Topic naming conventions

From DoWire Wiki

This is a wiki best practice.

There is little controversy about topic naming conventions in the vast majority of large public wikis. The work was very controversial 2001-2004 but it is no longer so. Why?

Because during that time, a vast amount of work was done that will not be repeated in our lifetimes, that being, the GFDL corpus namespace. This is a technically correct way to say "the names that things are given at Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia (and thus the GFDL corpus) are written in dozens of languages, to translate names is easy:

• go to the Wikipedia page in any language on that topic
• look to see if the language you want to translate to is listed in the list of other language versions
• if so, click on it or note what the name of the article is - this is the name of the same topic in that other language, or as near to it as all the trolls in the world can agree on

The idea of attempting to compete with, or defy, the naming conventions so painstakingly worked out over a few thousand troll-years of effort at Wikipedia, is actually very foolish. Unless some other namespace that is just as extensive, such as Encyclopedia Britannica or Microsoft Encarta, is released as open content, there is no competitor to the GFDL corpus namespace, certainly not in translation terms.

Most educated observers believe that in the long run, these keywords will be the ones granted special status in most search engines.