Hi,
I'm quite severely disturbed by the apparent habit of participants in some WikiProjects to completely disregard Wikipedia's Manual of Style and various guidelines, claiming that their pet WikiProject has their own pet style guidelines, as if Wikipedia's global guidelines have no say anyway.
Is this really how things are going now? Articles on topic X follow a certain style while articles on topic Y follow a completely different style?
Case in question: So far it seemed to me that Wikipedia uses brackets after article titles *only* when they are required for disambiguating between otherwise identical article titles. Hence, there is the title [[Cher (département)]] but not [[Haute-Corse (département)]].
However, the Star Trek WikiProject has now randomly decided that this rule needs to go, and all articles on Star Trek episodes must have an extra parenthesis showing what series it's an episode of, even though most of the titles are unique as they are. Hence, [[Hide and Q]] is a redirect to [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)]], and all links to such pages unnessarily look like this: [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)|Hide and Q]].
Add to this the fact that outside of Star Trek fandom, readers aren't likely to know what TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT mean anyway.
What is everybody's opinion on this?
Timwi
Timwi stated for the record:
and all links to such pages unnessarily look like this: [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)|Hide and Q]].
What is everybody's opinion on this?
That redirect is indeed unnecessary, since [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)|]] (the "pipe trick") would do just as well ... or poorly.
On 13/06/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Hi,
I'm quite severely disturbed by the apparent habit of participants in some WikiProjects to completely disregard Wikipedia's Manual of Style and various guidelines, claiming that their pet WikiProject has their own pet style guidelines, as if Wikipedia's global guidelines have no say anyway.
Is this really how things are going now? Articles on topic X follow a certain style while articles on topic Y follow a completely different style?
Case in question: So far it seemed to me that Wikipedia uses brackets after article titles *only* when they are required for disambiguating between otherwise identical article titles. Hence, there is the title [[Cher (département)]] but not [[Haute-Corse (département)]].
However, the Star Trek WikiProject has now randomly decided that this rule needs to go, and all articles on Star Trek episodes must have an extra parenthesis showing what series it's an episode of, even though most of the titles are unique as they are. Hence, [[Hide and Q]] is a redirect to [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)]], and all links to such pages unnessarily look like this: [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)|Hide and Q]].
Add to this the fact that outside of Star Trek fandom, readers aren't likely to know what TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT mean anyway.
What is everybody's opinion on this?
[[Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK Parliament constituencies]] has a lot of discussion on this; the project was a crash project to create a standard useful stub article for every UK constituency in about three weeks (which succeeded), and (mostly) went with a policy of naming every page [[Constituency (UK Parliament constituency)]] (or Scottish Parliament, as the case may be). There was a bit of heated debate at the time, which was mostly dealt with by the reasonable enough "look, can we come back to this after the election?"
The current debate is down at the bottom of that page; one point which may be of use in your context is the idea of standard redirects.
ie - whatever page "Hide and Q" ends up at, have a redirect page at Hide and Q (TNG episode). This means that if you're writing an article and want to link to it you don't have to go and check if it's listed as "Hide and Q", or "Hide and Q (episode)", or "Hide and Q (Star Trek episode)"... which is often one of the reasons to use standard page titles, for linking simplicity.
Andrew Gray stated for the record:
On 13/06/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
What is everybody's opinion on this?
ie - whatever page "Hide and Q" ends up at, have a redirect page at Hide and Q (TNG episode). This means that if you're writing an article and want to link to it you don't have to go and check if it's listed as "Hide and Q", or "Hide and Q (episode)", or "Hide and Q (Star Trek episode)"... which is often one of the reasons to use standard page titles, for linking simplicity.
Similarly, WikiProject Ships includes the hull number or pennant number in every ship's name, regardless of whether the ship's name is unique or not. The article is [[USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76)]], even though [[USS Ronald Reagan]] (or even [[USS Reagan]]) would not be ambiguous.
