Let's assemble a list of nominees, then we can vote.

My nomination:

Texas Eastern Transmission Corporation natural gas pipeline explosion and fire

"Worst" can mean whatever you interpret it to mean.

I appreciate the above title for both its undue length, the emphasis on "Texas" even though the explosion happened in New Jersey, and for the fact that nobody refers to this incident by this name.

Fixed-wing aircraft, because while I thought I was being cynical this whole time the article does in fact use this clunky title "...in order not to give precedence to either British or American spelling" by using the household term "airplane" or "aeroplane" based on the first-mover advantage traditionally afforded to the original author (and no, I haven't bothered to check).

I wonder how far they'd be willing to take this Solomon-like wisdom, perhaps "Air–fuel mixer", "Upper-lip hair", "13th chemical element", etc.

Bacterial milk fermentation?

Dick Ray. Not at all what I was expecting.

I'm sure it's not the worst, but special mention has to go to:

September 11 attacks

Wikipedia:Unusual_articles lists these, among others:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
Controversies about the word "niggardly"
James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher
List of hypothetical Solar System objects
Sound of fingernails scraping chalkboard

I just tried to read those two articles, and am stupider for it.

Thanks a lot.

The "niggardly" one was a title I think I changed it a bit to make it just exactly that name. There is no better name for the subject. It's absolutely perfect, actually. It's true that no one would look for the article by that topic name, but there isn't any other topic name anyone would use.

Entering heaven alive was an article that I think no one has ever been satisfied with, but each and every proposed alternative turned out not to cover the subject in its entirety.

The last two seem like good titles to me.

Alleged Ouze Merham interview of Ariel Sharon It's a clunky title, but it's accurate, tells you just what the article is about and isn't itself biased. All the alternatives we discussed didn't do that. What's clunky about it is that it's so long, but occasionally that's the only way you can meet those other goals, which are more important. It also isn't something that a person would independently think to type in a search engine or on Wikipedia's search function, another sign of a good title. I wish it said "with" rather than "of".

Articles about current events are often clunky because there's sometimes no established name for a controversy, scandal or event. For political scandals, there's always a disagreement, often a fight, over what to name the article. The article about Barack Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers must've gone through 17 different titles. Bill Ayers presidential election controversy is pretty awful, but may be better than all the alternatives.

Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D Which is actually the title of the movie, so you can't really say it's a candidate for the worst, but I thought I'd mention it. I think it must be the longest article title.

The line between "bad article titles" and "bad article topics" is hard to draw.

But not trolling and commentary.

Probably bad article topic ... Comparison between Roman and Han Empires. I did not think the Pee-dia did 'comparison' topics. It goes along the line ... "China had a big army, so did Rome" and then dives into all sort of warcraft. I am surprised it exists at all.

With comments like China's a good place to live. Think about it: ... servants for 700 yuan a month, low taxes ... What couldn't u like?, and a fixation on Han empire building and armies, one has to wonder what is going on inside.


Seeing removal of references to personal freedom removed, class struggle and flaps about Taiwanese independence, makes me wonder about the precocious Teeninvestor (T-C-L-K-R-D) .

Some of the most awkwardly-named articles are articles on flavor-of-the-month events and "controversies" like this:

• Social Security Texas school district controversy
• Controversy over the usage of Manchester Cathedral in Resistance: Fall of Man
• 2008 Sichuan Earthquake online hate speech controversy
• Nova Southeastern University 2006 Workers Unionization Controversy
• Retracted article on dopaminergic neurotoxicity of MDMA

2008 Kerry bogslide
?

False Moshe Ya'alon quotation, an article on a quote that, um, never happened.

Survived an AfD as "no consensus" largely on the input of a banned sock-puppet.

Before I clicked on it I was thinking of a recent unsuccessful presidential candidate...

It's a misspelling. It should be "bog slide" two words).

http://www.rte.ie/news/2008/0903/kerry1.html

No, that distinction belongs to Dante And Randal And Jay And Silent Bob And A Bunch Of New Characters And Lando, Take Part In A Whole Bunch Of Movie Parodies Including But Not Exclusive To, The Bad News Bears, The Last Starfighter, Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, Plus A High School Reunion, which is was about an episode of Clerks: The Animated Series.

It's a little-known fact that the limit for page titles is 255 bytes, not 255 characters. The way UTF-8 encoding works, the limit would be about 84 for a title composed of characters above U+07FF, and 64 when venturing beyond U+FFFF—systemic bias?

