Talk: Naming policy

Past discussions archived to...

...Wowpedia talk:Naming policy/Archive01 Archived 27 June 2006
...Wowpedia talk:Naming policy/Archive02 Archived 15:43, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
...Wowpedia talk:Naming policy/Archive03 Archived 00:45, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

For some previous naming related discussion, also see Wowpedia talk:Policies/Archive (old discussion page)

Proposal: eliminate the Quest: pseudo-namespace[]

I propose we revise the policy to eliminate the Quest: prefix on quest articles. Signifying links to quest articles is today much better served by DefaultLinks, and I really don't see the need to continue dividing quests (and only quests) out from the rest of the content. --PcjWowpedia admin (TDrop me a line!•C207,729 contributions and counting) 04:12, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Quest proposal votes[]

Yes

Yes PcjWowpedia admin (TDrop me a line!•C207,729 contributions and counting) 04:03, 10 September 2014 (UTC) - (Originally proposed)
Yes Cemotucu (talk contribs) 04:45, 10 September 2014 (UTC) - (See comments section.)
Yes Dark T Zeratul (talk) 05:20, 10 September 2014 (UTC) - (no comment)
Yes k_d³ 01:31, 11 September 2014 (UTC) - (no comment)
Yes Sdkphoenix (talk) 03:08, 11 September 2014 (UTC) - (After some more thinking, and reading other's opinions, I have changed my mind. It doesn't make sense for one namespace to be different than others for the sake of looking better. Consistency should be the rule.)
Yes Aquamonkeyeg (talk) 05:48, 15 September 2014 (UTC) - (I never noticed that about quests and the search box.)
Yes SWM24 48 22:36, 30 January 2017 (UTC) - (If a bot does it well. As it never became a namespace, it is just a relic that makes little sense. A lot of links to us from external sites might break, but it has no internal use.)
Yes — SurafbrovWowpedia administrator T / C 03:18, 11 September 2014 (UTC) - (For the average viewer.)

No

No - jerodast (talk) 01:12, 11 September 2014 (UTC) - (Helpful, harmless, quests have uniquely varied names that could do with clarification, see comments)
No g0urra[T҂C] 15:53, 18 September 2014 (UTC) - (Make Quest: an actual namespace.)
No Alayea (talk / contrib) 09:18, 15 December 2014 (UTC) - (Unless the navigation and search-ability is improved, the Quest: prefix requirement is very much a quality of life that I prefer.)
No Xporc (talk) 22:23, 30 January 2017 (UTC) - (Helpful, harmless.)
No Haghala (talk) 22:46, 30 January 2017 (UTC) - (With the inherit limitation of wiki Quest: prefix is more or less a must, even with the prefix we have to use suffixes for class and faction quests. the quest prefix helps more than it breaks, if its consistency issue more prefixes could be added, for ex: WQ, Mission, Follower and Champion.)
No ----Mordecay (talk) 22:52, 24 August 2017 (UTC) - (Keep / make it an actual namespace))

Quest proposal comments[]

Why was this policy decided at all? I mean... does it have arguments sustaining it? If not, I'll aprove the change. Cemotucu (talk contribs) 04:10, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

I'll try to find the original deliberations that put the Quest: prefix in place. It certainly is the product of a bygone era; we used to have a few other things that were off in their own spaces but none as widespread as quests. --Pcj (T•C) 04:13, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Quests being separate were apparently part of the original naming policy, voted upon as you can see in this history link. The rationale at the time is to make it match the style "as it appeared in-game". I don't think it's appeared that way in-game for a long time (if it ever was; couldn't find any screenshots with "Quest:" included and my memory's a bit foggy that far back). --Pcj (T•C) 04:26, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, if they ever were like that, it is clear things have changed. I'll vote yes. Thanks for searchign the old arguments, BTW!

Cemotucu (talk contribs) 04:43, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

This is a repeat of this proposal from 2011, which failed to achieve the margin required to change the policy. — foxlit (talk) 22:04, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Good find, I knew there had been debates in the past. Hopefully we can get the margin this time. --Pcj (T•C) 22:07, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

I like the Quest prefix. Mainly, quests have a wide variety of names. Some are sentences, some are names of people, some are names of events, some are abstract concepts. The prefix clears up any confusion about that at the first look at the page title or title bar. Most other types of pages do not have this problem, or at least it isn't widespread. I guess items can have some pretty weird names, but usually the name AT LEAST gives you a hint that it's some sort of physical thing in the game world. Achievements could definitely use a prefix since they share the same variety of names as quests, except that so many of them have (10 player) etc suffixes that make an extra clarifier redundant.

