Talk:Ural mountains

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Naming convention: isn't it more usual to wirte "Ural Mountains" ? Why create the link Uralskiy Khrebet instead of Uralskiy khrebet, by the same principle? --Anon

Good question. The wikipedia naming convention is to not captitalize second, third, fourth, etc. words if they are not always capitalized in grammatically correct English. As for the Russian name, that was me playing around -- I don't foresee anyone linking to either Uralskiy Khrebet or Uralskiy khrebet within an article within the English wikipedia. --maveric149

It seems like it could be argued either way, so given a redirect it makes no great difference. It's no harder than deciding the "right" spelling of Mohammed, civilisation or honor: the person who creates the article should get to choose (I did create Ural Mountains BTW but I don't care enough to change it back, given the redirect :-) --Anon

Its not as simple as that -- the reason why we have naming conventions is to reduce the amount of duplicated effort. For example, the page titled Ural mountains did not exist before I created it -- even as a redirect. It was only after I created this naming convention compliant page that I found that another stub existed at Ural Mountains. Most others would not have checked. See the section about this in naming conventions. Redirects are useful, but shouldn't have to be made for every variation in capitalization each time an article is made. Cheers! --maveric149, Sunday, April 28, 2002

Hmm, I've added and "when all else fails" section to the naming conventions. Please take a look and see if you agree. --Anon.

I had another thought about this: "Ural mountains" seems incorrect, since either "mountains" is a disambiguation, in which case it should be "Ural (mountains)", or mountains is part of the name of the place, in which case it should be "Ural Mountains". --Anon.

Now that's silly. English speakers do not call the Urals Ural so the use of a parenthetical name would be counter intuitive. The range is best known as the Ural Mountains -- however, since the "m" is not always capitalized, then, per wikipedia naming conventions it should be lowercase for the main article. The term Urals is less clear and therefore inferior to the two word name. --maveric149

Yes, Ural (mountains) would be silly. But in English it's normal to capitalize placenames: hence Ural Mountains is the more correct version and Ural mountains should be the redirect. --Anon.

It seems to me the Wikipedia naming convention is either wrong or is being applied here where it isn't applicable --Anon.

The motivation behind the rule was to instill in the minds of contributers to "when in doubt don't use capitals". There is a very strong tendency in many (if not most) newbies to capitalize everything. The reason is understandable -- the text at the top of the page is the title of the page and titles are capitalized in English. Makes sense. However, this is a wiki, and the whole point of a wiki is to make linking easy and second nature (see naming conventions) and not to either force people to use pipes so that direct links can be made to an article or have Improperaly and Odly Capitalized Words Within the Text of an Article (see naming conventions). Place names, perhaps, should have a separate convention. But then you would have to capitalize such things as Manzanar Japanese internment camp to Manzanar Japanese Internment Camp, which improperly gives the impression that the wording of "Internment Camp" is part of a proper name of the place. In fact the proper name of the place is "Manzanar National Historic Landmark". The current name of the article reflects what most English speakers would expect the article to be named and therefore would be the most likely candidate to be directly linked to in another article without much effort or knowledge. --maveric149

I think all this should be spelled out in the naming convention then, e.g., all place names are lower-cased even if it would require writing grammatically incorrect sentences to link (there's a note there pointing to further discussion but the link is broken). So the example above will be Manzanar national historic landmark or Manzanar japanese internment camp. -- Anon.

One would never have the word Japanese be lower case. And the historic landmark title is the proper name given to it by the Park Service. --maveric149

Looks like the "pages that link here" of redirects will soon be part of the "pages that link here" for the target of the redirects -- therefore it is no longer necessary to be so absolutist about the lowercase naming convention. This rule should probably be updated to say "most common capitalization seen in the body of most English text". --maveric149, Friday, May 3, 2002