User talk:Born2cycle/DearElen

Comment by PBS

• B2C you need to fix your signature.

I have read the page and what you have written seems to be correct with my relocations on what has been happening, but I have not compared your statements with those those on the AT talk page or the edits to AT so I can not verify any specific part of it. I will check any specific details of the statement if anyone makes a statement here contradicting anything you have written on User:Born2cycle/DearElen.

Although I can not speak for the motives of those who are opposing the return to the original wording that the majority of editors have expressed a preference for, it appears to me that Tony1 and Noetica are against this wording because it impairs Tony1's wish to have article names with more description in them than most people think is necessary (see Wikipedia talk:Article titles#hopelessly vague title). It might be worth mentioning this early in your statement for those who do not know why this sentence came under the microscope back in December. -- PBS (talk) 20:04, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

• Thanks, and I've added some more examples. If anyone has any others to add, please do. --Born2cycle (talk) 20:54, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Comment by kwami

Your essay looks fine after a quick read. The only thing I would question off hand would be the numbers on each side (not that WP is a democracy anyway), because they've been fudged in the past (though of course that doesn't mean yours have been). — kwami (talk) 22:16, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, Kwami. In this case the two numbers are 13 (substantively favoring the "familiar with" wording) and 0 (substantively opposed).

To backup the 13, I listed the names and actual substantive statements made at WT:AT by each of the 13 people, except for me, all easily verifiable.

The 0 is premised on the assertion that no one has made a substantive argument opposing the "familiar with" language. This is supported by the dearth (at least so far) of such statements in the new poll Greg started today, as well as the fact that this is easy to refute if it's false - by citing a single substantive argument made against the wording. --Born2cycle (talk) 22:36, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Comment by Mike Cline

B2C, thanks for calling attention to my position for the need to take a look at WP:Title holistically. It needs all the support it can muster, even though you are on the fence about it. I think you have become a victim of your style combined with the intractable issues the soBabel we call our titling policy engenders. In this case it is the absolute lunacy that becomes associated with a criteria like Reconizability. First, its not a real word and if it were its literal meaning might be: The ability to be recognized. WP title have no abilities, they are words at the top of a page. Because titles can't have abilities, we transfer responsibility to recognize to the reader--of which there are millions from all cultures, backgrounds and education. Once we transfer responsibility, then we purport to know how millions of readers are going to react to any given title. I look at dozens of WP articles of all genre every day. I never fail to recognize the title, because its always in big, bold black letters at the top of the page. Recognizability and Naturalness are seriously flawed criteria related to WP article titles. They are essentially meaningless. And when you have meaningless ideas, where any interpretation of what they mean is thereby in itself meaningless, editors like you fall prey to them. Any WP title criteria that has created as much contentiousness as this has, is bad policy pure and simple. We have got to find a way to simply this titling policy and make it meaningful for anyone who reads it. It should be clear, concise and unequivocal. You know my stand on this: WP titles should faithfully represent the article contents. WP article titles should reflect common usage as supported by English language reliable sources. WP article title should be concise and unambiguous ++ some considerations for consistency via naming conventions and MOS. I made add more later as I am about to land and will lose Internet access shortly --Mike Cline (talk) 00:27, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

Hi Mike; good stuff. I don't know what field you're in, but it's likely that it uses modifications of real words in its jargon. A jargon is necessary when the standard dictionary words are too general for the specific meanings that we would like to convey precisely and concisely in a particular context, and Wikipedia title decision-making is such a specific context. It's definitely true in my software/computer world, where we've made up words like "byte" and "debug" among countless others.

In contrast, real words like "ambiguous" can be problematic when the concept we're trying to convey is very specific, because its dictionary meaning might get conveyed instead of the specific meaning. In fact, that was the problem I was trying to address in an edit yesterday (see Wikipedia_talk:Article_titles#Clarifying_ambiguity). So, I don't think using jargon words (words that aren't really words, like "recognizability"), when we have a specific meaning to convey for which there is no term in standard English, is necessarily a problem, as long as we are clear about meaning. In fact, I suggest it's a good practice. So I don't see a choice but to reject any argument opposing the use of "recognizability" that is based entirely on the objection that "recognizability" is not a real word.

I think of recognizability as a quality or attribute of something, like resistance. So like resistance is the degree to which a material produces friction, recognizability is the degree to which a name achieves recognition with respect to referring to the topic of the article being titled. This concept is definitely a key consideration, with respect to those who are familiar with the topic, in deciding how to title our articles. It's probably the main reason we have such a strong predilection for using the most commonly used names of topics as our titles - for these are most likely to be recognized by our readers as referring to their respective topics.

But that doesn't mean there isn't another/better way to convey this. I don't think it's recognizability per se that has been the source of the problem in all this contention. It's the underlying idea that our titles should only reflect the name of the topic when reasonably possible (Noetica, et al think they should often be comprised of more than just the name even when the name is not ambiguous with any other use in WP, or the article's topic is primary for that name). That's the underlying issue. It just so happens that recognizabilty is one of those places that addresses this, and I tried to fix it because it was inadvertently broken in May, and, well, I think you know the rest of the story...

Hope you had a good landing! --Born2cycle (talk) 01:08, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

Landed safely and am now airborne again enroute to the next few days work. It is interesting that you bring up professions, jargon and such. My profession is pretty straight forward. I spend my days teaching, coaching and facilitating teams of high-level executives in the development and execution of enterprise and project level strategy. We don't use much, if any jargon because the number one priority is always aligning people around a common and understandable set of objectives (something our current titling policy does not even come close to). The language we use to convey policies and objectives is critical to success in a collaborative environment. If is not clear, concise and unequivocally understandable, it serves only to confuse and obfuscate and alignment around it is impossible. We collectively have failed to understand that with our titling policy. I read an article today that contained a paragraph that has great applicability to comments you made above: How Siri Makes Computers (and Coders) More Human. This paragraph in particular seems to sum up what I've been trying to say: The designers’ intention, no doubt, was to make their machines more user-friendly by simulating casual conversation with fellow humans. But there’s a side effect of that intention: in trying to program machines that speak like people, the programmers are forced to think like people. A lot of the language in WP:TITLE including a lot of the language you and others recently proposed reads like it was written by a programmer, not a person.--Mike Cline (talk) 03:03, 25 January 2012 (UTC)