[WikiEN-l] WikiProjects overriding global guidelines?

Mon Jun 13 23:10:43 UTC 2005

On 13/06/05, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> 
> 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?

[[Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK Parliament constituencies]] has a lot
of discussion on this; the project was a crash project to create a
standard useful stub article for every UK constituency in about three
weeks (which succeeded), and (mostly) went with a policy of naming
every page [[Constituency (UK Parliament constituency)]] (or Scottish
Parliament, as the case may be). There was a bit of heated debate at
the time, which was mostly dealt with by the reasonable enough "look,
can we come back to this after the election?"

The current debate is down at the bottom of that page; one point which
may be of use in your context is the idea of standard redirects.

ie - whatever page "Hide and Q" ends up at, have a redirect page at
Hide and Q (TNG episode). This means that if you're writing an article
and want to link to it you don't have to go and check if it's listed
as "Hide and Q", or "Hide and Q (episode)", or "Hide and Q (Star Trek
episode)"... which is often one of the reasons to use standard page
titles, for linking simplicity.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk