[WikiEN-l] WikiProjects overriding global guidelines?

Mon Jun 13 22:12:10 UTC 2005

Hi,

I'm quite severely disturbed by the apparent habit of participants in 
some WikiProjects to completely disregard Wikipedia's Manual of Style 
and various guidelines, claiming that their pet WikiProject has their 
own pet style guidelines, as if Wikipedia's global guidelines have no 
say anyway.

Is this really how things are going now? Articles on topic X follow a 
certain style while articles on topic Y follow a completely different style?

Case in question: So far it seemed to me that Wikipedia uses brackets 
after article titles *only* when they are required for disambiguating 
between otherwise identical article titles. Hence, there is the title 
[[Cher (département)]] but not [[Haute-Corse (département)]].

However, the Star Trek WikiProject has now randomly decided that this 
rule needs to go, and all articles on Star Trek episodes must have an 
extra parenthesis showing what series it's an episode of, even though 
most of the titles are unique as they are. Hence, [[Hide and Q]] is a 
redirect to [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)]], and all links to such pages 
unnessarily look like this: [[Hide and Q (TNG episode)|Hide and Q]].

Add to this the fact that outside of Star Trek fandom, readers aren't 
likely to know what TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT mean anyway.

What is everybody's opinion on this?

Timwi