Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (numbers and dates)

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[edit] Article for each date

Topic imported from Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

Is see user Pcb21 is making many new pages with titles like February 27, 2003. He is breaking up the February 2003 articles. Is this current policy? -- SGBailey 17:12, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

The most recent month pages are getting far too long, and many now appear on Special:Longpages, so breaking them up seems reasonable. That said, some thought needs to go into how these pages are organized and linked to. - SimonP 19:34, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
This came up on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/January 1, 2005, and there was no consensus. I agree with Simon that we could use a discussion about how best to do this before people start making radical changes. Christopher Parham (talk) 20:51, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
Additional problems include the fact that mislinked dates, using February 27, 2003 instead of February 27, 2003 are indistinguishable or nearly so on the page, if it weren't for the fact that preferences don't work with the former.
Another problem is the fact that there is no redirect from 27 February 2003.
Some of the problems of overcrowded and overlinked to pages could be alleviated by removing the screwball connection between preferences and ordinary linking. Can't someone get the developers to come up with some independent scheme to make date preferences work? Gene Nygaard 12:03, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Much better - thank you, now I understand it. - Haukur Þorgeirsson

Is there a policy discussion still going on about this? If so, where?

Just for the record, I support individual pages, though some dates should probably be disambiguation pages with (Gregorian) or (Julian) appended.

RandomP 01:36, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] guidelines and practice don't match for olympic games and others

The current guideline[1] states: (quote)

The recommended format for separate articles on events that recur at regular intervals is as follows:

<Name of event> (<time indicator>)

Where:
  • <Name of event> is the existing article title (non-redirect) that describes the event;
  • <time indicator> is used only as a disambiguator, giving no more detail than is needed for disambiguation, which would be a year in most cases.

But the actual format used for events is <year> <event>. The article Summer Olympic Games (1920), given as example in the guideline, is at 1920 Summer Olympics, and there is not even a redirect! I found the same with Winter olympics and Alpine skiing World Cup. For Football World Cups, <event> <year> is used, as in Football World Cup 2002. The Expo articles are inconsistent, cf. Expo '70, 1982 World's Fair, Expo 67, Expo 2005.

The only consistency seems to be that the guideline is not used.

Four different proposed solutions:

  1. Abolish guideline and use official name of event, i.e. the name the organizers use
  2. Rewrite guideline to match majority of articles; leave events with different, but consistent format as they are
  3. Rewrite guideline to match majority of articles (either <year> <event> or <event> <year>); rename all articles that don't match new guideline
  4. Enforce old guideline with mass renaming and relinking

-- Mkill 17:19, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Notes
  1. ^  Sorry, this isn't a guideline, it's only a (relatively new) proposal (see template on top of the Wikipedia:Naming conventions (numbers and dates) page), so the rest of Mkill's comment becomes quite senseless. --Francis Schonken 17:54, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

FYI, there is Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (years in titles)/Poll going on presently (as indicated on wikipedia:current surveys, if you ever visit that page). Up till today only three people voted in that poll. And then there's Wikipedia:Naming conventions (years in titles), which is older, and maybe more to your liking, but presently no more than a proposal either.

So there are two relatively new initiatives to get the "years in titles" NC guideline out of its long-standing proposed status:

These two initiatives started more or less concurrently, neither of them anything near to "guideline" status presently. --Francis Schonken 17:54, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Radiant!s suggestions

From: User talk:Francis Schonken:

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (numbers and dates) looks good to me, and to the best of my knowledge matches most of what we already have. Let's see, some remarks...