Case in question: So far it seemed to me that Wikipedia uses brackets after article titles *only* when they are required for disambiguating between otherwise identical article titles. Hence, there is the title [[Cher (département)]] but not [[Haute-Corse (département)]].
I think you've picked a pretty bad example here. It's hardly a hard and fast rule, and there's many circumstances when it's been seen as *much* easier for the parties involved to auto-disambiguate, as with US and Australian towns.
However, the Star Trek WikiProject has now randomly decided that this rule needs to go, and all articles on Star Trek episodes must have an extra parenthesis showing what series it's an episode of, even though most of the titles are unique as they are. Hence, [[Hide and Q]] is a redirect to [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)]], and all links to such pages unnessarily look like this: [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)|Hide and Q]].
This could, indeed, be a problem, if there were any "rule" in the first place that they "randomly decided" needed to go. I can't see any problem with it, if that's the consensus of the editors involved - they're the ones who generally have to link to the articles.
Add to this the fact that outside of Star Trek fandom, readers aren't likely to know what TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT mean anyway.
As long as they're covered by an appropriate redirect, I really don't see the issue at all.
-- ambi
On 6/14/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
I'm quite severely disturbed by the apparent habit of participants in some WikiProjects to completely disregard Wikipedia's Manual of Style and various guidelines, claiming that their pet WikiProject has their own pet style guidelines, as if Wikipedia's global guidelines have no say anyway.
Is this really how things are going now? Articles on topic X follow a certain style while articles on topic Y follow a completely different style?
I would congratulate the WikiProjects for doing the sensible thing and avoiding any possible ambiguity before it can occur.
Taking your example, it might be "easier" to put Hide and Q at [[Hide and Q]]. But someone looking for that episode will either follow a link there or type it into the search box, either way they'll find it. And people who come across it randomly will know from the title exactly what it is. An episode of TNG, even though they don't know what TNG is.
I agree with Gdr, specialities have their own naming conventions, for very good reasons.
Timwi wrote:
I'm quite severely disturbed by the apparent habit of participants in some WikiProjects to completely disregard Wikipedia's Manual of Style and various guidelines, claiming that their pet WikiProject has their own pet style guidelines, as if Wikipedia's global guidelines have no say anyway.
I've recently come across a couple of examples of something like this this too, on Wikiproject Cricket. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cricket_subcategories directly contains all subcategories of Category:Cricket in it, for use by wikiproject members who want a list of categories to search when categorizing new aticles. My attempts to either replace this with a plain old list page or to move the category tags into talk pages (in accordance with the category guidelines suggesting that "meta" categories should go on talk pages) were vigorously opposed by Wikiproject members. I let the issue lie for a few months since it didn't seem in any way urgent and monitoring the category's usage over that time has been useful.
More recently, there's been a bunch of arguing over the usage of transclusion in articles relating to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2005_English_cricket_season, in this case articles on individual cricket matches are being transcluded into larger articles that group them on various different criteria. I've been arguing that instead of transclusions they should be ordinary links, since this is the practice with other similar groups of articles on Wikipedia (and other reasons I won't go into here. I raised the issue at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28policy%29#Unusual_transclusion_issue_not_covered_by_policy and was told there was also previous discussion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Template_namespace#transcluding_prose). I'm more worried about this one because subst:ing the transcluded article text could result in a very difficult situation to reverse if it turns out to be a bad approach.
Wikiprojects are excellent for bringing standardized style and organization to subject areas, but I find it trouble when this starts going in a different direction from the style and organization of Wikipedia as a whole. Wikipedia is supposed to be a general reference work, people will be reading it for all manner of different subject areas and if each subject area is organized differently it'll make it harder to follow (as well as looking more like a hodgepodge). I'm not sure that there needs to be a policy specifically about this, though; in theory it should be enough that Wikipedia's general style guide applies to all articles. In practice, it can be difficult to go against the desires of organized voting blocks like this because by definition they're more interested in these particular articles than other editors are. Not sure how to balance these things out. Perhaps we could start some sort of "WikiProject Wikipedia" dedicated to improving consistency and organization throughout the project as a whole? Seems kind of redundant, somehow.
