Wikipedia:Article titles/Criteria order

The Article titles policy provides a list of five WP:CRITERIA for determining the most appropriate title for a Wikipedia article: recognizability, naturalness, precision, conciseness, and consistency. The exact order of them is actually quite specific and is treated by editors experienced in article titling discussions as intentional. This is because it, as the stable product of long and detailed consensus-determination discussions at the policy's talk page. The number and order of these criteria have not changed since they were established in late 2009, and this is for good reasons. If one were to go alphabetize them, or remove one and add a new criterion idea, such changes would be rapidly reverted.

The core of what is presently a Wikipedia policy named WP:Article_titles (shortcut: WP:AT) developed organically over Wikipedia's early years (mostly as an essay then guideline name WP:Naming conventions), and was a jumble of points ranging from crucial to just good-but-optional. Many of the latter sort have since been moved to split-off guideline pages on various naming-conventions topics, or shunted to WP:AT end-material subsections. Contrarily, some important material had been "policy-forked" off into sub-pages that have since been merged into the policy (see, e.g., merge list at top of this diff).

Even in 2008, the policy's content was just a random, unordered mess. By 2009 (and probably a bit earlier, in late 2008), the order was being intentionally prioritized, with what are now the criteria WP:RECOGNIZABLE, WP:PRECISE, and WP:NATURAL at the top (though WP:COMMONNAME – which is not a criterion but a selection process – was at that point a restatement of RECOGNIZABLE and was also at the top, resulting in basically R×2–P–N order, which later became the long-standing R–N–P order, as we'll see).

The most important points were put in an explicit, bulletized list of criteria for the very first time here, on 7 September 2009, built from a prior running-text paragraph with a longer history. It was in the present order (reflecting the already-established order in the prose version), though with two bullets for what became the gist of RECOGNIZABLE, and missing what we now have as WP:CONCISE (which was added by 10 September at the latest, with some short-term, sporadic editwarring and re-discussion about both it and WP:CONSISTENT, as well as about the order of NATURAL vs. PRECISE. Over the next month or so it was re-jiggered numerous times, with a lot of detailed and sometimes heated debate.

This was a contentious and serious enough process that the page was sometimes locked due to editwarring, and the talk history shows extensive debate about these things. CONCISE and CONSISTENT in particular were bones to chew. See edit summary of and related edits and discussions of that era. It was still at that time common to "pre-disambiguate" things that were not ambiguous at the individual article level, just to make them consistent with a "Foo (bar)" pattern that was dominant across a category, an idea we have since almost completely abandoned. These debates going against that practice is what resulted in CONSISTENT being at the very bottom of the CRITERIA list, and CONCISE second-to-last.

The top three criteria had actually already been order-prioritized long before this (before there was a bullet list), into sections, by late 2008; the only real difference was that PRECISE was once above NATURAL (sometimes, anyway). Whether to have recognizable–precise–natural order or the present R–N–P order went back and forth for some time from 2008 to late 2019. E.g., here is R–P–N order as late as 11 September, motivated specifically by a desire to divide the criteria into two groups by "kind" (communication vs. usability), an idea abandoned quickly in favor of a return to prioritization by relative importance of each criterion. The need to prioritize the summary list and reduce it to just the handful of most crucial points is all throughout the CRITERIA-formative discussions/debates c. September–October 2009, including a lot of illuminating "revert-talk" in edit summaries (e.g., "It is a given that they [the criteria] will come into conflict and need to be reconciled", and this is something we still do every day on a case-by-case basis).

By the October 2009 end of this fairly short period of disputation within about a month of the creation of the explicit list of criteria, it solidified into our current list of five. A clear consensus emerged for these specific points in this specific sequence, and they have remained very stable in the intervening years, with little happening beyond clarity copy-edits.

Aside: The early versions of what became NATURAL was sometimes "Use English words" and sometimes "Ease of searching and linking". It took a long time – before even the efforts to bulletize a criteria list – to tease apart: A) naturalness for English-speakers in looking for a title, as a crucial criterion; and B) a usual preference for English over native names for things in foreign languages, as a weaker best practice (which is now in WP:USEENGLISH a.k.a. Naming conventions (use English) – this is one of the things that got moved out after what is now AT went from guideline to policy and it became clear that some of the older naming-conventions material did not rise to policy level but was looser best-practices defaults more appropriate for a guideline). Similarly, RECOGNIZABLE and COMMONNAME/UCRN used to be the same advice in different wording, but were teased apart into an interrelated cognitive criterion (and chief among the criteria), vs. a process of selecting the most common name in RS as the default first choice of title, to test against all the criteria and against other applicable policies and guidelines.