Naming services

This wiki page presents practical guidelines, is edited collaboratively and is not normative. Normative constraints are exposed in the CONTRIBUTING.md file and their evolution has to be reviewed. Feel free to edit this page as you encounter new cases and you learn new ways! 🙂

Service name

Casing

• In order to find the service name casing, rely first on the page title (easily found in search results). Do not rely on the logo as it can be stylized differently. Example with Facebook:
• If it is still ambiguous, rely on Wikipedia as a source. However, make sure to differentiate the service from the provider company's name. Example with “DeviantArt”, a service (which used to be stylized deviantArt until 2014) by the limited liability company “deviantArt”:

Service ID

Normalisation

1. For non-roman alphabets (Cyrillic, ideograms…), use the service-provided transliteration.
2. For diacritics: normalise the string to its NFD normal UTF form, then remove the entire combining character class. Details.
3. As a last resort, use the domain name.

Provider prefixing

• If you encounter a document you want to add to a service, yet find that it would override an already-declared document for this service such as Terms of Service or Privacy Policy, and that the only solution you see would be to create a new document type that would contain the name of the feature, then it is likely you should declare a new service, potentially duplicating existing documents.

Example: the Facebook Community Payments terms are Terms of Service. The only way to declare them in the Facebook service would be to add a “Community Payments Terms” document type as they would otherwise conflict with Facebook's Terms of Service. It is better to declare a new service called “Facebook Payments” with its own Terms of Service. It turns out that this service also has a developer agreement, independent from the main Facebook service.

• As a last resort, rely on the trademark.

Example: Apple's App Store uses only generic terms (“app” and “store”). However, it is of common use to mention “the App Store” as Apple's. To help us decide whether it should be prefixed or not, we can check that Apple has trademarked “App Store”. The service can thus be named “App Store”, without prefixing.