[WikiEN-l] WikiProjects overriding global guidelines?

Mon Jun 13 23:49:02 UTC 2005

> 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)]].

I think you've picked a pretty bad example here. It's hardly a hard
and fast rule, and there's many circumstances when it's been seen as
*much* easier for the parties involved to auto-disambiguate, as with
US and Australian towns.

> 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]].

This could, indeed, be a problem, if there were any "rule" in the
first place that they "randomly decided" needed to go. I can't see any
problem with it, if that's the consensus of the editors involved -
they're the ones who generally have to link to the articles.

> 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.

As long as they're covered by an appropriate redirect, I really don't
see the issue at all.

-- ambi