[WikiEN-l] WikiProjects overriding policy

[David Gerard]

On 01/02/07, Timwi <timwi at 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&oldid=104820754
> 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.