This is a test since I can't seem to edit my first blog post to add this:
Page name capitalization/case: Having all pages be Title Case is annoying when trying to find a general concept that is not a proper-/pronoun! Only games, companies, characters, and some locations (not common ones like beach, island, ocean, etc) should be Title Case (unless otherwise written by the developer/company). Most objects ( grass, shovel, tree, etc) and concepts (which is horribly way too general/vague and needs subcategories--see my " Categories" blog post; particle system, weather, 1st-person perspective, etc) should be lowercase (but some special objects and concepts may have proper nouns). Or, at the very least, " Sentence case" (where the first letter of the first word is capitalized only, unless there is a proper-/pronoun elsewhere in the "sentence"). See Wikipedia: Manual of Style (capital letters).
Capitalization/case
This is a test since I can't seem to edit my first blog post to add this:
Page name capitalization/case: Having all pages be Title Case is annoying when trying to find a general concept that is not a proper-/pronoun! Only games, companies, characters, and some locations (not common ones like beach, island, ocean, etc) should be Title Case (unless otherwise written by the developer/company). Most objects ( grass, shovel, tree, etc) and concepts (which is horribly way too general/vague and needs subcategories--see my " Categories" blog post; particle system, weather, 1st-person perspective, etc) should be lowercase (but some special objects and concepts may have proper nouns). Or, at the very least, " Sentence case" (where the first letter of the first word is capitalized only, unless there is a proper-/pronoun elsewhere in the "sentence"). See Wikipedia: Manual of Style (capital letters).
We've discussed this, we're not Wikipedia. We capitalize titles because they are just that, titles, not just an occurrence of a word.
As has been stated multiple times; look at the AP stylebook for how we do things that aren't listed in Jeff's Style Guide:
In a heading/title all nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns and subordinating conjunctions (e.g. as, because) should be capitalized. Coordinating conjunctions (e.g. and, but, for), Articles (e.g. a, an, the) and prepositions (e.g. by, at, to, from) are the only words that should not be capitalized.
"Titles" are not necessarily always capitalized. This is an American concept (most likely influenced by the German language which has a habit of overcapitalizing MANY non-proper nouns). Specifically in the context of Giant Bomb, lowercase titles for NON-PROPER NOUN names (as I described above) would, again, make it easier to distinguish between the MANY kinds of things that get thrown into concepts (animals/beings/creatures/entities/insects/species, gameplay elements, effects, etc) and objects (refer to my " Categories" blog post for the many kinds of items!). If the autocompleter search results displayed more than 10 results this wouldn't be as big of a deal, but even then lowercase (or "Sentence case") would still help distinguish proper nouns from regular nouns.
Perhaps a poll is warranted, though I don't see an option to attach a poll to an existing thread. :/
Pages should have capitol letters. If everything is lower case it looks lazy.
You said only pronouns should be capitalized. Every page should be capitalized. It looks dumb when it's lower case.
What looks dumber is the search results when looking up common terms and a bajillion character/company/game/location results with the same or similar name show up BEFORE the common term. Try searching for " lightning" and you'll see what I mean: 2 objects and 3 characters all named "Lightning". It would make more sense to have the "Lightning" character names and the " Lightning" vehicle stay capitalized but lowercase the weather object (which should probably be a concept, but the distinction between "concept" and "object" is vague and subjective--hence why more categories are needed!). Obviously, characters like Jimmy Lightning and Lightning McQueen should remain capitalized but " lightning bolt", " lightning manipulation", and other actions/effects should usually be lowercased too (unless specific/unique to a certain game or franchise--but even that is suspect).
Again, it's all about making things easier to find...
Maybe you should start a poll so you can see just how many people are against such a proposal. It could look something like this:
Should the capitalization guidelines for Giant Bomb Wiki pages be changed?
a) Yes, the guidelines should be changed to be more like Wikipedia with some articles having lower-case titles.
b) No, that would look dumb and it's fine as it is.
