Naming

From eg

The laws of large public wiki emphasize naming as the central problem and the most important determiner of success. Many specific wiki best practices require specific names of pages:

• itself, all, list of, talk page, user page, project page
• other page name prefixes
• adopt Wikipedia names, ECG naming conventions

All ultra methods emphasize naming as central - see sociosemantic web.

The naming conventions are the backbone of this wiki and any other wiki. Wiki policy for any systems related wikis must include rigid designators that are very reliable over time. See eg:wiki for the decisions and tradeoffs in this wiki.

First, every wiki page is also a web page, and is presented at (at least) one URI. It's critically important in any wiki to simplify this URI as much as possible so it can be memorized so that typeins work. Accordingly it's a high priority to get rid of cruft like "/index.php/" in the name, and use the simplest possible domain, e.g. let.sysops.be. One of the worst mediawiki gronks is that installing mediawiki includes the cruft by default so apache rewrite rules are required to get totally rid of it. Do this very quickly! You do not want URIs with the cruft in them to proliferate widely.

Second, conserve capitals: there is no priority higher than preventing bad capital letter conventions from spreading. It is another of the serious mediawiki gronks to encourage adding bad capitals by capitalizing the first letter of phrases and command verbs. A good convention is shown in the top right hand corner of this screen, although, "IP" is an acronym and should be capitalized.

Third, take pains to name things exactly as they are named in any technical documents and standard references down to the punctuation. As a good rule of thumb, name things exactly what they are called in Wikipedia: not only do you have 850,000 names already argued out, you have translations of a great many of them into other languages. You are not going to repeat that work, so, copy it.