Ghyll talk:Quezlarian Numerals
Out-Of-Game Discussion
All new pages to be capitalised properly by decree of sbp now, k thx. If you see any phantoms that are going to cause problems in the future, please fix them! --Sean B. Palmer 18:43, 12 Sep 2004 (EDT)
Is "Roman numerals" capitalized? That's was the whole point of this entry, ten months ago. --Morbus Iff 19:23, 12 Sep 2004 (EDT)
Incidentally, are you advocating all pages be all ucwords? Why? I'm not sure that's right. --Morbus Iff 19:24, 12 Sep 2004 (EDT)
In seeing your other comments, it looks like you are. I'm steadfastly against it. Some things are just not proper names. "Awal shrinkage" should not be capitalized, any more than the "Luminous text". The distinction I've seen, and have been keeping conscious of, is between proper names and not. Bobby Shwarmph yes, Awal shrinkage, no. So, all references to "Council for Quezlarian Research" now needs a capital "For"? Forcing ucwords on all wiki pages is the equivalent, IMO, of CamelCase. The removal of CamelCase in wikis, one of the "good things", was to make reading entries better and more English like. Implementing a forced ucword seems backwards: another arbitrary decision that breaks the rules of English, imposed because one player can't keep things straight. --Morbus Iff 19:30, 12 Sep 2004 (EDT)
In fact, it's the opposite: I can't keep them straight because they break the rules of English! The rationale is that the page names form the titles of the entries, and "[i]n most house styles, all the major words in an English title are capitalized — 'major' meaning the first word, the last word, and everything in between except articles, conjunctions, and prepositions" - Lynch on Titles (which means that the "for" in your example doesn't need to be capitalised). In-page references probably should be capitalised normally though. --Sean B. Palmer 19:31, 12 Sep 2004 (EDT)
But therein lies the rub: how are we actually using the page titles? In most cases, they're being used inside a sentence, so the natural inclination of a person is the follow the non-title rules of English, as we've been doing. I think it's absolutely insane to force users to link to a page one way (ucwords) and then force (or, for the grammatically annoying, do ourselves) a different title for the link itself through the use of wiki syntax. The intent of wikis is to colloborate on the body of entries, and that's where all concessions should take place: in making it easier for the user to do what needs to be done. Users are thinking in sentences, not titles, and requiring them to redouble their efforts by thinking both ways (one for the link, one for the title) is obscene. Although a lack of (immediately findable) written policy, this appears to be how Wikipedia handles it (Mushroom_cloud, Nuclear_weapon) and also Encyclopedia Britannica. --Morbus Iff 19:52, 12 Sep 2004 (EDT)
The most concessionlessful approach would be to have [[Quezlarian numerals]] look up similar page titles in the wiki, and link to any that share its case. But in the absence of that, I'd rather do what's correct English than to have people be lazy; by extension, your argument says that it's alright to use txt spk in entries, leave out punctuation and apostrophes, and not capitalise anywhere since that's easier for the user too. Why have people link at all--too difficult! Our highly academic and scholarly lexicon has been a shining example of pedantry since its inception--correct quoting style, the Morbus removing whitespace hither and thither, anality in every nook and cranny--and this construct should not be any different. Therefore, we ought to use a [[Quezlarian Numerals|Quezlarian numerals]] [Changing over to BBC World Service! Rise for the national anthem!] syntax throughout the wiki. --Sean B. Palmer 20:03, 12 Sep 2004 (EDT)
I disagree - I see no reason to make the lives of our users more difficult, or to fly in the face of tradition. Similarly, your argument about txt spk is absolutely retarded - it'd only stand to reason if, in fact, our users were doing that already - people aren't going to "devolve" into morons regardless of this decision - they will, however, have to make conscious effort to jump out of the sentence and into titling and wiki syntax. Forcing them to break with sentence trandition, to think about syntax and not their fiction, and to train them the incorrect way to contribute to the Wikipedia, or to suggest that the Britannica is "wrong" is, IMO, damaging in the extreme. I mean, sure, we're pretty smart fellows, but breaking with 100 years of encyclopedia tradition seems absolutely high and mighty. Remember the goal here: we're making a Lexicon, and in traditional examples, there are no "page titles" - just text entries. We shouldn't, just like Clean URIs, make a decision on naming or titling because of our technology (where every term is a page). Quite frankly, I've already got a zillion more important babysitting tasks to accomplish then to schoolmarm sentences into proper constructs because there's no clear indication that, yes, you're writing a sentence, but no, think about titles in your body. --Morbus Iff 20:32, 12 Sep 2004 (EDT)
A hundred years of encyclopaedia tradition? You should've polled some more encyclopaedias rather than just finding two that support your point of view: the IEP, Encyclopaedia of British History, and Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy don't follow the "convention"--just from the first two pages of Google results for "encyclopaedia". As for having a zillion more important tasks than schoolmarming sentences, I direct you to your own Accidentally clicked here, so decided to be some of TEH ANEL diff--the first change in which is you correcting the "Folktown Records event" heading to "Folktown Records Event"! And I'm not forcing them to break with sentence tradition at all: they're having to make links anyway, so they might as well make proper ones.
