Wikipedia:Naming conventions (plurals)
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This page documents an English Wikipedia naming convention. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should follow, though it should be treated with common sense and the occasional exception. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page. |
- The word "always" appearing below is controversial; see Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions/archive5#SOME_article_titles_should_be_plural.
Convention: In general only create page titles that are in the singular, unless that term is always in a plural form in English (such as scissors) or is among the exceptions such as those listed below.
Let's say you were writing a page about crayons. Should you call the page [[crayons]], which is basically what the page is about, or [[crayon]], which makes it easier to link to from passages like "Harold took out his purple crayon and drew the curtains"? Probably the latter.
One can still write [[crayon]]s (which the software is smart enough to render as crayons), but if the page is called [[crayons]], then whenever one wants to use the term in the singular, one is forced into creating a piped link - the ungainly [[crayons|crayon]], or creating a redirect (see below). For markup help, see Help:Editing.
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[edit] Exceptions
There are some exceptions to this rule:
- Category names are usually pluralized, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (categories).
- Articles on groups of specific things, rather than a class of things. Some examples:
- Articles on particular language families, as opposed to individual languages, are pluralised, such as Romance languages, Afro-Asiatic languages, Native American languages, Sino-Tibetan languages.
- [debated] Articles on polynomial series may be pluralized, such as Legendre polynomials, Chebyshev polynomials, Hermite polynomials. Although one does refer in some contexts to "a Chebyshev polynomial" or "the nth Chebyshev polynomial", generally such a polynomial is of interest only because it is part of the polynomial sequence called the Chebyshev polynomials, the sequence being thought of for most purposes as a unit. Similarly, one is much more likely to mention the Bernoulli numbers than a particular Bernoulli number.
- Things like Maxwell's equations or Cauchy-Riemann equations. The topic is naturally the system of equations, although in some contexts they may be referred to in the singular.
- Things like polar coordinates. Although one may speak of the second polar coordinate of a point, the article is on the system of coordinates.
- [debated] Articles that actually distinguish between multiple distinct instances of related items can be sensibly given a plural title when the alternative would be to create an inappropriately large number of short articles, one on each instance. The various Zeno's paradoxes, for instance, are incorporated into one article, with a correspondingly plural name.
- Cases like The Beatles. Although Paul McCartney is "a former Beatle", so that the singular is used, it is of interest only because of the plural usage.
Some lists of lists are at, eg, lists of people, though the singular is more common. See wikipedia:list.
[edit] Redirects
[edit] Plural forms
If you use a singular title, then in many cases the plural can be constructed just by adding an 's' on the end: eg crayon->crayons. However, for some cases this is not possible: eg company -> companies. Therefore, consider creating a redirect from the plural to the singular in cases like companies.
Creating a redirect in cases like crayons is advisable as well, since third-party websites started adding automatic links to wikipedia from their topics (see, e.g., [1]), and many of them follow the opposite convention, i.e., pluralization.
If you make a page title which is a plural, always consider making a redirect from the singular to aid linking. This is particularly important because Wikipedians tend to assume that the article title will be in the singular.
[edit] Grammatical niceties
Some nouns are always in the plural. These are fine as titles. Some examples:
- Fireworks displays (as opposed to a single pyrotechnic device or its detonation, a firework).
- Organizations like sports teams or military units may only have a plural name, for example the Winnipeg Blue Bombers or the Royal Marines.
- The name of a people may correspond to the plural word for members of that people, for example Ukrainians, or French people (in contrast, some peoples have singular names, like the Bantu).
Mass nouns don't really have a singular, such as snow or rain. These are also fine.
Some nouns can be considered either plural or singular. For example, the Beatles is a four-piece band, but the Beatles are also four individual people. Use your discretion in such cases.
Some things change meaning significantly between what were once singular and plural forms — for example datum and data. So it may sometimes be worth having two articles.