On 6/14/05, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Timwi wrote:
I'm quite severely disturbed by the apparent habit of participants in some WikiProjects to completely disregard Wikipedia's Manual of Style and various guidelines, claiming that their pet WikiProject has their own pet style guidelines, as if Wikipedia's global guidelines have no say anyway.
I've recently come across a couple of examples of something like this this too, on Wikiproject Cricket. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cricket_subcategories directly contains all subcategories of Category:Cricket in it, for use by wikiproject members who want a list of categories to search when categorizing new aticles. My attempts to either replace this with a plain old list page or to move the category tags into talk pages (in accordance with the category guidelines suggesting that "meta" categories should go on talk pages) were vigorously opposed by Wikiproject members. I let the issue lie for a few months since it didn't seem in any way urgent and monitoring the category's usage over that time has been useful.
More recently, there's been a bunch of arguing over the usage of transclusion in articles relating to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2005_English_cricket_season, in this case articles on individual cricket matches are being transcluded into larger articles that group them on various different criteria. I've been arguing that instead of transclusions they should be ordinary links, since this is the practice with other similar groups of articles on Wikipedia (and other reasons I won't go into here. I raised the issue at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28policy%29#Unusual_transclusion_issue_not_covered_by_policy and was told there was also previous discussion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Template_namespace#transcluding_prose). I'm more worried about this one because subst:ing the transcluded article text could result in a very difficult situation to reverse if it turns out to be a bad approach.
Wikiprojects are excellent for bringing standardized style and organization to subject areas, but I find it trouble when this starts going in a different direction from the style and organization of Wikipedia as a whole. Wikipedia is supposed to be a general reference work, people will be reading it for all manner of different subject areas and if each subject area is organized differently it'll make it harder to follow (as well as looking more like a hodgepodge). I'm not sure that there needs to be a policy specifically about this, though; in theory it should be enough that Wikipedia's general style guide applies to all articles. In practice, it can be difficult to go against the desires of organized voting blocks like this because by definition they're more interested in these particular articles than other editors are. Not sure how to balance these things out. Perhaps we could start some sort of "WikiProject Wikipedia" dedicated to improving consistency and organization throughout the project as a whole? Seems kind of redundant, somehow. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
I agree with your concerns with these cricket articles. It's fair enough for specialist WikiProjects to override global *guidelines*, things like naming conventions are the best example, but overriding global *policy*, like Wikipedia:Subpages, etc, is a Bad Thing.
Bryan Derksen wrote:
Timwi wrote:
I'm quite severely disturbed by the apparent habit of participants in some WikiProjects to completely disregard Wikipedia's Manual of Style and various guidelines, claiming that their pet WikiProject has their own pet style guidelines, as if Wikipedia's global guidelines have no say anyway.
I've recently come across a couple of examples of something like this this too, on Wikiproject Cricket. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cricket_subcategories directly contains all subcategories of Category:Cricket in it, for use by wikiproject members who want a list of categories to search when categorizing new aticles. My attempts to either replace this with a plain old list page or to move the category tags into talk pages (in accordance with the category guidelines suggesting that "meta" categories should go on talk pages) were vigorously opposed by Wikiproject members. I let the issue lie for a few months since it didn't seem in any way urgent and monitoring the category's usage over that time has been useful.
As a followup "where are things now" sort of thing, here's what happened. After I mentioned category:cricket subcategories here, it was put up for deletion by User:Thebainer. I had been hoping to wait for six months or so before putting it up for deletion again, the last time was only four months earlier. It failed the vote again, with Grutness voting keep because "they seem to be keener on using the category, so I'm swayed towards supporting a keep here." and Ngb voting keep because "This is, as previously discussed in a recent CfD for the same category, an invaluable tool for participants in the Cricket Wikiproject http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Cricket. Conversion to a list is unsuitable as the list would need to be manually updated every time a new category was developed."