  • As noted on the talk page, it may help to put some thought into structuring articles like March 18, 2001. We probably don't need an article for each day in history. So which days get their own articles, and which go in March 18 in general?
  • The bit about Roman numbers is weird. Some of them redirect to years, others to numbers. Arguably some should redirect to Roman numerals. Some consistency would be nice. And arguably, a lot of deletion since many of these seem to be entirely arbitrary.
  • I think some standard would be nice on the repetitive events section, but good luck in getting any. I think we should stick with the "Event (year)" bit because it matches practice in other areas.
  • Overall, looks good! Radiant_>|< 16:51, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
Re. the general issue I read in your remarks, i.e.: balance between "instruction" and "multiple option recommendation": I tried to keep on the "safe" side this time, too instructive is more often a problem than presenting sensible options without pressure (that can always be made more stringent afterwards, in the case that would be desirable).
  • "March 18, 2001" type articles: I hadn't really discovered the mechanism behind them yet: apparently it works via a template in the "March 18" type articles, only for the years 2003 and up. I added that info to the guideline proposal.
  • Roman numerals: I don't really think the "weirdness" can be much helped, because of the weirdness of how Romans wrote down numbers. Take for instance C, it's even not unambiguous as a numeral, as in hexagesimal it can mean 12 (in Roman it is 100). Both numeric meanings are listed on the "C" page. CIC (Roman for 199) is at the same a TLA with many meanings (so, a disambig page). I don't think "arbitrary", and don't see what you would delete (...most of them either "harmless" redirect, or a mentioning in a disambig page list - even the MIX article mentions the numeric value of these letters read as Roman numeral). I think consistency of "x (number)" and "xxxx" year articles more important. IMHO Roman numerals should keep second plane, while their ordering principle is not really compatible with several other established wikipedia ordering principles (like for instance the TLA category). I wouldn't redirect MMVI to 2006 (number) though, nor VII to the year 7. Also I wouldn't know from what number it should flip from a redirect to a number article, to a redirect to a year article...
  • "Event (year)" is my preferred format too, but for the 5 or so voters on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (years in titles)/Poll this was not the unanimous choice. Also prior talk on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (years in titles)/Archive 01 indicated this only as the third option: since the "years in titles" NC guideline proposal only marked the two other options as acceptable, "Event (year)" is not applied very frequently yet in wikipedia, so I decided, for the time being, not to try to go too much against tide. As I said above, if the time is ready for a more stringent approach, it will not be too difficult to adapt the guideline in that sense (e.g., with an intermediate step of "discouraging" the two other formats for a period of time). --Francis Schonken 20:54, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] BC/BCE

It looks good to me, but perhaps a mention of the style guideline for BC/BCE usage would be appropriate? Talrias (t | e | c) 10:50, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Re. Wikipedia:Eras:
  1. This poll hasn't come to a conclusion yet (seen the controversy over the poll, including edit-warring on the poll page, I'm not very inclined to fan its relative importance prematurely);
  2. It is outside the present scope of Wikipedia:Naming conventions (numbers and dates) - the NC guideline is about pagenames of non-redirect pages - the rest is topic for Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers): the Wikipedia:Eras poll is not likely to change anything re. pagenames of non-redirect pages.
--Francis Schonken 12:05, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] User:Hoof38

(Copied from the wrong place to both Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Numbers and Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (numbers and dates)

List of "bad" articles he's created (IMHO) include:

  • (-> means redirect)
  • with my comments after
292,277,026,596 -> 11th millennium and beyond
edited both 10000 and 10,000 to be separate disambiguation pages
  • (I think they're now at least the same disambiguation page)


Category:Thousand
Category:Million
Category:Billion
123456789 (number)
1023456789 (number)
1234567890 (number)
12345678987654321 (number)
987654321 (number)
9876543210 (number)
−2 (number) -> Negative and non-negative numbers
−3 (number) -> Negative and non-negative numbers
−4 (number) -> Negative and non-negative numbers
−5 (number) -> Negative and non-negative numbers
−6 (number) -> Negative and non-negative numbers
−7 (number) -> Negative and non-negative numbers
−8 (number) -> Negative and non-negative numbers
−9 (number) -> Negative and non-negative numbers
−10 (number) -> Negative and non-negative numbers
  • I changed all of the −n (number) to redirect to n (number), but I don't think they should be there at all
Year −1 -> 2 BC
1st decade -> 0s
1st decade AD -> 0s
−0s -> 0s BC
  • (OK, these aren't confusing, anyway)
1st changed from 1 (number) to first
2nd from 2 (number) to second (completely wrong, this time)
10th from 10 (number) to tenth (wrong again)
  • I reverted these.
−1 as a disambig between -1 (number) and 2 BC
−2 as a disambig between −2 (number) and 3 BC
−3 as a disambig between −3 (number) and 4 BC
−4 as a disambig between −4 (number) and 5 BC
−5 as a disambig between −5 (number) and 6 BC
−6 as a disambig between −6 (number) and 7 BC
−7 as a disambig between −7 (number) and 8 BC
−8 as a disambig between −8 (number) and 9 BC
−9 as a disambig between −9 (number) and 10 BC
−10 as a disambig between −10 (number) and 11 BC
  • Why?
2100 changed from a redirect to 21st century to a disambig between 21st century, 22nd century, and 2100 (number)
4000 added reference to 5th millennium and 4000 (number) to disambig
5000 changed from a redirect to 5000 (number) to a disambig with 5th millennium, 6th millennium, and 5000 (number)
6000 etc.
7000 etc.
8000 etc.
9000 etc.
  • I'm not sure about these. They probably should be reverted per Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (numbers and dates), but...
[[12:00] -> hour
[[1:00] -> hour
[[2:00] -> hour
[[3:00] -> hour

etc.

