CZ Talk:Naming conventions

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Names of articles about people

I added a sentence about naming articles based on people so that we can be consistant throughout. If this is not the way we want to do it, lets change it fast. --Matt Innis (Talk) 09:28, 1 April 2007 (CDT)

There are a few special cases for personal names which need to have a convention soon:
The conventions don't need to be hard rules - the article on the second Viscount Stansgate may be better titled as simply Tony Benn, in violation of some other convention, because of his notability under that name. Also, there should be redirects from most of the common alternates. I have my preferences as to which ones we choose, but establishing some conventions is more important than my preferred choices. Anthony Argyriou 18:58, 3 April 2007 (CDT)
Nobody has weighed in yet, and trying to track down the discussion at the fora is hard. I'd like to make a few suggestions based on my comment above:

How to name articles about people

The general rule I propose is that an article about a person ought to live at the name at which the person is best-known to educated English-speaking people, with redirects from all common alternates. This will mean some inconsistency measured against other possible rules, but I believe will create the most easy-to-use compendium of knowledge.

People from English-speaking countries

Use the full first name and last name, unless the person is well-known by some other form. If a person commonly is given a middle initial to distinguish them from another person with the same first and last name, use the middle initial. If the person commonly is addressed by or discussed by a nickname, use that. Where more than one form is common, there should be redirects from the others. Thus, some U.S. presidents:

However, some people "part their name on the left", or are known by a stage name, or a single name. In general, the form the person uses in writing is the form which should be used for the article title, with some redirects. For example:

People from other latin-alphabet-using countries

In general, the same rules apply, though care should be taken to get the correct surname when doing default sorts and choosing disambiguation. For example, a former president of Colombia is Julio César Turbay Ayala. His last name is Turbay Ayala, and should be alphabetised under "T", not "A". It may be useful to create a redirect from Julio César Turbay

Note: This is likely more controversial than most of what else I'm proposing Names of people who have diacritical marks in their name should be listed using the diacritical marks, with a redirect from the unaccented version, plus any other redirects which would be appropriate. So, to use a more famous Colombian example, Gabriel García Márquez, with a redirect from Gabriel Garcia Marquez (and remember to list him as Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, not Marquez, Gabriel Garcia). The exception to this is for people who have been much discussed in the English-language press using a spelling without diacritics, thus Hermann Goering rather than Hermann Göring, but Kurt Gödel not Kurt Goedel, because the best-known work about the mathematician spells his name with the umlaut. (Of course, the other choice ought to exist as a redirect.)

People from countries which do not use the Latin alphabet

In general, the rules for English-speaking countries still apply, except for the issue of transliteration. For languages with fairly standard transliteration, such as most of those using the Greek or Cyrillic alphabets, this shouldn't be problematic; except to point out that transliterations should be into English, not German or French: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, not Tschaikowski or Tchaïkovski. Particular carre should be taken with transliterations from Greek, as Ancient Greek was not, according to the scholars, pronounced as Modern Greek is. Thus Eleftherios Venizelos, not Eleutherios Venizelos (nor Benizelos), but Euripides, not Evripidis.

Chinese names should be transliterated in the way most familiar to literate people in the English-speaking world. For people from the Republic of China, or major figures of Nationalist China or the Chinese Empire, that is likely to be the Wade-Giles method. For people from the People's Republic, that is likely to be the Pinyin method. For both, the family name should stay in front. So Mao Zedong (with redirect from Mao Tse-Tung), but Sun Yat-Sen. However, Confucius, not Kǒng Fūzǐ or K'ung-fu-tzu. (As always, redirects should exist from both of those, and from Kong Fuzi and Kung Fu Tzu.)

People whose culture has family name first

Except where such people have come to be known in the English-speaking world with their names re-ordered to the English standard, the name should be written out in the way which it appears in their culture. Thus Mao Zedong, not Zedong Mao. Redirects need not exist unless there is some substantial literature which has the names in English order.

People with titles of nobility or royalty

Here, I propose to follow the system for names and titles that the Royalty and Nobility Work Group at Wikipedia have developed.

In general:

  • Monarchs of nations: "{Monarch's first name and ordinal}, {Title} of {Country}". {title} should be omitted where it is "King" or "Queen".
  • Patriarchs and Popes: "Patriarch/Pope {papal name} {ordinal if more than one} of {episcopal see}". When the episcopal see is Rome, it should be omitted.
  • Hereditary nobility: "{Commonly used name}, {ordinal (if appropriate)} {title} (of) {place}".

