Forum:What is it with these PLURALS, anyway?
The unrestricted creation of articles with plural titles (or otherwise inflected noun forms) has got to be seriously addressed, especially in cases where we already have a decent article on the (nonpluralized) subject already (reference Wikipedia's guidelines on this). Honestly, has anybody ever seen a good article entitled "Blingwads" from a yuser who doesn't know enough, or is too damn lazy, to even bother to check if we already have "Blingwad"? (There are perfectly good exceptions to this, such as collective nouns that represent a specific group of people.)
There are the usual remedies (merging, eating, moving pages, deleting worthless crap), but this is all damage control after the fact, which is becoming increasingly annoying. I propose that we encourage preventative measures, such as (1) actively converting pluralized red links to singular whereever they occur, especially in the newer articles, and (2) noting this prominently in our style guide (which nobody bothers to read anyway), such as "please do not create articles with plural titles unless you have sufficiently good reasons" , and/or, if all else fails, (3) creating preemptive redirects if Special:Wantedpages shows that there are already so many links to a given plural that it's not worth the bother of fixing all the individual articles. --DW III 
21:48, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
- Here, here! Well spoken Bruce! They is a pain. You could temporarily edit MediaWiki:Newarticletext (en.wp) and MediaWiki:Noarticletext ((en.wp) a bit to hint at the stupidness of creating such. --Splaka
- What think ye about placing a "Search" button w/field (no "Go" button, just "Search") directly on the mediawiki message(s), coupled with a severe admonition to check, before creating, if we already have one or more versions of that given page? --DW III
13:35, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
- What think ye about placing a "Search" button w/field (no "Go" button, just "Search") directly on the mediawiki message(s), coupled with a severe admonition to check, before creating, if we already have one or more versions of that given page? --DW III
- Please see my last edit of MediaWiki:Newarticletext. I currently see no option for losing the spurious "go" button; any ideas? --DW III 15:14, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
- Please see my last edit of MediaWiki:Newarticletext. I currently see no option for losing the spurious "go" button; any ideas? --DW III
- I'm against the double pointing to the beginner's guide (once above and once under the edit box), but do find the search-suggestion a good idea. I've changed what DW did with a search-box into a simple search-link (searches for {{PAGENAME}}) --⇔ Sir Mon€¥$ignSTFU F@H|CM|+S 21:40, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
Sounds like a plan of of a plan, and O! What a plan have ye! ~
CaputosistheHorrible14:58, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
Please put back the link to the deletion log in MediaWiki:Noarticletext so I can see if an article has been deleted without going to the link in my userpage and copying the title. It is much easier to just go to the deletion log directly from the page. --Sbluen 04:00, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
- It was removed because MediaWiki:Confirmrecreate displays if you are editing a deleted article (so we don't need to bitch about that in the message itself), and administrators have a link to 'view deleted edits' at the top of deleted articles anyway. But since I am feeling generous I'll re-add it. --Splaka 04:12, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
- Thank you. Now it will be easier for non-administrators to find recreated and deleted pages and the reason for deletion of older pages, as well as the deletion log for This page does not exist. --Sbluen 04:40, 14 June 2006 (UTC)