I still maintain that this category is in violation of Wikipedia guidelines, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization#Wikipedia_namespace states "Categories relating to the Wikipedia namespace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Project_namespace should be added only to the talk page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Talk_page of articles. For example, tags suggesting the article is needs work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:To_do, or is listed on VfD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VFD would be placed on the talk page as they are relevant to editors, not an aid to browsing in the way ordinary categories are." So in accordance with that, I went ahead and started moving the category tags over to the category_tak: pages.
I got as far as the "C"s before User:Calsicol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Calsicolcame along and reverted all the work I'd done. He said "You seem to be an American, and your page gives no indication that you have any interest in cricket. Thank you." While it is true that I have no particular interest in cricket, this strikes me as being exactly the sort of problem that this thread was talking about; it doesn't _matter_ that I have no particular interest in cricket (and although I'm not actually American, it wouldn't matter if I was either). I have an interest in making sure the category system on Wikipedia is being used in a nice and tidy manner, which gives me just as much reason to be changing this setup as someone who's a rabid cricket fan.
Anyway, I guess I'll let the issue drop again for another couple of months and come back to it. I still have the 2005 cricket season subcategory thing to work on, I expect that'll draw a lot of ire when I start actually changing things too.
Bryan Derksen wrote:
an invaluable tool for participants in the Cricket Wikiproject http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Cricket.
Ack. I didn't realize that Thunderbird would preserve the links in copy-and-pasted text when told to send email as text only, sorry about the excessive linkage.
I for one (despite being a cricket cabalist) agree with you on the category thing. I don't quite understand the reasoning for the cricket subcategories category. I actually intend to undertake a major review of cricket categories very soon, so I'll discuss the point then.
However, I do in general disagree that policy (or at least guideline) couldn't be bypassed when it is for the best for the encyclopdia as a whole. That should be our target, not slaveishly following guidelines for their own sake.
Sam
On 6/25/05, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Bryan Derksen wrote:
Timwi wrote:
I'm quite severely disturbed by the apparent habit of participants in some WikiProjects to completely disregard Wikipedia's Manual of Style and various guidelines, claiming that their pet WikiProject has their own pet style guidelines, as if Wikipedia's global guidelines have no say anyway.
I've recently come across a couple of examples of something like this this too, on Wikiproject Cricket. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cricket_subcategories directly contains all subcategories of Category:Cricket in it, for use by wikiproject members who want a list of categories to search when categorizing new aticles. My attempts to either replace this with a plain old list page or to move the category tags into talk pages (in accordance with the category guidelines suggesting that "meta" categories should go on talk pages) were vigorously opposed by Wikiproject members. I let the issue lie for a few months since it didn't seem in any way urgent and monitoring the category's usage over that time has been useful.
As a followup "where are things now" sort of thing, here's what happened. After I mentioned category:cricket subcategories here, it was put up for deletion by User:Thebainer. I had been hoping to wait for six months or so before putting it up for deletion again, the last time was only four months earlier. It failed the vote again, with Grutness voting keep because "they seem to be keener on using the category, so I'm swayed towards supporting a keep here." and Ngb voting keep because "This is, as previously discussed in a recent CfD for the same category, an invaluable tool for participants in the Cricket Wikiproject http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Cricket. Conversion to a list is unsuitable as the list would need to be manually updated every time a new category was developed."
I still maintain that this category is in violation of Wikipedia guidelines, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization#Wikipedia_namespace states "Categories relating to the Wikipedia namespace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Project_namespace should be added only to the talk page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Talk_page of articles. For example, tags suggesting the article is needs work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:To_do, or is listed on VfD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VFD would be placed on the talk page as they are relevant to editors, not an aid to browsing in the way ordinary categories are." So in accordance with that, I went ahead and started moving the category tags over to the category_tak: pages.
