Anonymous

Changes

Willipedia:Naming conventions

1,194 bytes added, 22:09, May 5, 2006
m
in progress
''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. #Titles create expectations, and therefore a title ought to accurately reflect the content that follows it.#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 'General philsophy'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
949
edits