Naming things

Naming things is hard.

"There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors." – Leon Bambrick

General advice

Avoid ambiguity

• Search for similar keywords in existing features, extensions, products, and projects, to avoid confusion and a profusion of hatnotes, redirects, and See Alsos. (e.g., Beta beta beta, Labs labs labs, Collection vs Collections, Page Previews vs page previews)

Make it easy to pronounce, to type, and to remember

• Avoid l33t5p34k
• Avoid difficult capitalizations (e.g., SyntaxHighlight GeSHi)
• Don't use dashed-words if CamelCase is the local convention

Consider the translations

• If it is a user-facing feature, this is extra important.
• Is the name almost-untranslatable in many languages? (e.g., BetaFeatures (cf. T58537))
• Is the name going to be extra-long in any language? (e.g., help, randompage, ^{[better examples?]})
• Metaphors, idioms, and pop-culture references may have no meaning or different meanings in other languages or cultures.

Abbreviations

• For unavoidably long names, specify the short form.
• People tend to shorten anything they can, especially if they write it regularly, as help-desk people and developers tend to do.
• Contractions/Initialisms/Acronyms will be invented, if you don't plan for it. (e.g., visual editor is "VE" to many people)

Stick with a single name

• Try to pick just one name, for both the code & the user-facing product name. Otherwise you'll have to regularly explain the past/alternative names, and deal with persistent confusion. (e.g., PageTriage/Page Curation/Newpagepatrol/Newpagesfeed, or Echo/Notifications, or Popups/Hovercards/Previews/Page Previews).
• Renaming things is even harder: the first name used in public is likely to stick, even if you think it's terrible.

Check it isn't a reserved keyword in the usual programming languages

• This can lead to additional complexity in the code (e.g., Echo). For example: PHP reserved keywords and Puppet reserved words.

See also

• Differences between Wikipedia, Wikimedia, MediaWiki, and wiki
• Manual:Glossary
• m:Glossary
• Inclusive language

Further reading

Wikipedia articles

• Naming convention (programming)
• Product naming#International considerations
• Computer network naming scheme
• Yoda conditionals

Humour

• xkcd.com/910 - Permanence
• RFC 2100: The Naming of Hosts
• Even Naming This Talk Was Hard slides (video presentation 25min) by Ruthie BenDor, at Write the Docs Portland 2017

Other

• namingschemes.com
• RFC 1178: Choosing a Name for Your Computer
• "A Guide to Naming Variables"
• Code Complete 2nd Edition Chapter 11: Power of Variables Names - checklist (archived from the original)
• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About [human] Names (2010)
  • Falsehoods Programmers Believe About [human] Names – With Examples (2018)
• Horrible edge cases to consider when dealing with music
• Names should be cute, not descriptive