouldn't, but there should at least be something on the 386 page for people that followed the link expecting to find something about CPUs. I write thisn't knowing what is on the page 386, but having redirected 286 to Intel 80286 because I found the 286 link in an article (about the processor rather than the year).

It seems to me that some of these naming principles may make it more difficult for people writing pages to get the correct link first time. -- drj

The answer to that might be to mention "other things called "386" on the page for the year 386 — Tarquin

You can see a model for that at 1 and 2, using disambiguation block format. — Toby 10:55 Oct 10, 2002 (UTC)

Numbers themselves

It is possible that numbers might be worthy of articles for other reasons. What about 1729, famously the first number expressible in two different ways as the sum of two cubes (from a conversation between Hardy and Ramanujan)? - drj

We've had articles called Number 2 and Number 0, about the actual numbers 2 and 0. This seemed a reasonabel convention. I've just noticed these are now at Two and Zero, which I think is better -- at least for small numbers. -- Tarquin 11:06 Oct 7, 2002 (UTC)

CPUs

I think processor architectures and names should be described on pages of the form

<it>Manufacturer model-name/number</it>

so Intel 80386, Motorola 68000, Zilog z80[?]. I think creating redirects from shorter more common names is healthy and to be encouraged. I think most of the already written articles are already named like this.

Problem: architecture names that don't have a manufacturer, or not a snappy one. Example: PowerPC names an _architecture_ (ie not a particular chip) designed by a consortium of Apple, Motorola, and IBM. IBM PowerPC[?] (IBM own's the trademark and these days Motorola license it) seems slightly dishonest - it gives IBM too much credit - whereas IBM--Motorola PowerPC[?] seems very clumsy.

Common personal names

This issue was discussed in talk:List of saints, and I think it should also be borne in mind for articles on monarchs, Biblical figures, etc. I'd like to know how others think this should be addressed.

begin quote

And perhaps standardise their nomenclature before we get too many more?

Good idea, Malcolm. This is what I suggested to MichaelTinkler a couple of days ago:

Regarding names: I'm personally inclined to naming pages with the saint's name, and location or other description to distinguish between eg Augustine of Hippo and Augustine of Canterbury. Problem is that other Wikipedians may have already made a link to Saint XXX - that's how I found Saint Columba, for instance. It shouldn't be a *huge* problem, though.

The current Wikipedia pages with Saint at the start probably should be changed to just their name (and location if necessary) - must watch out for the backlinks too.

end quote

Common personal names are of course going to cause confusion especially in the case of monarchs. (I'm only familiar with European history, and have no idea whether this is going to be a problem with historical figures from other cultures.) For example, why does Henry I refer to the English king while Henry I the Fowler requires a more specific title? Should the Henry I page refer to Henry I of England, Henry I the Fowler, etc?

Also: should we use Sir Donald Bradman or Donald Bradman? Redirect one to the other?

There was a bit of discussion on how to handle titular names over on my talk page a while back: user talk:Paul Drye. Essentially "Go with the name that is likeliest to be used in common parlance". "Henry the Fowler" and "Henry I" in these cases because, well, that's what people call them. Since then I'm starting to think that the way to handle this better might be to have the page "Henry I Fowler" (to pick a specific example), and then have "Henry the Fowler" redirect to it, but that concerns me a bit because of ambiguity. If two people have the same common name, redirects are not going to help.

I've also been putting in a bit on an explanatory note in articles where I though they were need. See Duke of Wellington and William of Orange as examples. -- Paul Drye

Most long phrases (e.g., Ich bin ein Berliner; the most remarkable formula in the world) shouldn't contain capitalized words.

