Theopedia:Naming conventions
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Naming conventions is a list of guidelines on how to appropriately create and name pages.
Generally, the naming convention should give priority to what the majority of English speakers would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature.
In addition to following the naming conventions it is also important to follow the linking conventions. Following consistent conventions in both naming and linking makes it more likely that links will lead to the right place.
It is important to note that these are conventions, not rules written in stone. As Theopedia grows and changes, some conventions that once made sense may become outdated. But when in doubt, follow convention.
General conventions
Lowercase second and subsequent words
Convention: Do not capitalize second and subsequent words unless the title is a proper noun (such as a name) or is otherwise almost always capitalized.e.g. use John Wayne but Computer game. (Also note the first letter of a link need not be capitalized, since it, unlike the subsequent letters, is case-insensitive, thus: Computer game.)
Rationale and specifics: See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization) and Wikipedia:Canonicalization.
Prefer singular nouns
Convention: In general only create page titles that are in the singular, unless that noun is always in a plural form in English (such as scissors or trousers).
Rationale and specifics: See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (pluralization)
Avoid starting with articles
Convention: Try to avoid beginning the title with a definite or indefinite article (ie: 'the' or 'a'). For example 'the Trinity' should be Trinity.
Rationale and specifics: See Naming conventions (articles)
Redirect adjectives to nouns
Convention: Adjectives (such as democratic) should redirect to nouns (in this case, democracy).
Rationale and specifics: See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (adjectives)
Use gerund of verbs
Convention: Use the gerund of verbs (the -ing form in English) unless there is a more common form for a certain verb.
Rationale and specifics: See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (verbs)
Use English words
Convention: Name your pages in English and place the native transliteration on the first line of the article unless the native form is more commonly used in English than the English form.
Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)
Use common names of persons and things
Convention: Use the most common name of a person or thing that does not conflict with the names of other people or things.
Rationale and specifics: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names)
Be precise when necessary
Convention: Please, do not write or put an article on a page with an ambiguously-named title as though that title had no other meanings.
Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (precision) and Wikipedia:Disambiguation
Prefer spelled-out phrases to acronyms
Convention: Avoid the use of acronyms in page naming unless the term you are naming is almost exclusively known only by its acronym and is widely known and used in that form (NASA and radar are good examples).
Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (acronyms)
Do not use an article name that suggests a hierarchy of articles
Since wikipedia:Transportation in Azerbaijan could just as well be considered a subdivision of wikipedia:Transportation as of wikipedia:Azerbaijan, do not use a name like wikipedia:Azerbaijan/Transportation (the old Wikipedia software created a subpage when the article name contained a wikipedia:forward slash; this feature is discontinued for articles, but you may use it on user and talk pages).
Be careful with special characters
Some special characters either cannot be used or can but cause problems. For example you should not use a piping character (|), an asterisk (*), an ampersand (&), a plus sign (+), curly braces ({}), or square braces ([]) in a name.
Titles must not begin with an interlanguage link code followed by a colon. For example a page with the title FR:example will produce a "bad title" error.
Restrictions
Special characters
The following characters are not allowed in page titles:
" # $ * + < > = @ [ ] \ ^ ` { } | ~
The reasons include:
- + is used in web addresses to represent a space (e.g. when you type more than one word into a search engine). Using it in article names would potentially make parts of the system see their name wrong. Each + will be substituted by ' ' (space) respectively '_' (underscore) in the related page URL, see below.
- @ also has a special meaning in URLs, as a way of adding a username and password, and would have even more drastic consequences.
- [, ], {, }, |, and probably some of the others have special meaning within Wikipedia's syntax, which are processed before the pagename is determined. (e.g. [[{{CURRENTYEAR}}]] points at 2009, not a page called {{CURRENTYEAR}}.
- $, \, ", ` (and some others) have special meaning in other bits of the software, and allowing them would create potential security flaws which would take a lot of effort to insure against.
There are some pages not satisfying the restrictions, e.g. w:$. They may give complications.
Some very special characters, like two dots over the n that has been attempted for the page w:Spinal Tap, are not allowed either. They can only be represented using Unicode, whereas the English Wikipedia just uses w:ISO 8859-1 or similar.
Namespace prefixes
Also, the first part of a page name may not coincide with a project-independent namespace prefix that is automatically converted to another one, e.g. the name Project: A-Kon on Wikipedia is not possible.
