Wikipedia:WikiProject/Naming convention

This is a proposed naming convention for some of the more common sub-pages of WikiProjects, such as general pages, categories, and templates of WikiProjects across the board. At the discretion of each individual WikiProject when the project needs them; these pages, categories, and templates can be created with ease since they follow the same pattern. This structure would also allow ease of navigation to editors. Please discuss this proposal on the talk page.

If you wish to see if your project is already compliant with this proposal, or how much work your project would need to do to switch; you can use.

Why standardize?
There's no question that there would be some grunt work involved with implementing this proposal, which can thankfully be handled mostly by bots and users with AWB. So, it's important to take a minute to examine the many benefits of such a standardization.

Naming conventions are not new to Wikipedia. The Manual of Style springs to mind but there are others. In a huge and swiftly expanding project such as Wikipedia, it is very important to keep things streamlined in order to maintain ease of use, even in pages that are not generally seen by the public such as WikiProject pages. Organizing our pages in a consistent manner will make them easier to find, which encourages greater collaboration. With our pages properly managed, we will not have to spend precious time digging through indexes searching for the right page. We can spend that time on constructive discussion or improving articles.

With our page names standardized, we avoid major headaches for our template writers. At this time it is near impossible to write simple templates that can be used across multiple projects because of the variations in layouts such as projects which put their participant lists as a subheading on their project pages, some as subpages, some call their people members, others participants, etc. This naming convention would fix all that and make things a great deal easier to handle, navigate, and template.

A naming convention just makes sense. It could be argued that this adds layers of needless bureaucracy, but the truth is this is a proposal that is very much needed, and there's nothing bureaucratic about it. This proposal also makes it easier to form new WikiProjects because founders know exactly what they need and helps maintain existing ones as well by making them more streamlined. WikiProjects are about collaboration and getting editors involved. It should not be a struggle to just keep them running and to find the page needed. With this naming convention, those problems will be eased or even completely eliminated, and we will all have more time on our hands to spend doing more important things.

Ease of migration
With a great many WikiProjects using the WikiProject meta-banner, most of the changes would be easy. The meta-banner would be changed to reflect the naming convention, and all that use it would be converted with little fuss. Those that do not use the meta-banner would still have to change their banners, but since the banners do a lot of the work, this is still easy. After the banners are rewritten, all that would have to be done is the removal of the previously non-compliant categories and the creation of the compliant ones.

As for the template names, a bot could easily go through and replace the non-compliant names and replace them with the compliant ones.

Case
In all project related categories and page names, the project name should always begin with an initial capital letter as it is a proper noun in this context. Also, the exact name of the project should always be used in any subcategories. So, WikiProject Animals would always have Animals in their categories and other project pages such as Top-importance Animals articles, FA-quality Animals articles, Animals articles that need infoboxes, Animals task forces, Animals images, etc. with the only exception being the Wikipedian category: Wikipedians who like project.

Page names

 * Wikipedia:WikiProject Project
 * Wikipedia:WikiProject Project/Assessment
 * Wikipedia:WikiProject Project/Notice board
 * Wikipedia:WikiProject Project/Participants
 * Wikipedia:WikiProject Project/Participants/Active
 * Wikipedia:WikiProject Project/Participants/Inactive
 * Wikipedia:WikiProject Project/Participants/Sympathizers
 * Wikipedia:WikiProject Project/Peer review
 * Wikipedia:WikiProject Project/Requested articles
 * Wikipedia:WikiProject Project/Task forces
 * Wikipedia:WikiProject Project/Task forces/Task force name only
 * Wikipedia:WikiProject Project/Work groups
 * Wikipedia:WikiProject Project/Work groups/Work group name only

Category names

 * Project
 * Category: WikiProject Project
 * Category: Project assessment
 * Category: Project articles by importance
 * Category:Top-importance Project articles
 * Category:High-importance Project artcles
 * Category:Mid-importance Project articles
 * Category:Low-importance Project articles
 * Category:NA-importance Project articles
 * Category:Unassessed-importance Project articles
 * Category: Project articles by quality
 * Category:FA-quality Project articles
 * Category:FL-quality Project articles
 * Category:A-quality Project articles
 * Category:GA-quality Project articles
 * Category:B-quality Project articles
 * Category:C-quality Project articles
 * Category:Start-quality Project articles
 * Category:Stub-quality Project articles
 * Category:Unassessed-quality Project articles
 * Category:Current-quality Project articles
 * Category:Future-quality Project articles
 * Category:Needed-quality Project articles
 * Category: Other Project pages
 * Category:Disambig Project pages
 * Category:Merge Project pages
 * Category:Redirect Project pages
 * Category:Category Project pages
 * Category:Image Project pages
 * Category:Portal Project pages
 * Category:Project Project pages
 * Category:Template Project pages
 * Category:NA Project pages
 * Category:Needed Project pages
 * Category: Project articles to be improved
 * Category:Project articles that need (custom)
 * Category:Project articles that need a neutral point of view
 * Category:Project articles that need attention
 * Category:Project articles that need categories
 * Category:Project articles that need clean up
 * Category:Project articles that need copy editing
 * Category:Project articles that need images
 * Category:Project articles that need infoboxes
 * Category:Project articles that need lead sections
 * Category:Project articles that need navboxes
 * Category:Project articles that need references
 * Category:Project articles that need trivia sections trimmed
 * Category:Project articles that need wikification
 * Category:Project articles with comments
 * Category:Project articles with peer reviews
 * Category:Project participants
 * Category:Project stubs
 * Category:Project task forces
 * Category:Project work groups
 * Category: Project images
 * Category:Project portal
 * Category: Project templates
 * Category:Project infoboxes
 * Category:Project navboxes
 * Category:Wikipedians who like project