Wiki Quick Tip 12: Rules of thumb for choosing the perfect title of your article
One of the first tasks, if not THE first thing, to consider when publishing a new article is the title.
And many do not spend a lot of time to think about it, but it's one of the key success factors for your article.
This blog post should provide you a few rules of thumb, easy to remember to
define the perfect title for your new and existing articles.
Brevity
Rule of thumb: the title must be AS SHORT AS POSSIBLE.
- Only use the essential words that you need
- The less words the better
- Remove words like "the" (in English: definite article), "a", "an" (… "indefinite article")
WARNING!
Please be aware that if your article title is too long, your article will break and will not be accessible anymore. (Which is a known bug of the current platform.)
Format
The general format is
<core technology><version><category>: <specific topic, task or detail>
- So you START with CORE TECHNOLOGY.
- If applicable also edit the build or version of the technology.
- Next you add a category, like
- Troubleshooting
- Step-By-Step Guide
- ...
- Next ":" (English: colon)
- Next a specific topic, task or detail
In some cases, this default format doesn't fit or can't be used.. but these
exceptions are rare and will be kept to minimum.
Language tag
Rule of thumb: only add the language tag if you are publishing in a different
language than the hosting plaform. Do not use the same language tag as the
platform.
But also very important: by preference post the right language
Let me explain:
| Wiki Platform | URL | Tags To use | Tags to avoid, do not use |
| English (and internationalforum) | https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/ | (PT-BR), (FR-FR), (DE-DE),(BE-NL), (IT-IT), ... | (EN-US), (EN-UK) |
| Portuguese-Brazilian | https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/pt-br/ | none (if not PT-BR, better post on the Englishforum with proper language tag) | (PT-BR) |
| Chinese | https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/zh-cn/ | none (if not ZH-CN, better post on the Englishforum with proper language tag) | (ZH-CN) |
| Russian | https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/ru-ru/ | none (if not RU-RU, betterpost on the English forum with proper language tag) | (RU-RU) |
More details
You can find some more details on the Wiki title guidelines over here: TechNet Wiki Article Title Guidelines
Plus:
- Wiki: User Experience Guidelines
- Wiki Governance: Whether or Not "(en-US)" Should be Added to the Title of English Articles.
Comments
- Anonymous
August 06, 2018
Great tips Peter, thanks!