I got as far as the "C"s before User:Calsicol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Calsicolcame along and reverted all the work I'd done. He said "You seem to be an American, and your page gives no indication that you have any interest in cricket. Thank you." While it is true that I have no particular interest in cricket, this strikes me as being exactly the sort of problem that this thread was talking about; it doesn't _matter_ that I have no particular interest in cricket (and although I'm not actually American, it wouldn't matter if I was either). I have an interest in making sure the category system on Wikipedia is being used in a nice and tidy manner, which gives me just as much reason to be changing this setup as someone who's a rabid cricket fan.
Anyway, I guess I'll let the issue drop again for another couple of months and come back to it. I still have the 2005 cricket season subcategory thing to work on, I expect that'll draw a lot of ire when I start actually changing things too. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Sam Korn wrote:
However, I do in general disagree that policy (or at least guideline) couldn't be bypassed when it is for the best for the encyclopdia as a whole. That should be our target, not slaveishly following guidelines for their own sake.
Oh, I agree with that, especially for guidelines. However, in this particular case I figured "there must be something wrong with this" back when I first stumbled across the category and only later when it turned into a debate did I go around and find the specific guidelines that I felt applied here. Even if there were no guidelines on this subject I'd still be arguing that this isn't IMO an appropriate category to have in the main category network.
Bryan Derksen wrote:
I still maintain that this category is in violation of Wikipedia guidelines, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization#Wikipedia_namespace states "Categories relating to the Wikipedia namespace should be added only to the talk page of articles." So in accordance with that, I went ahead and started moving the category tags over to the category_tak: pages. I got as far as the "C"s before User:Calsicol came along and reverted all the work I'd done.
If you need a helping hand, I'll help, because I agree with you. By letting Calsicol revert you and by walking away from it, you are letting them win. :)
Just let me know. Timwi
Timwi wrote:
If you need a helping hand, I'll help, because I agree with you. By letting Calsicol revert you and by walking away from it, you are letting them win. :)
That's okay, I'm not walking away in "defeat." I'm a patient editor, I was planning to come back to the issue in a couple of months and try again in the hopes that more of those who were dead-set against my opinion had lost interest or changed their minds. I don't want to turn this into a revert war, especially when there are much more productive and important issues to deal with first.
Does anyone know where I can find a list of new features that MediaWiki 1.5 will have? If there's something in there that would allow for whole category trees to be viewed, that might be enough to satisfy those who argue that adding category tags to talk pages or to a manually-updated list page is too much work (as opposed to the hundreds of reverts that had to be done to undo my attempt to change this to a talk-page category, which apparently _weren't_ too much work to do manually :).
This is a rather specific comment, but I heavily support this sort of thing for works of fiction in general. I think making it VERY explicit -- i.e. in the title of an article -- that a given description of events is a work of imagination rather than some sort of factual account is always a good idea. It would be easy enough to have the link [[Hide and Q]] be a redirect to [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)]], which it probably is, if there is no need for a disambig. But I understand that might be the pet peeve of a historian!
One of the most humorous things I ever came across in Wikipedia edit histories and talk pages -- I think in the article on [[Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki]] -- was somebody who had, quite earnestly and accidentally, used an image from "The Onion" as an illustration (it was from their fake "old newspaper" style bits they run, with a picture of the Nagasaki mushroom cloud and the headline "U.S. BOMBS THE LIVING CRAP OUT OF JAPAN" or something like that). Some discussion ensued over it being a good illustration when finally, a week or so later, realized that "The Onion" is a humor magazine and not actually a historical news source, and removed it. Embarassment and apologies all around! Good reading for me, a year or two in the future.
I don't present this as representative, but it is, in a sense, akin to the confusion I'd hope to dispel. I realize, however, that my desire to "mark" all cartoon characters with little badges of (cartoon character) might be seen as some sort of horrible realist segregation scheme... which it might be, honestly. Hmm.