Prefixes look "cleaner" than parenthetical suffixes, to me anyway. I also find it slightly easier to search by prefix than by category since the quest prefix is readily apparent while category trees can be complicated, but that may be just lack of practice - unfortunately I can't seem to experiment with right now because I've been getting a number of errors since today's update.

I admit, if you took away the prefix and made sure all quest pages had infoboxes on them, I might end up being fine with that, but it just doesn't do any harm I can see and I find it comforting to have such a clear, concise identifier. And I can think of situations where I opened a bunch of tabs with names I wasn't familiar with, and the prefix helping me remember which tab was which. So it's a no from me, but I ain't quittin' the wiki over it. - jerodast (talk) 01:12, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Interesting perspective; just curious, did you have any specific quest pages in mind that are missing infoboxes? --Pcj (T•C) 01:18, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

No, I was just trying to think of what might distinguish a page as being a quest page at a glance, and it's either the prefix or the infobox. The prefix is an easy thing to do when creating a new page, the infobox takes a bit more work, so that's the concern if the prefix goes away, but it's pretty minor. - jerodast (talk) 01:25, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Removing the Quest psuedo-namespace has been a thing I've wanted to do for years now. I'd love to finally see it done. If necessary, we can always distinguish quests by using the disambiguating parentheses, "Foo" vs "Foo (quest)" the way we do for everything else on the wiki. --k_d³ 01:31, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

I guess what I'm trying to point out is that quest identification is distinct from standard disambiguation, just because there are so damn many weird quest names that it isn't clear what they're referring to at all, OR they're referring to something that sounds like it's something other than a quest but we don't actually have (or need) a page for. For instance,

[10-70 Daily] Big Gulp is named after a real world drink. Is it a drink? No, it's a quest. We can tell this instantly from the prefix if we happen to have landed on the page. I don't feel that the disambiguation-style "(quest)" is appropriate here, because when I see THAT I assume there is a

[10-70 Daily] Big Gulp page elsewhere, but there's not. The Quest: prefix says only "this is a quest", it does not imply anything about other pages. And as I said, I find prefixes cleaner looking anyway - you can have all kinds of things in parentheses, but only very well-defined terms as prefixes.

Also note that the mere presence of the Quest prefix helps with snap identification of other topics as well. Above, I mentioned ambiguous achievement names. A Little Patience is one of those abstract names that could be a quest or an achievement (or the title of a book or a bunch of other things, but most likely a quest or achievement). But looking at the page title, I can tell it's probably an achievement, because it doesn't have the Quest: prefix.

Again, being a little less instantly clear, requiring a second's more examination of the page, not the end of the world. But I just don't have a problem with it at all. - jerodast (talk) 01:50, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

To be clear, I meant "I just don't have a problem with the prefix at all that would outweight even the minor benefits" :) - jerodast (talk) 01:55, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Hah, I just realized the achievement for A Little Patience is actually named after the scenario of the same name. YOU SEE WHAT I'M SAYING with these unclear names? Which I guess we need to add "scenarios" to the list of? In this case, one or the other of the achievement or the scenario will have a disambiguation, but that still leaves the "main" page for the name slightly unclear at first glance. Wouldn't it be a ton easier if they all just started with "Achievement:" or "Scenario:"? I realize that's not what this proposal is about, but at LEAST the presence of "Quest:" narrows such vague page titles down a little. - jerodast (talk) 02:06, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

I agree with this, that Quest: does help keep quests separate from the rest. To me having (quest) or (achievement) is messy, however I don't want to change the latter. I have already resigned myself that is how achievements are, just like quests are Quests: and not (Alliance quest 1). It can get too messy looking for quests that shares names, has different faction requirements, and/or is part of a series. I say jt leave it how it is, and find a way to make searing for quests easier.Sdkphoenix (talk) 03:06, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

How is putting (quest) at the end of a few article names messier than essentially putting the "disambig" Quest: in front of every quest article name? --Pcj (T•C) 03:20, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

It is my personal opinion, but I have never been a fan of putting things in parenthesis, however I do not complain about what is already the rule since that is how it has been for a long time. Just like it has always been Quest: for as long as I remember. To me, it is just easier to keep putting Quest: in front of new quests instead of going back and changing every quest already in the wiki, while also having to see which ones need (quest) or (alliance quest) or (quest 3) etc. To me, Quest: is more pleasant to look at.Sdkphoenix (talk) 05:28, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

I've changed my vote from yes to no because the "Quest:" prefix is much neater for quests and I also agree with Sdkphoenix and jerodast. Plus is also easier to find the quest article you're looking for just typing in the url to it without worrying if you may need to add "(quest)". — SurafbrovWowpedia administrator T / C 03:18, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

The "difficulty" bit is a red herring. Bots will make the relevant changes, not editors. I've been playing with it on a test wiki and most quests will simply go from "Quest:Foo" to "Foo". Of the ~123k articles we have on the wiki, only ~15k are quests.

