User talk:SirJective/Parenthesis

User talk:SirJective/Parenthesis/other

USS

Careful with the USS articles. The parens are the ship hull number and the proper title of the ship. Yes, they eventually should have index pages for the numerous ships that carry the same name. A strict removal of the paren is not a good idea in this case. Not a complaint, just a note of caution. Jinian 15:40, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC) (copied from the village pump by SirJective)

Yes, I agree with you. This seems to be a case where the parenthesis is an important part of the article title. --SirJective 20:34, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Symphonies

Careful with Symphony No. 94 (Haydn). It's just a random fact about Haydn that he wrote so many symphonies, and a title like "Symphony No. 94" would be a bizarre and baffling way to designate Haydn's 94th symphony. Ditto for other numbered symphonies, sonatas, etc. I guess this is might be obvious, but just in case... So many articles seem to get mutilated by bots. Cheers, Opus33 03:58, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Yes, we have the same problem at de. I currently don't know that solution was found there. The articles should probably stay at their place, but it may be discussed if redirects are useful there.

The same holds for Sonatas, String Quartets and other titles that are more part of enumerations than real names. --SirJective 22:29, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Salamis class cruiser

In the case of this article, the parenthesis are only there to denote the TV show. Removing the parenthesis on this article doesn't effect the content because the first line also explains from which TV show the ship orignated. The same is more or less true for the other articles of UC gundam ships. Just be careful if you move or rename them because of lot of the gundam ship pages link to one another.TomStar81 07:13, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

List of North American named passenger trains

The parent page for the parenthetical versions of this subject is List of named passenger trains, which is a worldwide (albeit mostly North American-centric right now) list of trains. I've made List of North American named passenger trains a redirect to the proper parent page. slambo 20:54, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Is this a good idea?

There are plenty of subjects where the subject someone wants to write about is clearly not the significant one, the one that people would mean if they typed in the non-parenthesized version of the title. An example of this would be The Cold Equations (The Twilight Zone), an adaptation of the original story The Cold Equations from the 1980s Twilight Zone revival. There are also numerous subjects where the article title without the parentheses refers to an article that should not be written, since it would be a dictdef, like Teacher's Pet (Buffy episode). Are you sure that asking people to "fix" these things is a good idea? -- Antaeus Feldspar 22:25, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

So you say that episode titles should keep their parenthesis, even without an existing non-parenthesized title. That's fine with me.

I don't want to ask people to "fix" every single item on this list. Perhaps that is not clear enough from the text. At the german WP I was asked to create such a list. Many of the parentheses used there were considered superfluous and have been removed. Some of the articles were listed due to missing disambig pages, and new disambig pages have been created. I thought (and still think) it would be a good idea to create this list here, to get the same effect: Removing superfluous parentheses or creating disambiguation pages.

As has been noted earlier, not all article titles on this list need to be "fixed" but instead should stay as they are.

Idea: These titles could be collected in another list (maybe on a corresponding talk page) so they wont be listed again. This could include single titles, like 'The Flow of (u)', and regular expressions, like '^USS_' to catch all USS articles, or '\(.*episode.*\)$' to catch all and every title containing "episode" in the parenthesis. (The regexps should be listed separately, because some characters need to be escaped.)

--SirJective 22:29, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Well, unlike wiki-markup problems, where it's fairly clear once the automated scanning has detected the unbalanced brackets/quotes/etc what needs to be done to fix it, in this case it seems to me to be more of a judgement call. That's what causes my concern and my caution: someone with a lot of enthusiasm and willingness to help but not as much judgement or as good judgement as they think might see the list, say "Oh! All of these should be done right away!" and give us a real trouble restoring the ones that they did that they shouldn't have.

Creating regexes to exclude some categories from showing up in the list is one step, but the step I'd take instead is to give more guidance on the same page as the list to help people understand which are "valid" parenthesized titles, and which ones are not -- similar to the way exceptions to the "brackets should be balanced" rules and handling of the exceptions are discussed here. -- Antaeus Feldspar 17:34, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Another situation in which parentheses may be inevitable arises, for example, in naming an article about the novel "The Watcher". There are actually at least two novels of that name – one written in 1851, and one in 1981. There are also TV shows, episode names, film names, and song names. (See the disambiguation currently listed under "Watcher".) I have just finished creating article titles (but not articles) "The Watcher (novel, 1851)" and "The Watcher (novel, 1981)". Micro-Parallel (talk) 19:54, 25 February 2009 (UTC)