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.