" Try searching for " lightning" and you'll see what I mean: 2 objects and 3 characters all named "Lightning". "Your argument falls apart right there, because Wikipedia and most other MediaWiki sites automatically capitalize the first letter of every page. You would never see a page named "lightning". What people really need to be doing is looking at the page to make sure they're attaching the right one. Sometimes looking at the image is all it takes.
"Again, it's all about making things easier to find... "Improving the search feature would be more beneficial than changing our entire structure - luckily, because of the way GB organises things, the data needed to improve/filter using search is already there - not that implementing an improved search would be trivial.
Stop thinking like a MediaWiki user and start thinking about doing things the way we do them.
The argument is sound. Wikipedia only capitalizes the first letter of most (but not all) pages because it does so by default. There are ways of overriding that on Wikipedia and in the MediaWiki software (behind Wikipedia and other wikis--Wiktionary and my wiki allow lowercase articles, for example). So, yes, you DO see a lowercase "lightning" page on Wiktionary and my wiki. :)
But, again, I am referring to 2 things here: "Sentence case" and "lower case". Even doing sentence case formatting would help lessen the confusion but I still prefer all lower case for non-pronoun/-proper noun terms...
In the same way that other wikis have rules about the naming of articles, so too does Giant Bomb. Of course, you may have your own preferences and you certainly don't have to agree with Giant Bomb's naming conventions. But the least you can do is try to abide by them. Especially since unlike with MediaWiki, renaming is not so easy with this software. Changing the page naming conventions from title case to lowercase would require a staff member to rename almost every object, concept and location on the site. If we're going to do that, I recommend switching to CamelCase titles instead. Good old CamelCase. ;-)
While WikiMedia software does automatically capitalize the first letter - that is not the reason why the first letter is capitalized on Wikipedia pages. The Wikipedia: Manual of Style (capital letters) page you linked to earlier refers to capitalization in articles and does not apply to titles. Wikipedia:Naming Conventions (capitalization) addresses the capitalization in titles, and clearly states that the first letter of a title should be capitalized except in extreme cases (e.g. something where the second letter is capitalized - eBay, iPod). I could understand you arguing that only the first word be capitalized, since that looks fine, but page titles without any capitalization looks horrible."Wikipedia only capitalizes the first letter of most (but not all) pages because it does so by default. "
Either way, all the talk about wikipedia is completely irrelevant since we're not wikipedia. And I don't see what the big deal is with this. We go by standard AP guidelines with our page titles, Wikipedia does something different. Both are acceptable, and it isn't really a big deal. It definitely wouldn't be worth our time and effort changing all the pages currently in the database to a different naming convention. The benefits would be minimal, if there are any benefits at all, and it would take a lot of time of moderators and/or staff which could be spent doing far more constructive things.
Wikipedia DOES have some pages that begin with lowercase letters (like eBay, iPod, etc). Again, you're not taking into account that Wikipedia's article titles don't usually have EVERY first letter of EVERY word capitalized. See Wikipedia: Naming conventions (capitalization)." @Eep: Yep, I'm familiar with the MediaWiki software and the $wgCapitalLinks setting. But like I said, lower case titles are not used on the Wikipedia projects, which is what your argument is based on. The lightning article on the English Wikipedia isn't titled "lightning", it's titled " Lightning".
In the same way that other wikis have rules about the naming of articles, so too does Giant Bomb. Of course, you may have your own preferences and you certainly don't have to agree with Giant Bomb's naming conventions. But the least you can do is try to abide by them. Especially since unlike with MediaWiki, renaming is not so easy with this software. Changing the page naming conventions from title case to lowercase would require a staff member to rename almost every object, concept and location on the site. If we're going to do that, I recommend switching to CamelCase titles instead. Good old CamelCase. ;-) "
I'll gladly volunteer to rename every article. :) And, uh, CamelCase is even worse--you're not even being serious.
