Wowpedia talk:Naming policy/Archive01

= Analysis and Proposal for Naming Policy Changes =

The naming policy seems to be out of sync with the way the community if naming pages. The best example of this is that on the naming policy page it says, "But Linen Cloth is not [a good name]; it should instead be linen cloth." Of course, if you look at those pages linen cloth (the correct article name) redirects to Linen Cloth, the incorrect article name according to the policy. I have been trying to analyze the naming conventions currently used and the vast majority of pages use a 'book title' style naming convention. Quests, Items, NPCs (and othe mobs) have completely capitalized names, with the exception of 'a', 'an', 'of', 'to', etc. You can scan Special:Allpages and see other articles. It is hard to find pages that don't follow this convention. Pretty much the only stardard exceptions to this are Help and Policy pages, and most of the Category:Formulas_and_Game_Mechanics (although some of those seem to have completely random capitalization). The other exceptions seem to be articles 'about' something. i.e. a list or discusion about something, although this is a toss up many are completely capitalized.

As such I think we have a few choices,
 * 1)  Ignore the capitalization rule and do whatever we want (bad)
 * 2)  Enforce the capitalization rule and go through renaming all the pages to fit the rule (I'm not going to do it)
 * 3)  Change the naming convention to reflect how the community names articles.

I like 3 the best so this is a request to change the policy so that most of the articles we have once again become 'policy legal.'

There is the easy way:
Capitalize all words like they were a book title, i.e. all words should be capitalized, except ('an', 'of, 'the', etc).

The more accurate way:
Articles about something 'in' WoW, should be capitalized like it was a book title. For example, quests, items, classes, profession, spells, abilities, mobs, npcs, races, etc. Pages 'about' something in WoW or about many items should only have the first letter and proper names capitalized. For examples pages which are largely composed of lists, discussion or analysis and aren't about a particular instance of WoW. Some examples may be The history of Stormwind, Formulas:Poison per second, Help:Renaming (moving) a page, Defense gear.

More discussion
The first way is easy to remember, easy to implement, and easy to enforce, but I don't think it reflects the current WoWWiki naming procedure. I think the second way reflects more accurately the way the community has been naming things, although both ways are going to leave a lot of pages still out of compliance. The main problem with the second one is there is ambiguity. Arcane magic is in WoW, but it isn't an actually thing you can use, case, or pickup, should it be caps or not? I think there are going to be a lot of cases like that and not all of them will be apparent. Although a lot of this ambiguity could probably be resolved if we flesh out the definition of what articles should and should not be capitalized and how to classify something as 'in' WoW or 'about' WoW.

We can probably start a vote about this although I would like to hear what other people have to say about it first.

Other Items
I think there are several other things related naming conventions that should also be fleshed out somewhere and discussed (if we do change it maybe we should add some rules about these items, while we are changing things).


 * Use of special characters instead of words, like '&' vs. 'and' or '2' vs. 'two.'
 * Use of special characters, like double quotes, Fire Naga or "Shaky" Phillipe, use of periods - Patch 1.1.1 (Release Notes) or Www.HandOfElune.TK, use of non English characters, Über Chat Guide.

I try to give two examples just because if we flesh out the rules we will need to make distinctions. "Fire Naga" is just an article title in double quotes, which seems bad, "Shaky" Phillipe is the actual name of a WoW NPC and that is how it is displayed in when you see the character. Patch 1.1.1 wouldn't make much sense without the periods, but www.HandOfElune.TK is the website of a guild that should be named Hand of Elune. Uber Chat Guide (I assume) is the way the news article was actually spelled, what if a guild was named Über Leet, should they use the special character in the name or not, what if someone just wanted to name their article, Über leveling? I for one can't type that character without it being a pain, I assume most people can't either. Anyways some other food for thought if we can get a discussion going about this.

Also the vote section on, 'Including Definite Articles in Guild Names' is that something that is still be voted on and never got finished, or is it an achive of the votes for it?

--Ralthor 21:02, 8 May 2006 (EDT)

Additional Comments
Another item was the naming procedure for items with a random property. For example, Ornate Breastplate of .... I think there should perhaps be a part in the policy to just name the item Ornate Breastplate and explain the properties it can have in the page, but I could see people wanting to name it Ornate Breastplate of to signify that it has a random property after it. --Ralthor 21:25, 8 May 2006 (EDT)

= Naming Related Discussion and Votes =

Article Naming
I was looking at WoWWiki's Capitalization rules on the Policies page, when something struck me. In WoW, all items in game are spelled in Title Case. Therefore, the listed example of linen cloth is wrong, as it's spelled Linen Cloth in-game. Should I start a vote or something to change this policy, or do people think that this change would be bad?
 * Forgot to sign this.
 * --Powerlord 20:59, 13 Jan 2006 (EST)


 * It took that long to realize? (I don't mean that offensively.) Okay, well, by that rationale and that only, I would say go ahead and do that. And since it's not like linen cloth is even mentioned that much, I don't really care. However, I hate title case. In French (as I mentioned elsewhere), they capitalize the first letter of a title, along with any names. And the Library of Congress uses the same method when cataloguing a book. So how about we think of it that way? In the game, it uses title case, and here we use the LoC method as though we're cataloguing the items here. It reduces the number of (in my opinion) inordinate numbers of capital letters littering the landscape. There's nothing at all special about linen cloth, after all. Schmidt 23:02, 13 Jan 2006 (EST)


