CZ:Naming conventions

How to title articles

It is important to choose the right title for an article.

The title should describe the contents of an article accurately. If you have written an article about a topic, only to discover that your article concerns only one aspect of the topic (such as its history), then it is preferable to place your article on a more accurately-named page, to write a short article about the original topic, and then link from that short article to the new page. For example, if you were to write an article about Russia only to find that you had written exclusively about the history of Russia, then you should move your article to history of Russia, and link to that new page from a brief article about Russia on the Russia page.

Generally, prefer common names. The common names for things--if accurate--should be used in preference to the recondite or obscure, although this may have a few exceptions. For instance, we might better place the article about the 90s U.S. president at Bill Clinton rather than William Jefferson Clinton.

Typographical and stylistic rules

Prefer lowercase. The article title should be lowercase unless it is typically written uppercase when used in a regular sentence. So: computational complexity theory; but American Chemical Society.

First name first. Unless there is a compelling reason not to, articles about people should begin with the person's first name first; e.g., Albert Einstein. Note that there is a way to list names in categories by last name first; e.g., the code [[Category:CZ Live|Einstein, Albert]] files the Einstein article in the "CZ Live" category last name, first.

put keywords first. Consider for example a series of articles about France. The number of articles may grow to 50, 100 or more, and we want editors and users to find them easily. Thus we can use the commonsense system:

• France
• France, arts
• France, cities
• France, climate
• France, culture
• France, economy
• France, geography
• France, history before 1789
• France, history since 1789
• France, politics
• France, regions
• France, society
• France, sports, etc.

For a global topic, the main keyword, followed by the second keyword, followed by the geographical unit produces a scheme like this:

• World War II, Homefront
• World War II, Homefront, France.
• World War II, Homefront, Germany
• World War II, Homefront, Japan
• World War II, Homefront, U.S. etc.

We will have several hundred articles on World War II, and we have to plan for the readers who want to browse in different subtopics all related to one country (Japan, say), or one topic (naval battles), or one time period (December 1941).

Disambiguation in page titles

To disambiguate is to reduce ambiguity. It is occasionally necessary to use parenthetical phrases to specify which of various possible phrases might be meant. There are at least two sorts of case in which this is necessary:

• The title (i.e., the word or phrase in the title) is used in multiple ways, and the sense discussed in the article is not the most common sense. For example, there is a line of cosmetics called "Philosophy"; the article about that might live at Philosophy (cosmetics). The article about deep thought continues to live at Philosophy--no parentheses needed.
• The title takes a common word or phrase, or what might appear to be common, and uses it in a special way. For example, "attack surface" is a term in computer science, but the words themselves could mean all sorts of things, such as the deck of an aircraft carrier or a ping-pong table. Simply to clarify that we are using the word or phrase in a special way, we include a disambiguating phrase: attack surface (software). More examples: phenomenon (Kant's philosophy); frontal scale (snakes); pissant (insect).

Note: use parentheses for disambiguating phrases; do not use dashes, hyphens, or commas.

Some titles that should always be disambiguated--in particular, those titles that do not suggest any one particular sense. For example, "Georgia" is apt to bring to mind the U.S. state as much as the country in the Caucasus. Or, in any event, in the interests of neutrality, we should not pretend that one sense is the primary one. Therefore, we should use Georgia (U.S. state) and Georgia (country)--or similar, suitably disambiguated titles. What should we put at Georgia (with no parentheses)? At Georgia, we should put a "disambiguation page," i.e., a page that lists and links to the different pages with the title in question.

Disambiguation pages

The function of a disambiguation page is strictly to list the various articles (including planned articles) that go under a title. Linux (disambiguation) is a good example. Typically, disambiguation pages are marked with "disambiguation" parentheses, but not always; again, Georgia is an example.

Please do not list senses of a word for which there are no articles. It is also unnecessary to list related articles; for example, it is not necessary to list Linux creator Linus Torvalds on the Linux (disambiguation) page, since Torvalds is not a sense of "Linux." Presumably, people will arrive at the disambiguation page looking specifically for a pointer to an article that goes under the title in question; anything else is a distraction.