Wikipedia:WikiProject Disaster management/Naming

This page contains copies of existing conventions for the naming of disaster-related articles. It is the intention to use this page to display the current consensus of the WikiProject and for it to be a basis for discussion.

WikiProject Disaster Management naming convention

A naming convention for such articles is also definitely required. It has been decided that all articles concerning individual disasters should be <<year>> <<place>> <<event>>. To illustrate the point with an example, the article October 11, 2006 New York City plane crash was recently renamed to 2006 New York City plane crash

The convention in the aid business, which talks about disasters all the time is this

The South East Asia Earthquake 2005
The Indian Ocean Tsunami 2004

<<area affected>> <<event>> <<year>> In other words, exactly the inverse of what has already been decided here.

There exists a system of indexing disasters in a database called the [GLIDE number] This system uses a coded disaster type, the year, an id number corresponding the number of disasters recorded that year, and a country code. Hurricate Katrina was a tropical cyclone, the 144th official disaster of 2005 and was coded as TC-2005-000144-USA. A naming system might reflect the GLIDE way e.g. <<type>> <<year>> <<country>> Of course without the id number, this would not make a unique descriptor. And the plane crash above would merely be described as a technological disaster in 2006, USA.

If the GLIDE number were used, perhaps with a link to the GLIDE site, then the actual naming of the disaster could be more flexible and potentially ambiguous.

Wikipedia Naming Convention

For disasters (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Disaster management#Naming convention), the recommended format is "<year> <place> <event>". Examples: 2006 New York City plane crash, 1700 Cascadia earthquake. This is only a "soft" recommendation, if no other more appropriate name is available. Counter-examples include Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, Pan Am Flight 103, Minoan eruption, Krakatoa (no separate article about its best known eruption), Cyclone 05B (1999) and Kyrill (storm).