'Ich bin ein Berliner' is really silly example - it contains capitalized word --Taw

Correctly so because German nouns are always capitalized. --Eclecticology

Discussions on Nomenclature

Moved from article for discussion:
=== When all else fails ===

These conventions don't resolve all naming questions -- sometimes there is more than one "correct" answer. Some words have more than one widely used spelling: Mohammad vs Muhammed, civilization vs civilisation, honour vs honor. Or maybe Ural Mountains vs Ural mountains: is it a proper name or not? In this case it makes no difference which option is chosen, but there are a few things to consider:

*Always list variant spellings at the beginning of the article, if you can think of them. This helps with searching. *Always create redirections for the other variants if they are small in number. This helps to avoid duplicate articles. *Never move an article from one variant to another, unless you are more or less rewriting it. This is pointless work and may be irritating to the person who created the article.

What is important is what the majority of current English speakers will recognize. Therefore Mohammed should be the redirect and Muhammad should be the article (see naming conventions). The "Ural Mountains" example has already been discussed - if the second or subsequent words are not always capitalized, then the convention is to use lower case naming (see naming conventions).

I agree with the varient spellings part and the redirection of varients to the main article. However if a varient is used for the name of an article and not the correctly named article (per naming conventions) then the artilce should be moved and all the broken redirects fixed. For the reasons why please see my responses on Talk:Linda Lovelace and User talk:maveric149. --maveric149

I don't think it's practical to decide what the majority of English speakers recognise, but Muhammed and Mohammad are both very common. I agree that incorrectly named articles should be moved. --Anon

It is practical to decide what the majority of English speakers will recognize -- although not always easy. What is needed is some experience on how the term is commonly used along with making sure that you name articles in a disambiguous manor while trying to preserve easy linking, and also to use Google if you get stuck. Search for both varients and see which one comes up with the most hits (looking for hits that only have the exact term as part of the title of the page is best -- otherwise you might get more hits for Urals vs Ural mountains., for example -- Urals is more ambiguous than Ural mountains and therefore violates another rule) --maveric149

Commonly used variants should be acceptable even if not what the majority of web pages use, e.g., most web pages in English are probably written by people in the USA, so all British English variants are excluded automatically -- which is against some other Wikipedia policy I read somewhere else. --Anon.

The English/British spelling variation is a separate matter -- the agreed upon protocal (after much angst) is that the spelling that is first used wins and redirects take care of the alternate spellings. Therefore we have metre and picometer. The commonality of varients isn't always clear cut and discussion and consensus then has to be used with Google playing as a type of "objective" intermediary. In some cases this doesn't work very well since Google doesn't have the abiltiy (to my knowledge) to exclude non-English webpages. A place where this breaks down would be searching for the most correct spelling of the Dutchman Anton van Leeuwenhoek by searching against the alternate spelling of "Antoni van Leeuwenhoek". The second spelling gets a 1000 more hits but almost all of them are in Dutch. So this using Google is only part of the formula when working these things out. --maveric149

27/5/02 The convention says PREFER singular nouns, but isn't there a place for the plurals - in articles talking about a plural subject (eg.lists) If you are looking for say British fantasy authors[?], you are not going to look for it as British fantasy author (singular)[?] - it just doesn't make sense. Surely it's just as easy to make the redirect work the other way around in this case? Shouldn't simple logic play a part in how strictly the naming conventions are applied? If I see an article titled in the singular I expect it to BE singular (not about the plural), and vice versa ~ KJ

You do have a point but then one would have to write [[British fantasy authors|British fantasy author]] when trying to say that "X Smith was a British fantasy author[?]. I agree that redirects are great, but their presence isn't obvious and contributors will tend to either make edit links that don't link to the correct article or use torturous piping like in my example. The reason why the convention exists is to make linking easy and natural within an edit window of another article (this is the wiki way). However, I would suggest that as soon as a page titled British fantasy author[?] gets fleshed out into a decently sized article then the best thing to do would be to move the list to list of British fantasy authors[?] and have this list linked at the bottom of British fantasy author[?]. Any article with the word "list" in the title is going to be inherently plural so pluralization in this case is called for and appropriate. Come to think of it, we might decide that it is more gramatically correct to have author of British fantasy[?]. Then one could say that "X Smith is an author of British fantasy[?]" -- which I tend to like better (Argh! I already moved most of these author pages).--maveric149

