Tardis:Naming conventions
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When naming an article, you should typically use a singular noun and only capitalise the first word. The main exceptions to this rule are story titles and proper nouns. You should typically try to represent the name of a thing or a story faithfully, but some technical restrictions may prevent exact duplication.
The core naming conventions of this wiki are that:
- Article names should be in singular form, not plural. So: Time Lord not Time Lords. An exception would be a group such as The Beatles, or an organisation such as the United Nations, as the official, legal names of these are in plural form.
- Unless the name of the article contains a proper noun, only the first word should be capitalised.
Things flatly forbidden by the software
This list is non-exhaustive, and instead focusses on the things most likely encountered here at Tardis.
- Article names cannot contain the characters |, #, <, >, {, }, [, and ]. For advice about how to handle a page which should include one of these characters, like 2|entertain or Man #1, please see this discussion.
- While article names can usually contain a colon (:), they cannot always do so, if the words preceding the colon have a meaning. The most pertinent example on this wiki are the various Big Finish articles beginning with Project:, like Project: Twilight. Because Project: refers to the project namespace, what you're really saying if you type [[Project: Twilight]]'' is equivalent to typing [[Tardis: Twilight]]. Thus, in order to properly represent the title of the audio on this wiki, you have to rather laboriously type ''[[Project Twilight (audio story)|Project: Twilight]]'' to italicise and pipe trick it to the correct name. But the proper page name must be sans colon.
- Some other colon (:) use at the front of titles is flatly impossible because of inter-wiki linking. For instance, you can't name a page Wikipedia: A Heck of a Site, because that creates a link to Wikipedia.
Things allowed by the software, but tricky
- Articles can have more than one set of parentheses, but there is a technical consequence to doing so. It inhibits proper pipe tricking, which a number of automatic templates depend upon. While there are many use-cases for parentheticals at the end of a title, never use internal parentheticals that aren't actually a part of a title. If you're forced to title a page with an internal parenthetical — like The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot (TV story) — a redirect from the single-parenthesised title — The Fiveish Doctors Reboot (TV story) — must be maintained. It's this version of the title that then needs to then be manually added to the {{{name}}} and/or {{{prev}}}/{{{next}}} fields in infoboxes.
- It is technically possible for article titles to contain single quotation marks, and it usually works without incident. After all, a single quotation mark is simply an apostrophe. However, it's recommended that single quotation marks be replaced by double quotation marks, especially when the article title needs to be italicised. This is because the single quotation mark has a meaning in wiki markup, whereas the double quotation mark does not.
- Please don't use forward slashes (/) in naming articles, unless you mean to indicate that the part to the right of the slash is a subpage of the part on the left. "Human-Dalek" means "a thing that is part Human and part Dalek". "Human/Dalek" means "the Dalek subpage of the article Human".
- Using multiple colons (:) poses the same risk to pipe tricking that using multiple parentheticals does. They should be avoided unless they're actually in the title to something.
Stylistic choices of this community
- Ampersands (&) should never replace the word "and", unless the credit actually contains one, or the title actually uses one. For instance, the ampersands in Northwest Imaging & FX and Love & Monsters are fine, but Mad Dogs & Englishmen is incorrect, since the title is Mad Dogs and Englishmen. (The deciding forum discussion is here.)
- Using hyphens should be avoided unless they actually appear in the title. Editors often assume that there is a hyphen when none exists. This was a part of the reason why we decided to drop "Doctor Who" (and other brand names) from the beginning of so many pages.
