Site:Page names

From WingetWiki

General

In theory, you can name an article anything you want. In practice, it's a good idea to conform to certain conventions about these titles. The following are suggestions to help minimize confusion. You are not obligated to follow them, but it's a good idea for a number of reasons.

The main reason for conforming to these conventions is because it helps folks find articles. Having a standard set of conventions for titles makes it easier to find an existing article about a person or place that interests you. And if you've written an article, you DO want others to find it. Otherwise, they will probably think there isn't one, write one of their own, and reinvent the wheel, giving you both bother when you try to merge the articles.

Here are some things that you are urged to do.

Articles covering individuals

• Use a full name to the extent possible---e.g, First Middle Last.
• indicate a life range in years (YOB-YOD)
  • no spaces between dates and hyphen!
  • no day and month---keep it simple
• If you don't know the YOB or YOD, use an approximate date if possible (e.g, bef1795-c1856)
  • use 'c' for circa, rather than "About" or "Abt"---it doesn't really matter what you use, all the above are OK, BUT standardizing on 'c' simplifies the hunt for articles.
  • use "bef" for "earlier than" and aft for "later than" (because "less than" and "greater than" symbols don't work well in web titles). Thus, you might write a date "(bef1795-aft1856)", NOT "(<1795->1856)".
  • if you are really stuck, the convention this site has adopted is to indicate an unknown date with a "?" as in (?-?). Avoid using "Unknown" or "Unk". For a person known or presumed to be still alive, do not use a closing question mark: thus Robin Forlonge Patterson (1940-).
• If you want to insert a nickname or "by-name", put it at the end of the title (so as to minimize confusion of alphabetical order), rather than between first and last names. Thus

       John Walker (c1735-c1818) aka "Indian Killer", not "John 'Indian Killer' Walker". 

• However, a semi-official addition to a name should precede the dates, eg John Pollok of Balgray (c1690-aft1720).
• If there is series of people with the same name (grandfather, father, son, grandson) you may want to insert a roman numeral to help distinguish between them. That works best between the surname and the dates. Thus, John Walker IV (c1735-c1818) aka "Indian Killer". If known, use the symbols they or their immediate family use(d).
• This site generally uses a single person as the basis for an article's name. (If you want, you can add the spouse's name to the title, but then you run into the problem of what to do with multiple spouses. It seems to work better if only one person is in the title, with their spouse being written up in a separate article of their own, and linked back so people can follow their lineage.) In addition you may have a page for the couple/family or clan, with links to the individuals. See Category:Clans. Polish up your "copy&paste" skills and there won't be much duplication of effort. We may one day introduce "couple" pages with standard ways of linking: watch this space!

In short, article titles are (among the few) things you should be fairly precise about. The title "John Walker (1795-1856)" is not the same as "John Walker (1795 - 1856)", in the computer's "mind". The extra spaces are subtle differences, but if you type in something in the search box, once with and once without spaces, you may get different articles or miss the article you are searching for.