The first part of a page name can coincide with a namespace prefix that is not converted. For example, there might be articles in the English Wikipedia about books called Wikipedia: The Big Adventure and Talk: Secrets are Bad (but only without the space after the colon). However, in that case the pages are in the wrong namespace. This may be inconvenient in searching or displaying a list of pages. Also, in the second case there is no link to a Talk page about the book. (As explained above, the second page name is not possible on e.g. the German Wikipedia: see de:Talk: Secrets are Bad).
Prefixes referring to other projects or pseudo-namespaces
A page name can not start with a prefix that is in use to refer to another project, including language codes, e.g. "en:" (list), or one of the pseudo-namespaces "Media:" and "Special".
Spaces vs. underscores
In page names, a blank space is equivalent with an underscore. A blank space is displayed in the large font title at the top of the page, the URLs show an underscore. See also below.
Case-sensitivity
If for the first letter of a page name two cases exist, as in the case of letters of the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Armenian alphabets, the following applies.
All characters of namespace prefixes are case-insensitive. The canonical form, shown in large font as page header, and in URLs generated by the system, is with one capital. Below "page name" refers to the name without the possible namespace prefix.
Case-sensitivity of the first character
The first character of the page name may or may not be case-sensitive, depending on the project. [[Help:page name]] gives on this project: Help:page name. If the first character of the page name is case-sensitive this is a link (to a different page), otherwise it is bold (a self link to this page).
Currently in all Wikimedia projects other than the Klingon Wikipedia and the toki pona Wikipedia it is not. For these two, compare e.g. tlh:jo and tlh:Jo, and tokipona:musi with tokipona:Musi. For Wiktionary changing this is being discussed at Wiktionary:Wiktionary:Beer parlour/case-sensitivity vote.
Case where the first character is case-insensitive
The canonical form is with a capital. A link like [[template]] works like a piped link [[Template|template]]: template; unlike a redirect, the conversion shows up already on the referring page when pointing at it: in the pop-up and in the status bar (if applicable for the browser).
Note that in the case of a prefix that is not a namespace for the software, the case-insensitivity applies to the first character of the whole name, e.g. MediaWiki User's Guide: Using tables and MediaWiki User's Guide: using tables are distinguished.
Case-sensitivity of the file name extension of an image
Note that even the file name extension of an image is case-sensitive: compare image:Stop_sign_us.jpg and image:Stop_sign_us.JPG
Ignored spaces/underscores
Spaces/underscores which are ignored:
- those at the start and end of a full page name
- those at the end of a namespace prefix, before the colon
- those after the colon of the namespace prefix
- duplicate consecutive spaces
Some show up in the link label, e.g. [[___help__ :_ _template_ _]] becomes ___help__ :_ _template_ _, linking to Help:Template.
However, a space before or after a "normal" colon makes a difference, e.g. MediaWiki User's Guide: Editing overview and MediaWiki User's Guide : Editing overview, and MediaWiki User's Guide:Editing overview are all distinguished, because "MediaWiki User's Guide:" is a pseudo-namespace, not a real one.
Coding of characters
A page name can not contain e.g. %41, because that is automatically converted to the character A, for which %41 is the code. [[%41]] is rendered as A. Similarly %C3%80 is automatically converted to the character À. [[%C3%80]] is rendered as À. The URL of the page is http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%80. One can argue what is the real name of the page, %C3%80 or À (a user will say the latter), but anyway there can not be distinct pages with these names.
Alphabetical order
Alphabetical order, e.g. in Special:Allpages, is (at least for that range) according to ASCII. Note that this means that "a" comes after "Z", see e.g. [1].
Variables {{PAGENAME}} and {{PAGENAMEE}}
Variable {{PAGENAME}} gives for this page Naming conventions, Variable {{PAGENAMEE}} gives Naming_conventions.
Thus in the first case a space is used, in the second case an underscore, like in URLs. Similarly À becomes the escape code %C3%80 (see above), etc.
{{NAMESPACE}}:{{PAGENAME}} and {{NAMESPACE}}:{{PAGENAMEE}} give for this page Theopedia:Naming conventions and Theopedia:Naming_conventions, respectively. For a page in the main namespace the page name is prefixed with a colon.
Example:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target={{NAMESPACE}}:{{PAGENAMEE}}
gives
{{PAGENAME}} would not work.
With a Google search there is the problem that for Google the space and the underscore are different, see w:Template talk:Google.
