Metaweb:Naming conventions

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

Naming conventions are guidelines for creating Metaweb names. These guidelines will make it easier for users to find entries and to link to them.

Some pages are specific to a particular work. All such pages should follow the convention of having names composed of (in order): the author's last name, the author's first name, the name of the work, and then the name of the specific item. Each of these components is separated by a colon character (":"). Examples are given below for each category. Note that depending on context, you may wish to use the pipe character ("|") to display link text only containing the name of the specific item. Again, examples follow.

Furthermore, some entries are "authored" entries. This means that they represent the opinions of a specific person. These entries are indicated by the presence of the author's name, in parentheses, as the final component of the page title. No colon is used to separate this from the name of the topic.

Intermediate pages

Intermediate pages link together multiple entries on a given subject. An intermediate page's name should simply and clearly name its topic in the form most likely to be used by a fluent speaker of American English.

Intermediate pages are "unauthored" in the sense that no article writer's name should appear as a Metaweb author in the title, unless of course the intermediate page is about that person. So Trireme is a valid name for an intermediate page, but Trireme (Joseph Smith) is not.

An intermediate page for a character named Daniel Waterhouse in Neal Stephenson's book Quicksilver looks like this: Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:Daniel Waterhouse. If the context makes it clear that Daniel is a character in Quicksilver, using | might be appropriate, as in: Daniel Waterhouse.

Page annotations

Page annotations are composed of a slight extension of the general page naming convention described above: the book author's last name, first name, book title, page number, annotated text, and finally, annotation author. This is a slight extension of the general naming convention described above in that it contains an extra level for the page number in question and explicitly names the author. All page numbers should be to first editions. Components of the name are separated by colons, except for the annotation author's name, which is in parentheses.

The name of an annotation by Metaweb user Patrick Tufts on page 16 of Neal Stephenson's book Quicksilver looks like this: Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:16:Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts (Patrick Tufts)

The annotated text in the name should be brief and descriptive.

People

A Metaweb entry about a person should be named after the most commonly used version of that person's name. Titles should not be part of the entry's name. For instance, Elizabeth I rather than Queen Elizabeth I. If the person uses a pseudonym, use the name that is more familiar to readers: Mark Twain rather than Samuel Clemens. If the person is specific to a given work, indicate this in the page title by use of the scoping convention described above.

People entries should list the birth and death dates, when known. See Dates (below) for the format.

People entries representing the opinion of a specific author should indicate this in their page names. For example, Samuel Clemens (Jeremy Bornstein) should contain Jeremy Bornstein's thoughts on Samuel Clemens.

Places

Use the best-known version of the place name. For towns and cities in what is now the United States, give the city and state - Concord, Massachusetts. Where the place is a well known city, omit the country - Paris, rather than Paris, France. Where there are multiple places with the same name, include the country - Cambridge, England and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Place entries which are specific to a work should follow the scoping convention described above, and should focus on the geography and events during the time of the relevant work.

Dates

Date entries contain events, people, and happenings associated with specific times. If an entry is specific to a particular work, it should be scoped as described above. The final part of the names of these entries should follow the convention "day month year" - 17 December 1649. When the day is not known, "month year" or just "year" are acceptable - August 1701 or 1701.

Note that during the period in which the Baroque Cycle is set, England used a different calendar from everyone else. English dates differed from those used in the rest of Europe by several days (the exact number of days varied as time went on and the calendars got more and more out of sync, but it was on the order of 10). To make matters more confusing, the English did not observe New Year's Day until March. We have not yet established a convention for how to handle this complication in Date entries.

Everything else

For everything else, use common sense. Pick a name that other people are likely to understand, in the form that they are most likely to understand. When you have a choice, and it makes the most sense, use English names rather than French, Latin, or German. Again, if the entry is specific to a work, use the scoping convention described above to make this clear.