" @Eep said:The big deal and benefits are readability and efficient searching. Lowercase doesn' t look horrible when trying to distinguish regular nouns from proper-/pronouns. If the site had more categories beyond the vague "concepts" (which is just lazy database design), this case issue wouldn't be as big a deal as it is to me. But since it seems unlikely any more categories will be added, other steps should be taken to reduce confusion, annoyance, and irritation in dealing with the lackluster classification and search systems.While WikiMedia software does automatically capitalize the first letter - that is not the reason why the first letter is capitalized on Wikipedia pages. The Wikipedia: Manual of Style (capital letters) page you linked to earlier refers to capitalization in articles and does not apply to titles. Wikipedia:Naming Conventions (capitalization) addresses the capitalization in titles, and clearly states that the first letter of a title should be capitalized except in extreme cases (e.g. something where the second letter is capitalized - eBay, iPod). I could understand you arguing that only the first word be capitalized, since that looks fine, but page titles without any capitalization looks horrible. Either way, all the talk about wikipedia is completely irrelevant since we're not wikipedia. And I don't see what the big deal is with this. We go by standard AP guidelines with our page titles, Wikipedia does something different. Both are acceptable, and it isn't really a big deal. It definitely wouldn't be worth our time and effort changing all the pages currently in the database to a different naming convention. The benefits would be minimal, if there are any benefits at all, and it would take a lot of time of moderators and/or staff which could be spent doing far more constructive things. ""Wikipedia only capitalizes the first letter of most (but not all) pages because it does so by default. "
And, again, I'll volunteer to change the pages...
" Wikipedia DOES have some pages that begin with lowercase letters (like eBay, iPod, etc). Again, you're not taking into account that Wikipedia's article titles don't usually have EVERY first letter of EVERY word capitalized. See Wikipedia: Naming conventions (capitalization).That's just {{DISPLAYTITLE}} though; it only affects the way the title looks when viewing that page. Pages are still stored with in initial uppercase letter, as I'm sure you know.
I'll gladly volunteer to rename every article. :) And, uh, CamelCase is even worse--you're not even being serious. "
Cases like iPod and the like are exceptions. The Wikipedia community decided to allow those exceptions, and the MediaWiki developers decided to add the technical capability to make those exceptions. We make exceptions for them too [1] [2] [3]. But we don't do it for all pages, and neither does Wikipedia. I'm familiar with enwiki's article title policies and guidelines, and I get the feeling you do too. But they don't apply here. Giant Bomb has its own style guidelines, just as your site does.
I actually brought up CamelCase for a reason; not that I really think it should be used here, because obviously it shouldn't. But I wasn't trying to be a total dick either. It's about history [4]. Once upon a time, Wikipedia ran on UseMod. UseMod used CamelCase for linking, as was typical of wiki software at the time. So Wikipedia used CamelCase too [5]. But it didn't take long before UseMod developer Clifford Adams realized CamelCase was not a good fit for an encyclopedia [6] and added free links [7]. CamelCase had never been seen as a problem before, but Adams saw that it wasn't well suited to that particular task and came up with something that was. To this day some people still prefer CamelCase over free linking. It depends on the application and one's preferences. For linking to pages as part of prose, as most MediaWiki sites do, that works great. If you expect to be linking words at the beginning of sentences, you may want to keep $wgCapitalLinks set to true to avoid the hassle of redirects.
And if you want to create wiki software with no wiki markup, where page titles have little relevance, and where linking requires the conscious use of a search every time, you're welcome to do that too. That's what's what the wikid developers have done here. And because they've chosen to do that, page titles matter a lot less. You don't type "Doom uses a [[first-person perspective]]", or "Doom uses a [[First-Person Perspective|first-person perspective]]" or "Doom uses a FirstPersonPerspective" and magically get links. You type it as "Doom uses a first-person perspective" or whatever you want, click the link button, and search for the relevant concept; which may or may not be in the initial search results. It's completely different from MediaWiki and other popular wiki software, and as a result it's not important that page titles use proper sentence case. wikid gives a site's staff or community the ability to make up their own naming conventions without having to worry about redirects and how text appears in sentences. Unfortunately what it lacks is an easy way to fix naming mistakes.
