Moegirlpedia:Article naming guidelines

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This page, "Moegirlpedia:Article naming guidelines", is an active guideline of Moegirlpedia The text of the guidelines has been deliberated and adopted by the community. All users have the responsibility to follow the guidelines outlined in this text; If you have any doubts about the content, please go to the discussion page first to initiate a corresponding discussion; If it is necessary to amend or revise this guideline, please discuss it on its talk page or on the discussion board.

This guideline regulates the naming of articles (namespace=0, excluding disambiguation pages and redirects). For naming disambiguation pages and categories appropriately, you can refer to this guideline.

The article name is the actual title of the article, it can be linked using two brackets [[article name]]. The URL also contains the article name.

Article names are case-sensitive, but the first letter is always capitalized. You can use {{lowercase}} to make the first letter of the displayed title lowercase. Spaces in article names are equivalent to underscores, and appear as spaces on page titles. {{Title format}} is used to handle disambiguating prefixes and suffixes in titles as well as subpage and namespace prefixes.

Determining an article's name needs to go through two parts: #Naming principles and #Handling symbols and uncommon characters:

1. A reasonable article name should satisfy at least one of the naming principles, or many principles as possible. If a title satisfies a greater number of principles than other titles, then the former takes precedence rather than the latter.
2. The names selected through the naming principles may contain various symbols and uncommon characters, which can be used as article names after processing.

If it is not possible to choose a better article name in this way, the relevant editors should negotiate and discuss it.

Sometimes the name of the article may not be determined. In this case, you can decide on a temporary title, and hang the {{Temporary Title}} template at the top of the page to write down the reasons for the tentative title. If the article name is determined in the future, the article can be renamed through the "Move" option, and the {{Temporary Title}} template can be removed. All pages with {{Temporary Title}} will be displayed in Category:Pages with temporary titles for easy management.

Naming principles

The official title takes priority

Take the official English name specified or recognized by the copyright holder of the work or the person describing the article.

1. If the original text is in a foreign language, the official translated name is given priority. Example: Pokémon instead of Pocket Monster (ポケットモンスター).
2. If there is no official translation, then take the translation that is formal, that is, the one used by authorized publishers, broadcasters, and distributors.
3. If the quality of the translation is particularly poor and seriously deviates from the original text, then the official and formal translated names should not be used. Reasons for such selection can be explained by means of notes, discussion, etc.

The common name takes priority

The title should use the most common and more formal name used internationally as much as possible, for example: Smile Pretty Cure! (Toei official English title) is used as the article name, since it is better than Glitter Force (Saban English dub).

English takes priority

In principle, the naming priority of English Moegirlpedia articles is: English>Japanese/Chinese and other languages. When foreign-language titles can be translated, English should be used as much as possible.

Full name usage

Convention: Please try not to use abbreviations or "aliases" to name articles, unless this "alias" is only used by it, or this "alias" is known to most people. Try to avoid using Chinese or other foreign-language abbreviations, unless the abbreviation has been recognized as a proper noun, such as IBM, etc.

Handling duplicate names

Generally speaking, the naming of articles should be as concise as possible, avoiding vague and unclear naming. When the subject described by the article has another name, or a more complete and equally clear name, we can use those, for example: Hina Satou (instead of "Hina (The Day I Became A God)"), etc.

In some cases, however, it may be a better option to use names that have been retitled, these include:

• Cases with characters whose names are Western names, or whose full names are excessively long, for example: Lulu (Myriad Colors Phantom World) (instead of "Lululaluli Lulalalilalalululililali Lilalalululalalululalalilali"), Louise (The Familiar of Zero) (instead of "Louise Françoise le Blanc de la Vallière")
• Cases when the ambiguous name is more commonly used, and it has higher visibility, for example: Mercy (Overwatch) (instead of "Angela Ziegler"), etc. Characters in current games and other works make heavy use of codenames, user handles, and other non-traditional names, resulting in renaming, so it makes no sense to require that an unambiguous name should be used as the article title.

Please be flexible, depending on the actual situation of the subject the article describes, and don't deliberately use names that aren't generally used to avoid ambiguity. In this case, specific naming guidelines are detailed in Moegirlpedia:Disambiguation policy#Article name disambiguation.

Handling symbols and uncommon characters

"Symbols and uncommon characters", in this context, means characters that are used in addition to the English letters Aa-Zz and numbers 0-9.

When the name contains symbols and uncommon characters, names should be treated progressively according to the following rules.

Retention or non-retention of characters

Where no technical restrictions are involved, symbols and uncommon characters that satisfy one of the following principles may be retained.

• The following ASCII punctuation marks and symbols can be used: " (blank space) " ! $ % & ' () * + , - . / : ; = ? @ \ ^ _ ` ~".
• Greek letters with specific meanings in real subjects, such as mathematics or astronomy.
• If the untranslated title is provisional, then when not blocked by the system, the original words and symbols in the name can be retained;
• Characters allowed by subsequent rules.

