FamilySearch Wiki talk:Naming a Project

Divergence in project titles

Title	Namespace	Comments
FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject U.S. Census	FamilySearch Wiki	The word Wikiproject helpfully indicates this is a project within this wiki.
Wikiproject US Census	Main	The word Wikiproject helpfully indicates this is a project within this wiki.
FamilySearch Wikiproject: Danish Jurisdictions	Main	The colon in the title and the words preceding it may lead some users to erroneously believe that a FamilySearch Wikiproject namespace exists.
Maryland Barn Raising Tasks	Main	The word Tasks indicates a form of project.
North Carolina Barn Raising	Main	We learned from some Brits that the term Barn Raising doesn't mean anything there. Project seems better.
FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject Integrating Place Standards Database with FamilySearch Wiki	FamilySearch Wiki	What an enormous title!
Task to Copy Research Guidance and Help Content	Main	The termTask indicates a form of project.

Project titles are getting too long

Note that FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject Integrating Place Standards Database with FamilySearch Wiki and FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject Linking to Books in the BYU Family History Archives use the same naming and namespace conventions as projects on Wikipedia (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Alternative music). Sensible conventions, but long titles! Wikipedia's product namespace is simply "Wikipedia" where ours is "FamilySearch Wiki." Such a long namespace title bloats any title incorporating that namespace.

And it may get worse: There is talk among FamilySearch managers about renaming FamilySearch Wiki to FamilySearch Research Wiki because there may be a future need for more wikis at FamilySearch. Can you imagine if all the titles in the wiki's product namespace were all preceded with "FamilySearch Research Wiki:" -- wow, what long titles we'd have, Grandma! Ritcheymt 23:10, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Main or other namespace?

It seems a good idea to have project pages in a namespace other than Main. Over time, the wiki could ostensibly have a project for, say, each of the types of U.S. records. So there'd be one for U.S. Census, U.S. cemetery records, and so forth. Users searching for census articles would run into the census project page(s). Doesn't feel like a good experience. We may find at some point that project pages are spamming search engine results, at which point we might want to have projects not appear in the default search results. If all projects were in a namespace other than Main, it would be easy to exclude them from default search results. If projects were all in the Main namespace, however, excluding them from the default search would be a nightmare. So Wikipedia probably has a good reason for having projects reside in the WikiPedia namespace. Ritcheymt 23:34, 14 December 2009 (UTC) 

Argument against FamilySearch Wiki namespace

Of all the articles in the FamilySearch Wiki namespace, project pages have a greater chance of having the same keywords as regular articles -- keywords for localities and record types, for instance. Thus, project pages have a greater chance of spamming search results for users seeking regular articles. In addition, projects have the potential to far outnumber everything else in the FamilySearch Wiki namespace. So at some point down the road we found that project pages are spamming search results unlike anything else in the FamilySearch Wiki namespace, we would not have the option to just suppress project pages from the default search. It'd be all or nothing: suppress the whole FamilySearch namespace or don't. If projects were in a seperate namespace it'd be easy to suppress them -- and just them -- from search. Ritcheymt 23:39, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Create project namespace?

What if we replaced titles like FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject Linking to Books in the BYU Family History Archives to WikiProject:Linking to Books in the BYU Family History Archives or FamilySearch WikiProject:Linking to Books in the BYU Family History Archives. To do this, we'd need one of two things:

1. A community decision to create a new namespace called "WikiProject." In this case, the use of the string "WikiProject:" in the beginning of a title would place the resulting page in the WikiProject namespace. Or...
2. ...a community decision that we want projects to reside in the main namespace. In this case, the use of the words "WikiProject:" in the beginning of the title would not place the page in a special namespace.

G Fröberg Morris' title FamilySearch Wikiproject: Danish Articles Needing Revision captures that the page is about a project and that the project is on FamilySearch Wiki (for outsiders doing a Google search). Ritcheymt 23:10, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

If FamilySearch is thinking of having more than one Wiki, then the namespace "WikiProject" might be confused with the other Wikis. Maybe "Research WikiProject" would work, but it is long. I hope we get other ideas from the community. Franjensen 15:57, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

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