On the finding things point, non-editors (the vast majority of our hits) will almost always search for the quest in the search box rather than filling out the url, or search for it on Google and come in from that way. However, with the mandatory pseudo-prefix, searching for a quest like "Delegating on Draenor" on the wiki pops up the search results page (Special:Search/Delegating on Draenor) rather than going directly to the quest (Delegating on Draenor), and the search box's auto-suggestion won't turn up any results because the search query doesn't start with "quest:". Compare this with any non-pseudo-namespace'd article, like "Siege of Orgrimmar". Type that into the search field and see what's suggested while typing, and see what happens when you type in the whole article and hit enter. You'll go directly to the relevant article rather than a search results page. That is what we should be striving for.

If we really wanted to be consistent, we'd use a (pseudo-)namespace for everything: items, achievements, NPCs, spells, etc, just like the databases do. That is completely unacceptable to me. The wiki is not trying to be a database - it's a human-readable/searchable wiki.

Parenthization is the standard way of disambiguating articles, and the base wiki software already knows how to handle links like [[Foo (whatever)|]] (it outputs "Foo" as a link to "Foo (whatever)", but without foxlit's DefaultLinks extension, it doesn't know how to handle pseudo-prefixes like Quest.

Anyway, that's my stance on this. "Quest:" as a pseudo-namespace should've been gone years ago. It's only here because of inertia and I would really rather see it gone. --k_d³ 01:52, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

I have to thank KD3 for this last comment. I had realized long ago that to search for quests you needed to put the "Quest:" prefix; but as I became an editor, I simply learned and assimilated it. But for a casual user, it is indeed counter-intuitive and unfriendly. So more reasons to change it.

Cemotucu (talk contribs) 12:44, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

I can only agree on that it should be an actual namespace (instead of a pseudo one) and include in default search. --g0urra[T҂C] 17:42, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Interesting suggestion. Care to elaborate? -- Taohinton (talk) 02:42, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

To summarize the 2011 discussion: the Quest: prefix shields us from collisions with NPC/item/achievement/location names; roughly 10% of quest articles would need to have disambiguation added/adjusted if we remove the prefix. The transition can largely be automated, so the question really is whether the benefits of a more uniform disambiguation scheme outweigh those of having a somewhat more reliable way to guess what the title of an article for a given quest is. The way Search works is largely tangential to this discussion: we could instead make Quest a real namespace, and include it in the list of namespaces searched by default, which would make it possible to find/navigate to quest articles via the search box.

From my side, I'd like to hear the opinion of people who actually edit quest and quest-related articles (as I, mostly, do not) -- is the prefix helpful, or is it an annoyance?

On a mildly related note, having case-correcting redirects (like Apprentice Engineering schematics) in the main namespace annoys me -- that particular problem should really be solved at mediawiki/extension level; and perhaps similar logic could make http://wowpedia.org/In_Dreams redirect to http://wowpedia.org/Quest:In_Dreams as well. — foxlit (talk) 20:48, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

As far as I can gather, it sounds like the tangible benefit of the change would be easier searching, while the downside would be a trickier situation for editors linking pages. By the latter I mean that when creating quest links there would be a regular need to check that the pages linked to were actually the quests, and not other pages which shared the names. However if the quest pages had been created, I'm assuming links to them would still display as quests, eg A Little Patience vs [15-35] A Little Patience, so it would be a simple matter of scanning the text to make sure all intended quest links displayed the usual presentation (and then if necessary amending the edit). Nonetheless I think we can be fairly sure the change would result in a greater number of mis-links; it's much simpler to just add "Quest:" at the start, every time. This is however already the case when linking anything other than quests.