Perhaps we should throw this open to a vote, since we're clearly not going to agree between ourselves, and I'm confident of my position. What say ye? --Sean B. Palmer 20:56, 12 Sep 2004 (EDT)
Well, DrBacchus's recent change is an interesting one: he changed "Awal shrinkage" to "awal shrinkage" and it redirected properly still. Is that because of a redirect on the page? Awal Shrinkage doesn't seem to go anywhere. If that is the case, we can set the redirects up ourselves... but DrBacchus has also demonstrated just how confusing this whole thing is, since his change seems to be erroneous: in the original article, "Awal" is capitalised throughout. I'll revert his change. --Sean B. Palmer 21:11, 12 Sep 2004 (EDT)
Nope - MediaWiki automatically capitalizes the first letter of all wiki links, and this has been a bone of contention - as far as I know, there's a bug report running around for it to stop. As for "Awal shrinkage", in this case, it should be capitalized because, as we both know, it's the name of a person. As for the Folktown Record Event, I'm surprised you're considering that a good example: those are headers to a table, irregardless of technology or page titles. Concerning the vote, do whatever the hell you want, but if it passes, it becomes your responsibility to correct all the sentences, including my own. Regarding the polling of two supporting encyclopedia, honestly, I didn't poll or check others: I thought of the two that were the most well-known, in my head. Non-committally, perhaps they've trained me the wrong way, though I still find the extended wiki syntax effort daunting, unnecessary, and intrusive. Unfortunately, of your choices, I only "recognize" one (and by the Stanford name alone) which, naturally, doesn't invalidate their import. It doesn --Morbus Iff 21:52, 12 Sep 2004 (EDT)
doesn? Did you have more to say, before I reply? --Sean B. Palmer 22:27, 12 Sep 2004 (EDT)
Huh. I have no clue what that is. Sounds like an unfinished thought, left behind due to the allure of a paused X-File. Please go on. Oh! And yes, we can setup any redirect we want - I believe the syntax is something like #REDIRECT [term or URL]. You can actually see that in use on the previous Quez pages. --Morbus Iff 22:40, 12 Sep 2004 (EDT)
Well I think that if Ghyll is to survive and prosper, we need to have a lot more anality from all of its players. I'd like to see ten people as anal as you, not just you going around and making those careful changes. If that happens, we're going to need to have a consensus: if everybody decides that properly capitalised titles are the way to go, I don't see why you should want to do the opposite unless you're wanting to sulk or fall into a dictatorship. When you opened this up to other players than just us to, you acknowledged that it's going to be a large team effort. Perhaps you just meant you'd make the mistake automatically because that's your natural inclination, but again I think you should put the effort in to be anal in a way that the Ghyll scholars vote to agree upon, as well as your own particular analities.
On the other hand, you could start closing the wiki up to give you a greater control over it. And I really wouldn't mind that (I've been favouring it more and more lately; it'd make things so much easier from a consistency point of view, and I'm not fully enamoured with the Ghyll world as its developing), but I don't think that you want that.
As a third path, we might set the redirects up and then let people choose either method, but do we really want inconsistency for the sake of flexibility? --Sean B. Palmer 00:08, 13 Sep 2004 (EDT)
As a new player who has no history with Ghyll before this project started almost 2 weeks ago, I speak only for myself. I really don't care what is decided here, as long as something is. I know I can follow instructions if those instructions are clear, and I'm sure the other players can too. For my own writing, in my first post about Aelfants I use the term "Alezanian" in my text which actually links to the Alezanians entry. I needed the singular for my text, so I did the link modification thing. There will always be cases when a writer wants to link a term that is not the precise spelling or form of the entry's title. We can and do work around this. In the case of "case" however, this seems a bit of needless overhead. Let computers do what computers do well to free the humans for the creativity. If I had my druthers, links would be completely case insensitive. I'd love if the wiki could send "Aelfants," "AELFANTS," and "aElFaNtS" all to the same entry. This allows the writer maximum flexibility while writing. Writers shouldn't have to concern themselves with the case of the linked entry. In their writing, perhaps they have a reason to do some wacky capitalisation. Case insensitive matching shouldn't be too hard to hack into the wiki code. If you accept that, the problem becomes much more tractable. It then is merely a question of what you, (the creators of the game) want as a canonical form for entry titles. Whatever that turns out to be, all the scholars will honor, it will be easy to fix the strays that happen accidentally, anyone can write their links with whatever capitalisation is correct within the context of their entries, and the anal-retentive grammar-checkers can be happy with merely reviewing content, and not canonical link correctness. Less work for everybody, writers get maximum flexability, and entries all get some kind of standard, even if that standard is "it doesn't matter because all the links will work anyway." Jesse a.k.a. --Qwentyth Pyre 02:14, 13 Sep 2004 (EDT)
Well said, Jesse. Always knew old Qwentyth had sense bursting out all over. Couldn't agree more, or have put it better. --Ginestre 05:11, 13 Sep 2004 (EDT)
Sbp, in poking around, I've still yet to see evidence to support either of our positions. I don't think your Titles link is valid, because we're working on an entire lexicon, and there are 50,000 entries or terms defined, not 50,000 titles (it just appears like we're working on titles because our particular technology gives us that impression). I couldn't find anything magical in the two English books I happened to have lying around (Prentice Hall Handbook For Writers, Eleventh Edition, which just showed a dictionary example from Webster's, where "howl" was uncapitalized and The New Fowler's Modern English Usage Third Edition, which itself was a lexicon, with entries all lowercased and capitalized only when needed [benefited vs. Bible]). Other less reputable books (The A-Z to Angels, and similar) capitalized every letter of every entry (and this also seems to be the case with the Dictionary of the Khazars, what Lexicon is inspired from). Your Titles link doesn't bring anything to light with an eye toward dictionary or lexicon creation but I think that's the angle we should investigate this from: "how to create a dictionary, encyclopedia, or lexicon", not titles. --Morbus Iff 08:23, 13 Sep 2004 (EDT)
I think all links should be ALL CAPS. After all, they are more important than the actual text, right? --MELIK FIZZUO 09:08, 13 Sep 2004 (EDT)
