You've come at an awkward time when our conventions and
our software are a bit out of sync. I'll summarize briefly
here, and I'm still working on updating the policy pages
to better reflect our consensus about such things.
If a title is "Plato's Republic" or "Philosopher's Stone",
go ahead and use the apostrophe. If that screws up the
search function, then the search function needs to be fixed.
Simple singular nouns like "Possum" are ideal titles. There
are still some legacy pages with plural titles that are lists
of things, and those may get changed to "List of..." or
something at some point, or we might just leave them alone
because people are used to them and there are many links.
There's no longer any such thing as a subpage. Slashes
should only be used for titles that actually have a slash in
them, like "OS/2". Pages that really are dependent on context
should include that context in the title with a phrase like
"Abstraction in object-oriented programming" rather than
"Object-oriented programming/Abstraction".
Articles about independent specific topics should be named in
whatever way makes them clear; references to related topics can
appear inside, but there's no reason to hard-code relationships
in titles. Pages "Possum breeding" and "Keeping possums as pets"
will probably both have links to "Possum", but there's no
reason to enforce any other relationship among them.
"Lime" should be a disambiguation page, with links to
"Lime (fruit)" and "Lime (mineral)". See the pages
<http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/wikipedia:Naming_conventions>
and
<http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/wikipedia:Disambiguation>.
You Wrote:
I've tried to work it out but I'm still a bit
confused, so I've got a
couple of questions that maybe you can help me with.
The search engine on the wikipedia rejects punctuation, so does that
mean that for best search results we should leave it out of entry
titles?
eg. There was no entry for 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'
until I made one, but there was an entry already there for 'Harry
Potter
and the Philosophers Stone' without the [correct]
apostrophe. Which
one
should be the main article and which one should be the
redirect?
If I want to make a sub-page for a topic, say 'Possums', what's the
protocol for naming it? I see a lot of entries have used backslashes,
but I read that the slashes don't mean anything anymore. I'm
confused!
Just say I wanted to make subpages on possum dietary
requirements,
how
to keep possums as pets, and how possums breed. [not
that I know
anything about possums, but it's an example that came to mind.]
And, lastly, if I wanted to break my user: page up into subpages with
projects I'd like to do on one page and projects I've already
started on
another, what should I call it? I'm getting
confused. I looked at the
FAQ and help pages but I didn't really understand their
explanation... I
got lost at about the point where I was told to use
brackets to make
categories more logical.
And about those brackets, which subject header would be more
correct -
lime, fruit lime/fruit or lime (fruit). I've seen
entry titles using
all
three formats.
Thanks in advance!
Karen
--
Karen AKA Kajikit
Come and visit my part of the web:
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