FF
On 6/13/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Hi,
I'm quite severely disturbed by the apparent habit of participants in some WikiProjects to completely disregard Wikipedia's Manual of Style and various guidelines, claiming that their pet WikiProject has their own pet style guidelines, as if Wikipedia's global guidelines have no say anyway.
Is this really how things are going now? Articles on topic X follow a certain style while articles on topic Y follow a completely different style?
Case in question: So far it seemed to me that Wikipedia uses brackets after article titles *only* when they are required for disambiguating between otherwise identical article titles. Hence, there is the title [[Cher (département)]] but not [[Haute-Corse (département)]].
However, the Star Trek WikiProject has now randomly decided that this rule needs to go, and all articles on Star Trek episodes must have an extra parenthesis showing what series it's an episode of, even though most of the titles are unique as they are. Hence, [[Hide and Q]] is a redirect to [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)]], and all links to such pages unnessarily look like this: [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)|Hide and Q]].
Add to this the fact that outside of Star Trek fandom, readers aren't likely to know what TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT mean anyway.
What is everybody's opinion on this?
Timwi
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
I thought categories were for rational organization? In any event, I don't consider categories very explicit -- at least in the Monobook skin, they are at the BOTTOM of the page, the LAST thing available to the reader. I like my nonsense to be labeled in a bright neon sign, if possible. But I understand this to be a somewhat undefendable bias of sorts.
FF
On 6/14/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Fastfission wrote:
I think making it VERY explicit -- i.e. in the title of an article -- that a given description of events is a work of imagination rather than some sort of factual account is always a good idea.
But that's what categories are for.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Fastfission wrote:
I thought categories were for rational organization?
But that is exactly what you're trying to use the article title for. Or what else do you mean by rational organisation?
at least in the Monobook skin, they are at the BOTTOM of the page
Right, so of course we must move them into the article titles, rather than just simply modifying the Monobook skin so that they're at the top, like I've always advocated (and indeed achieved with my user CSS/JS).
Timwi
But that is exactly what you're trying to use the article title for. Or what else do you mean by rational organisation?
Taxonomy. Titles are for the "species" or even "sub-species" level of information, to use a biological metaphor, whereas categories can be used for a wide variety of classification -- from the very broad to the very specific. Additionally, categories are a much fuzzier type of classification -- they can include information from widely different types of domains. What I'm arguing for is using some sort of way to clearly and instantly designate fictional content from non-fictional (one could imagine a less intrusive "fiction" template that would do the same thing, if designed well). I see these as being separate functions with separate effects. (Again, I'm not really making a major point of this; I think it would probably be an unpleasant precedent to actually start labeling all titles in a very literal fashion, and would loathe to clutter up non-fiction works with (non-fiction) in their title.)
Right, so of course we must move them into the article titles, rather than just simply modifying the Monobook skin so that they're at the top, like I've always advocated (and indeed achieved with my user CSS/JS).
Well, I disagree with this, for informational as well as aesthetic purposes, and think it in any event it is a separate discussion from the point I am trying to make. I think labeling something as fiction is of a higher level of importance than labeling all of the other various sets it could fall into, and the purpose of doing so would be quite different from the purpose of categories.
FF
Fastfission wrote:
Well, I disagree with this, for informational as well as aesthetic purposes, and think it in any event it is a separate discussion from the point I am trying to make. I think labeling something as fiction is of a higher level of importance than labeling all of the other various sets it could fall into, and the purpose of doing so would be quite different from the purpose of categories.
I disagree, but this whole subthread is a digression from the main point. You're suggesting that Wikipedia have a global guideline or policy of putting a parenthetical comment in the titles of articles about fictional things (In addition to Timwi's objection, the presence of a parenthetical phrase in a title would then have two completely different possible meanings which is IMO a bad idea) but the original subject was Wikiprojects that decide to disregard global Wikipedia policies in favor of their own "local" ones. If this suggestion were to be adopted as policy, what would we do about WikiProject Wormhole X-treme when it decides that _their_ policy is never to use parentheses in the titles of articles relating to that show?
