mAsterdam Excellent content. It is hard to come up with a title that helps people find it. The name now only reflects the history of the original idea. So what would be a nice flag for this ship? The page deals with tasks you give yourself or the stones - An item here is action, a role to perform, a kind of "to do"-thingy, function. Hmm. Tough one. What can the stones do? for you?
Dieter: As for this other SL junkie, I am as bewildered by Charles' page titles as always. I really appreciate your article-like contributions Charles, but I have a general difficulty with them and the page title is symbolic for my difficulties. I really don't know what to think of a "participle survey" nor do I think it will occur often as a link on another page. Maybe you have other intentions with these pages than the ones I can think of. I repeat: I appreciate the effort.
On a similar note, maybe a page like basic instinct should be called basic technique.
Charles I'm quite willing to change this or other titles. I can see that a rather strict Wiki convention is that all titles refer somehow to a basic 'unit' of a supposed pattern language. That way, you link to a page in order to talk about the unit in question by indirection - and that's all. At the other extreme page titles can be like newspaper headlines: their main function is to make you read a little of the content, and see if it is interesting for you today. Basic instinct is a good illustration: it refers to a film title, and it is interesting, while BasicTechnique is duller. Anyway, perhaps a title change to What the stones are doing? might help.
Stefan: I'm with Charles on this one. The sexier the title, the better I like it, and people here will find what they look for one way or another. Other than that it's best to keep the style/content ratio on the page itself within limits, but that one's already been clubbed to death elsewhere. Finally, "Ing" as a page title here is maybe too much of an inside joke?
Charles Trust me, I did think of that. French speakers could use Ant.
unkx80: That title would make me think of Ing Chang-Ki.
Alex Weldon: If we're trying to think of a simple title that will make it easier to find the page and/or link to it, how about something like Action Words?, or just Actions?.
Roland Illig: I very much like the title. When I first saw it, I just thought: Wow, someone has written the article I've been searching for. Sure, it's hard to embed the whole title in a running text, but there's always the possibility of referring indirectly (see WhatActionsTheStonesAreDoing).
Alex Weldon: As an English teacher, I believe that the "-ing" form of verbs is known as a gerund, not a participle. The sense in which I've seen the word "participle" used is as "past participle" (the past participle of "know" is "knew"), and "present participle" (the present participle of "know" is "known").
I may be wrong, though, because the terminology of English grammar is pretty wacky.
Charles I did gerunds and gerundives at school in Latin, and even at one time could have performed a valid gerundive contraction. It's quite perilous to transfer that over to English; so I wonder what the received terms are these days. Gerunds would be nouns, gerundives adjectives (as in 'a stinging rebuke'). But surely participles are still thought of as forms of a verb: I recall doing them in French and Russian as well. Don't think I'm going to rename the page as GoGerundPanorama.
Morten Going off-topic and not really wanting to argue with native englishmen, at the time of my english grammar schooling, it went along the lines that the -ing ending is common to both gerunds and present participles, but that the difference is that gerunds act as nouns (I think 'verbal nouns' is the correct phrase), whereas participles act as adjectives (probably verbal adjectives...?). With reference to Go and the word attacking, 'I enjoy Attacking' would be a gerund, whereas 'These are attacking stones' would be a participle.
If this page is about the 'notions', maybe Gerunds are what we are really talking about.
Bill: How about Garden of Go Gerunds?? ;-)
Rich: as it stands, the presence of "actions" in the page title makes the list one of gerunds; for a fussy (professional) editor, it may be more concise to remove that word and leave it as a list of participles.