This page is a guide to help contributors through the topic creation and naming process. Thoughtfully creating and naming topics will help users quickly and easily distinguish between them.

1. Make sure the topic doesn’t already exist by another name

• Search by most common usage first and then by less common usages.
• Search for a version of the topic title using contractions or abbreviations.
• Search for versions with parenthetical disambiguation.

2. Consider common usage

• Titles should be as recognizable as possible and follow common usage.
  • Example: Bill Gates is preferred to “William Henry Gates III”.
• A user should expect to find the article with their natural query instincts. Knowledge of specific naming conventions shouldn’t be a prerequisite for finding the right article.
• Keep in mind that common usage differs in different parts of the world.
• Abbreviations should only be used if they represent the most common usage.

3. Precision, but not too much

• Titles should have enough precision to identify a unique topic but no superfluous details that will be explained within the article.
  • Example: Maryam Mirzakhani is preferred to “Maryam Mirzakhani, Iranian mathematician, professor, and Field Medal winner”.
  • Example: Alan Turing is preferred to “British mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing”.

4. Disambiguation

• Disambiguation is necessary when a title name could refer to multiple article entities.
• Unambiguous usages should not have any parentheses.
• Use parenthetical disambiguation to add a context or class to an article to distinguish it as accurately as possible.
  • Example: Plasma (blockchain) is prefered to “Plasma”. The blockchain scaling solution proposed by Joseph Poon and Vitalik Buterin is an alternate usage of Plasma and therefore should have parenthetical disambiguation.
• Alternate terms or phrases which accurately and uniquely identify a topic are preferred to parenthetical disambiguation if possible.
  • Example: Plasma cell is preferred to “Plasma (cell)”.

5. Style

• Capitalization conventions follow sentence case.
  • The first word of the title should be capitalized.
  • Subsequent words should not be capitalized unless they would be capitalized in standard prose i.e. proper nouns.