Forum:SH Archive/Why articles shouldn't be unknown, unnamed, or anonymous

We've decided that we'll allow articles on pretty much any character that exists. Agree or disagree with that, it gives us with a ton of conjecturally titled articles, and I think good titling practices would make accessing and navigating through them a good deal easier.

Putting "unnamed", "unknown", or "anonymous" before the titles is bad practice for a number of reasons:
 * It's redundant. If they weren't unnamed, they'd, well, have a name. ;-) So it's just an unnecessary word in the title.
 * It makes navigating categories, or any list of article titles, more difficult. First, all articles beginning with "unknown", "unnamed", or "anonymous" are all lumped under "U" or "A" respectively in categories, pretty much defeating the purpose of the alphabetical sorting. And second, they hide the actual important part of the title. If I'm looking in a category for a Human Jedi, it's a lot easier to find when it's called "Human Jedi" then when it's called "Unknown Human Jedi". Scanning a list of titles is a lot more annoying and tedious when you have to ignore the first word of every title (which isn't giving any useful information anyway).
 * It's not really accurate. They're not unnamed or anonymous as far as we know, and "unknown" is vague as all get out.

So that's why I think unknown/unnamed/anonymous shouldn't appear in conjectural titles (there might be some exceptions to this, but this is the general rule). The flip side of this is to have the names we do use be more descriptive.

The thing about conjectural articles is that if anyone wants to find information on that subject, they're not going to know what to search for. If I see a giant anthropomorphic duck in a Classic Star Wars issue (this is real), I have no idea what to search on the site for. So the only way these articles are going to be found is either in a list or in a category. Which means that the titles need to give the best possible idea of what the subject is.

This may require being creative. There's no sense in giving every article a stuffy by-the-numbers name if it doesn't help anyone find it. Take Unnamed Stormtrooper (Cloud City), for example. No offense to anyone involved in titling that, but it's incredibly unhelpful. If I want to find the stormtrooper that Chewbacca knocks down, that's not going to be obvious that that's what it is. The title isn't particularly distinctive, and in a category will just blend in with the rest of the unnamed articles. If you put that at "Stormtrooper that Chewbacca knocks down", I don't care how stupid that sounds, it would be a lot easier to find. Of course, a good title would straddle the two extremes; it would be descriptive enough to tell you what it's about, while not overly complex. Wookiee victim stormtrooper, I don't know; I don't really have a good title off the top of my head for this case. However, unlike canon titles, there's few restrictions on conjectural ones. If you need a complex title to give a good idea of the subject, nothing is stopping you.

I know this is a lot of words on what seems like a fairly minor thing, but since we have these conjectural articles, I think we could do a lot towards making them more navigable and easier to use. A million "unnamed" articles that no one can find isn't doing anyone any good. - Lord Hydronium 10:27, 20 November 2007 (UTC)