A couple of possible exceptions:

Anthony Argyriou 14:49, 26 April 2007 (CDT)

DEFAULTSORT template

Wikipedia has a nifty template we should consider borrowing. Called DEFAULTSORT, it automatically seats an entry in the right place in any catgories into which that entry is included. Thus, the list of categories for Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals Justice Rosemary Barkett reads:

{{DEFAULTSORT:Barkett, Rosemary}}
[[Category:1939 births]]
[[Category:Living people]]
[[Category:Mexican-born United States political figures]]
[[Category:Florida state court judges]]
[[Category:Judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit]]
[[Category:Living people]]
[[Category:People from Tamaulipas]]
[[Category:Syrian Mexicans]]

The article therefore shows up under "B" in all of the above categories. (note: I am not endorsing this category scheme, just the template).

Cheers! Brian Dean Abramson 20:11, 1 April 2007 (CDT)

Looks pretty useful to me--those who want to use it should be able to use it, no? I mean, I don't see any reason why not. --Larry Sanger 21:51, 1 April 2007 (CDT)

Ah, I lack the technical know-how to make such a template work here - I'll try a copy/paste to see if that does it, but will that work? Brian Dean Abramson 23:08, 10 April 2007 (CDT)
Template is copied over but does not work. Techie intervention would be welcome. Brian Dean Abramson 21:25, 14 April 2007 (CDT)

One Word Titles

We need a much more detailed policy on naming conventions, I believe. For one, I do not think we should ever have any main entries which begin with a miniscule letter; such use flies in the face of any and every reference work I have ever used or contributed to; the first word should always be capitalized. I note that with the example given, computational complexity theory, the actual article does indeed have its first word capitalized!

Another aspect not covered here is one-word entries (Automobile, Novel, Television) which it should be made clear are capitalized (although the wiki itself doesn't mind, consistentcy here looks best, I think).

Lastly, the alphabetical issue is far larger than just names -- we would not want, for instance, an entry on "Fossil Fuels" to index under "Fossil," but under "Fuels, Fossil", and the same might apply to many phrases or three or more words (Trans-Siberian Railway, European Economic Community, or Functional magnetic resonance imaging).

Russell Potter

Thanks for your comments, Russell. As you pointed out, the wiki does not care whether the first letter of the title is majuscule or minuscule. Therefore, I'd say we don't really need a naming policy about it; the system will capitalise everything on its own. What's more of a problem, I think, are the rare cases where the title should not be capitalisd, such as iPod and e (the number).—Nat Krause 15:47, 8 April 2007 (CDT)
Yes, I've since found that out -- though I think we still want to have the first letter capitalized in the initial sentence of the entry, on redirection pages, and such, for stylistic consistency! Russell Potter

Acronyms

Just out of curiosity, what about acronyms?

--Paul Derry 23:22, 13 April 2007 (CDT)

I'd prefer, though I may be over-ruled on this, that articles appear under the full name of the acronym, with a redirect as appropriate: North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with a redirect from NATO. Many acronyms have more than one meaning, and thus the acronym will require a disambiguation page, and so the specific articles are best distinguished by spelling them out; for example, see wikipedia's ACS page. For far too many more, see Wikipedia's List of TLA disambiguation pages. Anthony Argyriou 14:44, 14 April 2007 (CDT)

Phrases

I'd like to suggest the following convention: an article title should be a phrase that is natural to use when referring to the topic in running text. For example "history of the United States" since it is natural to write "In the history of the United States, the ..."; not "United States: History" or "History: United States". (Compare with the discussion at Talk:World War II: Homefront: US.) -- Fredrik Johansson 11:16, 23 April 2007 (CDT)

. Put the key word forst solves the problem. Everyone has a somewhat different idea of what is "natural"? all these are natural: "American history," "U.S. History," "history of the United States," "American political history" etc. As for style it is easy enough to use [ [ U.S. History|the history of the United States ] ] or [ [ U.S. History|American history ] ] or [ [ U.S. History| American political history ] ] Richard Jensen 06:02, 24 April 2007 (CDT)
I did a study of history titles in journals and major publishers. The form History of XYZ" is rarely used in recent years; it is near-defunct and CZ should not use it. For CZ users, XYZ, history is the natural way to search, as it puts the keyword first, and easily connects to XYZ, bibliography" "XYZ, demography," etc. Richard Jensen 20:24, 3 July 2007 (CDT)

plea for logic and order

I make a plea for standardizing headings. Let's start with countries and states as the topics that will have many sub-articles and can be logically organized. Some people think it does not matter because search engines can solve any problems. Those people who think it does not matter can let the rest of us decide. One way it matters is that the editors have to keep track of what's been done. That means we need an alphabetical list of, for example, all articles dealing with France. Otherwise we will have several editors writing on the same topic with different titles. ("French art", "Artistic trends in France", "Main French artists", "Painters in Paris" and "Arts in France", "19th century French art", etc ). Richard Jensen 05:58, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