Is there a policy on acented characters in page names, for example André Breton? I suggest making that the main page, and creating Andre Breton as a redirecting page. -- user:Tarquin

We try to do things the other way around in wikiland -- those damn yanks don't know how to make the accents and international characters with their keyboards and will assume direct links are needed to link to a page (redirects ain't obvious and the original author of any particular article hardly ever provides them). What the name of the page itself is called is more important for making internal linking as much of a no-brainer as possible and for gaining the largest number of Google hits (going back to the "damn Yanks" problem -- most searches on search engine for someones name will not have the accent and since search engines like Google rank pages partly based on whether the searched for name is part of the page title, "Andre Brenton" will rank higher and get more hits than "André Breton" since most netcitizens will be searching for "Andre Breton" and not "André Breton" -- even if "Andre Breton" is a redirect to "André Breton" the ranking will be lower because the only content of the non-accented title will be #REDIRECT [[André Breton]]). Of course, in the first line of the article and throughout use "André Breton". Please also see naming convention of use of English names.--maveric149

What's the convention for "juniors" (ie John F. Kennedy Jr.). ? --Robert Merkel

I don't think there is a set convention on that -- however John F. Kennedy Jr. looks fine to me. --mav

Isn't it common to use a comma, i.e. John F. Kennedy, Jr.? Or am I wrong here? Jheijmans 02:59 Jul 23, 2002 (PDT)

The standard University of Chicago Press Manual of Style gives the examples:

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

Adlai Stevenson III

So, comma for Junior, but not for the "royal" numbers. Ortolan88 21:54 Jul 24, 2002 (PDT)

Changing

So how, when and where were these decided? Can the discussion be reopened, or is all the discussion still going on on the Talk pages just filling of space and wasting of time?Andre Engels

These things are roughly worked out on the mailing list and specifics are decided on relevant talk pages. The city naming convention roughly had it's start on the mailing list with a general consensus that there should be consistency in naming within countries. As the specifics were being worked out the general convention on consistency was questioned by some. This particular convention may become disambiguation based in the same way the movie naming convention is now as a result. To a certain extent discussion technically can be reopened for any convention if/when a particular convention is no longer deemed useful but the longer a convention is in place the harder it is to change. We also shouldn't be changing conventions all the time because they then lose their usefullness and work previously done under an older convention will have to be fixed to follow the new. --mav

As I see, it the discussion on the list simply died out with no conclusive solution. However, when the naming conventions page was updated, I assumed there was a real decision made on the topic. In later talks, I found out that that was not the case.

I agree we should not keep challenging naming conventions when they are established, but we should establish them properly first. Since there doesn't appear to be a way to reason each other to the on or other solution, I propose a vote should be held to decide. When that has happened, I (and everybody else, hopefully) will obey the new convention, no matter the outcome.

Since there hasn't been a proper decision on the city naming conventions, and it is still hotly disputed (I know I'm not the only one against it), I propose a vote. We should try to notify everybody involved in any of these this discussions (and others interested) and have a vote. That is a nice democratic way to decide upon something which is never going to be settled in another way.

We should then close the subject, unless new and good reasons show up to decide for another solution. Jeronimo

we should refer to spacecraft from the USSR according to their Russian name-not according to the English name.

Roman numerals should be used when referring to spacecraft. Lir 07:09 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)

Would there be any objections if we changed the "Languages, both natural and programming" convention from: Programming languages should be suffixed with "programming language", and natural languages with "language", to:

Languages which share their names with some other thing should be suffixed with "programming languages" in the case of programming languages, and "language" in the case of natural languages. If the language's name is unique, there is no need for any suffix. For example, Python programming language and English language, but Visual Basic and Sanskrit.

(As an aside: I'd also like to think that eventually English language could be changed to English (language), as mav says at Talk:Sanskrit, but I don't think the pipe trick he refers to on that page is widely enough known for this to be such a great idea just at the moment - it does mean an extra pair of parenthesis to type for those who don't know the trick, after all). --Camembert

Well, no objections, so I'm changing the convention. I'll move pages that need to be moved as I come across them. --Camembert 00:25 Nov 29, 2002 (UTC)

on my way to add the pipe trick to the FAQ ... -- Tarquin 10:23 Nov 29, 2002 (UTC)

More discussion on this convention change is at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (languages)

Is there a convention about Arabic names? E.g. is it "Al Saud", "al Saud", "Al-Saud", or "al-Saud"...? "Bin" or "bin"...? Does it depend on the country of origin? -- Oliver Pereira 16:55 Nov 27, 2002 (UTC)

The "al" in this context simply means "the" and is used with proper nouns in Arabic when English would never think of doing so. "bin" or more correctly "ibn" refers to a patronymic. "abu" is for a kind of surname. AFAIK "al" is always written with a small "a" even when it begins a sentence; it is always followed by a hyphen. "Ibn" is always written with a small "i", but not when it begins a sentence; it isn't followed by a hyphen. "Abu" uses a capital and isn't followed by a hyphen. Eclecticology 01:48 Nov 29, 2002 (UTC)

What should lists of people be named? Famous boozers[?], List of boozers[?], List of noted boozers[?], or what? I favour List of boozers[?], myself -Martin

That view is consistent with the general trend on Wikipedia. Articles that seem to contradict this are often older articles that were never converted, or sometimes ones where the membership is so low that a list isn't warranted. Of course, sometimes there can be other exceptions. Eclecticology 19:05 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)

The article has a typo: acryonm. Someone with permission, please fix it. -- Heron

Fixed. Thanx for seeing that. --mav

I redirected topic creation here, since it was just duplicated content. Could someone remove the link there? Martin

done. --mav 20:07 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

Discussion moved to this page:

I have a problem with the naming of some of my articles. In the "Wikipedia naming convention" I could not find the answer. My problem is: In South Tyrol, Italy, we have two official languages. German and Italian. So, every city, every place, every mountain has two names. Two official names. What should the title of the article then be? e.g.: Bolzano / Bozen (but I have seen, the / is a problem in titles). BTW, the problem of which one comes first, italian or german, I am already afraid of that discussion... Thanks for your help, Fantasy 21:34 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)

Hm. We usually go by most common usage by English speakers but that is a bit difficult for small towns in countries where English isn't the first language. But searching all English language webpages on Google indicates that significantly more English speakers use Bolzano instead of Bozen. I'm not sure if this will be the case for all cities in that part of Italy... I know this is probably a political issue but for cities that do not have English name it makes the most sense to me to use the Italian names as a general rule since these are Italian cities (but there probably are cases were the German name is more commonly used by English speakers). I hope this helps. --mav

Only recently a University in Bozen was founded: http://www.unibz.it/ You can see there on the top for the language selection:

- Freie Universität Bozen

- Libera Universita di Bolzano

- Free University of Bozen - Bolzano

As you can see, the "english" name is "Bozen-Bolzano" Can I use that as a title, or is that not liked in Wikipedia? Thanks, Fantasy

Bozen - Bolzano looks perfectly acceptable to me. But this discussion should be moved to a place where more people interested in the outcome can see it. You can copy this thread to Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions. --mav

Great, thanks for your help, Fantasy

I do not agree with Bozen-Bolzano. This double name is just used, because the university did not want to prefer one name. But nobody would use it in this form. Encyclopaedia Britannica uses the Italian names for places in South Tyrol, where no english name exists. It appears natural to me to do it the same way. Or do you think, that a naming dispute about the article titles might arise (unfortunately quite common on Wikipedia)? In that case Bozen-Bolzano might be a compromise, but I still don't like it. -- Cordyph 22:40 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)

