User:Wolfgang Jeltsch/Page renaming

On 20 February 2006 I renamed several pages of this very wiki. This article gives some information concerning this renaming.

Background

Information about the background of this page renaming can be found in the thread page names on the new Haskell wiki of the Haskell Mailing List.

The renaming

The renaming took place on 20 February 2006 between 8 PM and 11 PM UTC.

I took care to change redirects which referred to the old page titles accordingly. So there shouldn't be broken links and the like. Of course, I might have missed some redirects.

Rationale for page titles

The following points describe my opinion about how to name pages and form the rationale I used for choosing the page titles:

1. Page titles not only affect a page's URL but they are also shown at the top of the page. Therefore, it is important that a page title is a title, not a mnemonic “path name”. I strongly doubt that we need such mnemonic names but if they are introduced they should denote only redirects to the actual page.
2. On the other hand, it is good if titles are not unnecessarily long so that URLs have reasonable size. Especially, redundant occurences of the word “Haskell” in titles should be avoided. If a page on the Haskell Wiki is just named “Compilers and interpreters”, it should be clear that it refers to “Haskell compilers and interpreters”, so the extra “Haskell” is not needed.
3. Titles should use sentence-style capitalization (see [1]). Capitalizing more words seems to be only appropriate in larger documents like books. If slashes are used to denote hierarchy, each part of the hierarchical title should be handled as if it were a title itself, i.e., its first word should be capitalized. Note that before my renaming there was a big inconsistency concerning capitalization. Further note that I didn't take care to change words after hierarchy slashes to begin with an uppercase letter so far.