TycheManual:StoryPageNaming
Naming Guidelines
This is our suggested approach, borrowing liberally from Wikipedia conventions:
- Articles about cities, towns, villages (incorporate or unincorporated) follow the convention CITY, STATE NAME (Albany, New York)
- An article about a placename that requires disambiguation because of two cities in the same state should follow the contention CITY, COUNTY | PARISH NAME, STATE NAME (Victory, Saratoga County, New York)
- Articles on counties and parishes are titled "X County, State" or "X Parish, State" (Orleans Parrish, Louisiana)
- Articles on metropolitan areas (generally recognized or ad hoc areas) can be "[city name] metropolitan area" (Denver Metropolitan Area) or “[colloquial name] area” (Northern Virginia)
- Commas between the geographic components
- Diacriticals are OK
- Subjects are not separated with a comma
- Subjects should have the main topic presented first and then a subtopic as the 2nd (and 3rd/4th words), and any clarifying adjective can follow the main topic
Examples:
- Albany, New York Budget Trends
- Albany, New York Budget by Segment
- Albany, New York Budget Landfill
- Albany, New York Demographic Trends
- Albany, New York Demographic Race
- Albany, New York Housing Development
- Albany, New York Housing Lower Income Development
- Albany, New York Housing and Taxes
- Albany, New York Crime Mapping
- Albany, New York Crime Trends
- Albany, New York Violent Crime Trends
- Albany, New York Strong Towns Finance Decoder
Background
We are including our thought process below to provide context on how we came to the initial page naming proposal.
We want to have a consistently used, logical scheme for naming pages. A basic title should cover the name of the area under study and the subject of the study, e.g. “Albany PILOT Tax Abatements”. We want to put structure and conventions around the Page/Story naming - consistency makes it easier for the author, the searchability/findability, and understandability to the reader.
We can draw on what Wikipedia does however a lot of the issues that Wikipedia faces may not be as relevant to LDS, e.g. multilanguage views into names, Germany vs. Deutschland, Rome vs. Roma, etc. We can also draw from Wikipedia's USA-specific guidance.
Some guiding thoughts on identifying the geographic area:
- We want a naming scheme that works for incorporated areas like cities (Albany, NY), generally accepted names for unincorporated areas (NOVA for Northern VA), feature named areas (Great Salt Lake, Schroon Lake)
- Many places will have the same name (at the same hierarchical level [many cities are named ‘Lincoln’] or at different hierarchies - Albany City/Albany County) so we need to ensure that we disambiguate with next level up descriptors (Lincoln Nebraska) or hierarchical descriptor (Albany County)
- Abbreviations are helpful and yet people still don’t understand them (is Minnesota MI or MN?) White space vs. underscores vs commas for separators
- Use diacriticals? E.g. Cañoncito, Bernalillo County, New Mexico
- We won’t be able to solve every clarity problem in a title so we can always use an Infobox to provide more detail about the geographical context
- We can use redirects (“ATL” => maybe that redirects to Category:Atlanta_Georgia - however we may want to hold on formalizing a lot of redirects until we get a sense of the type/name/volume of data stories
- Anything that we do to optimize for the USA and English language will inevitably have challenges or things that break when we go non-English and non-USA
Some guiding thoughts on identifying the subject:
We want a succinct subject, likely 3 words or less
Do we have a separator between geography and the subject? Probably not, e.g. Wikipedia has “Boston Police Department”
We will want to have a standard set of words that we use
We want to avoid single word subjects (“Crime”, “Budget”) We want to have a place for branded story themes “Strong Towns Finance Decoder”
We want to determine where a vintage could or shouldn’t fit into the title e.g. “Albany New York Crime Trends 2025”? Or “Albany New York Crime Trends”
We won’t be able to solve every clarity problem in a title so we can always use an Infobox to provide more detail about the subject context
Even the above tests of subject names present challenges - “Demographic Race” - “Demographics by Race”? And we will need to create - as a part of a subject matter dashboard - the suggested subject title
The proposal doesn’t address a few topics such as: An article that analyzes multiple areas on a particular topic - e.g. a comparison of PILOT tax abatement across every metro area in New York, crime trends in every Boston suburb An article that crossreferences and analyzes the intersection of multiple topics - e.g. how does immigration impact economic growth, how does changing poverty impact crime rates How we handle multiple articles on the same topic but with different vintages (e.g. An Albany Budget article covering 2015-2025 and the same article expanded to include 2026) How we handle multi-part articles such as Adam’s Crime data stories