  • I've proposed these for deletion. He's now redirected one of them to clock.
  • Help — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 02:22, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
    • What's the problem? Why is it that 10th should redirect to 10 (number) rather than tenth Hoof38 02:38, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
      • Except in slang, 10th only means the ordinal 10 (2nd disambiguation from tenth), with occasional references to the interval (4th disambiguation), and rare references to 1/10 (1st disambiguation). I've added a second {{otheruses}} (more or less) to 10 (number).

[edit] Standard format?

Should we have a standard format where the article on an event that does not recur at regular intervals (or didn't recur at all)? Currently there is no "standard format" for the representation of the time indicator, This creates inconsistency as well to the project. I feel that a conclusive consensus would create less inconsistency here. --Siva1979Talk to me 22:03, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Are people following these guidelines?

I was wondering why some of the examples are red-linked in the Articles on events section? it seems strange that the guidelines give Summer Olympic Games (1920) as an example, and then later say 1920 Summer Olympics is also acceptable, but maybe giving too much weight to the year (though the guideline fails to mention that it also drops 'Games' from the title). Looking at the articles for Summer Olympic Games, they all use the 'year in front' and 'Olympic Games' -> 'Olympics' style. So what is going on there? Then there is the example of "UEFA Champions League (2005-2006) (note that each year is written in full, separated by a hyphen)". If you look at Category:UEFA Champions League, you can see that this guideline hasn't been followed. They all write the second year as two digits instead of the full year and drop the brackets (eg. UEFA Champions League 2005-06). The guideline also gives the example of U.S. presidential election, 2000, when that is actually a redirect, and the article is at United States presidential election, 2000. So is this guideline just out-of-date, or are people not following the naming conventions? Carcharoth 22:15, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Francis Schonken changed the U.S. example - thanks for that. Anyone know anything about the other examples? Is 1920 Summer Olympics just accepted as an exception, and are the football league ones named in a different style for some reason? Carcharoth 22:35, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Anyway, maybe also have a look at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions/Archive 9#Elections, an aborted attempt to add still more formats ("<event> of <year>" this time, for elections). All formats currently on the Wikipedia:Naming conventions (numbers and dates) guideline page are used (I made all "examples" reflect real examples now), and I think these three formats are enough to choose from for recurring events. --Francis Schonken 00:10, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Funnily enough, I was going to mention elections, as they are the only events mentioned at Wikipedia:Naming convention that have their own convention. See Wikipedia:Naming_conventions#Elections. I thought that was a bit funny, as it should technically be a subset of "events" or "numbers and dates". Did someone slip that onto the page over there after the above discussion, or was it already there? And what should be done about those earthquakes (that's what set this all off for me). I moved a couple to fit what I thought was the standard way to title (not name) earthquake articles, but now I'm not sure what to do. If you look at the examples I gave, different names give differing amounts of information to the reader. Some earthquakes have local names, some are widely known by another name, many have absolutely no name at all. The USGS seems to introduce them as date (day, month, year), location, and size. With the occassional 'common' name thrown in when an earthquake has acquired one. I suppose if the names are a mess in the real world, then Wikipedia article titles will inevitably reflect that. Would that be a good way to sum this up? Carcharoth 01:11, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
Francis, thanks for the election naming convention update. Was there a talk page discussion somewhere to support that? I really would like to start a discussion somewhere to get guidance on how to decide on a title for earthquake articles, as I want to start filling in the gaps in Wikipedia's coverage in this area (mainly older, pre-20th century earthquakes). I would go ahead with using the Disasters Wikiproject naming convention, but I had a bad experience with 1356 Basel earthquake, which I requested a translation of from the French at that page title, and a few days later (even before the translation process was finished) it got moved to Basel earthquake. The arguments for both sides are at Talk:Basel earthquake, along with the current move request, but before I create any more earthquake articles, I want to make sure I don't get bogged down in any more arguments over what title the articles should be at. What would be the best way to do that, and still fit in with the necessarily slow development of naming convention guidelines? Carcharoth 11:04, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
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