The question then for me is whether the reduced fiddliness for editors is worth the reduced accessibility for readers searching for the quests. From what KD3 states of the current functionality, I suspect it is not. I agree that the proposed functionality is what we should be aiming to provide. The one downside I can see is that the prefix does in my opinion look better than the odd, irregular parenthesised suffix will, but on the other hand this form of irregularity is itself standard on the site ;)

The other arguments are far less tangible. I agree that such an exception is curious and irregular, and that it no longer appears necessary, and that we definitely don't need to divide the whole site into separate pseudo-namespaces. But I don't consider any of this very important compared to which is the better functionality. Provided the improved accessibility is worth all the minor edits (and the work to change it over), it seems the better option. -- Taohinton (talk)

Articles starting with The[]

The policy states:

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.

Is the intent of the final sentence that the exception applies only to "quest articles, titles of books, games, and similar works"? Or does it also apply to article types such as items, NPCs and zones?

If it does not, the section needs to be rewritten to make this clearer, and certain pages currently starting with 'The' need to be moved. If it does, the section needs to be rewritten to make this clearer, and certain pages currently not starting with 'The' need to be moved. I would be happy to make all of these changes, but am obviously seeking clarification and consensus first. -- Taohinton (talk) 13:09, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

If it appears with an article in the game (or on Wowhead), then it keeps the article. If a proper noun always appears with a capitalized article as part of its name, then it keeps the article. Zone names are tricky as they appear with capitalized articles, but only rarely in running text. Keep in mind that there was a recently-ended vote about this that won, but was shot down by every admin that voted.--SWM24 48 16:19, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Proposal: Re-work TCG page naming[]

From looking at categories under Category:Warcraft TCG cards it seems that "TCG" is becoming a pseudo-namespace of its own, similar to "Quest:" above. I propose the following:

The use of the "TCG" prefix in page names should be discontinued, and
Pages about TCG cards should default to the name of the card, disambiguated from other articles as necessary.

The current scheme of {{SET NAME}}/{{CARD #}} may be retained as a redirect for backwards-compatibility.

For example, TCG Blood of Gladiators/124 would be moved to "Gladiator Addisyn (Blood of Gladiators)". "Blood of Gladiators/124" would redirect to the new location.

TCG Blood of Gladiators/18 would be moved to "Witch Doctor Koo'zar" over the redirect. "Blood of Gladiators/18" would be a redirect.

TCG Through the Dark Portal/2 would be moved to "Grumpherys (Through the Dark Portal)".

TCG proposal votes[]

Yes

Yes PcjWowpedia admin (TDrop me a line!•C207,729 contributions and counting) 20:07, 6 February 2018 (UTC) - (Originally proposed)
Yes — SurafbrovWowpedia administrator T / C 20:15, 6 February 2018 (UTC) - (It just seems cleaner and more effective this way.)
Yes Alayea (talk / contrib) 20:18, 6 February 2018 (UTC) - (no comment)
Yes Bannanawaffles (talk) 20:25, 6 February 2018 (UTC) - (I can begin work on the back catalog as soon as you'd guys like before I continue producing new pages.)
Yes Alianin T • C 21:34, 6 February 2018 (UTC) - (It was a pain trying to link concept art to card pages when I was uploading/updating the images from Sons of the Storm.)
Yes Mordecay (talk) 21:40, 6 February 2018 (UTC) - (no comment)
Yes Sssssssssssssssssssssssss For Pony! (^Sssss/_Slithered) 01:54, 7 February 2018 (UTC) - (no comment)

No

No Xporc (talk) 20:29, 6 February 2018 (UTC) - (Extremely against it, see below.)

Comments[]

I finish most of my days exhausted enough already due to the current amount of daily edits on the wiki. There would be thousands pages to update for very little gain. I'd rather have our members create original content rather than endlessly rehash the same things that work well enough, especially since there would be a high risk of introducing bugs or broken links. If it's the Category:Warcraft TCG which is problematic, I rather suggest creating a Category:Warcraft TCG cards sub-category instead. Xporc (talk) 20:34, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

Your arguement is invalid. The whole point of the wiki is to add more content (as they come) and keep updating old content; and this proposal is an example of validating old content and improving them. Plus you started working on Classic content whenever it is speculated to come around 2020. This TCG namespace pretty much relates to the "Quest:" namespace, but the TCG really isn't needed and can be made more user friendly. — SurafbrovWowpedia administrator T / C 20:44, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

Although I do like the idea of the subcategory being added with this proposal. — SurafbrovWowpedia administrator T / C 20:49, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

Agreed, went ahead and implemented that change. --Pcj (T•C) 21:57, 6 February 2018 (UTC)