User:Ricken/SandboxPG/Article titles

An article title is the large heading displayed above the article's content. The title indicates what the article is about and distinguishes it from other articles.

The title may simply be the name (or a name) of the subject of the article, or it may be a description of the topic. Because no two articles can have the same title, it is sometimes necessary to add distinguishing information, often in the form of a description in parentheses after the name.

This page explains in detail the considerations, or naming conventions, on which choices of article title are based. This page only covers names of pages in the main namespace. If necessary, an article's title can be changed by a page move.

Naming an article

Article titles are based on how an average Amtgardian refers to the article's subject. There is often more than one appropriate title for an article. In that case, editors choose the best title by consensus based on the considerations that this page explains. Often, alternate names for the subject of an article are created as redirect pages to the main article. Conversely, a name that could refer to several different articles may require disambiguation.

A good title for an AmtWiki article is:

• Recognizable to someone who is familiar with, but not necessarily an expert on, the subject
• Natural, or what someone might likely use as a search term
• Precice, to distinguish it from other similar subject and make it clear what the article is about
• Concise, so the title is no longer than necessary
• Consistent with the pattern of similar articles' titles.

These should be seen as goals, not as rules. For most topics, there is a simple and obvious title that meets these goals satisfactorily. If so, use it as a straightforward choice. However, in some cases the choice is not so obvious. It may be necessary to favor one or more of these goals over the others. This is done by consensus. For instance, the recognizable, natural, and concise title of Blackspire is preferred over the more precise title The Kingdom of Blackspire.

Use recognizable names

In AmtWiki, the article title is usually the name of the person, or of the place, or of whatever else the topic of the article is. However, some topics have multiple names, and this can lead to confusion about which name should be used in the article's title. AmtWiki generally prefers that a name is the most commonly used version. The wiki does not necessarily use the subject's "official" name as an article title; it generally prefers to use the name that is most frequently used to refer to the subject in the rest of AmtWiki and in Amtgard.

Ambiguous names for the article subject are often avoided even though they may be more frequently used. If an article title can commonly refer multiple subjects, a disambiguation page should be page that links to the articles that it could refer to. For example, there are dozens of Amtgardians and chapters with the name Shadow. Instead the page "Shadow" featuring just one person named Shadow, the page is a disambiguation page that links to all articles with titles similar to "Shadow".

Name changes

Sometimes, the subject of an article will undergo a change of name. When this occurs, the name of the article should also also be changed. The old name should ideally remain as a redirect to the new name.

Explicit conventions

The following points are used in deciding on the title of articles:

• Use sentence case: words are not capitalized unless they would be so in running text
• Use the singular form: exceptions include nouns that are always plural and names of sets of objects
• Avoid definite and indefinite articles (a, an, and the) at the beginning of the title unless it's part
• Use nouns instead of other parts of speech
• Do not enclose titles in quotes unless the quotes themselves are a part of the title
• Do not create subsidiary articles: articles should not be subpages of another article, and should stand alone.
• Avoid special characters