[Wikipedia-l] RE: movie naming convention

[Daniel Mayer]

>The policy should remain that first level of 
>disambiguation answers the question "what?" 
>rather than "when?". The 1932 movie "Scarface" 
>was based on the 1930 novel of the same name 
>by Armitage Trail.  It is not safe to assume 
>that just because you have [[Scarface (1930)]] 
>and [[Scarface (1932)]] the earlier one must be the
book.

I wasn't talking about having a (YEAR) convention for
novels (that would have to be discussed separately).
The issue here is that there are two movies with the
name; Sacarface -- thus we would have [[Scarface
(1932)]] and [[Scarface (1983)]]. If there is only one
novel by that name then that would be at either
[[Scarface (novel)]] or just [[Scarface]] (with a
disambiguation block on top -- my preference). If
there were only one movie by the name Scarface and
only one novel by that name, then to disambiguate the
movie from the novel we would have [[Scarface
(movie)]]. 

The whole point here is to have the minimum amount of
disambiguation information in order to distinguish one
thing from another (thus the word "movie" is not
needed to differentiate between the two movies with
the same name). 

A bonus of the (YEAR) convention is that this is
precisely the way movie titles are often written when
there are more than one movie that share a single name
(search Google for  "Scarface (1932)" and  "Scarface
(1983)"). This is seen in so many places that I would
call  "Scarface (1932)" a way to naturally
disambiguate movie titles when there are more than one
movie by the same name. 

In fact one contributor has titled many movie articles
in this very format without even knowing there was a
movie naming convention (so many, that if the current
convention is kept and if it is to be effective, then
all those pages will have to be moved to the
unnecessary (YEAR movie) format that will never be
linked without pipes). 

With the (YEAR) convention there is also less to type
since the word "movie" would not be used (as in (YEAR
movie) -- of course, (movie) would still be used when
needed to differentiate one movie from something else
that shares its name). 

In short, when two or more things have the same name
/and/ they are the same type of thing, then it is
perfectly reasonable to differentiate them based on a
temporal aspect.  

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)



__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com