Wikipedia talk:Article titles: Difference between revisions - Wikipedia

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{{od}} I think [[WP:COMMONNAME]] is sound policy for a general encyclopedia. However, as generally understood and applied within WP, it has failings not entirely attributable to the Common name policy itself. Its first and probably greatest failing is the lack of consistent, replicatable methodology that indeed determines the common name of any topic. The current methodology as seen in many RMs is very ad hoc and loaded with the biases of the editors pushing one common name over another. Its second failing (not of its own making) is trying to equate common names with accurate or correct names. Correctness and especially accuracy demands a solid point of reference or ground truth if you will. When you introduce cultural, political, language and other biases into a discussion about accuracy or correctness (each editor will view something a being accurate only based on their view of what the real ground truth is), what is common to one editor is not to another. Common name does not care about accuracy or correctness, it cares only about what is most prevalent in '''all''' reliable sources, sources that have not been culled to selective remove or deal with the inherent cultural, political and language biases we face in the WP community. --[[User:Mike Cline|Mike Cline]] ([[User talk:Mike Cline|talk]]) 20:45, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

==Restored 16 May deletion to [[WP:COMMONNAME]] status quo 23 March==

{{quotation|Titles are often proper nouns, such as the name of the person, place or thing that is the subject of the article. The most common name for a subject, as determined by its prevalence in reliable English-language sources, is <u>often</u> used as a title because it is recognizable and natural. Editors should also ask the [[#Deciding on an article title|questions]] outlined above. <u>Ambiguous or inaccurate names for the article subject, as determined by reliable sources, are often avoided even though they may be more frequently used by reliable sources.</u> Neutrality is also considered; our policy on neutral titles, and what neutrality in titles is, follows in the next section.<!--Please restore the internal link if the section order changes; the section linked to is now called Neutrality--> When there are several names for a subject, all of them fairly common, and the most common has problems, it is perfectly reasonable to choose one of the others.}}

[[WP:COMMONNAME]] is part of the basic building blocks of [[WP:AT]], to have this section (i) used as a sandbox, (ii) deleted for 7 days, is not helpful to promoting encyclopaedic accuracy. This deleted section in particular is one of the few clear instructions to keep to encyclopaedic standards, high-MOS, etc rather than let en.wp slide into a tabloid blog where [[WP:MAJORITYNAME]] is the rule. Rather than further sandboxing (almost edit-warring?) in the text of [[WP:COMMONNAME]], if there are constructive improvements to the sentence (I see some above but not too convincing), let's list the options, and then gain community-wide consensus before further sandboxing in the article text or deleting. [[User:In ictu oculi|In ictu oculi]] ([[User talk:In ictu oculi|talk]]) 00:08, 24 May 2012 (UTC)