Wikipedia:Article titles and scopes
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An article's intended scope is a major factor for determining its title. Before you can figure out what the title should be, you need to know what the subject of the article is.
Correct process
[edit]Ask these three questions in order:
- What's this article supposed to be about?
- What's a good name for that?
- Are there any other, existing pages whose titles we need to work around?
There is no shortcut to the first question. You need to know what the intended subject is, not just what's currently on the page. If you didn't create the page, you may need to start a discussion on the talk page. The intended subject may change over time. You need to find out what the currently intended subject is.
In some cases, editors may not be able to form a consensus. (For example: Is the article presently located at Woman supposed to be about human adults who are biologically female, which excludes all intersex people and includes all trans men and some non-binary people, or is it supposed to be about the social concept of womanhood, which includes some intersex people and all trans women and excludes all trans men and all non-binary people? Or should all of this be in the same article?)
Don't assume that everything with the same name goes in the same article
[edit]Mistake #1:
- What's this page called?
- Ooooh, so everything called by that name goes in this page, right?
Usually, this only happens with polysemous words whose meanings are still closely related. We're past the days when people regularly tried to put Cancer (disease) and Cancer (constellation) and Cancer (astrology) on the same page. These days, this mistake results in problems like information about the trendy keto diet ending up in an article about the life-saving ketogenic diet for epilepsy.
Don't assume current contents correctly reflect the scope
[edit]Mistake #2:
- What's currently on this page?
- Let's find the narrowest title for that.
A typical example of this is an editor reading an under-developed article called Subject. This article is about a global subject (e.g., education), but the editor notices that it currently only provides examples or information from the US. The concerned editor proposes that the article be renamed to Subject in the United States, and that we create a new article about Subject, or have no article at all. Another typical request is to move articles about body parts to Body part in humans, instead of adding information about non-human animals to the existing Body part.
The best response in such situations is to add information about the missing content. If you can't improve the article, you can tag such articles with {{globalize}} or {{Missing information}}.