Sore loser, you voted delete. I would have voted keep. A lot of things that "didn't happen" are worthy of Wikipedia articles.

Not only that, the same indef-banned sockpuppet voted twice, first to Keep and later to Delete. No wonder they put it as No Consensus. How could you possibly resolve that tangled intellectual knot without making the embarassing mistake of reading the comments by the people who haven't been convicted of Wikifelonies.

This is one of the best ways one could prove that Wikipedia is not an "encyclopedia". Because real encyclopedias don't have articles like that--such events would be folded into the articles for the primary subjects.

The Sichuan Earthquake one is stupid beyond belief. I would swear it was an Onion parody, if it wasn't on Wikipedia. It's also a stealth bad-BLP.

Hey. It's not a BLP if the name of the person in question doesn't appear in the article's title. So there.

There are a lot of editors who fervently believe there is no such thing as a "terrorist attack". Same as there are plenty of academics these days who refuse to classify localised wars as "rebellions".

That's fine. But "September 11 attacks"? It's so incredibly ambiguous.

But, well, both Encarta and Britannica use the same crappy title. Which means either 1) I'm wrong, and it's not a bad article title; or 2) This really is the worst article title, based on its incredible influence.

Why not "Flight hijackings of September 11, 2001"?

Or to classify rebellions as "localized wars."

Problem: the only difference between a rebellion and a revolutionary war is whether it succeeds or not. Treason doth never prosper, for if it prosper, none dare call it treason. These things are in the mind of the beholder; they aren't "real". Nothing that "exists" only in retrospect, and has no way of even theoretically being tested for at the time, can possibly be said to have any kind of objective existence.

Occasionally rebellions, due to the shear size of their scope and duration, get to be called "wars" even if they fail. Such as the American Southern Rebellion of 1861-5 with attendent terrorist attacks by Sherman on the citizens of Georgia. Or something. But I think the titles there are mostly honorary. At the time, there were a lot of people in favor of stringing up the whole lot, as simple "criminals against the State," after the manner of John Brown. A fate that would have descended on most of the US "founding fathers" also, had their rebellion of 1775-6 gone on to fail.

In the days afterward, and ever since, I thought "September 11 massacres" was the most descriptive name that could have been used, and, of course, it was totally accurate. "Massacre" conveys the obscene nature of the killings in a way that "attacks" just doesn't. But the writers and commentators in the U.S. decided not to go for the more blood-curdling word. I used to think the blander "attacks" was preferred because of the left-wing tendency to bend over backwards to accommodate anyone who attacks the U.S. in any way. But now I think they were groping for something less painful, and that's why everybody accepted the name even then.

"Flight hijackings" is worse than "attacks" because it's even more vague, and a good title for a Wikipedia article expresses as much information as possible if it doesn't lengthen the wording much. The point of the operation was to kill and shock, not hijack. Hijacks don't normally involve murder, I think, much less mass murder.

Anyway, none of this matters. It's known as the "September 11 attacks" and that's that. Wikipedia goes by the consensus of the best sources for titles as in anything else.

Actually, the title might be improved if it were "September 11 terrorist attacks", or "attack" (just as accurate since you could think of it as one thing or a set of things). I think that name is about as common.

No, it's a different kind of encyclopedia, and it shouldn't be constrained by the limits of paper encyclopedias and the difficulty those encyclopedias would have in paying people to instantly create so many articles on recent events. This is one of the strengths of Wikipedia, although since so many are badly done, it's also one of the weaknesses. I doubt the articles about recent events are much worse than Wikipedia articles as a whole, actually. The worst thing about them, generally, is that some of them shouldn't have been started, but they get deleted.

Something else about those titles: The easiest one of them to read is the third, "Controversy over the usage of Manchester Cathedral in Resistance: Fall of Man". It's easier to read because it starts out "Controversy over", so that you immediately know what kind of subject it is. With the others (except for the last), you have to go through all those compound adverbs, so the fact that it's an article about a controversy hits you at the end, probably as a surprise. Maybe editors do that in a misguided attempt at shortening the title, but it isn't worth it. Stick "Controversy" at the beginning, add an "over the" or "about the" or "on the" and the whole title is smoother and not much longer.

It's *more* vague? How is "flight hijackings" more vague than "attacks"? All hijackings are attacks, but not all attacks are hijackings. "Hijack" is more specific than "attack". The whole point of the suggestion was to be *less* vague.