Please stop trying to ruin our site.
Yes, I use redirects on my site but mostly for plural forms. However, Wiktionary (which you "forgot" to consider in your reply), allows any kind of capitalization in an article and seems to work fine.That's just {{DISPLAYTITLE}} though; it only affects the way the title looks when viewing that page. Pages are still stored with in initial uppercase letter, as I'm sure you know.
Cases like iPod and the like are exceptions. The Wikipedia community decided to allow those exceptions, and the MediaWiki developers decided to add the technical capability to make those exceptions. We make exceptions for them too [1] [2] [3]. But we don't do it for all pages, and neither does Wikipedia. I'm familiar with enwiki's article title policies and guidelines, and I get the feeling you do too. But they don't apply here. Giant Bomb has its own style guidelines, just as your site does.
It depends on the application and one's preferences. For linking to pages as part of prose, as most MediaWiki sites do, that works great. If you expect to be linking words at the beginning of sentences, you may want to keep $wgCapitalLinks set to true to avoid the hassle of redirects.
And if you want to create wiki software with no wiki markup, where page titles have little relevance, and where linking requires the conscious use of a search every time, you're welcome to do that too. That's what's what the wikid developers have done here. And because they've chosen to do that, page titles matter a lot less. You don't type "Doom uses a [[first-person perspective]]", or "Doom uses a [[First-Person Perspective|first-person perspective]]" or "Doom uses a FirstPersonPerspective" and magically get links. You type it as "Doom uses a first-person perspective" or whatever you want, click the link button, and search for the relevant concept; which may or may not be in the initial search results. It's completely different from MediaWiki and other popular wiki software, and as a result it's not important that page titles use proper sentence case. wikid gives a site's staff or community the ability to make up their own naming conventions without having to worry about redirects and how text appears in sentences. Unfortunately what it lacks is an easy way to fix naming mistakes. "
And what wikid lacks is decent categorization and more popup search results beyond 10 to make finding things easier and less annoying. Until more specific categories (as previously mentioned), keeping common nouns lowercase (or at least "Sentence case") and proper nouns "Title Case" will greatly aid in finding things. I even tried using Proxomitron to use a different autocompleter javascript file that allows 20 search results instead of 10, but it just won't redirect to my version for some reason (despite it testing fine in Proxomitron)--I guess the javascripts are added dynamically or something.
I wish you and others would stop thinking this is a Wikipedia-only thing. I only mentioned Wikipedia because it's a high-profile website that works this way ("Sentence case" mostly anyway).
" @mracoon: Yeah, I agree. It seems Eep really wants GB to be Wikipedia. If you look at his pages, he's even putting a header for "External Links" at the bottom of the pages with a link to the corresponding Wikipedia page, which I feel is unnecessary. "No, I only do that now (well, before I was wiki-banned...) when there is already existing content (though I still think a link to the appropriate Wikipedia article should be on EVERY page by default). I've already discussed this with the moderators and they said a link to Wikipedia is fine if a page already has existing content in the body. The Wikipedia link is for reference for more info about a subject that it makes no sense for GB to mindlessly regurgitate yet again...over and over...like every other gaming website does. GB should instead focus on the features games have and how they relate to other games instead of trying to reinvent the wheel by doing what every other gaming website (and Wikipedia) does.
When I feel small and insignificant I look at this thread.
It reminds that there are things much less important than me.
I didn't forget Wiktionary. "It depends on the application and one's preferences." For what Wiktionary is trying to do, $wgCapitalLinks=false makes sense. But it's not relevant here. We're not building a dictionary.
