GenieWiki:Naming conventions

From GenieWiki

This page is an official policy of GenieWiki, and is therefore a standard that all users should follow.

Having said that, the wiki is still in its very early stages of development, and there are no clear rules on what we should do in a number of situations where there is a lack of clarity over naming. For all discussions about general rules for article naming please use the talk page. For naming of specific articles, please discuss on the talk page of the article itself, but if the issue is one that requires a general rule to be made please discuss it here as well. When we have adequate consensus on issues we will be able to put in place more concrete rules on article naming. Our basis for naming conventions can be taken from Wikipedia:Naming conventions as a starting point, but the wiki will need to have its own specific rules for many issues, especially relating to the naming and sorting of articles relating to specific games, when they conflict with other articles.

Naming conventions is a list of guidelines on how to appropriately create and name pages.

It is important to note that these are conventions, not rules written in stone. As GenieWiki grows and changes, some conventions that once made sense may become outdated, and there may be cases where a particular convention is "obviously" inappropriate. But when in doubt, follow convention.

Generally, article naming should give priority to what the majority of English speakers would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature.

Another way to summarize the overall principle of Wikipedia's naming conventions:

Articles should be named for readers over editors; and for a general audience over specialists.

In addition to following the naming conventions it is also important to follow the linking conventions. Following consistent conventions in both naming and linking makes it more likely that links will lead to the right place. A redirect should be created for articles that may reasonably be found under two or more names (such as different spellings or former names). Conversely, a term that may be used to describe several different search terms may require a disambiguation page.

General conventions

Capitalisation

Convention: Capitalise all second and subsequent words as they appear in-game as well as something otherwise almost always written in capital letters (for example: Imperial Creations and HeavenGames. Many units are named with capitals, e.g. Gold Mine. Another example is the editor naming of conditions like Bring Object to Object.

Due to technical limitations inherent to the MediaWiki software, the first letter in an article title always needs to be a capital letter. Ordinarily this isn't a problem, but it poses an issue when a proper noun's first letter is lowercase (for example, eBay). The first letter of an internal wikilink need not be capitalized and will direct the reader to the same page (for example, map editor or Map editor can be used interchangeably as needed).