Star Wars Merchandise Wiki:Naming conventions

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 As Wookieepedia grows and changes, some conventions that once made sense may become outdated, and there may be cases where a particular convention is "obviously" inappropriate.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.

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.

Lowercase second and subsequent words
Convention: Do not capitalize second and subsequent words unless the title is a proper noun (such as a name) or is otherwise almost always capitalized (for example: Han Solo, but Computer game).

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, t'landa Til). The first letter of an internal wikilink need not be capitalized and will direct the reader to the same page (for example, computer game or Computer game can be used interchangeably as needed).

Rationale and specifics: See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization) and Wikipedia:Canonicalization.

Prefer singular nouns
Convention: In general only create page titles that are in the singular, unless that noun is always in a plural form in English (such as electrobinoculars, magnacuffs or vibroknucklers). Category names follow different pluralization conventions, see Categorization. Rationale and specifics: See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (pluralization)

Redirect adjectives to nouns
Convention: Adjectives (such as Imperial) should redirect to nouns (in this case, Galactic Empire). Rationale and specifics: See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (adjectives)

Use gerund of verbs
Convention: Use the gerund of verbs (the -ing form in English) unless there is a more common form for a certain verb. Rationale and specifics: See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (verbs)|

Use English words
Convention: Name your pages in English and place the native transliteration on the first line of the article unless the native form is more commonly used in English than the English form. Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)

Use common names of persons and things
Convention: Use the most common name of a person or thing that does not conflict with the names of other people or things. Rationale and specifics: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names)

Be precise when necessary
Convention: Please, do not write or put an article on a page with an ambiguously-named title as though that title had no other meanings. Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (precision) and Wikipedia:Disambiguation

Prefer spelled-out phrases to acronyms
Convention: Avoid the use of acronyms in page naming unless the term you are naming is almost exclusively known only by its acronym and is widely known and used in that form (laser, radar, and scuba are good examples). Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (acronyms)

Avoid the definite article ("the") and the indefinite article ("a"/"an") at the beginning of the page name
Convention: Except in titles of works (The Bacta War, "The Lady or the Tiger?", A Clockwork Orange) or in official names (The Maw), avoid the definite ("the") and indefinite ("a"/"an") articles at the beginning of a page name. This applies even if the subject of the page is usually preceded by the definite article "the" in speech or writing: Thus, for example, Death Star is preferred over The Death Star, however The Galaxy is preferred over Galaxy. Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (definite and indefinite articles at beginning of name)

Do not use an article name that suggests a hierarchy of articles
Since History of the Jedi Order could just as well be considered a subdivision of History as of Jedi Order, do not use a name like Jedi/History (the old MediaWiki software created a subpage when the article name contained a forward slash; this feature is discontinued for articles, but you may use it on user and talk pages).

Be careful with special characters
Some special characters either cannot be used or can but cause problems. For example you should not use a piping character (|), an asterisk (*), an ampersand (&), a plus sign (+), curly braces ({}), or square braces ([]) in a name.

Titles must not begin with an interlanguage link code followed by a colon. For example a page with the title FR:example will produce a "bad title" error.

Also, for naming pages the restriction to ISO-8859-1 is strict, no characters that are not ISO-8859-1 may be used. See Wikipedia:Special characters for a list of non-ASCII characters that are allowed.

See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (technical restrictions).

Aircraft names
Aircraft names are too varied to give full guidelines here; see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (aircraft).

