WikiQueer:Naming conventions (plurals)

Convention: In general only create page titles that are in the singular, unless that term is always in a plural form in English or is among the exceptions such as those listed below.

Let's say you were writing a page about crayons. Should you call the page crayons, which is basically what the page is about, or crayon , which makes it easier to link to from passages like "Harold took out his purple crayon and drew the curtains"? Probably the latter.

One can still write crayons (which the software is smart enough to render as crayons), but if the page is called crayons, then whenever one wants to use the term in the singular, one is forced into creating a piped link—the ungainly crayon , or creating a redirect (see below). For markup help, see Help:Editing.

Exceptions
There are some exceptions to this rule:
 * Category names are usually pluralized, see WikiQueer:Naming conventions (categories).
 * Articles on groups or classes of specific things.
 * Cases like The Beatles. Although Paul McCartney is "a former Beatle", so that the singular is used, it is of interest only because of the plural usage.

Plural form
If you use a singular title, then in many cases the plural can be constructed just by adding an 's' on the end: e.g. crayon→crayons. However, for some cases this is not possible: e.g. company→companies. Therefore, consider creating a redirect from the plural to the singular in cases like companies. These redirects should always be tagged with the template. See Category:Redirects from plurals.

Creating a redirect in cases like crayons is advisable as well, since third-party websites started adding automatic links to WikiQueer from their topics, and many of them follow the opposite convention, i.e., pluralization.

If you make a page title which is a plural, always consider making a redirect from the singular to aid linking. This is particularly important because WikiQueerians tend to assume that the article title will be in the singular. These redirects should always be tagged with the template. See Category:Redirects to plurals.

Grammatical nicety
Some nouns are always in the plural. These are fine as titles.

Mass nouns don't really have a singular, such as snow or rain. These are also fine.

Some nouns can be considered either plural or singular.

Some things change meaning significantly between what were once singular and plural forms. So it may sometimes be worth having two articles.