Here is another case of something I mentioned to this mailing list some time ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Timwi&diff=104821425...
In a nutshell, the [[Wikipedia:WikiProject UK Parliament constituencies]] wants to add the parenthesis "(UK Parliament constituency)" to all constituency articles, even those that don't have ambiguous names and would therefore -- under the general naming convention rules -- not have the parenthesis.
These people feel they're completely in the right because they have a discussion to link to -- a discussion that took place on the WikiProject page. Since such a discussion cannot override a general rule such as the Naming Convention, how do I properly respond to this without causing an edit war (or move war)?
Timwi
On 2/1/07, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
These people feel they're completely in the right because they have a discussion to link to -- a discussion that took place on the WikiProject page. Since such a discussion cannot override a general rule such as the Naming Convention, how do I properly respond to this without causing an edit war (or move war)?
Tell them that you're pleased some Wikipedians actually managed to get together and agree on something.
Tell them that you've thought again about what they're doing, and have decided that since they're not agreeing to include original research, nor are they agreeing that it's ok for their articles to be unverifiable, nor are they agreeing that it's ok if they don't worry about NPOV, that it's really no big deal that they are agreeing about some absolutely trivial matter (even though it might be, in some people's opinions, not within the strict letter of a mere naming convention).
On 2/1/07, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/1/07, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
These people feel they're completely in the right because they have a discussion to link to -- a discussion that took place on the WikiProject page. Since such a discussion cannot override a general rule such as the Naming Convention, how do I properly respond to this without causing an edit war (or move war)?
Tell them that you're pleased some Wikipedians actually managed to get together and agree on something.
Tell them that you've thought again about what they're doing, and have decided that since they're not agreeing to include original research, nor are they agreeing that it's ok for their articles to be unverifiable, nor are they agreeing that it's ok if they don't worry about NPOV, that it's really no big deal that they are agreeing about some absolutely trivial matter (even though it might be, in some people's opinions, not within the strict letter of a mere naming convention).
-- Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com
I don't agree with you Stephen. The naming convention was created to avoid overly convoluted names. The places articles are located should be easy to link to.
We don't append "(US president)" to every president either. Because it's a pointless exercise. It doesn't achieve anything other than a lot of unneccesary work.
To overwrite a basic policy like that, you need much wider discussion anyway.
Mgm
On 2/1/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
I don't agree with you Stephen. The naming convention was created to avoid overly convoluted names. The places articles are located should be easy to link to.
In a series of many articles, *when the majority need disambiguation*, how is it not easier (in terms of browsing and linking) to keep all the titles in the same format, even the ones that don't need disambiguating?
Surely it's easier to know that for a given set of articles - and this is a clearly finite set of precisely 646 articles - the titles will all be in the same format. If the purpose of naming conventions is to ensure as much consistency as practicable, surely having all articles in a given finite set titled in the same fashion is the most consistent outcome possible?
The case would be different where only a small number of articles in the set needed disambiguation, or where the majority of articles in the set would be the primary disambiguation target (your US Presidents example fits this description).
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
[snip] The naming convention was created to avoid overly convoluted names. The places articles are located should be easy to link to.
The Naming Conventions are created to avoid endless move-wars between people who favour one formulation over another. Copy & paste takes care of problems to do with linking.
It just so happens that there is a strange wrinkle in the way that links are processed which can be useful in this context; see here (it will open a preview first that you might check I'm not linking you to the Last Resort :-): http://preview.tinyurl.com/2xxkd5 Check out the "link with leading pipe".
So to link from [[a (b)]] to [[c (b)]] placing the link [[|c]] in the former during an edit will, at the moment, work just fine: it will automagically expand to [[c (b)|c]] in just the same way as [[c (b)|]] would have expanded to the same thing. I leave enumerating the advantages to the interested student.
HTH HAND
On 2/1/07, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Here is another case of something I mentioned to this mailing list some time ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Timwi&diff=104821425...
In a nutshell, the [[Wikipedia:WikiProject UK Parliament constituencies]] wants to add the parenthesis "(UK Parliament constituency)" to all constituency articles, even those that don't have ambiguous names and would therefore -- under the general naming convention rules -- not have the parenthesis.
These people feel they're completely in the right because they have a discussion to link to -- a discussion that took place on the WikiProject page. Since such a discussion cannot override a general rule such as the Naming Convention, how do I properly respond to this without causing an edit war (or move war)?
Timwi
The best thing to do -- if you want to make an issue of it -- would be to bring the question up on the main NC page and invite the WikiProject to make their case their. Having said that, a few points:
- There is nothing inherently less meaningful about a discussion on a WikiProject page versus a discussion on some other page; both function as a consensus of participating editors, which isn't really affected by the page name. - It's perfectly normal for guidelines -- particularly one-size-fits-all guidelines -- to have exceptions (even broad ones); and quite reasonable for WikiProjects to come up with such exceptions. The deciding factor is whether what's being proposed makes sense, not who came up with it. - Looking over the linked discussion on the WikiProject page, I'm not convinced that they're actually incorrect in suggesting pre-emptive disambiguation here. It's pretty much a decided issue that all geographic locations will eventually have articles; and if constituencies are, indeed, named after locations, then delaying disambiguation until those articles get started -- even though we *know* that we'll need to disambiguate -- seems rather unnecessarily bureaucratic. (If nothing else, the project could easily fit within the letter of the law here by creating one-liner stubs for the locations; but I don't think that's something we ought to push.)
