The Cunctator wrote:
Gah. You do all realize every time we change the title we kill thousands of links in?
How is that? Was the move not done properly?
A better google comparison would be "september 11" "attack" -terrorist vs. "september 11" "attack" "terrorist".
Have you performed this Google search? You may be surprised! ^_^
But those are both fairly useless searches to perform. We want /phrases/ -- not the entire content of a page.
Analogue: "jimmy carter" president : 335,000 "jimmy carter" -president : 221,000
So do we move [[Jimmy Carter]] to [[President Jimmy Carter]]? No ... because more people will look for just "Jimmy Carter" than for the entire phrase "President Jimmy Carter".
What the search above reveals is that /most/ web pages on Jimmy Carter mention that he is president -- but that's not what we're asking for.
And if /most/ web pages on September 11 mentioned that it was terrorist (my Google search suggest that they do not! but let's pretend), that would not be of any help in choosing the title.
Shorter phrases will pretty much always have more hits than longer equivalent ones.
One reason why page titles should usually be shorter. The shorter phrase is what people will more often look for. Titles are not meant to be maximally complete. OTC, they should be (barring some other useful convention) as short as will do the job (being clear and disambiguating).
The change from "September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack" to "September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks" was in my opinion completely unnecessary. But I understand people's need to make an imprint.
Well, the latter name violates /more/ naming conventions than the former, if that's what you mean. ^_^
-- Toby