I created this page so we can discuss ideas here with the wiki community rather than adhoc in-person/IRC/Wiki/Email discussions so everyone can participate. When this page gets big enough split discussions out into seperate pages.

Naming conventions of pages.

Theres been a bit of discussion around of this recently with WLUG:GNOMENotes vs WLUG:GnomeNotes, or BookReview vs !!BookReview?Book. Traditionally we seem to have use fooNotes, preserving case on Acronyms, and using [? where appropriate.

One suggestion has to make the wiki case preserving. If you goto !GnomeNotes and the page !GNOMENotes exists, redirect you there automagically. This could be done when we upgrade to the next version of the wiki.

PerryLorier

I prefer fooReview, as it reads better and sounds like a noun, where !BookReviewFoo? sounds like a verb (to me anyway, everyone should know that my command of english is tenuous at best).

The case preserving idea sounds good, it will break some pages (Free vs free) but I think that we can deal with that. We can organise this when we (Finally) get around to upgrading to the new version of phpwiki

StuartYeates

i don't really care, so long as there exist WikiGnomes to homogenise the page names it doesn't really matter what set of rules they use.

PerryLorier

Yes, but the WikiGnomes have to agree.

CraigBox

Lapsed gnome (GNOME?) disagrees. I think that having !BookOfFooReview? is extraneous if there is no !BookOfFoo? page. I like having stems (!BookReviewBookOfFoo?). I don't mind Foo and !FooNotes? but given the chance to do everything again I'd want everything to be as Wiki:CamelCase (!StudlyCaps?) as possible.

DanielLawson

Regarding book reviews: We don't have to have them in the wiki at all. They are an exception to our standard system, as Craig points out - there is no !BookOfFoo? page. But, I don't think there is a better place to put them, and I don't think we should work on putting more software in place when the wiki does the job. I think we should still adopt a standard, consistent nomenclature (and have it documented somewhere so people can learn what it is), HOWEVER I don't think we should pick one that requires a huge amount of effort to change to - unless someone wants to dedicate however many hours it'll take to fixing it (ie, saying 'all pages should be !PrefixName?, eg !NotesOnFoo?, or !BookReviewFoo?', is going to take a fair amount of work). The most important thing is to be consistent, and IMO we should be consistent with what we have already.

CraigBox

We were consistent with !BookReviewFoo?, and then it was changed. That really pissed me off actually. Why do all the Howto pages start with HowTo?

DanielLawson

I mean consistent across all page types, not just within a page type. Howto's are another matter altogether - I don't think they work very well at all within the wiki, because we either don't edit them, or we don't submit patches back upstream. They format badly, are hard to import, and even harder to update. We could probably get rid of them entirely. Personally, I think having to step some arbitrary number of characters into a page name just to find the actual content of the word is ridiculous. Having a suffix system serves to distinguish similar nodes with different content (Mozilla, MozillaMail, MozillaNotes, etc.). Using a prefix system means the first thing you see is type of the page, not the actual name of the page. Given that we don't have orphans, we either search for a page (in which case suffix or prefix is irrelevant), you use a category tag (in whcih case suffix or prefix is irrelevant), and they are linked from other pages, in which case a system which lets you actually find the real content of the page quickly, as opposed to having to look some unspecified distance (might be 5 letters or 15. Could be one WikiWord, could be three), seems far more useful. And if you have a bunch of pages in a list that share the same prefix, the different suffix just pops up because of alignment.

• Mozilla
• MozillaNotes

• MozillaReview?

Contrast with:

• Mozilla

• NotesMozilla?

• NotesOnMozilla?

• ReviewMozilla?

• ReviewOfMozilla?

I've included the on / of ones, because MozillaNotes scans nicely, !NotesMozilla? doesn't. It sounds like engrish.

And, Why did renaming the bookreviews piss you off? We've not decided on a solution, so I made the reviews consistent with the notes.

DanielLawson

on lowercasing everything, there is one problem that is harder to get round, although whether it occurs or not is another issue. !FoobarPage? and !FooBarPage? might well be very different pages, but if you ignore case they get merged together.

... Your comments here ...

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