The use of piping linkes negates the need to alter the article title for the purpose of organising lists and category pages. For example, at the foot of the article put {Category:History Workgroup|England, history of} with article title History of England. By using pipes we can list the article under 'E' for England in the category and workgroup but still start it with 'H' in the article title.
Also see the potential use of the DEFAULTSORT template above. Derek Harkness 10:04, 26 April 2007 (CDT)
Yes we will have to do that with all the human names, or else we have a list sorted by first name. Which is efficient: setting up a system that does not require piping or spending hundreds of hours fixing tens of thousands of entries after they are written? Of course piping does not help the users any. They can't browse for nearby spinoff articles. Richard Jensen 11:11, 26 April 2007 (CDT)
If we just begin the entries with what the consensus says is the proper, standardized title format, and include the desired abc sort on the Article Checklist as well as piping its main category entry to the way we want it sorted, then we will not have to return to 'fix' them at any point later. The piping will in fact help the users since the article's entry in the tagged category will be sorted in proper alphabetical order. Just so, in the old print model, a book's chapter heading ("The Battle of Gettysburg") would correspond with an index entry of "Gettysburg, Battle of". I think we need to think of the entry titles as chapter or section titles; then the analogy is clear. No historian, I am sure, ever gave a chapter title such as "Pittsburgh, history of"; such a format would be appropriate in a book's index only. Our piping, in essence, is the link from the natural-language title to the indexable title. Russell Potter 13:24, 26 April 2007 (CDT)
The consensus in every reference book I have seen, including non-paper encyclopedias like Encarta, is to put the main keywords first. I have seen no alternative proposal laid out here and explained or justified; we so far have NOT thought out the problems we face. It's a fallacy to hope that powerful search engines will overcome our planning mistakes. Already the workgroups have poorly organized lists--imagine the mess when they are 50x longer. Take this aspect: one role of editors is to see what gaps we have and to assign entries to fill them. When we have 10,000 history entries in garbled order (with people sorted by first name), who's to tell where we are? Richard Jensen 13:30, 26 April 2007 (CDT)
If we name the article Gettysburg, Battle of then every single time I want to link to that article I will have to pipe the link but your category will be nicely alphabetised by place names. But if we named it Battle of Gettysburg then I will only need to pipe the article once, when placing in the category, every other link can be unpiped.
Also, you keep saying 'by keyword'? How do you know what the keyword is? You are assuming that the geographical place name is the keyword but it might not be. Derek Harkness 20:57, 26 April 2007 (CDT)
Derek asks, "How do you know what the keyword is?" The answer is that CZ has experts who know the material, as opposed to the amateur world of Wikiwisdom or the count-the-links formulas of Google. Why else do we have CZ except to have experts who can tell good quality, who know the literature, and who can see what articles need to be added and which need major improvements.Richard Jensen 22:22, 26 April 2007 (CDT)

I agree, it's for an expert to decide. But who is the expert here? That expert should be an expert in Information Technology and usability. This is different form expert in history or geography or biology. We need someone like Jakob Neilsen [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Nielsen_(usability_consultant)]. Or perhaps, defining expertise through previous employment rather than academic study, we could call Larry Sanger an expert in this subject. Derek Harkness 09:38, 27 April 2007 (CDT)

We could ask a librarian--they are in the classification business (I was a department head at the Newberry Library for 10 years). The expertise however we want is content expertise--for history that means familiarity with historiography. For example, in recent years historians and major publishers rarely title books or articles a history of XYZ.' It's considered very old-fashioned. Yet we are starting to get articles like that on CZ by authors familiar with XYZ but not with historiography. And so CZ gets a retro-1970s look unintentionally. Normally the subject-field editor is the one entrusted with assigning topics and titles and coordinating the work of authors. That is what makes CZ different from Wikipedia.Richard Jensen 11:04, 27 April 2007 (CDT)
Since CZ is an online encyclopedia, not a book or a series of books, I don't see that book titles, or book classification systems, are necessarily a model for us. Secondly, since we are an encyclopedia, uniformity of titles across all subject areas is important to us -- and this of course was true in the era of print encyclopedias as well! -- as it gives the site clarity and consistency no matter what subject is being researched. I'm familiar with historiography, and can differentiate between the "longue durée" approach and histories which focus on discreet events or "great figures" -- but I do not think that titling an entry "History of Cleveland", given that such titles have evolved as the standard in wiki reference, are relatively commonsense (a bit more so, I would say, than "Cleveland, history"), necessarily implies one historiographical approach or another. Article sorting can be handled by the abc sort of the checklist and/or by piping the titles in the category link, so that's not a problem. Lastly, as to search engines, as I've noted, the *vast* majority of people using CZ, just as those uping WP or other such resources, will come in laterally from external search engines (Google), and will do so whether we want them to or not. We need a simple standard we can all agree to follow, so we can get back to writing content. Russell Potter 11:17, 27 April 2007 (CDT)
We either buy into expertise or we don't. The experts in history have all stopped using terms like "the History of Cleveland" and there is no reason for CZ to go back to old fashioned terminology. In terms of users we want to build a clientele who understands that the same coding for articles on France applies to articles on Germany, and is set and standardized by expert editors. Some may argue that it doesn't matter because of the search engine factor. I suggest that people for whom it does not matter should please step back and let the debate go on among experts who believe it does matter. Richard Jensen 11:50, 27 April 2007 (CDT)
Richard, I have the greatest respect for the work you're doing here on history articles, but I just do not agree with you on this issue. I would never suggest that people outside of a discipline dictate to those within how they ought to describe the state of knowledge in their field. But I would agree with the earlier posting, that undrestanding how to manage an encyclopedia using a wiki model is also an "area of expertise," and when it comes to issues such as how -- accross all fields -- article titles are to be formatted, that this should be determined by the Editorial staff of this project, in consultation with Editors from various fields of expertise, and only after issues have been discussed and vetted as broadly as possible. And I'd agree that our Editor-in-Chief, Larry Sanger -- with whom I've certainly disagreed with in the past, and vigorously -- is the most experienced editor of wiki-based encylopedias here, and should in this area have the final say. Russell Potter 12:26, 27 April 2007 (CDT)

