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# Naming conventions/Talk

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I think for works the detour wouldn't be the worst thing. See Orson Welles for the why and how.

Maybe we should also add a suggestion to make subdirectory links prettier (basically that means hiding the /). See Chess

Q: Should you link every occurance of a term or just the first one in an article?

A. I'm in favor of link the first occurence in an article and then any one in the 'see also' section at the end of the article.

A2. I think we should link the first occurrence, any one in the 'see also' and maybe one more, if it seems sensible for some reason. I also think that we should spell 'occurrence' in as many different ways as possible. ;-) --Jimbo Wales

Q2: If this system is on a UNIX box, is it possible to shell out and do a 'spell' as an option from the page? I concur, it should be required to spell occurrence in a unique way each time it is used :) .

Q: When linking to city or town names, especially with names where there may be another city or town with the same name and spelling in another state or country (i.e., Paris, France and Paris, Texas), what type of convention might we use? I understand that Paris, France would stand alone as Paris because it is a city of note. But, might we use Paris?, Texas to specify this particular town in Texas? -- Invictus

I think "least surprize" should be the guiding principle here. This implies several things: first, that disambiguating pages should list things in the likely order of significance. For example, the "Paris" page should have links to the French city, the Texas city, and the mythological figure, in that order. Second, when one mentions a subject in another page, it should link directly to the most specific page. For example, the "Macbeth" link on the Orson Welles page should link directly to a page specific to his movie, not to the play or other movies or to the disambiguating page. The text of the link, however, should be whatever makes sense in context; i.e., in a list of Welles' works, the link text should just be "Macbeth", but its destination should be "Macbeth (Orson Welles film)" (Let's get those parentesized titles working!). Similarly, if one is writing about Helen of Troy, the name "Paris" should appear unadorned to make the text read smoothly, but it should be linked directly to "Paris (mythological figure)". --Lee Daniel Crocker

I don't think the principle of "least surprise" implies that we should make Paris a links page. I think it implies that we should make Paris about Paris, France, and also, on that page, include links to [Paris, Texas]? and wherever else. Bear in mind, though, that pretty soon we're going to be able to use parentheses in titles, and all of this will be moot (thank god). --LMS

It might be tempting to write about Paris, Texas on a page named Texas/Paris?, i.e. a subpage to the entry on Texas, because that city lies entirely within the state of Texas. In this case, Texas could also be a subpage to the United States, which might be a subpage to the North American continent. At some level this hierarchical structure gets very ridiculous, so where should the line be drawn? The state of California has been part of USA since 1850, but was earlier a part of Mexico. Some cities in Europe have belonged to different nations during history, so the hierarchical approach is not universally useful.

  I totally agree with this. I was going to label a link [Genoa, Italy]?, when I remembered that Genoa existed for quite a while before Italy per se existed. :-) Generally speaking, when we--very soon, now!--upload the latest UseModWiki software to the server, we'll be able to use parentheses, and some of these sorts of troubles will be over. Then it will be a question whether we want to label the page "Paris (Texas)" or "Paris, Texas." And we will still probably not want to label the page "Genoa (Italy)"--though, given that there are probably several other noteworthy (to some extent) Genoas around the world...well, we can use parentheses for those Genoas, and leave the main old Genoa unparenthesized. --LMS

When writing that Albert Einstein was a physicist (see Albert Einstein, physicist, scientist, Biography, and Biography/Talk for this discussion) it was tempting to create a link to a page listing various physicists through history, and pointing out that all physicists are also scientists. One issue is whether these pages should have pluralized names (addressed above). Another issue is whether the structure or catalog of professions should be created before we start writing biographies of other scientists, like a coordinate system is drawn before the data points are plotted. Such catalogs could be: professions, academic disciplines, timelines (like the excellent one on geologic ages), families of biological species, types of organic chemic substances, etc. The risk with such an approach is that the catalogs will dominate over the substance contents (Yahoo without the Internet). The risk with not taking such an approach is that a lot of useful links will be missing from entries (the Internet without Yahoo).

Any thoughts?

  Hmm, only occasionally have I been a bit bothered when someone has put up a long list of links without full sentences about the subject of the article. Yes, I don't think Wikipedia should be a list of links, external or internal. On the other hand, lists of links are great and absolutely necessary in a hypertext encyclopedia, so we gotta have 'em. I just think we should discourage the idea that an adequate article might consist just of the links. E.g., I still think actress should address the phenomena that are actresses, and not just give a list of actresses (as if people visiting the "actress" page were interested only in finding their favorite actress.

  My conclusion is that unless there's a really striking problem (as, in my opinion, the existence of many mere-dictionary type entries was becoming), it's not worth it to discourage anyone from doing anything. The beauty of Wikipedia is that, by being open to all manner of contributions, everyone wants to contribute. It's great that way. --LMS

How should acronyms and similar constructs be handled?

