Talk:Rotating tower

From MYSTlore

Can we for once agree whether:

• we want the article title suffixed by Myst or Myst Island, which would be consistent with every single other landmark on Myst Island, and the redundancy of which has no negative effect that I can see, given that we have redirects anyway?
• we consider "rotating tower" a proper noun or not?

Those renames from one to the other are just silly pedantry. Chucker 13:11, 15 November 2007 (CST)

• Why do we even need the suffix? There's no other rotating island in any of the other games, so there should be no confusion regarding which rotating tower the article is about.
• I realize "rotating tower" is not a proper noun, but article titles are proper nouns, so I would think they should be capitalized as such.

--DedHed 13:58, 15 November 2007 (CST)

We don't need the suffix. I thought it made sense to associated those generic words with Myst in particular ("clocktower"? really?), but since everyone else seems opposed to that, fine by me. What's not fine is that the articles keep getting renamed. Make a consensus and stick to it.

Article titles are not proper nouns, and never have been, unless they contain a proper noun. Not on MYSTlore, not on Wikipedia, and not on plenty of other popular wikis. Chucker 14:57, 15 November 2007 (CST)

Ah! I see the confusion now. It is a rule of English grammar that most words in the title of books, articles, and songs are capitalized. Exceptions are short prepositions, and the words "the," "a," or "an," unless, of course, those words are the first words in the title. But, yes, wikis don't follow this rule... I suppose because it just makes linking easier when you don't need to remember specifically which words need to be capitalized or not.

SO... the only words in a wiki article title that should be capitalized are the first word (which happens automatically,) and any proper nouns.

Using 'rotating tower' as an example, the proper title for the article should be Rotating tower, not Rotating Tower. As another example, say we have an article that discusses the eating habits of the Bahro, the correct title would be something like Bahro stool samples, not Bahro Stool Samples.

Correct? --DedHed 17:49, 15 November 2007 (CST)

Correct.

• Due to what I regard as bad design choices in MediaWiki (the underlying software), article titles are case-sensitive, so you could have a title Rotating tower that wouldn't necessarily point to the same article as Rotating Tower.
• At some point, Wikipedia came up with conventions to more or less deal with this. Consistent, but as you said, not really in line with English language stylistic conventions. For instance, what most English scholars would call "List of D'ni Kings", we call "List of D'ni kings", because "king" is not a proper noun.

So the question is whether Atrus would have considered "Rotating Tower" a proper noun, say, because it is a significant landmark of Myst's. Apparently, the consensus is no. Either way is fine by me. And, yes, your Bahro examples are correct. Chucker 00:28, 16 November 2007 (CST)