User:Seav/Consistent does not mean the same

Some people think that the consistency criterion of the article titles policy means that the titles of a set of articles should have the exact same format. For example, if some articles in a set have some form of disambiguation, then the rest need to have the same form of disambiguation even when disambiguation is not necessary. This is based on the mistaken belief that the word "consistent" means "the same". But the OED gives the following current definition for "consistent": "Agreeing or according in substance or form; congruous, compatible". This just means that two or more things can be considered consistent when they do not contradict each other with respect to some measure.

For example, in the quotation above, we do not expect that the University of Nagasaki study had the exact same results as other studies, but only that the results of all these studies do not contradict each other, with respect to some academic measure such as statistical significance on a set of data.

For the titles of a class of Wikipedia articles, the consistency measure is the class' naming convention. This idea is borne out by reading the definition of the consistency criterion of the article titles policy:

The definition above says that the titles must not contradict a "pattern", which is simply another term for "naming convention". As the definition says, "Many of these patterns are listed (and linked) in the box of Topic-specific conventions on article titles." And the said box contains a list of links to various naming conventions!

To give an example, see the following titles of articles on songs by the band U2:


 * Where the Streets Have No Name
 * One Tree Hill (song)
 * Another Day (U2 song)

The knee-jerk reaction is to say that these three titles are inconsistent because they have varying levels of disambiguation. But according to the article titles policy, these are all consistent because they do not contradict the music naming conventions, specifically WP:SONGDAB.