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The purpose of this History Workgroup is to focus and coordinate efforts to create and improve articles related to history. Authors and Editors interested in all areas of the subject are welcome in this group. If you wish to be an author in this field, please add yourself to Category:History Authors, introduce yourself on the History Workgroup Forum (linked below) and start improving our articles. If you meet the requirements to be a Citizendium Editor for this workgroup, please follow the directions found here to become an editor, and then add yourself to Category:History Editors.

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Naming convention: need a decision

Editor Benjamin Lowe asks whether Massachusetts: History should be changed to History of Massachusetts . That's a policy issue--what do people think? It's a policy issue for many articles: France: History, Japan: History etc. The Massachusetts: History format naturally leads to MAssachusetts: Economy/Education/Government etc, with the stress on the state. Richard Jensen. Richard Jensen 15:44, 9 April 2007 (CDT)

Here was Larry Sanger's response in a move the other day "17:52, 7 April 2007 Larry Sanger (Talk | contribs) North Carolina: History moved to History of North Carolina (Better to invite a free-standing article without a colon)". That seems to imply his preference. Matt Mahlmann 17:31, 9 April 2007 (CDT)

the goal is to help people find articles. When we have thousands of articles that start History of ... then it's hard to find things. When we have 10 articles that start Massachusetts: History or Massachusetts:Government or Massachusetts: Economy then searching is much easier. I assume people are interested in Massachusetts (rather than in history generally). Richard Jensen 17:38, 9 April 2007 (CDT)

I don't mean always to have my way, but omitting colons used in this way is a good policy. Presumably, we won't be finding articles via alphabetical lists. I rarely do this, and I doubt others do either. The main way to find articles is (1) the search form, and (2) via links from other articles.

The difficulty with this use of colons in titles is that they subtly enshrine and "hard-code" a certain relationship between the part to the left of the colon and the part to the right. Why should it be "North Carolina: History"? Why not "History: North Carolina"? And why not "History of the South: North Carolina"? Etc. Besides, if we use colons in this way here, people will start using them in many other places, when there won't be any clearly understood rules about when to use them and how. Will we have "Aristotle: Metaphysics" or "Metaphysics: Aristotelian"? (Reference point: [1]) It seems we can easily sidestep such potentially difficult problems by omitting the colon. --Larry Sanger 18:02, 9 April 2007 (CDT)

We can avoid colons but we can't ignore the problem of standardizing subarticles for geographical regions. It makes more sense to have the main search word first, then secondary search words. thus I recommend: Utah, Utah--History, Utah--Economy, Utah--Geography. (and not: Utah, History of Utah, Economy of Utah, Geography of Utah). That way the search engines (our and outsiders) will put all the Utah articles together. Richard Jensen 18:28, 9 April 2007 (CDT)

I essentially agree with Richard Jensen in this discussion. I'm no fan of the colon, but the state (or other geographical unit) should come first, followed by history. They can be separated with a colon, an m-dash, a comma, or something else (we need to figure out what and stick with it), but I think "History of X" is cumbersome and puts the cart before the horse.--Ben Alpers 21:05, 10 April 2007 (CDT)

Well, if the goal is to help people find the articles, then I think that it is more likely that they will be searching History of Massachusetts and not Massachusetts: History - I certainly would do that. --José Leonardo Andrade 10:13, 23 April 2007 (CDT)

I think people are interested primarily in Massachusetts. People will lose out if they try "History of the state of Massachusetts" or "History of Massachusetts Bay Colony" or "History of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts." But I suggest the scheme is mostly for the benefit of editors so WE can keep track of all the Massachusetts-spinoff articles (on politics, economy, society, environment, etc). Richard Jensen 15:50, 23 April 2007 (CDT)

I didn't notice this debate (still) going on here until now. This really isn't an issue for the History Workgroup, per se, to decide, because it is a perfectly generalizable issue.

I don't think that any naming schemes (in the main namespace) should be made simply for our own benefit. The question is what is going to be most inviting and useful for our users; and "History of Massachusetts" is a lot more inviting to me, anyway, than "Massachusetts--History" or whatever you'd like the convention to be.

Richard wrote: "That way the search engines (our and outsiders) will put all the Utah articles together." I don't see how this is the case. Search engines, ours and others, for the most part don't care about alphabetization, nor should they, in my opinion. Let human beings make meaningful groupings; don't make ugly titles so that machines can do it better more efficiently.

Also: "It makes more sense to have the main search word first, then secondary search words. thus I recommend: Utah, Utah--History, Utah--Economy, Utah--Geography." But these aren't search terms, they are titles. As such, it's actually very important that they be inviting and immediately comprehensible. "History of Utah" is more inviting and immediately comprehensible (to the user of a search engine) than "Utah--History".

There's also the argument I made above, in the paragraph starting, "The difficulty with this use of colons in titles is that they subtly enshrine..." That's important to me. It's bound to cause trouble.

