Rosetta Code:Village Pump/Task titles

The issue

For a while now, this has been something of an elephant-in-the-room for me: tasks aren't named consistently. Some names are in title case (Missing Permutation, Walk Directory Tree, List Comprehension) and some are in Wikipedia-style sentence case (Increment numerical string, Atomic updates, Count programming examples). Some are imperative clauses (Loop over multiple arrays simultaneously‎, Execute a System Command‎), some are gerund phrases (Repeating a string, Testing a Function‎), and some use agent nouns (Simple Random Distribution Checker, 24 game Player). Some use articles (Print a Multiplication Table) and some omit them (Simulate mouse click). I don't mean to say that every task title should have exactly the same grammatical form; I just think that this much diversity is ugly and confusing and makes it harder to remember a given task's exact title.

I suggest we adopt conventions for page titles. The exact conventions we choose doesn't matter to me so much as the issue of whether we use conventions in the first place, but here are my suggestions:

• Page titles should be in sentence case (that is, only the first word and proper nouns should be capitalized). This would be consistent with Wikipedia and with MediaWiki's (and hence Rosetta Code's) special pages. Also, in my opinion, sentence case is more legible than title case, since it preserves the distinction between proper nouns and common nouns.
• Imperative clauses should be preferred to gerund phrases: that is, "Testing a function‎" should be renamed "Test a function". Similarly, agent nouns should be avoided: "Fix code tags" is better than "Code tag fixer".
• Articles shouldn't be omitted, except at the beginning: prefer "Increment a numerical string" over "Increment numerical string" but "Longest common subsequence" over "The longest common subsequence".

Should we reach a consensus that a mass renaming is called for, I'm willing to carry it out. —Underscore (Talk) 22:01, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

1+ --IanOsgood 00:30, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Once a more thorough discussion on what to rename them to has been had, I'll give you the privs you need to do it. (I don't think normal users have the move privilege, but I've never been one...) There are over 400 tasks on the site, and I'd like to see what happens when the renaming principles are applied to the entire list; I want to catch edge cases as early as possible. --Michael Mol 04:21, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Proposal

To show you how I intend my rules to be applied, and to discern for myself how well they work, I've chosen a title for every task. I've made a lot of exceptions, since I figure it's more important for titles to be short, accurate, and easy to understand than consistent with each other. One issue that particularly bothers me is number: some of my proposed titles are singular and some are plural, and my method to decide which should be which is pretty arbitrary; all I know for sure is that "Array" and "Accumulator factories" are both bad titles. And there are some tasks, like Top Rank Per Group, for which I can't think of any remotely good title. At any rate, for the most part, I think the new titles would be an improvement. —Underscore (Talk) 20:38, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

As I haven't seen anyone seriously critique your new names, I've put you in the groups with the relevant privs. --Michael Mol 23:17, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Actually, one doesn't need special privileges to move pages, and I think I'll do all the moving with User:UnderBot so as not to spam recent changes. (Assuming moves can be hidden like normal edits can. I hope so.) If there are no objections, I'll start as soon as I get round to writing the code and running it; I'll have the program move a page every thirty seconds so the whole operation will take less than four hours. I wouldn't be surprised if some users object to the new titles after I've made the changes, but there's not much I can do about that now. —Underscore (Talk) 15:21, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

I missed the above. Probably because of the holiday season. I have a comment, OK, it is vanity, but I am wondering about references to the original task names, Will they still work? I would like to still be able to track my initial contributions. --Paddy3118 05:27, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Yes; MediaWiki's "move" method automatically creates a redirect page. --Michael Mol 08:10, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

P.S. SEDOL -> SEDOL check digit and validation. ? (or just SEDOL) --Paddy3118 06:34, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't notice that the task calls for validating the input, too. I've chosen "SEDOLs" instead. —Underscore (Talk) 15:21, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

I'ld prefer Spiral matrix instead of Spiral array, and Zig-zag matrix instead of Zig zag array --Rldrenth 16:01, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

And Also:

• Doubly-linked list/Define,
• Doubly-linked list/Insert element,
• Doubly-linked list/Define element
• Doubly-linked list/Traverse

--Rldrenth 16:12, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Exception?

Um, request for an exception Sir.

At one time, it was noted in the blog that we had no tasks beginning with the letters K and Y. I remember it was close to Xmas too, and created the Yuletide Holiday task to fill a need where the name was important. Could I most humbly ask that the name be changed to just have a lower-case H becoming: Yuletide holiday? (The same applies to Knapsack Problem, but you already seem to be set to change it to Knapsack problem with a lower-case p). Thanks --Paddy3118 07:05, 1 February 2010 (UTC)