Renaming of pages/naming convention

[Tony]

I see Julian is renaming a lot of pages to remove capitalisation and was wondering on the reason for this?

IE moved [[Making bar soap from Glycerol]] to [[Making bar soap from glycerol]]

Glycerol is a chemical name and surely therefore should be capitalised?

[Julian]

I thought we agreed early on that we would follow the wiki's format of only capitalising the first word of a title.

In the case of glycerol, I was under the impression that the correct chemical name was Glycerine hence loosing the capital.

Another I was unsure of was Anhydrous sodium methylate as that's a mixture.  There's probably a better case for changing AMS back in retrospect.

I feel it's quite important to have consistency within the wiki and try to correct things as I find them.  If you feel my alterations are incorrect, please change them back, but I think it's important that the wiki get regular attention to insure it's built well.

[Tony]

Yes you're right, though I have long forgotten the Wikipedia convention

Looking at this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycerol

It isn't capitalised there so seems reasonable for us to adopt the same strategy (I expect there are many pages here where it is capitalised in the content of the pages too).

[Julian]

I thought you were right about chemical elements having a capital letter.  Hence I left Methanol capitalised in a title somewhere.  I just wasn't sure about the Glycerol / Glycerine thing.  I took Glycerine to be the correct name and Glycerol to be an Americanisation.

However, as you say, the wikipedia page uses lower case throughout and many other sites seem to advocate lower case for chemical names.  I thought a proper noun was capitalised and a common noun wasn't.  I wonder if there is a difference between UK English and US English?

Not quite sure where you go for a definitive answer.  I'll ask my mate with a PhD in chemistry when I next see him, he's pretty good on that sort of thing.

[Julian]

Hmm ...

Found this on wikipedia ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(chemistry#Capitalization_of_elements_and_compounds

It would appear that prior to September 2004, the(IUPAC) International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, who appear to be a Swiss based organisation, used capital letters for names of chemicals.  After that date they dropped the capitalisation and wikipedia have followed suit.  Wikipedia make the statement that chemical names are common nouns when written out in full.

The IUPAC also advocate using Sulfur instead of Sulphur and Caesium not Cesium.  Seems wrong to me, but what do I know.

So what does everyone think ... Methanol or methanol?  The wiki is intended to be a collective effort, so opinions are welcomed.

[Tony]

I've always capitalised chemical names - seems I was wrong!

Would like to hear other opinions on this one.

[Head Womble]

methanol get my vote,
the way I see it is we're not chemists and the whole ethos of the wiki is to be informative, yet for the common man.

[Julian]

It seems wrong, but my vote would have to go with lower case.

[Rotary-Motion]

my vote would be all lower case its only a link as such, as long as the main page its linked to has its proper grammer alls good

but im happy anyway it goes whtevers in keeping

 

[Julian]

So, after an underwhelming response we have three in favor of lower case and one don't know.

Looks like we'll go with lower case as a standard for the wiki then.

Perhaps if anyone modifies a page in the future, they could scan it for chemical names and change them to lower case.

[Tony]

Been doing a bit of that.

There are some double redirects that have been created by page renaming, I've sorted a few out:

http://www.biopowered.co.uk/wiki/Special:DoubleRedirects

Also, are we putting the acronym in after the name, IE Free fatty acid (FFA)?  Because that makes casual linking difficult, as you have to remember to include the bracketed acronym.  My feeling is that we shouldn't do this in the page names.

[Julian]

Been doing a bit of that.

There are some double redirects that have been created by page renaming, I've sorted a few out:

http://www.biopowered.co.uk/wiki/Special:DoubleRedirects

Also, are we putting the acronym in after the name, IE Free fatty acid (FFA)?  Because that makes casual linking difficult, as you have to remember to include the bracketed acronym.  My feeling is that we shouldn't do this in the page names.

I just started working through page by page adding the acronym seemed sensible at the time but if you have an issue with it, take them out.

I noticed that several pages had redirects allowing linking from text that wasn't the page name.  This isn't necessary as you can arrange any text to link to any page by using a vertical line to separate the link text from the page name.

Maybe we need to delete all previous page names to keep things simple.

[Tony]

Ah so many links would become [[ My chemical (MC)|My chemical ]]

I think I prefer the simplicity of just saying [[ My chemical ]] in the page text.

Though I suppose there is nothing to stop the creation a redirect page that jumps from "My chemical" page to "My chemical (MC)" to allow references to it either way?  In which case it doesn't really matter how the pages are named.

Now I'm wondering what wikipedia do...

[Julian]

Oh, dear.  It's hardly many.  I think it was two to which I added acronyms.  I'll change back them back if it's so much of an issue.

To my simplistic mind having one page title and adjusting links in the page makes more sense that having a redirect for each time someone wishes to link to a page with different text, we could end up with numerous redirects.

[Tony]

Nah don't worry about it Julian, far more fruitful ways to spend time