Just a friendly hint--this isn't a paper encyclopedia. --Larry Sanger 17:45, 23 April 2007 (CDT)

Yes it does matter how to search. We want a simple system that any user can quickly master. If users want information on a state they will search on the state. It is highly unlikely that users will want information on generic history, where any place will do. We need some way for users and editors to see what is available on a georgraphical unit. (This issue comes up in other ways as well, but let's start with geography.) It's not true, I suggest, that "history of xyz" helps anyone. The user will NOT know whether to search on

"History of Colonial Massachusetts"
"History of Massachusetts before 1776"
"History of Witches in Massachusetts"
"Social History of Colonial Massachusetts"
"Economic History of Massachusetts"
"Farming in Massachusetts History"
"History of Massachusetts Bay"
"History of Puritan Massachusetts"

The bottom line is that the most useful keyword should always come first in a title. Richard Jensen 18:10, 23 April 2007 (CDT)

It's hard to anticipate how people will type queries, but since they're not optically looking through a print index, the "order" of such entries matters only on index pages (and there we can sort using DEFAULT:SORT of the article checklist's "abc" entry. If it's for the editors that we want all History articles sorted by keyword first, you could use the article checklist to do that. Russell Potter 04:19, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

How people type in queries is irrelevant, the search engine will match various word orders. Also any search engine worth it's salt will match plurals and other tenses. As Larry said, we should title in a way that is logical to normal English usage. We don't have to copy the style used in Library catalogues of reversing word orders and adding colons and commas.

In plain English, we can put the words either way round without loosing the relation ship between the words. There are two ways to indicate possession. Either the word 'of' or the use 's. E.g. "History of Citizendium" and "Citizendium's History". Using this method of writing, the ambiguity of the relationship that a colon leaves is cleared up.

Again, I have to second Larry, this discussion should be beyond the history workgroup. It applies to the entire site. I notice the Biology workgroup has settled into using parenthesis e.g. Cell (biology) to disambiguate their articles. I think we should move this topic to the general forums for wider input and consensus. Derek Harkness 07:12, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

I think reliance on super search engines (which we do not yet have) is a poor solution. There are too many hits. What happens when we have 10,000 articles that start with "History of XYZ"? answer: editors will get lost easily and start new articles when we already have an article that largely cover the subject (this has already happened to me on CZ!). We want to tell users: "The best way to search CZ is as follows...." (and we can say start with the geographical unit, like "Massachusetts," then the topic like "witches." (note that asking google about Massachusetts witches gives 558,000 hits; asking for Connecticut witches gives 352,000 hits). We can then ask our search engine to give priority to our own naming convention. (who's writing this search engine?) Conclusion: One standard approach decided upon early will reduce confusion for readers and editors. Richard Jensen 05:21, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

We do already have a search engine. It's far form super, but it's what we have and we don't have the resources to do anything other than minor changes to it. So we can't decide a convention then produce a search engine around that; rather we must work with the search engine we have and base our decision on it's current behavior.

But, our search engine is of low significance. Where our pages are going to be found the in the 558,000 and 352,000 hits that google throws up. Many people are going to search google then come to our site, not come to our site then search.

Lastly, we want to tell Users that the "The best way to search CZ is the way your already do." Nobody wants to learn how to use our site. It should be intuitive. If we have to teach people how to use our site then we have made a mistake. Derek Harkness 07:12, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

we should plan for 10,000 articles in a year and eventually 100,000 articles. That means a simple search may turn up 100 unstratified hits inside CZ--that is too many to be useful to a student in a hurry. If our search engine is week then we ought to build into the system a logical order. How do users now search-- no one knows, and to pretend to match this imaginary process is a recipe for confusion. The way classification works is that it organizes material in an orderly way (think of biology, or indeed Roget's thesaurus.) I've prepared a dozen book indexes. The worst ones were computer generated (I used automated Kew Word in Context in my Historians's Guide to Statistics, 1971), and the best ones required some thought and design. Richard Jensen 07:24, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

Some numbers: Wiki now had 1.8 million articles in English. When you try something like "Massachusetts Bay history" you get over 2000 hits inside Wiki, which is going to baffle users. I suspect when confronted with lots of hits people take just the top 10 or 20 (that is google's formula anyway). That means they miss 99% of the available information. The solution is to structure the information so users can find their way around. Richard Jensen 07:39, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

I see, so this is mainly about the convenience of searchers? Well, as any computer scientist can tell you, placing words in a certain order is not going to make a whole lot of difference--unless you straightjacket the search engine by telling it, "Deliver the results in alphabetical order." Document search isn't exactly a "solved problem," but it there is a lot known about it. Search results can be delivered according to various useful heuristics (whether the word occurs in the title, number of times a word occurs in the article, whether the word occurs among the first N characters, etc.), and those heuristics are usually more useful than anything you might produce by alphabetical order.

One particularly useful heuristic, by the way, is the ability to deliver at the top of a list articles that have all the search words in the exact order in which they appear in the search. Well, most people are going to search for "history of Massachusetts", not "Massachusetts, History", and you'd like to present them with exactly what they searched on, if possible. You can try this right now: when I search for "history of Massachusetts" right now, the first result is "Massachusetts, History"--which takes one extra beat of processing before I realize, "Oh, that's what I'm looking for, they've just used the old-fashioned paper encyclopedia method of titling articles; how quaint."