I agree, it is subthread, one that I didn't think would go on this long, and again, I'm not seriously pushing for this. It was meant to be simply an extension of the idea of labeling episodes and other entries which were nothing more than descriptions of fictional events (i.e. plot re-caps). But again, I'm not really trying to push it as any global policy. I apologize for taking up space with this.
FF
P.S. I apologize for taking up space with this apology as well! P.S.S. I apologize for that last apology too! .... and so on! ;-)
On 6/14/05, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
I disagree, but this whole subthread is a digression from the main point. You're suggesting that Wikipedia have a global guideline or policy of putting a parenthetical comment in the titles of articles about fictional things (In addition to Timwi's objection, the presence of a parenthetical phrase in a title would then have two completely different possible meanings which is IMO a bad idea) but the original subject was Wikiprojects that decide to disregard global Wikipedia policies in favor of their own "local" ones. If this suggestion were to be adopted as policy, what would we do about WikiProject Wormhole X-treme when it decides that _their_ policy is never to use parentheses in the titles of articles relating to that show? _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
"Timwi" timwi@gmx.net wrote in message news:d8l02r$h92$1@sea.gmane.org... [heavy snippage...this paragraph should be representative I hope]
However, the Star Trek WikiProject has now randomly decided that this rule needs to go, and all articles on Star Trek episodes must have an extra parenthesis showing what series it's an episode of, even though most of the titles are unique as they are. Hence, [[Hide and Q]] is a redirect to [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)]], and all links to such pages unnessarily look like this: [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)|Hide and Q]]. What is everybody's opinion on this?
For me, this goes to the "principle of least astonishment".
The titles of many episodes are common phrases. It is not unlikely that someone might link to that phrase. It is a good thing that the default target for such a link is **not** a TV episode which happens to use it.
Phil Boswell wrote:
For me, this goes to the "principle of least astonishment".
The titles of many episodes are common phrases. It is not unlikely that someone might link to that phrase. It is a good thing that the default target for such a link is **not** a TV episode which happens to use it.
But in those cases wouldn't it be more appropriate to actually have an article about the common phrase? That way the normal disambiguation state kicks in and a parenthetical is warranted. Other episodes with titles that aren't common phrases wouldn't be disambiguated, but they also wouldn't be astonishing so they wouldn't need a special rule like this.
"Bryan Derksen" bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote in message news:42AF0E66.2080500@shaw.ca...
Phil Boswell wrote:
For me, this goes to the "principle of least astonishment". The titles of many episodes are common phrases. It is not unlikely that someone might link to that phrase. It is a good thing that the default target for such a link is **not** a TV episode which happens to use it.
But in those cases wouldn't it be more appropriate to actually have an article about the common phrase? That way the normal disambiguation state kicks in and a parenthetical is warranted. Other episodes with titles that aren't common phrases wouldn't be disambiguated, but they also wouldn't be astonishing so they wouldn't need a special rule like this.
Bryan he speak good sense :-)
Yes, I absolutely agree. The point being that if the link to such a common phrase comes up "blue", editors will assume that such an article already exists, whereas if it comes up "red" they might be inclined to go and write it.
Phil Boswell wrote:
Yes, I absolutely agree. The point being that if the link to such a common phrase comes up "blue", editors will assume that such an article already exists, whereas if it comes up "red" they might be inclined to go and write it.
Ah, I see - I'd thought you were arguing that _all_ episode titles should be disambiguated because some of them might be ambiguous. I certainly have no problem with disambiguating episode titles where an actual ambiguity exists, even preemptively disambiguating them before the other article exists isn't a bad idea. It was the idea of putting disambiguation parentheticals on all episode articles without exception that I had a problem with.