OpenWetWare:Information management/Article naming conventions

Help pages that need to be written ...

• Guidelines for choosing a proper name for your page
• Instructions for how to rename a page
• Instruction for undoing an edit to a particular page

• Austin 18:19, 15 June 2006 (EDT): We also need a discussion about what these naming conventions should be. When should colons be used? When should slashes be used? One problem of using colons is that MediaWiki treats it "specially" for interwiki links (OpenWetWare:Namespaces) as I found out when trying to create an interwiki link to the igem wiki. Suddenly all pages beginning with IGEM: stopped working. Other issues include what should happen when someone names a page badly either intentionally or not. Who and with what means do we deal with it? Another thing that I don't particularly like about the current naming scheme is that everyone creates a page for their name (e.g. Austin Che). This pollutes the main namespace and is quite redundant with the user's page which most people have a redirect to in one direction or another. For example, I filter everything in the User: namespace out of my recent changes and having individual user pages in the main namespace essentially makes this filtering useless.

• Kathleen 19:42, 15 June 2006 (EDT): I agree that we should decide what we want the naming conventions to be before we make this page. Personally, I like the "slash" technique because it automatically generates a link to the previous page. I think some combination of this and namespace usage makes the most sense, but we definitely need to make sure that what we decide is compatible with interwiki links, etc. I think if we establish a convention for new users, most people will try to follow it. And, as some people stated earlier, I'm not sure it's a huge deal if people use general names for stuff. Potentially, we could use the Openwetware namespace for all "whole wiki" pages and avoid the issue altogether.

• RS 21:23, 15 June 2006 (EDT): I also agree that we should think about naming conventions carefully and Kathleen's proposal which is along the lines of what we are using now seems reasonable. On the issue of using the OpenWetWare namespace, I prefer using the OpenWetWare namespace for OWW related topics and no namespace for pages that are of general interest to the biological research community. For instance, OpenWetWare:Poster for posters advertising OWW and Posters to discuss how to put together a poster.

• yeem 21:53, 15 June 2006 (EDT) FWIW, MediaWiki is phasing out and/or frowns upon using the slash to create subpages in article space, but doesn't care if it's done in user space. Reshma, your namespace convention makes sense, perhaps we should codify it on the naming conventions page?
  • Kathleen 22:17, 15 June 2006 (EDT): I think what is an article and what is user space is a bit different here, and perhaps up to interpretation. For instance, I would consider a lab page (and sub-pages) part of user space while general protocols, materials, and information are more article-like. I think that most of the overlaps in page names will occur in user space (using my definition) and this may be where we want to focus our attention on setting up some guidelines. If others agree, I think we can continue to encourage the slash option, as long as this will continue to work in future versions of MediaWiki.