Neither do "attacks" (even if it is "September 11" that's doing the attacking). "September 11 attacks on the United States" maybe, except I doubt you could get the morons at Wikipedia to agree that it's accurate.



At the time Wikipedia came up with the name, pretty much no one was calling it that. To this day it's probably a minority, and much of that minority was influenced by Wikipedia.

If you wanted to go with popular naming, "September 11th" would probably be the victor.



Agreed. Both would be improvements to the current title. And they aren't even that good. Hence "worst-named Wikipedia article".



Only if you have a stupid definition of "encyclopedia". Calling Wikipedia an encyclopedia is like calling Yahoo! News a newspaper. Actually, it's worse than that, because the articles in Wikipedia change while you're reading them.

You forget that the terrorists themselves picked an ambiguous name for the operation: "The Day of New York". Islamic scholars describe it as the "September 11 al-Qa'ida raid on New York", but that sounds old-fashioned to most Westerners and implies that the Pentagon was a backup target or something.

There's a metaquestion here, and that is this: why are the titles of WP articles not allowed to have subheadings, as books do, and even threads in blogs and BBS' do (for example, here).

There's a REASON for headings and subheadings where we see them. It performs a partial indexing for you, thus giving you more bang for your 255 bytes of book-cover space, or whatever limit it is that you have.

Resistance: Fall of Man (game)
Usage of Machester Cathedral Controversy

Al-Qaeda attacks on the United States
The 9/11 suicide/homicide airline-hijackings

Oh, right, cause if the terrorists did it, then it must be okay.

In this thread some people are pointing out long article titles as if they are bad just because they're long. As far as I can tell, many of these titles are perfectly good, and if you don't agree you should suggest alternatives instead of just mocking them. If you're a deletionist who believes Wikipedia shouldn't cover these topics, then your complaint is really something unrelated to the thread topic.

BBC news never uses the word "terrorist" any more.

That's not strictly true:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialg...ackground.shtml

Though you never were one to follow Governmental (or quasi-Governmental in this case) guidelines, were you?!?

I disagree. By suggesting alternatives instead of just mocking them, you validate the absurd decision-making structure which created the horrible titles in the first place.

By all means, if anarchy and chaos is the kind of environment you like to work in, suggest alternatives. But if you'd prefer to work in an environment shaped by structure and reason, mock away.

I'm not allowed to participate in English Wikipedia any more, so what would be the point of my making alternative suggestions?

Agreed. WP is so screwed up, making suggestions there is hopeless. Especially when they conflict with the personal play space of one of their much-loved screaming babies.

Better to mock them here, then it will be documented. Thereafter, someone might read the mockery and perhaps fix the original problem.

But more specific here would be misleading, which is worse than being vague. "Hijacking" doesn't begin to cover it.Unnecessarily long.

Not at all. The name was established within a few months of the event, before Wikipedia ever existed. I remember watching it get established and being disappointed that "massacre" wasn't used. And now everyone recognizes the name.

It is what it is.

And you're claiming it was established as "September 11 attacks"? What are you basing this on? If it was anecdotal, where? I can't find any evidence for this, and it directly contradicts my memory that the incident was most commonly referred to in the English language as "September 11", "September 11th", or "9/11".



Yeah, a website, not an encyclopedia.

As I said, it went that way because of the input of a sock, and even the closing admin said he probably would have closed it differently if it weren't for his inappropriate input. So please, go fuck yourself with this "sore loser" absurdities.

And the fact that one of Jayjg's little loyalistas would've knee-jerked a keep vote for something like this is hardly a shocker, bud.




Where are you seeing that? I see socks of Nocal100 and Historicist voting keep.

I apologize, I misread the talkpage. User:Nableezy tagged User:Hamilton's first '''Keep''' vote as a suspected sockpuppet, crossed the entire comment and signature out, and signed it himself (?), then later on voted '''Delete'''. I didn't look carefully enough so I thought that User:Nableezy was the actual sockpuppet. Sorry for any confusion.

The New York Times archive has 493 results when I search for the phrase "September 11 attack" with a date range of September 1, 2001 to February 28, 2002. Sounds conclusive to me. Maybe everybody else is using a different term, but this one looks good enough. Frankly, it's not worth any more effort arguing over, is it?

I guess not. I'm sticking with my suggestion. You can stick with your disagreement of it.