Memory Alpha:Naming conventions

This page is a list of guidelines on how to name pages.

Generally, article naming should give priority to what the majority of English speakers would most easily recognize with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature. Beyond this general statement, the most important sections to read are the first few sections: Simplicity, Precision, Capitalization, and Pluralization.

The purpose of these policies is to make creating new pages with appropriate links easier. When writing Wiki pages on any subject, names, words, or phrases that you think should be linked to further information should be [[bracketed]] so that they will appear as links. Following consistent conventions in both naming and linking makes it more likely that these links will lead to the right place.

It is important to note that these are conventions, not rules written in stone. As Memory Alpha grows and changes, some conventions that once made sense may become outdated. But when in doubt, follow convention.

General Conventions

Lowercase second and subsequent words

Convention: Unless the term you wish to create a page for is a proper noun or is otherwise almost always capitalized, do not capitalize second and subsequent words.
Rationale and specifics: See Memory Alpha:Naming conventions (capitalization) and Wikipedia:Canonization.

Prefer singular nouns

Convention: In general only create page titles that are in the singular, unless that noun is always in a plural form in English (such as economics or trousers).
Rationale and specifics: See Memory Alpha:Naming conventions (pluralization)

Use English words

Convention: Name your pages in English and place the native transliteration on the first line of the article unless the native form is more commonly used in English than the English form.
Rationale and specifics: See: Memory Alpha:Naming conventions (use English)

Use common names of persons and things

Convention: Use the most common name of a person or thing that does not conflict with the names of other people or things.
Rationale and specifics: Memory Alpha:Naming conventions (common names)

Be precise when necessary

Convention: Please, do not write or put an article on a page with an ambiguously-named title as though that title had no other meanings.
Rationale and specifics: See: Memory Alpha:Disambiguation

Prefer spelled-out phrases to acronyms

Convention: Avoid the use of acronyms in page naming unless the term you are naming is almost exclusively known only by its acronym and is widely known and used in that form (NASA and radar are good examples).
Rationale and specifics: See: Memory Alpha:Naming conventions (acronyms)

Do not use an article name that suggests a hierarchy of articles

Since List of Federation Starships could just as well be considered a subdivision of Federation as of starships, do not use a name like Federation/Starships (a so-called subpage).

Be careful with special characters

Some special characters can not be used, or can, but give problems. For example you should not use a piping character (|), an asterisk (*), an ampersand (&), or curly braces ({}) or square braces ([]) in a name. See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (technical restrictions).

Also, for naming pages the restriction to ISO-8859-1 is strict, no characters that are not ISO-8859-1 may be used. See Wikipedia:Special_characters for a list of non-ASCII characters that are allowed.

Other specific conventions

Historical names and titles

Convention: In general, use the most common form of the name used in English (not necessarily the name translated into English) and disambiguate the names of monarchs of modern countries in the format [[{Monarch's first name and ordinal} of {Country}]] (example: Edward I of England).
Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (names and titles) and Wikipedia:History standards

Use plain numbers only for years

Convention: In general the use of number-only page names should only be used for Timeline entries. So call it [[NCC-1701]], not [[1701]], and [[One]], not [[1]]. That way, if we ever want to add a page about what happened in the year 1701, we won't have a collision with the other uses of numbers.
Exception: A very small number of episodes have had only numbers in their titles, like TNG: "11001001" and VGR: "11:59". These are the sole exceptions to the rule.

Languages

Convention: Languages which share their names with some other thing should be suffixed with "language", in the case of spoken languages. If the language's name is unique, there is no need for any suffix. For example, Romulan language and Vulcan language, but Klingonese and Sanskrit.

Ship names

Convention: Articles about ships that have standard prefixes should include them in the article title; for example, USS Voyager, IKS Bortas. Note that although in text the name but not the prefix is italicized, this is not indicated in the article name, so pipe links are used, e.g. for the above [[USS Voyager|USS ''Voyager'']], [[IKS Bortas|IKS ''Bortas'']]. In the rare case where separate articles are needed for different ships of the same name, append the registry number in parentheses; for example, USS Defiant (NX-74205), USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D). Articles about ships that do not have standard prefixes should be titled as (Name) ({Nationality} {ship type}); for example, Cardassian warship Prakesh ([[Prakesh (Cardassian warship)|Cardassian warship ''Prakesh'']].

Klingon Names

Convention: In most circumstances, it is not necessary to specify a Klingon by their full family title (e.g. Worf, not Worf, son of Mogh, or Gowron, not Gowron, son of M'Rel). This applies to other alien cultures with similar practices.

Bajoran Names

Convention: As in accordance with Bajoran tradition, the precedence should go first to the family name, and then the personal name (e.g. Kira Nerys).

Planet Names

Convention: In all cases, use the most common version of a planet's proper name, (e.g. Earth instead of Terra or Sol III, and Qo'noS instead of Klingon homeworld). In cases where no other name is known, use the standard "name, Roman numeral" convention (e.g. Malcor III).

Lists

Convention: Put a list of Xs as list of Xs, rather than Xs, famous Xs, listing of important Xs, list of noted Xs, list of all Xs, etc.

---

If you have another specific issue that should be added to this list, please bring it up on the talk page.

---

Source: Wikipedia: Naming conventions http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions (2003-12-03, 19:24 UTC).