Article titles Greg your post of is the best and most lucid explanation of the problem I have yet seen I would hate to see this post disappear into an archive and I hope you will at the very least develop it into a formal essay linked from Article titles I had elsewhere started to write a rejoinder to Ravpapa s earlier post about power but decided to leave well enough alone and never posted it there If there are any ideas or phrasing of mine with which you agree and that you feel might be usefully integrated into yours please help yourself to them I disagree with Ravpapa s post about power This discussion isn t about power though it can seem to devolve into that It s really more a problem of WP naming policy being a Procrustean bed for specialties like ornithology or classical music where a field of study has developed guidelines that best suit their specific needs and then here at Wikipedia they get pushed and pulled to fit into schemes that are not just foreign to them but by their lights simply don t work as well That s how I see it anyway But then I also have my own bete noir concerning encyclopedic tone as someone tried to describe it I truly believe that if we are attempting to be authoritative we should also try to sound authoritative and not dumb down to the lowest common denominator of readers Redirects do all the work and the wording at the start of an article s lede assures immediate easy access to any and every wanted article More properly formal article titles are noticed by most users and do serve a valuable purpose in at least offering to a reader a concept of how the topic fits into a more general scheme rather than reinforcing his her limited view of the article in isolation