There's no rule against it as far as I know, but I don't include link sections. Deciding what should go there would require rules in order to avoid spam and abuse. I don't want to have to get into any arguments over what should be allowed to go there and what shouldn't, so I leave it out entirely.
" I didn't forget Wiktionary. "It depends on the application and one's preferences." For what Wiktionary is trying to do, $wgCapitalLinks=false makes sense. But it's not relevant here. We're not building a dictionary. "GB (and Wikipedia) are also dictionaries (despite Wikipedia claiming to the contrary). Both are full of slang and jargon. Besides, dictionaries are hardly the only thing that can have lowercase entries.
I just don't get how all of you can't see the benefit in having COMMON NOUNS lowercase (or at least Sentence case) while leaving PROPER NOUNS capitalized (Title Case). So far all your arguments are fallacious: appeal to authority (how the AP and other "big organizations" do it) and ad hominem/non-sequitur ("it looks dumb", etc).
@LordAndrew said:
" There's no rule against it as far as I know, but I don't include link sections. Deciding what should go there would require rules in order to avoid spam and abuse. I don't want to have to get into any arguments over what should be allowed to go there and what shouldn't, so I leave it out entirely. "Wikipedia has FAR more users than GB has (or can ever really hope to have, realistically, considering it's a very specific type of video gaming website vs. Wikipedia's general/all-purpose encyclopedianess) so to NOT include a link to Wikipedia is just elitist and impractical.
I don't think it's elitist. I just don't see why GB must tied to Wikipedia through every entry. You sound as if you believe GB (and every other gaming web site) shouldn't exist because Wikipedia already houses information better. If you don't like the way things are done here, why are you here?
Wikipedia covers words, but that doesn't make it a dictionary. Articles that are nothing more than dictionary definitions can be and are moved to Wiktionary. Articles that discuss those words in an encyclopedic manner are fine.
"It looks dumb" has never been the basis of my arguments. I find those arguments quite weak myself. My argument was that what we have currently works fine, and that sentence case is used on other wikis partially due to the linking mechanism used on those sites (if they wanted to use title case they'd have to rely on redirects, piping, or both). We don't have to do something just because some other community chose to do it that way. Not all Wikipedias have the same policies and guidelines. The community chose them. The community doesn't set the rules here though; the staff do.
Sometimes it can be ambiguous as to whether something is meant to be capitalized, but sometimes it's like that in the original game too. Is this location actually called Backwoods, or does it just happen to be backwoods? I don't know. The game never made that clear.
Wikipedia may have more editors, but that doesn't mean we have to link to the site. I'm not trying to be elitist; I just don't see much point in an external links section that contains anything more than a link to a game's official sites. If we allow Wikipedia, what else should we allow? MobyGames? GameSpot? IGN? Any number of gaming-related Wikias? Some site hosted on Webs that you found interesting? Any of those could potentially be of use to readers, but how do we determine which sites to include? The English Wikipedia has external links guidelines, but many people here want to avoid having large amounts of rules and guidelines. And then of course there's the discussions when it's not clear whether something fits the guidelines. We have enough heated debate over whether certain concepts are worthy of inclusion. It's easier for me to just not include any external links at all. But of course, that's not an official rule. If someone wants to add some there's not currently a rule against it. I wouldn't remove links, but I can't speak for anyone else. At this point it is more
And one final note. You seem to have a lot of ideas for the site. I think it's great that you've got ideas, but posting them doesn't mean your ideas will be supported or used. Remember that this is still a commercial site largely controlled by the site staff and a small team of developers. Perhaps you could extract data from the site using the API, create a mirror or fork, and then use those ideas to enhance the existing content. I too have crazy ideas floating around in my head, one of which involves MediaWiki-based mirror of Giant Bomb's content that could potentially have other useful features. There are many things that could be done with this site's data, and it doesn't all have to be done on-site.
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