Separating article page-names and titles

[Joe Quick]

What's exaggerated?

This part:

The point is merely that, without some disambiguating phrase or other clear indication near the title, they will not immediately see that they are on the right page,

The very first line in the article (should, according to our guidelines) provides a clear indication.  If that isn't immediate, then I don't know what is.

This part too:

and if they know about history, they will naturally wonder, without some clear indicator, whether we know that there are other Charles IIs. 

A link to a disambiguation page -- which should be there anyway -- would settle any doubts, but I have trouble imagining that anyone except maybe 15-year-old WP admins would try to seriously suggest that we obviously don't know about the other monarchs that went by such-and-such a name simply because we didn't include parenthetical disambuating information in our titles.

Disambiguating the article for humans the same way we do for the software is (marginally) clearer for the reader and simpler in point of policy (one less thing to explain to people).

I don't know that it is really simpler in terms of policy either.  We already spend an awful lot of time explaining how to use disambiguating info.

Sure, we could just expect people to read the first sentence and figure that we know about the other Charleses, and I'm sure we wouldn't go that far wrong, but why deliberately create this problem?  Similarly, we could simply ask people to add a disambiguating line just below or above the article title, like "This article is about the French king.  See [[Charles II (disambiguation)]] for the other Charles IIs."  We'll probably ask that anyway.  The point is that the current system of including the disambiguating phrase in the human-readable title is more helpful to humans than not having it.  Or so it seems to me.  This isn't a huge issue, and maybe I'm just off.

Actually, it's not that big of a deal to me either.  I mainly just want to be able to call things by their names.  The recent (ongoing?) debates about US versus U.S. versus United States provide a pretty clear example, I think.  The disagreement ended up revolving around what things like the U.S. State Department are actually called.  Prof. Jensen pointed out that, in that particular case, the department is actually called the "Department of State" (I think that's what he said) and that the name doesn't actually include any reference to the country at all.  While I agree that something like [[Joe Quick (King of my own imaginary island)]] is unlikely to actually cause confusion, I think that appending the words "United States" or some variant in the title of such articles actually obscures a minor but important bit of information that many of us who participated in the debate evidently didn't know.

[Joe Quick]

Well, they put the disambiguating text exactly as I said, on the EB page I saw; they apparently have two different formats and policies!

http://www.britannica.com/bps/home#search=tab~TOPICS%2Cterm~Charles%20II&tab=active~home%2Citems~home&title=Britannica%20Online%20Encyclopedia

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/106876/Charles-II#tab=active~checked%2Citems~checked&title=Charles%20II%20--%20Britannica%20Online%20Encyclopedia

Bizarre!  Does that mean we're both right, or neither of us are?

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

Most national names (such as Ministry of Agriculture; or Department of State) are exactly that, so an international reference needs to specify the country. This means that any encylopedia has to have a consistent and logical policy on the matter, which is what I suggested in the US debate. The country that most of yoiu appear to reside in is called, formally, the United States of America, but there is no reason why we should not abbreviate it to USA. On the other hand, there are many reasons why we should not use the prefix US in front of things that do not normally use it in their titles.

Specific to this debate, however, the very idea that there is a concealed electonic disambiguation is scary. I want to see exactly how things are ordered, not guess what might be happening. Larry is quite right about this.

[Larry Sanger]

Well, they put the disambiguating text exactly as I said, on the EB page I saw; they apparently have two different formats and policies!

http://www.britannica.com/bps/home#search=tab~TOPICS%2Cterm~Charles%20II&tab=active~home%2Citems~home&title=Britannica%20Online%20Encyclopedia

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/106876/Charles-II#tab=active~checked%2Citems~checked&title=Charles%20II%20--%20Britannica%20Online%20Encyclopedia

Bizarre!  Does that mean we're both right, or neither of us are?

It means the argument from authority doesn't work in this case.  :-)

[Joe Quick]

Specific to this debate, however, the very idea that there is a concealed electonic disambiguation is scary. I want to see exactly how things are ordered, not guess what might be happening. Larry is quite right about this.

I don't understand what is scary.  Encyclopedia Britannica (and this is true of both online versions ) identifies their articles with a number in the URL, not with the article's title.  Once you arrive at the article, the title appears right at the top where you would expect it.  In their case, it makes the URL shorter and probably makes the database a bit easier to manage.   

For us, it is easiest to use the article title in the URL because this is how we link between articles.  The exact page-name, including the disambiguating information, is going to be required when we create links whether we separate page-names and titles or not.  But the title at the top of the page will be much cleaner looking if we leave the disambiguating information out of the big bold title at the top and place it somewhere else.  That could be just under the title (as in the version of Britannica that Larry found) or at the beginning of the first paragraph (as in the version of Britannica that I found, which is already common in many of our articles).

[Brian P Long]

In the military workgroup, Howard has just raised the spectre of another really involved naming convention issue (http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,1796.html). By my rough estimate, this is about the fourth or fifth thorny naming convention issue that I've seen at Citizendium (and I hadn't even heard of the biology discussion until just now).

Whenever this kind of issue comes up, there are always two parties: there is the group of contributors which wishes to have precision in naming conventions (usually with the precise and unambiguous but perhaps opaque terminology of experts in the field), and there is a group of people who wants to have the article title reflect the way normal, non-expert people refer to the subject, so that our readers will be able to find the articles they're looking for.

The discussion Howard started has finally pushed me over the edge on this-- I strongly feel that we need to make this a formal proposal and try to get this adopted as policy-- yesterday, if possible. This policy would allow us to satisfy both camps in the naming convention disputes, I think. The specialists can work on finding unambiguous ways to refer to the objects of their study, and other contributors can work on tweaking article titles so that they are most useful to the non-expert reader.

Whatever we do, though, we need to make sure that non-specialist readers have a simple time of finding the pages they're looking for...

-Brian

[Joe Quick]

Yes, I noticed another case yesterday where separating titles and page-names would be a valuable tool to have.  We've been having trouble dealing with slashes in titles because they are used to designate subpages, but separating titles and page-names should allow us to avoid the unprofessional-looking notice at the top of such pages. See Jeff Dean's post on Noel's talk page: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User_talk:J._Noel_Chiappa#R60-2_is_incorrect

[Brian P Long]

The only difficulty that I can see with this proposal is that we want to make sure that the unsuspecting reader who searches for an article will not be confronted with the technical names for what they're looking for. As it is now (correct me if I'm wrong), search brings up the article page-name.

How difficult would it be to change the software so that a search brings up the article title (in Noel's scheme) instead of the page-name? In the case of ambiguous article titles, how would we make it easy for the readers to tell which one they want?

The most elegant solution, to my mind, would be to have Search bring up the article title as well as the definition (since we have them laying around anyway). That would greatly enhance the utility of CZ's search function, I think, but it's such an obvious idea, I feel that this must be in the works already or be technically infeasible for some reason or other.

-Brian