Rosetta Code:Village Pump/Task titles

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Revision as of 22:01, 3 January 2010 by Underscore (talk | contribs) (Created page with '== 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]…')
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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)