[Wikipedia-l] Movie naming convention: proposed tweak for simplicity

Daniel Mayer maveric149 at yahoo.com
Mon Aug 26 17:53:32 UTC 2002


As it is, our movie naming convention (which has been around since before 
January) reads:

"Oftentimes movies share the same name as other movies, books or terms. When 
disambiguating a movie from something else use (movie) in the title when only 
one movie had that name and (YEAR movie) in the title when there are more 
than one movies by that name (example: Titanic (1997 movie))."

One user has for some time now been creating many movie titles in the form 
[[{movie name} (YEAR)]] (example [[Scareface (1932)]]. However I moved that 
page to the convention compliant [[Scareface (1932 movie)]]. After the move I 
compared the two and quickly realized that the word "movie" is not at all 
needed for disambiguation because "Scareface" is already disambiguated by 
year (there wasn't anything else released that year named "Scareface" that I 
know of). What's more is the fact that Scareface (1932) actually has a chance 
of being linked simply as [[Scareface (1932)]] instead of [[Scareface 
(1932)|Scareface]] (not that it matters too much with Lee's neat pipe trick). 

So this is my proposed new wording of the convention (and I will assume 
acceptance of this as is if there are no objections):

"Oftentimes movies share the same name as other movies, books or terms. When 
disambiguating a movie from something else use (movie) in the title when only 
one movie had that name and (YEAR) in the title when there are more than one 
movies by that name (example: [[Titanic (1997)]])."

We could add in the detailed movie convention page that if and when there 
/is/ more than one thing with the same name that is released in the same 
year, then the format of [[{name of movie} (YEAR movie)]] can be used.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)



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