Other characters should be avoided. In particular, due to technical restrictions, pages with titles containing "# < > [] | {}", or a specific combination of those characters, cannot be created. See Help:Title restrictions for details.

Unified format

If the following characters that are present in the name can be used for the article name, always use (or change) the specified characters in the article name. This, while not the most appropriate in particular cases, helps avoid some confusion. While quite a few of the characters here are difficult to determine with the naked eye, common errors are automatically blocked, so no need to worry too much.

• The blank space " " (U+0020 space), instead of the various other blank characters.
• The interpunct "·" (U+00B7 middle dot), and its variations "‧" (U+2027), "•" (U+2022), "･" (U+FF65).
• The Unicode section of Greek and Coptic scripts used in the Greek alphabet.
• The full-width Latin alphabet, replacing the Arabic numerals with half-width characters.
• Replacement of specialized Roman numeral characters with the Latin spelling form, Ⅲ is read as "III" (three I's). In fact, it is not incorrect to use the Latin alphabet to express Roman numerals, instead, it is more standardized..
• "〜" (U+301C wave dash) is read as "~" (U+FF5E fullwidth tilde), the former is mostly found in Japanese.
• "-" (U+2010 hyphen), "−" (U+2212 minus sign), "–" (U+2013 en dash) are read as "-" (U+002D hyphen-minus), that is, a short horizontal line typed directly on the keyboard.
• "―" (U+2015 horizontal bar) is read as "—" (U+2014 em dash), the usual "Half Chinese dash".

The following provisions relate to disambiguation, part of it involves system operations:

• Parentheses and colons for disambiguation, use half-width characters, for example: Alice (PC-98), Koihime Musou:Shuri.
• When a colon for non-disambiguation purposes appears in the article name, it is necessary to use {{ColonSort}} or otherwise ensure that the categorization index is correct.
• The slash (/) does not appear in disambiguation prefixes, and neither the colon (:) nor the slash (/) appear in disambiguation suffixes.

Universal guidelines

Where the copyright holder of the work or the person the article describes is otherwise publicly and explicitly identified, it is not necessary to follow what is covered in this section.

The slash ("/") relates to subpage functionality, when the article is not used as a subpage, or the official name does not contain a "/", article names, should, as far as possible, avoid using "/". A similar effect can often be achieved by using "and" or "or".

For works, where the name does not satisfy the "Official name priority" principle, the representation of the subtitle should respect the original title. Various expressions include "Title: Subtitle", "Title Subtitle", "Title -Subtitle-", "Title ~Subtitle~", etc. However, the specific symbols are further determined by the type of text of the article name, as seen below.

On the basis of compliance with retainable characters and unified format, punctuation in an article name should be used according to the more standardized and common form used in the text corresponding to the article name. This usually solves the issue, however, the following should be noted:

• In the presence or absence of spaces around punctuation, it should be consistent with the original text, for example, there is no parsing in Bright!Light!. When it is not possible to refer to the original text (when a part of the original text is not in English), follow the normative approach.
• Always use straight quotation marks (" and "), instead of curved ones (“ and ”). Apostrophes also use the straight form.
• For titles such as "Title -Subtitle-", the hyphens made on either side of the subtitle are made with "-".

Treatment of non-retained characters

Non-retained characters not referred to in the #Unified format and common norms may be treated flexibly, for example:

• Replacing with characters of similar meaning or effect: Emma★August → Emma August, Fujiko Fujio Ⓐ → Fujiko Fujio A;
• Latinization (Romanization), and use of the 26 Latin letters without symbols: Ϡ → Sampi, Japari Café → Japari Cafe;
• Symbols mainly used for decoration can be deleted or replaced with a space: Senren * Banka → Senren Banka, 777☆SISTERS → 777 SISTERS.

The above are just examples, and it is not limited with the above methods. There can be other, more appropriate changes to specific articles.

• If the name has gibberish, blanks, etc. that are difficult to deal with, naming the article with an alias might be a better choice, i.e. a name that conforms to as many naming principles as possible is selected as the article name.

If only a part of the characters is adjusted, it will result in a violation, optionally, other parts can be adjusted together.

Exceptions

Some articles would be inappropriate without retaining certain characters, the main manifestation of this is a lack of recognition. If the characters in the article title to be processed that should have been (that is, disregarding this rule) non-retained meet all of the following conditions, then they can be retained:

• If the character does not have a clear meaning in the language to which it belongs, or its meaning in the article name is independent of the original meaning;
• If the characters are not for decoration or do not form words in other languages with their shape (using shapes such as the "φ" in Next New Wφrld);
• If, after treating said characters in a suitable manner (without attempts to avoid ambiguity), the name of an article can create ambiguity with other existing ones. And by retaining those characters, there is no ambiguity.

If there are article names in which certain characters have been retained as a result, then, when referring to the object described by said article in other article names, it is also possible to retain the characters.