Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (numbers and dates)/Archive 02

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Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (years in titles)/Archive 01

Years in titles, revisited again

I've noticed that Wikipedia:Naming conventions (years in titles) hasn't been finalized. Are we going to accept U.S. presidential election, 2000 as the standard or 2000 U.S. presidential election as the standard? Furthermore, how do you address date ranges? The cricket articles have several inconsistent naming standards, such as 1888/9 South African cricket season and 2005 English cricket season (1-14 June), both which are apparently non-preferred. They also might use something like Category:English cricket from 1890 to 1968, which I would imagine to be non-preferred as well. Passing mention that an en dash should be used in the official title for a closed date range, rather than a normal dash. Personally, having to include an en dash is just asking for more trouble and making the convention less likely to be adopted. --AllyUnion (talk) 18:27, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Please elaborate the proposal with what you think most sensible, and then proceed with trying to reach consensus about such proposal (via wikipedia:village pump (policy), wikipedia:current surveys, etc.)
As for my preferences:
  • I don't like the format "U.S. presidential election, 2000", because I think it's better to avoid punctuation marks in article titles;
  • I don't like the format "2000 U.S. presidential election", because I think it's better not to start with a number in such case;
  • I prefer the format "United States presidential election (2000)", because I think that better in line with standard wiki-like qualifiers between brackets.
  • So I suppose I'd have "English cricket season (2005)" (not mentioning the "1-14 june"), or maybe "Cricket (United Kingdom 2005)" - but I'm no cricket specialist.
  • Likewise, "South African cricket season (1888-1889)" or "Cricket (South Africa 1888-1889)"
Note I'm not in favour for cricket having a separate article for every country, every season - isn't this a bit close to the wikipedia:notability criterion?
--Francis Schonken 07:15, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
However, it's been mentioned that "United States presidential election (2000)" is not preferred. I can see why as well, since you need to separate from one event from another... --AllyUnion (talk) 07:26, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, I can see that as well, but still, on the whole, when I give my preference, it is as stated above. Anyway, all of this indicates it would be better to make this step up from a guideline proposal to a naming conventions guideline - I'd be glad to submit to a consensus if there is one.
Anyway, I added to the guideline page what I know about "years in titles" w.r.t. "people" naming conventions; I just copied what I knew to be in guidelines presently.
--Francis Schonken 07:46, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
In regards to the cricket articles, their claim is that all cricket matches placed on the Wikipedia are usually international matches, and are notable... But, you tell that to the WikiProject Cricket, I think what they are doing is a bit excessive.
In regards to a format, I believe the reason for opposing the (DATE) format is if one were to mistakenly use a '|' in a Wikilink, it would be simply the name of the event, and would confuse between two same named events held at two different years. --AllyUnion (talk) 07:57, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
Cricket: I'm not interested enough;
I don't know what exactly you mean with the piped wikilink problem? Could you give an example that shows where this is different from other uses of years in titles?
As for what my proposal would be, see below. --Francis Schonken 08:25, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
A title like [[United States presidential election (2000)]] when piped like so: [[United States presidential election (2000)|]] automatically changes to [[United States presidential election (2000)|United States presidential election]] --AllyUnion (talk) 09:14, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
Didn't know about that feature, testing without "nowiki" tags: United States presidential election - not problematic as far as I'm concerned: one would only do that when wanting to link to the article of that particular election, without the bracketed disambiguator showing up in the text where the wiki-link is used. That's what this feature is for I suppose, and by all means the year of a particular US election is a disambiguator as far as I can see. --Francis Schonken 09:40, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
I find that when editing articles, I most often want to use the phrasing "U.S. Presidential election of 1980," requiring the cumbersome wikiformatting herein: "Delegates from Saturn and Mars did not participate in the [[U.S. presidential election, 3468|U.S. Presidential election of 3468]] rather than being able to wikify "the U.S. Presidential election of 3468" directly. For what it's worth. Kaisershatner 02:40, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Recurring events

For recurring events I think I'd modify the guideline proposal to something like this:

Recurring events

The recommended format for separate articles on events that recur at regular intervals is as follows:

<Name of event> (<time indicator>)

Where:

  • <Name of event> is the existing article title (non-redirect) that describes the event;
  • <time indicator> is used only as a disambiguator, giving no more detail than is needed for disambiguation.

Example: Summer Olympics

  • The article is at Summer Olympic Games (and not at "Summer Olympics" or "Olympic games" or "Summer olympics", etc...)
  • The year suffises as time indicator, the month in which the Olympics were held is superfluous information, not retained in the article title;
  • Formats like "Xth olympiad", etc. are not witheld to do the disambiguation of the article titles (though such formats may be used for redirect pages)
  • So, for instance: Summer Olympic Games (1920) for the VII Olympiad, held in Antwerp.

Example: Champions league football competition

For events that recur at non-regular intervals, for instance Ecumenical councils, the articles on the individual events usually avoid a date indication, but are numbered/characterised otherwise (e.g. place of event, combined with numerical), for instance: Fourth Council of the Lateran; First Council of Lyons; Second Council of Lyons; Council of Vienne - similarly for Crusades: First Crusade, Second Crusade, etc... Note, however, that exceptions to the rule of avoiding dates are applied according to established practice, for instance: Crusade of 1101 (minor crusade, not numbered, and generally indicated by the year it occured).

Note that for numbering usually a text version of the numbers is used for these types of events, or (exceptionally) Roman numerals, if that is the most established practice (e.g. World War I, World War II).

If a time indicator is used in the title of an article on an event that doesn't recur at regular intervals (or didn't recur at all) there's no "standard format" for the representation of the time indicator, so there is for instance: Crisis of the Third Century; German Crusade, 1096 (one of the developments of the First Crusade); May 1968, etc... The format of the date depends, in these cases, from established practice in history books and the like. In general, however, abbreviations for years or months are avoided (e.g., May '68 → May 1968); for centuries numerals are given in text, capitalised (e.g., Crisis of the 3rd century → Crisis of the Third Century)

PS - Maybe this guideline proposal ought to be renamed to wikipedia:naming conventions (numbers and dates) or wikipedia:naming conventions (dates and numbers), and expanded to cover this whole topic (so that it becomes the "article naming" counterpart of Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers). --Francis Schonken 11:52, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Started that, see Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (numbers and dates) --Francis Schonken 14:22, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Discussion

Yeah, this proposal is different from the current proposal, but I think it better --Francis Schonken 08:25, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

The problem is that you wouldn't want to disambiguate every event... It would be redundant to have a disambiguation page for events that occur on a certain interval or what not. --AllyUnion (talk) 09:17, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
I don't get the gist of that remark: if time indicators are randomly applied as it is now (e.g. UEFA Champions League 2005-06 for Champions league, and 1920 Summer Olympics for Olympic games), each of these series of sports events would NEED a list (or disambig page, or category) to sum up these events so that wikipedia users can find these articles. If an identical scheme is applied accross all these events, disambiguation is without doubt easier, at least for the ones recurring at regular intervals.
For events not recurring at regular intervals, this wouldn't be handy anyhow, and is against established practice (in history books and the like), e.g. Crusade (1202-1204), or any other format using years for the major Crusades is against the common names principle (wikipedia:naming conventions (common names)) --Francis Schonken 09:57, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Poll

A poll can be found here: poll --AllyUnion (talk) 09:44, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

My idea, that poll makes it appear much more complex than it probably is.
e.g. "–" (en dash) is not advised as a replacement for "-" in page name titles, per wikipedia:naming conventions#Be careful with special characters.
So, instead of commenting on each of the remote options presented at that poll, I simply state that I prefer the proposal presented above on this page #Recurring events, for recurring events; and Wikipedia:Naming conventions (years in titles)#Articles on people for what there's to be said on articles re. people. --Francis Schonken 10:10, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
The page you linked to says nothing about dashes. I think you are getting confused with remembering before we switched to Unicode. Susvolans ⇔ 12:57, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
Still, the general guideline says "Be careful with special characters" in article names... Are not mentioned in that guideline either: "⁺", "†", "☩",... - yet all of these were refused for use in an article name after the unicode conversion, see Talk:Sonneries de la Rose Croix.
The "en dash" character is neither by definition more "correct", nor easier to type (and the "insert character" table below a wikipedia edit window doesn't help all that much: "dash" and "en dash" have the same length on my screen in that table).
So, opposing artificial complication for which I don't see how it would improve Wikipedia: I don't even see a marginal improvement would result from it. --Francis Schonken 14:56, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
Feel free to reorganize it... just trying different variations. --AllyUnion (talk) 21:40, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

re-proposing Wikipedia:Naming conventions (numbers and dates)

This has been mentioned on this page and wikipedia:current surveys before. In the mean while several suggestions were incorporated, and others answered at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (numbers and dates).

So, proposing the updated Wikipedia:Naming conventions (numbers and dates), to be accepted as guideline in a week or so - unless there are still fundamental alterations required.

Note that this guideline proposal absorbs wikipedia:naming conventions (years in titles) (which would become a redirect). Also this is about the last wikipedia:naming conventions topic that doesn't have a "naming conventions" guideline yet, separate from the more general MoS, which doesn't discuss many "page naming" specifics. --Francis Schonken 21:35, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

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