Kirill
We never disambiguate pre-emptively (or rather: we shouldn't) See [[Wikipedia:Disambiguation]].
Mgm
On 2/1/07, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/1/07, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Here is another case of something I mentioned to this mailing list some time ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Timwi&diff=104821425...
In a nutshell, the [[Wikipedia:WikiProject UK Parliament constituencies]] wants to add the parenthesis "(UK Parliament constituency)" to all constituency articles, even those that don't have ambiguous names and would therefore -- under the general naming convention rules -- not have the parenthesis.
These people feel they're completely in the right because they have a discussion to link to -- a discussion that took place on the WikiProject page. Since such a discussion cannot override a general rule such as the Naming Convention, how do I properly respond to this without causing an edit war (or move war)?
Timwi
The best thing to do -- if you want to make an issue of it -- would be to bring the question up on the main NC page and invite the WikiProject to make their case their. Having said that, a few points:
- There is nothing inherently less meaningful about a discussion on a
WikiProject page versus a discussion on some other page; both function as a consensus of participating editors, which isn't really affected by the page name.
- It's perfectly normal for guidelines -- particularly
one-size-fits-all guidelines -- to have exceptions (even broad ones); and quite reasonable for WikiProjects to come up with such exceptions. The deciding factor is whether what's being proposed makes sense, not who came up with it.
- Looking over the linked discussion on the WikiProject page, I'm not
convinced that they're actually incorrect in suggesting pre-emptive disambiguation here. It's pretty much a decided issue that all geographic locations will eventually have articles; and if constituencies are, indeed, named after locations, then delaying disambiguation until those articles get started -- even though we *know* that we'll need to disambiguate -- seems rather unnecessarily bureaucratic. (If nothing else, the project could easily fit within the letter of the law here by creating one-liner stubs for the locations; but I don't think that's something we ought to push.)
Kirill
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On 2/1/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
We never disambiguate pre-emptively (or rather: we shouldn't) See [[Wikipedia:Disambiguation]].
Um, fifth-pillar and IAR issues aside, the page doesn't actually say that. Indeed, the only real principles there are "Disambiguation in Wikipedia is the process of resolving conflicts in article titles that occur when a single term can be associated with more than one topic" and "When there is no risk of confusion, do not disambiguate nor add a link to a disambiguation page". (Pedantry: note that this doesn't explicitly require that both articles be created prior to disambiguating; the only requirement is that the *term* be known to be ambiguous.)
Kirill
On 2/1/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
We never disambiguate pre-emptively (or rather: we shouldn't) See [[Wikipedia:Disambiguation]].
Lets of people do though. I seem to recall lots of "... (Price is Right pricing game)" articles, lots of "... (some lame tv show episode)" etc articles. There are plenty of reasons for and against. IMHO, if more than some proportion (like 30%) of articles in a given category have to be disambiguated, you might as well just do them all for the sake of consistency and ease of guessing names.
Steve
On 01/02/07, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Here is another case of something I mentioned to this mailing list some time ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Timwi&diff=104821425... In a nutshell, the [[Wikipedia:WikiProject UK Parliament constituencies]] wants to add the parenthesis "(UK Parliament constituency)" to all constituency articles, even those that don't have ambiguous names and would therefore -- under the general naming convention rules -- not have the parenthesis.
This isn't "policy" in the sense of NPOV or verifiability. Or even in the sense of deletion procedures. Naming conventions are essentially arbitrary.
These people feel they're completely in the right because they have a discussion to link to -- a discussion that took place on the WikiProject page. Since such a discussion cannot override a general rule such as the Naming Convention, how do I properly respond to this without causing an edit war (or move war)?
Decide what the "who cares?" value is.
If you can think of important counterexamples, raise those and see if they can be fitted into the proposed convention in a reasonably streamlined and obvious manner. They actually care about it, so good on them for being prepared to work on our content.
When I say "important counterexamples", I mean ones that would be clearly *wrong* with the bracketed bit after the name and a redirect from the old name. Not ones where it makes no difference.
I'm a big fan of "who cares?" on naming conventions and a forest of redirects to help searchers. I think the last one I bothered voicing an opinion on in a LONG time was [[Ecma Office Open XML]], and only because I was in the middle of the media coverage. (Microsoft's big issue was the name - it was at [[Microsoft Office Open XML]] - and I think they were arguably correct, given the analogous examples of [[ECMAScript]] vs [[JavaScript]] vs [[JScript]]. So far it's been at the current title for a week and fingers crossed it stays there.)
- d.
David Gerard wrote: <snip>
I'm a big fan of "who cares?" on naming conventions and a forest of redirects to help searchers.
Me too. About the only problem I have is when you get stuff like "X (Y of Z)", and X, Y and Z don't have links to it.
I think the last one I bothered voicing an opinion on in a LONG time was [[Ecma Office Open XML]], and only because I was in the middle of the media coverage. (Microsoft's big issue was the name - it was at [[Microsoft Office Open XML]] - and I think they were arguably correct, given the analogous examples of [[ECMAScript]] vs [[JavaScript]] vs [[JScript]]. So far it's been at the current title for a week and fingers crossed it stays there.)
... I was about to ask "why isn't ECMA uppercase" until I read [[ECMA]], which helpfully pointed out that they've dis-abbreviated themselves (hrm, who else did that?), so the lowercase is correct.