Animals, plants, and other organisms
The capitalization on the common names of species has been hotly debated in the past and remains unresolved. As a matter of truce both capitalized and non-capitalized (except for proper names) are acceptable, but a redirect should be created from the alternative form. Scientific names are always written in italics. The first name (genus) is capitalized, the second (species) is not. Examples: Homo sapiens, Tyrannosaurus rex, Velociraptor. See: Article titles and common names'' See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (fauna)'' See: Capitalization''

Categories
See: Wikipedia:Categorization

City names
Convention: In general, there are no special naming conventions for cities, unless multiple cities with the same name exist. Discussion, rationale, and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (city names)

Comic books
See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (comic books)

Languages, both spoken and programming
Convention: Languages which share their names with some other thing should be suffixed with "programming language" in the case of programming languages, or "language" in the case of spoken languages. If the language's name is unique, there is no need for any suffix. For example, Python programming language and English language, but Galactic Basic and Jawaese. Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (languages)

Lists
Convention: Put a list of Xs as list of Xs, rather than Xs, famous Xs, listing of important Xs, list of noted Xs, list of all Xs, etc. See list. Consider making a category instead of a list: categories are easier to maintain.

Literary works
Suggested convention: Use the title of the work as the article's title, following all applicable general conventions. To disambiguate, add the type of literary work in parentheses, such as "(novel)", "(novella)", "(short story)", etc. You may use "(book)" to disambiguate a non-fiction book. If further disambiguation is needed, add the author's surname in parentheses: "(Orwell novel)", "(Asimov short story)", etc.

Movie titles
Convention: Oftentimes movies share the same name as other movies, books or terms. When disambiguating a movie from something else use (movie) in the title when only one movie had that name and (YEAR movie) in the title when there are two or more movies by that name (example: Titanic (1997 movie)).

Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (movies)

Organizations (such as political parties)
Convention: For articles on organizations (like political parties) the general rule applies. That means: Name your pages with the English translation and place the original native name on the first line of the article unless the native form is more commonly used in English than the English form. Examples of the last are names of organizations in India, Ireland, Israel, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Quebec, Sri Lanka (English is or was an official language in most of these countries, which led to the general use of the native name) as well as some in Spain (Batasuna), Indonesia (Golkar), Iran (Mujahedden al-Khalq), Russia (Yabloko and Rodina), Republic of China (Taiwan) (Kuo Min Tang) and Cambodia (Khmer Rouge). Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)

Ship names
Convention: Articles about ships that have standard prefixes should include them in the article title; for example, HMS Ark Royal, USS Enterprise. Note that although in text the name but not the prefix is italicized, this is not indicated in the article name, so pipe links are used, for example for the above HMS Ark Royal, USS Enterprise. Articles about ships that do not have standard prefixes should be titled as (Nationality) (type) (Name); for example, Soviet aircraft carrier Kuznetsov ( Soviet aircraft carrier Kuznetsov . Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ships)

Years and plain numbers
Convention: On Wikipedia, the use of number-only page names should only be used for Year in Review entries. However, Wookieepedia deviates from this convention because years are always followed by either "BBY" or "ABY". Therefore, plain numbers (like 1138) can be used for any purpose.

Using plain numbers for clone trooper commanders has been phased out in favor of the CC- convention, like CC-2224 ("Cody").

Years in titles
Convention: In general, there are no special naming conventions for articles on recurring events, such as elections or the Olympics. See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (years in titles)

Currency
Convention: This convention is in progress; see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (currency)

Identity
Convention: in progress, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (identity)

Initials
Initials in people's names, or companies named after them, should be written with full stops (periods) after them, with a space between the initials and the name, and between initials. Thus, R. A. Salvatore, A. C. Crispin, T. E. Lawrence, and F. W. de Klerk. (See Oxford Style Manual 3.2, Chicago Manual of Style 8.6). (This convention is under discussion; see Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions.) An exception is a reference to someone using only initials, such as is occasionally done in informal discourse in reference certain U.S. presidents: FDR, LBJ, or JFK.

Acronyms and initialisms such as IBM, NATO, and WYSIWYG are likewise written without periods (see: Naming conventions (acronyms)).

Military units
Convention: getting started, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (military units)

Places
Convention: in progress, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (places)

Suffix
Convention: in progress. Page names should use the least number of suffixes possible?

Television series and shows
Convention: in progress. See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (television)

More issues
There are many other specific issues to be discussed on the talk page.