One approach would handle them like this

          Entry: CPU
          +- - - - - - -
          |CPU - [central processing unit]?
          |

Another would be to

          Entry: CPU
          +- - - - - - -
          |#REDIRECT [central processing unit]?

          Entry: Central_processing_unit
          +- - - - - - -
          |Central Processing Unit (CPU)

that is, the acronym redirects to the main page, and is displayed in an on-page title; in this scenerio, only acronyms with multiple definitions would be handled as in the first case:

          Entry: CPU
          +- - - - - - -
          |CPU - [central processing unit]?
          |
          |cpu - cerebrially pleasant ungent

Finally, should it be that all (but horribly complex) acronyms simply define the expansion and link to a main page? For example, right now "GUI" is the main page and "graphical user interface" links back to it.

--loh

  MHO is that acronym pages should, in most cases, be mere pointers to other fully-spelled-out pages. APA? means many different things, and many of those things will have encyclopedia articles, sure. (Some meanings of acronyms, however, won't, and in that case, there's no point in our listing those senses, because we aren't going to have encyclopedia pages about those senses. I shall explain on Larry Sanger soon, I think... --LMS

  This seems right to me, although it is worth noting the exceptions. I think that WYSIWYG, for instance, has become a word unto itself. --Janet Davis

  I agree with the "word unto itself" argument, especially for things like the programming languages Algol, COBOL, FORTRAN, perl, etc. Also the POSIX standard, and even Unix itself. Each of these have not simply become "words unto themselves" but are the official names of something. I doubt if one person in one hundred knows or cares that the names are acronyms. There are also a lot of jargon words which are acronyms; "modem", "radio", and "RADAR" come to mind. Further, just what kind of "main title" would you use. Most sensible thing seems to be to use the the acronym as the entry and include the expansion in the article (but not as a link).

  OTOH, the link "Ada" should lead to a disambiguating page (as I write, it is about the Ada programming language. There are at least three things it should point to (not in any particular order). They are the Americans with disabilities act; the Ada programming language; "Ada" as a proper name (no link, possibly omitted); and the Lady Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, generally referred to as Lady Ada Lovelace. --buzco

I ran into this editing DMCA and Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I created a section above based on my own take of what's going on.
<>< tbc

Q. Plural links. In Naming conventions, the example shows crayon?s (as in `[[crayon]]s`), but some editors modify these to crayons? (as in `[[crayon|crayons]]`), look at the first two revisions of Pyramid, where pharaohs was changed to `[[pharaoh|pharaohs]]`. I personally prefer the former. Should we set a convention here and stick to it? (to be explicitely added to the 'Prefer singular nouns' paragraph in Naming conventions) --Gerald Squelart

A. KQ's opinion: What it seems to me happened is that a contributor didn't like the look of a word which was partly linked and so caused it to display otherwise, in much the same way as the `[[crayon|crayons]]` example above. That doesn't change the link itself, or the title of the page that it will link to or allow to be created, just how it displays. Personally I don't mind it if a word is only partly linked; I've done it with for instance European in some entries, and I think it's easily enough changed if it does bother someone. I'd be interested to hear other opinions on the subject.

  I think that partially linked words are deeply unattractive! What's the use of an interface if it can't hide some of the functions from you, the way pharaohs does? On the other hand, people who use partial links are giving neurotics like me something to do when we don't feel like writing a new entry. --MichaelTinkler

  The problem being that other kinds of neurotics like me will want to change things back the way we like it (and the way I wrote it first :-)! Let me just explain my point of view: I believe links shouldn't be hidden under a different name. So, if I click 'pharaohs', I'd expect to go to a page name 'Pharaohs', not 'Pharaoh'. I know, it's not much different, but hey. I didn't want to change the pyramid page back because I felt it may end up in a kind of war, where the page is modified every five minutes back and forth between both styles, it's just counter-productive! Michael, to satisfy your cravings, you may want to modify the link to tetrominoes in the Tetris page :)) But seriously, I'd prefer you refrain from doing it, until we conclude something here, pleeez! Other inputs welcome... --Gerald Squelart
  Oh well, it seems nothing can stop Michael in his crusade (see World Wide Web), so I give up.

The page talks about preferring free links, but it doesn't encourage or discourage converting existing old-style links into free links whenever one runs into them. I see several possibilities:

1. Leave existing old style links as they are.

2. Rename existing old style links into pseudo-free-links: they look like free links, but point at the page named according to the old convention.

3. Rename existing old style links into free links, relocated pages named in old style to new pages named in new style.

4. Do that *and* find all pointers to the old-style name and change them.

I like to convert them and all references to them. --KQ

Should English plural English singular or Latin plural be used as taxonomical names ?

Example: Therapsid vs. Therapsids vs. Therapsida

Any preferences?

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