Cut from the page

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:

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).

Why all that was cut from the page

Richard, I've cut that because this is not standard practice for wiki pages or for Web documents generally, and because it it has been our own practice until you arrived.

Richard, you can feel free--for now--to continue to follow that rule in your own history articles that you started, frankly because I don't have the time to persuade you otherwise. But we won't follow your practice generally until the Editorial Council has had a chance to weigh in. --Larry Sanger 20:23, 25 April 2007 (CDT)

Repeating ourselves.

Many discussions of this topics have already taken place on the forums. There was a comment above that someone couldn't find the forum discussions. To save us repeating and maybe ignoring the comments made, I have cataloged the relevant forum discussions below:

  • Anthropology - What's in a name? [[1]]
  • Article Policy - Romanization of Chinese: Pinyin and/or Wade-Giles? [[2]]
  • Geography - Naming Irish articles [[3]]
  • Geography - A request for real names [[4]]
  • Biology - Naming policy (four pages!) [[5]]
  • Music - Naming conventions for individual works [[6]]
  • Computers - The Linux "family" of articles [[7]]
  • Article Policy - Articles about titled people. [[8]]

Additionally, some wiki talk pages have discussions on this the topic of Naming conventions. Where possible, I have summarised the topic discussed.

This list is by no means fully comprehensive. If there are any more, please add them. Derek Harkness 12:38, 27 April 2007 (CDT)

Propose change in rule to Surname-first

The first-name-first rule we have is poor, because it is not the logical way to search. It requires searchers to know two names, and start with the lesser-known. (Users are much more likely to know surnames rather than first names--Einstein, Kepler, Galileo, Copernicus, Mendel, Laplace, Heisenberg, Poincaré, Montesquieu, Kant, Hegel, Descartes, Maxwell, Trotsky, Molotov, Engels, Hayek). The first name of a person is far more variable than the surname. Foreign language spellings are a problem. Alphabetizing by initials would be a disaster: in Britain, scholars commonly use their initials (A.J. Ayer, A.J.P. Taylor), and sometimes in the US (C. Vann Woodward-- Comer is his first name, Vann is his mother's name; what does our rule call for??). First names for royalty and aristocrats?? Obviously the rule fails (Lord North, Queen Elizabeth, Earl of Chatham, Lord Beaverbrook). American politicians often are best known by nicknames, (Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Joe McCarthy, Jerry Ford, Bob Dole, Rudy Giuliani, Teddy Roosevelt, Jack Kennedy, Colonel House, Tip O'Neill), which throws off the convention. Furthermore, family members are broken apart when they should stay together. Most important, the editors will be unable to spot articles easily; who will be browing through the Johns to find someone? So I propose we adopt a Surname-First rule. Richard Jensen 19:41, 3 July 2007 (CDT)

Richard, since surname and first names are in different fields actually it is merely a presentation layer, it can be changed in order - I just don't think the developers will be waiting to change every presentation layer into lastname-firstname(s) basis. It can however be done and the info in the database is independent. If you ask to change a presentation layer the firstname-lastname way is the way you address a person. Searches however can be executed based on last names. HTH Robert Tito |  Talk  19:54, 3 July 2007 (CDT)
Searches that require a first name are inferior to searches that do not. We have few enough biographies now that a changeover now will be easy. Richard Jensen 20:19, 3 July 2007 (CDT)
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