Main Page | Recent changes | View source | Page history

Printable version | Disclaimers | Privacy policy

Not logged in
Log in | Help
 

dKosopedia:Page name issue

From dKosopedia

Every dKosopedia page name issue needs to be documented in one place to identify similar controversies. Do that on this page. Should this just be dKosopedia:rename ?

Eventually a list of dKosopedia:naming rules will be developed. In the meantime Wikipedia's are useful to read as they apply to the whole GFDL corpus extending it. So are those of openpolitics.ca which are more focused on action and political projects like this one.

Contents

unhelpful names

Unhelpful name:

A similarly unhelpful name:

Also:

internal identity and process issues

See Talk:Main Page for issues regarding ThinkTanks and presentation of the material to newbies to set good habits, neither of which are strictly page name issues. This page deals only with things where the issue is mostly name.

Stuff like Frameshop: PRAs (Personal Retirement Accounts is just wrong. Try reframe:retirement and deal with the specifics under term:PRA and so on.

other naming issues that may create bad conventions

Planning,_Maui_County is another weak prefix: "Planning,_" ? Hmm... Maui County plan or Maui County planning would be better I think.

putting personal essays and rants in main namespace

If you prefer collaboration, maybe we need a rant:namespace, but that would be subjective, so best to put these in position:namespace or claim:namespace and keep them very specific.

invitations to participate

Names like Happening Now, Rapid Response, MemeTank and Software Technology Project, The dKosopedia Category Project are all too generic and again do not state the action desired of the user or the scope of the project(s). We need more predictable consistent namespace prefixes with action focus. Something like do:namespace ? So it's do:now for tasks we must "do now" and do:respond if we would say "do, respond!" to the crap the Republicans are putting out.

So names like How To Run For Office become do:run for office with obvious variants like do:run for POTUS or do:run for Mayor of San Francisco.

simple naming problems

Just take positions here, and offer alternatives if you feel strongly. If the positions aren't challenged, then, they'll just be dKosopedia:renamed.

First, we really really need to keep the Hawaii names absolutely perfect and pure, since they are so complete that others will use them as a template to imitate. So get picky with Hawaii names, and fix them

inconsistent plurals

Watch the plurals.

overuse of uppercase

This is a very serious problem because it prevents casual linking, e.g. you cannot say Mayors_of_Major_Cities in a sentence unless you are an idiot. A non-idiot would write mayors of major U.S. cities in a proper sentence, so you are requiring non-idiots to use a complicated anchor text solution that will lead to errors or fewer links. There are many problems of this nature. Always name pages in ways they can be used in sentences most easily and with as little context as possible:

using uppercase to define generic concepts into overly specific existence

timelines

BartFraden responds: The Europeans are describing the problem as one of Secret Prisons. Surely we should consider adopting conventional article names that permit easy searches.
BartFraden responds: Q: When are international crises recognized? A: 1) When tanks roll and/or bombs fall, 2) When news media describe them as such and 3) When post hoc conclusions are rendered by historians about a series of historical events. I think we're safely in the realm of "2) When news media describe them as such." Major U.S. and European news media sources are treating this chain of events as a crisis and describing it as such. The IR theorist in all of us wants a crisis to meet the ideal of being a sharp series of unexpected events that demand immediate decisions from those with command authority. Unfortunately real international crisies often build slowly. Lets watch this one before we go downgrading it just yet!

redundancies

place names

Does Auburn,_Massachusetts need the redirect Auburn, MA or something? Probably not since you end up with things like Ontario, CA which conflicts with the province of Ontario, Canada. Again follow Wikipedia where possible.


The Emperor's new clothes

If you look on the Main Page, you will find this statement: The dKosopedia is written from a left/progressive/liberal/Democratic point of view while also attempting to fairly acknowledge the other side's take. The underlying question here is "What is dKosopedia?" and just as importantly, what dKsopedia is not.

I agree there are some name-space issues. Mainly, many article titles are non-encyclopedic, not to mention articles that don't belong here in the first place. dKos is indeed a blog, but dKsopedia is not certainly not. Blogs should be done on dKos, in your own blog space; you are not going to get any more prominence here than you would on dKos. Position papers, requests for debate on a current issues, essays, rants, etc., do not really have a place here; this being a wiki, where anyone can edit, one wonders what the original author of such an article feels like having their original version of such articles edited into oblivion, i.e., having their original pov lost in the shuffle.

The name-space conventions regarding the states and associated articles are established, and only need to be refined and made consistent. Biographical articles, insofar as they relate to politics, are similarly established. These are not a problem.

One of the shortcomings of this and the main wiki is how current events are handled. These are profoundly labor-intensive articles, but once out of the news cycle, editors tend to lose interest and the articles are often abandoned, left to cleanup crews to slap templates at the top demanding rewrites -- rewrites that are often never accomplished. A related problem in such cleanups is the fact the URL references are broken. And when doing a google on older such articles, the best reference tends to be Wikipedia or dKosopedia. Fixing such articles becomes burdensome, even impossible. Creating a current events category is only a partial solution, in that it in turn has to undergo regular maintenance. At the end, quite a few abandoned currrent events articles end up becoming candidates for deletion; it's not that the topic is unworthy, it's just that no one is interested in putting them into a condition fit for an encyclopedia.

Place names have been mentioned. For the state level articles (Iowa, Hawaii, are of course necessary, but if you notice, they are quite diffferent from Wikipedia's. I think city and county articles should initially link to the main wiki, and confine themselves to the Democratic pov, mentioning state and local political issues and personalities. I would follow Wikipedia's naming conventions here. To restate myself, we are not Wikipedia, nor do we really duplicate Wikipedia; rather we supplement it, and even sometimes correct it, from the point of view of Democrats. --Allamakee Democrat 21:15, 29 May 2006 (PDT)

Retrieved from "http://localhost../../../p/a/g/dKosopedia%7EPage_name_issue_29ef.html"

This page was last modified 20:02, 6 October 2006 by Chad Lupkes. Based on work by AlanF and dKosopedia user(s) Allamakee Democrat, Jbet777, Anonymous troll and BartFraden. Content is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.


[Main Page]
Daily Kos
DailyKos FAQ

View source
Discuss this page
Page history
What links here
Related changes

Special pages
Bug reports