Willipedia:Naming conventions

This is a draft of a policy being worked on by the Willipedia board. It has no effect until approved by board consensus.

Titles of articles in Willipedia are chosen to serve two crucial goals which are sometimes at odds.

1. Titles create expectations, and therefore a title ought to accurately reflect the content that follows it.
2. But, on Willipedia, titles are the names that articles are called by. Titles need to be succinctly named, or they will never be called by editors, will never be linked to, and will fall into obscurity.

For an example, consider the old article, "How To Procrastinate." This was the first title it had, and it did a good job of creating the expectation of a list of suggestions, which is indeed what the article was. But only editors who already knew such an article existed could link to it. Naive editors were unlikely to guess such a title. Eventually, it was renamed to Procrastinating, a name with the advantage of still being decently descriptive, and far more likely to be linked to in the course of normal writing.

The short set of naming conventions below arises from this need for a minimal set of conventions for editors to learn so we know how to best name our new articles, and how to link to where an article is or will be as we write body text.

General Guide to Naming

Try first to choose the most general title that names the realm of your subject. However, if this general name is one that you do not expect that a Willipedian can write meaningfully about, choose a more specific title.

Illustrative examples:

Problem: You want to write about how awesome the beech in the Forest Garden is for tree-climbing.

A good start: Even though you just want to write about that one tree, start/edit the article "Tree climbing," and place what you write in a section of it. If you want to do a really good job, go the extra mile to start a preface on the general title to help other editors get an idea of where they can work from.

In the future: Even without a preface, it's a very good bet that others will expand on this subject, with more trees and perhaps a guide to history and technique of the pasttime.

Problem: You want to give advice on procrastinating on a thesis. You're thinking "How to procrastinate on a thesis" might be a good title.

A good start: Think about your topic in the general sense. You are talking about two things: the practice of procrastinating and the topic "thesis." Start/edit an article with either name, and include what you want to write in a well-named section, even if it is a lonely section at first.

In the future: Others are likely to have something to say about "Procrastinating" or "Thesis". The articles are likely to cross-link. Over time, what you started will evolve into a rich article.

Conventions

Effort is wasted when someone starts an article "Prank" when it really could have been added to (or already was in) "Pranks". Using naming conventions lets us use content to its fullest extent, and build on what's there already. Much of the below is adapted from Wikipedia's naming conventions.

Singular vs. Plural nouns

Wikipedia origin

Most of the time, a singular noun is preferred. When the main focus of an article will be to explain, define, or give the history of the subject, use a singular noun (eg. broomball, Mountain Day, crusty). "Guide to X" often becomes "X".

For some topics, however, defining seems totally unnecessary -- "Class" or "Prank" are good examples. It's outside the scope of Willipedia to explain what a class or prank is, but we are quite likely to want to talk about instances of Classes and Pranks. In such cases, where the content will be listing and explaining instances, use the plural.

Use -ing verbs

Wikipedia origin

For activities, common practices, and the like, try to use the most basic but most unique gerund verb applicable. Instead of "Great places to ski" use "Skiing"; instead of "How to X", consider "X-ing".

When a section of an article gets large and detailed enough to be its own article, use the shortest descriptive title you can, such as Skiing cheaply instead of "Ways you can ski cheaply". Whatever name you choose, be sure to link to the detail article in the article it was spun from (as in Skiing's Lift Passes section).

Sentence-style capitalization

Wikipedia origin

Even though the title of something, like an encyclopedia article, typically has all words campitalized, Willipedia is different. Capitalize article and section titles as though you were writing a sentence: the first word is capitalized, and all other words are lowercase unless they are proper nouns.

Naming students and alums

Even though it is convention in most Williams publications to include the class year whenever a student or alum is named, on Willipedia, the class year should usually not be part of the title of a page on a person (ie, "Joe Freshman" is preferred to "Joe Freshman '09"). This is for ease of linking: in this system, an editor who wishes to link to a person need only know his/her name. If class years were in titles, on would need to know name and graduation year to link.

Use full names to be unambiguous

Wikipedia origin

Another common issue for Willipedia is that we have a lot of things named after people (namely, buildings). This creates a need to resolve ambiguity about whether "Hopkins" is an article about Hopkins Hall, Mark Hopkins House, or Mark Hopkins the person.

The solution in most cases is to use the full name of something, even if it is rare in common parlance. So while it is typical to say, "I'm eating at Mission," the article on this it would have to be "Mission Dining Hall". Notice that all words in this titles are capitalized, as it is the proper name of the place.

If you're feeling very helpful, create a disambiguation page at the name that forks to many related pages. The Spencer and Dodd pages are examples of these.