WikiEducator:Style guide/Proposed guidelines/Use of plurals

Approvals

 * I agree that plurals should be used for this guideline. --Kruhly 05:38, 17 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I agree that plurals should be used for this guideline. --Peter Rawsthorne 14:54, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Discussion
I state that they should be plural, if possible and logical, because this is what I most frequently see in other wikis. See: WP's general conventions and special conventions.

However, what I've noticed is that WE's current convention is mostly singular nouns for list categories, i.e. Category:English teacher. So, what I really need is to hear some discussion on this. Basically, do we forge onward with our own naming conventions (which will generally involve lots of deliberation), or should we model off WP (which involves lots of category name changing)?

I would prefer to stick with the WMF convention on this because of the likelihood of new users being already familiar with such conventions, and I can't think of a reason WE would need to be different. I don't mind doing the name changing myself, especially since it would fit in so easily with my process of restructuring the category system.

--Jesse Groppi 02:16, 14 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Hi Jesse, From our original conversation on plurals. I approve of the use of plurals for the Category names when appropriate. You mentioned that you were interested in learning about the bots for doing some of the work on this conversion( if it gets approved) but thought that they could be more time consuming for some tasks. There are two bots that I have used: pywikipediabot which is run from the command line using python and AutoWikiBrowswer which has a GUI but only runs in Windows via IE. In either case the bot owner has control over each edit and gets to preview the changes. So if I'm understanding your comment, the bot owner would be "double checking" the work while she/he is running the bot as he/she would do by hand. The benefit is that  all the pages are loaded automatically, in for instance a category, for editing which will save heaps of time. Hope this helps. Kruhly 05:31, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Here's what I think should be the wording of the guideline, with some detail: Titles should be in the singular form, except where the content is in the form of a list. In general, most content pages would be in the singular form and many categories would be in the plural. How does that sound? --Jesse Groppi 01:14, 28 July 2009 (UTC)