It's the job of programmers to take ordinary English pages and then deliver the desired results near the top of a search. Trying to second-guess them by titling articles in a certain way will not help them very much, unless you redesign the way the search engine works--which we aren't going to do. --Larry Sanger 09:53, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

I wholeheartedly agree with Larry here -- we have search paradigms, and the ability to tweak them, and therefore do not need to follow the old print-based notions of tables of contents and indexes. But in order to ensure a clear, uniform look across articles and topics, the sooner we have an unambiguous guideline for naming conventions, the better. One thought: might we have a mainpage link to such editorial policy documents? I know we have some out there, but my intuitive guesses as to where they are linked seem to be wrong. Russell Potter 10:32, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

Russell, can you please have a look at CZ:Project Home and offer suggestions (on Talk:Main Page) about what we should have on the main page? I agree that it's due for an overhaul. --Larry Sanger 10:42, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

what do editors do? we keep track of articles planned, underway, finished, in need of updates, etc. With say 10,000 history articles we have to use alphebetized listings to keep track--there is no other way. It is a curious fallacy that CZ can do without alphabetical order. Richard Jensen 17:33, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

Richard, I do understand your concern -- but by the time we have that many articles, no one person will be keeping track of them all, and even an alphabetized list of 10,000 articles would be balky and not very useful. We have other tools -- page tracking and the Article Checklist among them -- which will do the job far better. It may be useful to put the keyterms in the order you've suggested in the abc field of the Article checklist (since we want an alpha sort to be possible on these), but there's nothing to be gained -- either in sortability or tracking articles -- by using such terms for actual article titles. Russell Potter 17:39, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

Yes, an editor can keep track of articles if they are sorted the same way for each subtopic. (For example, the subarticles for states will all look like UTAH, HISTORY, VERMONT, HISTORY, VIRGINIA, HISTORY etc rather than HISTORY OF UTAH, VERMONT HISTORY, VIRGINIA STATE HISTORY etc. Richard Jensen 17:50, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

But we will be compiling many lists--and, in fact, that the wiki itself is itself (or can be) an efficient, effective sorting mechanism. I concede that listing articles in Category:History Workgroup won't be easily findable without the convention you suggest--I take it that that's your point. But I doubt it will be very helpful even if we make our entries more "alphabeticizable," simply because many topics are not "classified" by their titles (for example, the names of political figures, or battles). But by compiling lists (or, as I recently proposed, "catalogs"), we can make it much easier to find things. It's very important to think about the possibilities that not being paper opens up... --Larry Sanger 17:51, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

Thinking outside the box is one thing, but having heaps of unorganized, unsystematic names is quite another. As an old librarian, I spent a lot of time with classification schemes and actually, there is a logic to using logic. :) If it does not matter to you, then please step away from the discussion because it really does matter to some people. Richard Jensen 18:00, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

Hey, just because you're an old librarian, that doesn't mean you have the lock on interest in classification. I thought I had the lock because I'm a philosopher. Stand back! :-) We're debating about how to classify. You want article names to reflect their classification. I don't; I think that the tendency to use the names of articles (and other things) to organize is a reflection on old-fashioned automatic paper methods of classification. I.e., according to that old librarian way :-) of doing things, each item goes on a card, and all the cards go into a giant alphabetized stack, and people locate books by searching through that alphabetical list. Of course, if those are your constraints, it makes sense to name articles the way you want. But there are no such constraints here. We can still classify things, but by using wiki pages, we can do it even better. --Larry Sanger 18:06, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

we have this constraint: if every topic uses a different naming system nobody will be helped and everyone will be confused. The authors will be doing duplicate entries because they did not spot the duplication. (This actually happened to me this week!) This anti-paper bit is a red herring: it assumes, without evidence or logic, that search engines will solve problems and I want to prevent the problem in the first place. Richard Jensen 19:19, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

I think everyone agrees we need a consistent naming convention, for our own internal consistency and to help prevent duplication (though if the Arcticle checklist has the key term first in its abc field, then duplicate articles should show up right next to one another -- a very helpful detail!). But I don't think we're anti-paper here, simply post-paper. If, as has been the case with Wikipedia, the *vast* majority of users come to the site laterally via search engines then, for better or worse, it's to that mode of access we need to attune ourselves. Russell Potter 20:40, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

Most folks who use search engines use only the first page, and indeed only the first few listings--that means Wikipedia. That's bad for our numbers. We should cater to more sophisticated users who appreciate quality, for we will never beat Wiki at the numbers game (they have 1.8 million articles today). Richard Jensen 21:50, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

Now is a good time

Hi folks, I'm not sure if you realize, but we should not be making redirects to articles to change the naming conventions. When you do that, you lose the page histories. As this workgroup now has two articles up for approval, and I assume some editing will be forthcoming, the decision needs to be made in rather short order. Thanks. --Matt Innis (Talk) 21:12, 24 April 2007 (CDT) Constable

I split the Pittsburgh article in two per discussion, then someone not in this group jumped in and changed my titles. That's a no-no, so I changed them back. Richard Jensen 21:45, 24 April 2007 (CDT)