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

Use the most general title you can about your subject, when you feel a Williamsian can write something meaningul about the general title (ie, even if you can't)

example: you want to write about the awesome beec in the forest garden for tree climbing. start/edit "Tree climbing"

example: you want to write about cheap places to ski. start/edit "skiing" and start a section in it on going cheaply. hope you or someone else will write the preface on generally skiing at williams

example: you want to write about great spots to hang hammocks on campus. "Hammocking" is the most general title, but is there something meaningful to write on "hammocking" besids where to do it? This is arguable. Start/edit "hammocking" with a section on places, or start/edit "hammock spots". Someone can always create "hammocking" and link to/move your content later.

Singular vs. Plural nouns

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willi rule of thumb: when the main focus of an article will be to define or give the history of the subject, use a singular noun (broomball, Mountain Day). when listing and explaining instances of the subject -- especially when defining what the title means would be silly for willipedia -- use a plural (Pranks, Classes).

Use -ing Verbs

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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" and, after talking generally a little about skiing at williams, have a section on "places" if you wish.

When what would otherwise be a section gets large and detailed/complex enough to be its own article (Skiing cheaply) use the shortest descriptive title you can (Skiing cheaply vs. Ways you can ski cheaply) and be sure to link to this article in a (perhaps empty) section of the main article.

sentence-style capitalization

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even though the title of something, like an encyclopedia article, typically has all words campitalized, Willipedia is different. capitalize your title as though you were writing a sentence

the first word in the title is capitalized (the program will force this)

all other words are lowercase, unless they are proper nouns

names of students and alums

use full name of a place to be unambiguous

ex: Dodd Dining Hall, Hopkins Hall, Mark Hopkins House (notice all these words in these are capitalized, as they are all proper names)

if you're feeling very helpful, create a disambig page at the name that forks to many related pages. ie, "Dodd"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions#Be_precise_when_necessary