FamilySearch Wiki talk:Naming Conventions

This page is for vetting ideas regarding the conventions or best practices we should provide to help contributors create clear, unambiguous, intuitive titles.

System Constraints

Several constraints of the MediaWiki software that runs this site influence our decisions. They are:

1. Every title must be unique. The software uses titles as the identifier for each article rather than using some sort of unique identification number.
2. The Exact Match search, which is the same as Wikipedia's Go search, is case sensitive for all words in the title after the first. So articled titled "Vital Records" and "Vital records" are different to the Exact Match search. For this reason, Wikipedia created a convention whereby all words in a title other than proper nouns must be lowercase. However, Wikipedia uses Go/Exact Match as their search default, where FamilySearch Wiki does not. Therefore, case may not be as big an issue to FamilySearch Wiki.

Decisions Needed

1. Whether to use jurisdictional identifiers (the word "county," "parish," "township," etc.) in place names.
2. The number of jurisdictional levels to include in a place title. For example, should one title an article "Rockville, Montgomery County, Maryland" or "Rockville, Montgomery County, Maryland, United States?"
   
3. When to use historical vs. modern names. In covering information on Utah before it became a state, is it wise to create a new article on "Utah Territory, United States?" This may be less an issue of naming conventions than an issue of when to fork an article in two. Therefore, I will probably make this the subject of a new article.
   
4. The use of upper or lowercase in titles. Exact Match on this MediaWiki search engine is case sensitive. For that reason, Wikipedia organizers have created a naming convention that all words in the title after the first which are not proper nouns must be lowercase. This site, unlike Wikipedia, uses the case-insensitive Search rather than case-sensitive Go or Exact Match as its default for searches.
5. The use of special characters, such as commas, colons, parenthesis, and hyphens.

Principles

1. In writing mailing addresses, users are accustomed to identifying a place from smallest to largest jurisdiction, such as "Rockville, Maryland, United States." Since this pattern is customary, it may be more intuitive for users.
2. Shorter titles can be better, but only if they help the user understand an article's subject matter without having to read the article. So an article titled "Jefferson," while wonderfully short, would not tell users which of 114 places the article is about.
3. It can be helpful to users unfamiliar with a place's location to include more jurisdictional handles.
   
4. Including all jurisdictional handles in a title tends to result in many undesired search engine results. Thus, if towns are named like "Rockville, Montgomery County, Maryland, United States," an article on tax records of the town might be titled "Tax Records of Rockville, Montgomery County, Maryland, United States." But under such a system, if a user trying to find United States federal tax records searches "United States tax," the search engine results will list every article on tax records for every town in the U.S. rather than just articles on United States federal tax records.
   

Resources

General

Category:Wikipedia naming conventions
Wikipedia:Naming conventions
Wikipedia:Naming conflict
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (technical restrictions)

Special rules for templates

Spaces in the name are allowed, e.g. {{train topics}}. The first character (only) is not case-sensitive, so {{cleanup}} and {{Cleanup}}are the same template, but {{cfd}}and {{cfD}}are not.

The template name in general should be short. Many on Wikipedia are abbreviations.

Special rules for namespaces

Only a system admin can create a namespace. Namespaces should be created only after much discussion. The name should be a single word.

Headings:
Wikipedia:Manual of Style - Section headings
Help:Section - Creation and numbering of sections

Categories:
Wikipedia:Naming conventions & categories