[WikiEN-l] [[Ireland]] and [[China]]

[Daniel Mayer]

On Wednesday 11 December 2002 02:00 pm, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>  Obviously, we can't completely ignore the most expected forms, but
> redirects are wonderful bidirectionsl tools, and I am not bothered when
> a link from [[Bill Clinton]] redirects to [[William Jefferson Clinton]].
>  The person who did not know the connection between those two names has
> an opportunity to learn something.  When I get a surprising result I
> begin by asking "why?"; once that question is asked I can learn something.

The reason we title the article [[Bill Clinton]] is for more or less technical 
reasons that revolve around making it as easy as is reasonable for people to 
find what they are looking for and link to it directly. Yes, redirects can be 
used to facilitate this, but we should continue to prefer titles that will 
naturally catch most queries and most links. Redirects are great to catch 
secondary uses. 

There is also the big picture to consider: If we do not favor the titles most 
likely to be searched for and linked to then this sets an example for new 
contributors who will invariably make hideously long and complicated titles 
for things (and the amount of information that can be added to a title often 
varies a great deal - thus we get multiple articles on the same subject). And 
it has been my experience that newbies in general either don't know about or 
bother with redirects. So we should encourage titles from the start that will 
catch most spontaneous links and queries. The beauty of this is that newbies 
who are not aware of our conventions at all tend to title things using the 
most common form already (although they do tend to capitalize and pluralize 
too much for my taste). 

So we should keep the amount of information in the title to a reasonable 
minimum and explain in the article just what the full names of people and 
things are. In short, KISS 

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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