Talk:Man (word)

From Tolkien Gateway
Latest comment: 7 January 2022 by LorenzoCB in topic Article Name

Article Name[edit source]

Should this page be something like Man (Quenya) or Man (word)? I feel that "Man" should redirect to the page for Men, as that is the more commonly linked page, and a lot of pages regarding Men link to this one by accident. --Grace18 17:04, 23 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Hi Grace18, perhaps a page title "Man (Quenya word)" is clearest. I've had a very quick look to see if there are any similar naming conventions on TG but couldn't find anything, so it makes sense to me to call the page by the clearest possible name. Since "Man (word)" is ambiguous (e.g. my first thought goes to the English word), in my opinion "Man (Quenya word)" works best (though I also think that "Man (Quenya)" is sufficient). Hope this helps! --GondolinFan 17:20, 23 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Thank you! The main goal seems to be to create a clear and separate article title that is as short as possible. However, I'm not sure as to the best way to do this, as it has been done multiple ways. For example, there are the articles:
Sometimes "word" is used when the title is a word in various languages, such as Brand (word), but this isn't always the case. Some articles use the language and "word" (i.e. "Sindarin word"), while others just use the language (just "Sindarin"). There appears to be a sort of loose system for which is used when but it isn't clear or always followed. --Grace18 18:45, 23 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I see what you mean. Given that there isn't a consistent way to do this at the moment, then perhaps we should suggest the one that makes the most sense here! I propose the following naming convention for "words".
  1. Where the word is not ambiguous with a place or anything else (take for example "inga" which to the best of my knowledge fits in this category), then the article title should just simply be the name of the word ("inga" in this example case).
  2. Where the word is ambiguous with a place or something else (e.g., the word "Tirion" you've put above (or "man"), then I think the best/most consistent naming convention would be "Article name (word)" - so "Tirion (word)" in the example case). This does the job of distinguishing the word from its namesake, while at the same time allowing multiple languages to be housed in one article. As an example of this last point, see the article men (Elvish) where Quenya and Sindarin meanings are given in the same article. This reduces the number of pages with the same base name (e.g., there will not be "men (Quenya)" and "men (Sindarin)" articles) which I think is a good thing and helps keep everything a bit tidier (especially as these articles won't be very long).
Just a note: by the convention I've suggested here, the article men (Elvish) would be changed to "men (word)". For Elvish words like "men" and "man" which could be interpreted as English words, I still think the convention "man (word)" is sufficient, since once you're on the page, it's clear what is being referred to (also good categories would help here!). At first I thought "man (Quenya)" would be better, but I think this "... (word)" convention is clear and most consistent with what TG currently has (see http://www.tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Category:Sindarin_nouns where there are a mix of clarifications in the article name, but the dominant one appears to be "... (word)"). Further, this fulfils the criteria of "creating a clear and separate article title that is as short as possible". Let me know what you think! --GondolinFan 19:37, 23 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I think we could leave things as they are in this case. IMO nobody is gonna look for "Man" as a race, and if so we have the desambiguation box for that. But good work looking for consistency, go ahead with that! --LorenzoCB 20:11, 23 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Thank you both! I agree people probably won't just look up "Man" in the search bar. But a lot of times editors try to link it in articles (I fixed a couple but there's plenty that still link here mistakenly, and more to come in the future I'm sure). We get used to being able to put things like "Finrod was an Elf" and it going to Elves, but linking "Beren was a Man" comes here instead of Men. I think the redirect might save a lot of mistakes, since this article is the less major one.
Should we go ahead with moving the ...(Elvish), (Quenya), (Sindarin word), etc. articles to "... (word)"? --Grace18 20:27, 23 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Should we go ahead with moving the ...(Elvish), (Quenya), (Sindarin word), etc. articles to "... (word)" - Yes, I think so. With regards to this specific "man" article, for exactly the reason you say ("Beren was a Man" comes here instead of Men) I think it would be cleaner (with the result being easier for editors) to change this one article to be titled "Man (word)" and allow all articles pointing to "man" to be redirected to "men", than for editors to type [Men|man] (I mean double square brackets here) in situations like you've given above. Another advantage of doing this is that it will fix articles that are pointing to the incorrect "man" that we may not know about. In summary, "I think the redirect might save a lot of mistakes, since this article is the less major one" - I completely agree with this and am in favour of changing this article title to "Man (word)" (and redirecting "man" to "Men") to fix this. --GondolinFan 20:53, 23 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
An idea I've just had about moving the ...(Elvish), (Quenya), (Sindarin word), etc. articles to "... (word)" articles. Where the current article title contains additional information beyond the lone word e.g (Quenya) or (Sindarin word), then when we change those article names to "... (word)", we should try to make sure that the categories (at the bottom of the article) that the article fits in retain some of the knowledge that was in the old article name. As an example: the current article "Brethil (Sindarin word)" will become "Brethil (word)" but then we should make sure that it is in some appropriate "Sindarin words" category. This way, information isn't lost, it's just better organised! --GondolinFan 21:03, 23 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Just thinking about moving the ...(Elvish), (Quenya), (Sindarin word), etc. articles to be called "... (word)" (for consistency), and notice that this may be a fair amount of effort, since there are quite a few articles that link to words (two examples here and here), and it may be a pain to go through all of those articles and change the instances of those links. I guess with a lot of articles, we could use a redirect though (e.g. using "Nár (Quenya)" as an example, I see no problem moving "Nár (Quenya)" to "Nár (word)", and then redirecting links from "Nár (Quenya)" to "Nár (word)", and so on for other word articles)? The issue I'm trying to avoid is a situation where we wouldn't be able to use a redirect because of ambiguity with other articles, but I suppose it's unlikely there will be many of these situations (which could therefore be dealt with on a case-by-case basis). Is it still worth making the article names consistent? I notice that this issue was noted back in 2011 but it looks like nothing was really decided back then. Also, after a quick look, it doesn't appear that there are too many to do (see here and here). --GondolinFan 18:06, 6 January 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I didn't notice that the "Man" links were mostly for Men, so now I agree it was a good change. Go ahead with moving the pages to just "... (word)": an article can contain the Quenya and Sindarin/Noldorin meanings in separated sections. I think it's better to replace and delete all the "... (Quenya/Sindarin word)" instead of leaving redirects, just for the sake of having the Search bar clean. Be careful with the red links. --LorenzoCB 08:54, 7 January 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]