...you are not alone. I do not like it either, but there are two official names. Just for your information: In ~1920 Ettore Tolomei, an italian, started to translate the german names in italian names. Most of the names have been german. Even Families had to give up their german family name and translate it to italian. Now, after many years of fights south tyrol came to a status, where both names, the original ones and the new italian one are "at the same level", so who decides which one is the right one? Encyclopedia Britannica? See also http://zis.uibk.ac.at/stirol_doku/dokumente/19610214.html for information about the italianisation of South Tyrol. Sorry for the my way of writing, the argument is a little bit difficult and I am no english native speaker... Fantasy

Please add a language link [[sv:Wikipedia:Namngivning]]. Thanks! // Liftarn

There's a discussion of renaming the U.S. presidential election, 2000 page as well as all of the other U.S. presidential election pages going on in Talk:U.S. presidential election, 2000. The options being discussed are:

I'm leaning toward U.S. presidential election of 2000[?], but as long as we're talking about doing a bunch of work for 45(?) election articles, I'd like to make sure we do it just once. Any thoughts from this crowd? Should we be using "United States" instead of U.S.? -- RobLa 06:55 Mar 11, 2003 (UTC)

Perhaps it would be helpful (read: "a bloody nuisance") to separate some issues here, since some of them are quite general and would apply to a lot of articles:-

What, in general, are the conventions for using dots in abbreviations? Are they (a) useful for indicating abbreviations, or (b) redundant? Or does it depend on the context?
More specifically, how should the United States of America be referred to in titles? "United States"? "U.S."? "US"?
When do titles need to be capitalised? Is George W. Bush the President or the president?
What about derived adjectives - was his election Presidential or presidential?
How do we disambiguate regular events by year? With a comma, a colon, parentheses, or with "flowing prose"? Does this also depend on context?

Hmm, maybe I've over-complicated everything here, but these issues are bound to come up again and again, so the earlier we come up with some definite guidelines the better, I think... -- Oliver P. 04:16 Mar 12, 2003 (UTC)

for ", 2000" vs "of 2000", see wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (years in titles)

Naming convention fans may be interested to know that I've proposed a convention at the bottom of Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (pieces of music) which will be springing into action in a few days if there are no objections. You may, or may not, like to have a look at it. --Camembert

I'm going to move discussion of the correct title of the (US/U.S.) war in/on/against Iraq to Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Iraq war). Martin

Anybody interested see Talk:Gangsta rap, which I would like to move to gangsta hip hop for reasons described there. Tuf-Kat

I want to establish a convention for names of military units, in particular those identified by generic names and numbers, such as 1st Infantry Division. These designations are highly ambiguous, since many countries of the world use them. Options are basically Bulgarian 1st Infantry Division[?], 1st Infantry Division (Bulgaria)[?], or 1st Infantry Division, Bulgaria[?]. The first "reads" better, but the adjectives are awkward for some countries, the second is more of a wikipedia standard, but will almost always need pipe-trickery, and the third will read OK sometimes, but is idiosyncratic and not often seen. Preferences? Stan 05:49 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

The first one seems better on first sight, but I'd like to see wider discussion, with examples, before I make up my mind completely. Tannin

Should the ampersand (&) be on the list of discouraged characters? It's listed there in the "for technical reasons" section, but I know I've seen it in article titles, sometimes even with the same title with "and" spelled out redirected to one with the ampersand in it, e.g. Jesus and Mary Chain. Is this in anticipation of using it for something else, or should it be removed from the list there? -- John Owens 22:23 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

We went to some trouble to get the ampersand to work (see patch (http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/wikipedia/phase3/maintenance/apache-ampersand.diff?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup) to apache.) So we can have AT&T and whatnot. Be careful with it, though; if you put it next to something that looks like a named character entity it might not do what you expect. --Brion 23:45 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)