 * Well if we look at the pages we currently have it looks like the community has gone with Title Case. Whether it is an item or an information page or whatever almost every page is all caps with the exception of words like 'of' 'the' 'a/n' etc. like it was a paper title or something.  Even linen cloth redirects to Linen Cloth.  The only real exception to this is pages in the Help: and WoWWiki: namespace.  Perhaps we should update the policy to reflect this?  I know you hate caps Schmidt, but in my opinion it feels more nature and thottbot/allah use the same naming convention so you can copy and paste from those sites to get to the article you want.   --Ralthor 09:36, 5 May 2006 (EDT)


 * If you can clarify your idea as a specific proposal change, I'll put it up for a vote. It does seem that there are different naming conventions for in-game stuff vs. wiki stuff. --Fandyllic 1):33 AM PDT 5 May 2006

Capitalization of Category Names
For many articles, however, the name to be chosen is debatable. I recommend going by the rule of thumb as mentioned before. If it reduces typing and piping (the use of the | character for linking), then that name should be used. BaldMonkey agrees on this point mostly, but disagrees as much to say that he would prefer categories to be capitalized according to the common method in English, keeping major words (not necessarily proper nouns) capitalized and other minor words lowercased.

The reason BaldMonkey has for using capital letters in category names it to allow them to stand out from a normal article when viewed as a link. Such that it should be easier to see that Alliance guilds is a category containing various pages related to guilds on the alliance side while alliance guilds is an article that talks about guilds on the alliance side.


 * ''I moved this from the main page, since it doesn't represent a clear directive to the user, and could use some further discussion. --Aeleas 10:44, 28 Oct 2005 (EDT)

I think it's okay to leave categories capitalized, or not. Most categories won't be linked from within articles; only at the bottom of each article it belongs to. So capitalization should have little effect on any given category, as far as linking goes, and if you were to link it in an article inline, and wanted to put it in a sentence, say, you'd most likely make the cosmetic portion of the link something at least slightly different from the category name anyways. Like, say, On Earthen Ring, there are x guilds on the Alliance side, and y guilds on the Horde side. (Not a very good example, I know.)

In conclusion, I don't feel the need to be adamant that they should have standard English rules applied (rules regarding normal sentence syntax, not titles). And Alliance should be capitalized because it's a proper noun, and Horde likewise. Schmidt talk 22:40, 28 Oct 2005 (EDT)


 * I agree that there is really no problem with category names being capitalized. If no one objects, I'll put a less equivocal version back on the main page.

--Aeleas 12:21, 29 Oct 2005 (EDT)

Capitalization of Race Names

 * ''Pulled this into a separate discussion from the Category Name discussion.

As for Night Elf and Blood Elf, should they be capitalized? Should we say that saying Night Elf and Human and Gnome and Troll and so on are similar to saying American and British and Italian and German and so on, or like saying white or black or engineer or banker or farmer? I rather think they should be capitalized in the same way as a nationality. (This is a departure from my thought on it some time ago.) And (although it doesn't relate to article names) what should we say about classes? The only class I can think of that might be capitalized in normal English (as opposed to "titular" English – and if that's not a word, I mean when appearing in a title) would be Druid. And should we even try to get a concensus on this? Schmidt talk 22:40, 28 Oct 2005 (EDT)


 * In earlier games, Blizzard always capitalized them, e.g. "The Orcs invaded,", but in later games and works they usually don't. In WoW quests, for example, it would say something like, "I have no doubt you love the night elves and their allies as little as I."  I would recommend that we don't capitalize them, just to stay as consistant as possible with Blizzard.
 * --Aeleas 12:21, 29 Oct 2005 (EDT)
 * Looking at the most current official Blizzard usage of race names (on www.worldofwarcraft.com), they always capitalize the race names. I believe the correct usage is to capitalize them. Pureblade 23:03, 30 Oct 2005 (EST)
 * Race names are capitalized in the race description pages, but not in the "History of Warcraft" section, or generally within the game itself. The preview of the blood elves uses capitals on the main page, but not on the page specifically about them.  They seem to be alternating between treating them as species names, which would not be capitalized, and ethnic groups, which are.  I guess staying consistent with Blizzard means having no consistency at all, which I'm content with. --Aeleas 15:24, 31 Oct 2005 (EST)

Including Definite Articles in Guild Names
I added a section on definite and indefinite article use from the Wikipedia standard, as well as a statement on not capitalizing parenthetical text and using the singular form for page names. They are just explicit statements of the general Wikipedia standard which was already mentioned in the article, but if anyone finds anything controversial, please move it to this page for discussion.

Proposal:
Regarding articles (the part-of-speech variety: "the", "a", "an"), they should generally not be included, but there is an exception for situations in which you would capitalize the title in running text. This includes the titles of works, e.g. The Last Guardian.

In our case, I think it should probably also apply to guild names, since they seem to follow the model of band names like The Who rather than organizations like the Catholic Church. In-game organizations, like the Scarlet Crusade, wouldn't fall under this rule.


 * --Aeleas 10:38, 28 Oct 2005 (EDT)

Votes

 * Yes:
 * 1) Aeleas 12:24, 29 Oct 2005 (EDT)
 * 2) Schmidt talk 22:40, 28 Oct 2005 (EDT), as stated above
 * 3) Powerlord 17:18, 29 Oct 2005 (EDT)
 * 4) Fandyllic 5:39 PM PST 9 November 2005

NOTE: This proposal is ratified and will be marked adopted when the changes have been integrated into the policy page. --Fandyllic 9:36 AM PDT 6 Jun 2006


 * No: