Wowpedia:Naming policy

Wowpedia:Policies
Policy status and phases
Category Copyright Deletion – Speedy deletion Disallowed content – NDA Editing – Disruptive editing External links Fan fiction Images		Item articles Lore Naming Neutrality Personal articles Player character pages Projects Stubs Three revert rule User naming Vandalism Voting
See also: guidelines, administrators

This page is an official policy on Wowpedia. This policy has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow. Feel free to propose any changes to this policy, but please make sure that changes you make follow the official process and reflect consensus on the discussion page before you put them into practice. Any big changes need to be Adopted or Decreed to be enforced as policy. See Wowpedia:Policies for an overview of Wowpedia policies. See Category:Policies for a list of proposed and adopted policy articles. Shortcut: WP:NAME

Naming conventions for specific article types

Item articles

Shortcut: WP:NIA

Articles about items present in WoW should have their article named exactly as they are in WoW, including capitalization. For example,  [Linen Cloth].

Quest articles

Shortcut: WP:NQA

Quests should have their article named exactly as they are in-game, including capitalization. Formerly, this policy required that quests be prefixed with "Quest:". Newly created quest articles should skip the creation of these redirects.

Some quests use punctuation that simply will not work in the wiki. Often the best thing to do is to just skip those characters.

Disambiguation

• If a quest line has the same name for multiple quests, the first quest by that name should follow the previous convention and further quests in the line should be disambiguated with parenthetical text signifying the quest part, i.e. (2), (3).
• If there are two quests by the same name, but they are different for Horde and Alliance you can:
  • Make an article explaining both sides of the quest.
  • Make two articles, one with the exact name of the quest and a second disambiguated with either (Horde) or (Alliance).

The original icon should have a disambiguation link at the top pointing to the second article. For example,  [Chen's Empty Keg],  [15] Chen's Empty Keg.

Character articles

Shortcut: WP:NCA

Character pages should be listed under the character's full name (first and surname) if known, excluding titles such as "King" or "the Destroyer". For example, Arthas Menethil, Terenas Menethil II, Blackhand.

It should be noted that some races and characters do not have "surnames", names like "Hellscream" or "Lightbringer" (or "The Lightbringer") are in fact titles, these are allowed as the names are how they are commonly known or can disambig between more than one version of the character, for example Uther the Lightbringer.

NPC articles

Shortcut: WP:NNA

NPC articles which are based primarily on in-game content should be named using the NPC's in-game name, including case, e.g. High Executor Darthalia, Archmage Pratt, Master Shang Xi.

API articles

Shortcut: WP:NAA

API function descriptions are prefixed with "API " and then exactly as the function name, with the same capitalization and no whitespace. For example, API GetShapeshiftFormCooldown. Object methods use spaces rather than colons, e.g. API Font GetFont. See How to edit API pages for details.

CVar articles

Shortcut: WP:NCV

Console Variable articles are prefixed with "CVar " and then exactly as the console variable name, with the same capitalization and no whitespace, unless it is part of the variable name. For example, CVar bgLoadThrottle and CVar cameraDistanceBarber Shop.

Personal articles

Main article: WP:PA

Personal articles, including almost all fan fiction articles, should be located as subpages of the author's user page.

Player characters

Main article: WP:PC

Player character articles should be located as subpages of the server on which the player resides, or (though less preferred) located as subpages of the author's user page.

TCG articles

Articles about Warcraft TCG cards should be named the same as the card, with disambiguation used as needed to differentiate it from other pages. For example, Witch Doctor Koo'zar and Aegis of the Blood God.

Other articles

Shortcut: WP:NOA

All other articles should have the first word capitalized (this is unavoidable) and any additional words in lowercase. The exception is that proper nouns are always capitalized. For example, Help:Starting a new page.

Articles should also not include definite or indefinite articles ("the" and "a/an") at the beginning of the page name. For example, use First War to refer to the event, not The First War. There is an important exception to this rule: "the", "a" or "an" is included when it would be capitalized if it appeared in text. This exception applies to quest articles, titles of books, games, and similar works.

Additional naming rules

Plurality

Shortcut: WP:NPL

Normally, all articles are named in the singular form, e.g. the article describing the general properties and history of dragons is named dragon.

Exceptions to this rule:

• Names that are always plural, such as the Knights of the Silver Hand.
• Articles that are lists, e.g. Paladin spells. This may cause extra work in attempting to say "foo is a [[paladin spells|paladin spell]]", but the suggestion is to set up "paladin spell" as a redirect to "paladin spells" if there is no page describing the general properties of what a "paladin spell" is.
• In cases where you feel that visitors are likely to type in a plural name directly in the URL, it is perfectly acceptable to create a redirect, e.g. Dragons → Dragon.
• For "simple" items, it is also perfectly acceptable to create a lower-case redirect, e.g. linen cloth →  [Linen Cloth]. Note that the case of the first letter is ignored in the wiki software: dragon is the same as Dragon, no redirect necessary.

Redirects of category pages are never allowed according to the category policy.

Parenthetical text

Parenthetical text to distinguish page names, such as in Onyxia (tactics), should generally be in lower case. Only capitalize it if it is a proper name or title, such as War of the Spider (History of Warcraft), or an acronym such as in Events (API).

As for code in linking to each of these, you can type [[Onyxia (tactics)|]] and arrive at this link: Onyxia. The parser will appropriately cosmetically drop what is found in parentheses.

Subpages and namespaces

For the purpose of capitalization, after the colon for a namespace is considered the start of the article title. For example, Wowpedia:Policy. Additionally, each subpage is considered the start of an article name.

Race name case

Shortcut: WP:RACE

Race names ("humans", "dwarves", etc.) are written in lowercase in Wowpedia. This also goes for when they appear in page names. Note that "nationalities" are capitalized, i.e. "Forsaken".

Obviously, the MediaWiki software will always capitalize the first word in the page title, and there is nothing we can do about that. This rule is only relevant for when a race is mentioned later in a page title.

• Note that regardless of this rule, articles named according to in-game NPCs are still capitalized as they are in-game, as per the NPC articles rule, above.

Category names

Main article: Wowpedia:Category policy

Category names are put into sentence case, much as in article names, except with proper nouns.

Technical restrictions

Some page names are not possible because of limitations imposed by the MediaWiki software. These include:

• Base names beginning with a lower-case letter. Note that a title can be displayed with an initial lower-case letter, using DISPLAYTITLE.
• Titles containing the characters # < > [ ] | { } (which have special meanings in wiki syntax), the non-printable ASCII characters 0–31, the "delete" character 127, or HTML character codes such as &.
• Base names beginning with a colon (:).
• Base names equal to "." or "..", or beginning "./" or "../", or containing "/./" or "/../", or ending "/." or "/..".
• Base names whose length exceeds 255 bytes. Be aware that non-ASCII characters may take up to four bytes in UTF-8 encoding, so the total number of characters you can fit into a title may be less than 255.
• Titles beginning with a namespace alias (WP:, WT:, Project:, Image:).
• Titles beginning with a prefix that refers to another project, including Wowpedia in other languages, e.g. "es:" (see Interwiki linking).
• Titles beginning with any non-standard capitalization of a namespace prefix, alias or interwiki/interlanguage prefix, or any of these with a space (underscore) before or after the colon. For example, it is not possible for a title to begin "HELP:", "HeLp:", "Help :" or "Help:_".
• Titles consisting of only a namespace prefix, with nothing after the colon.
• Titles beginning or ending with a space (underscore), or containing two or more consecutive spaces (underscores).

If an article falls into one of these special cases, you must name it differently and place {{Wrongtitle|<correct title>}} at the top of the article.

See also

• Help:Disambiguation
• Wowpedia:Disambiguation
• Help:Starting a new page