Wikipedia:Article titles

Naming conventions is a list of guidelines on how to appropriately create and name pages.

It is important to note that these are conventions, not rules written in stone. As Wikipedia grows and changes, some conventions that once made sense may become outdated, and there may be cases where a particular convention is "obviously" inappropriate. But when in doubt, follow convention.

Generally, article naming should give priority to what the majority of English speakers would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature.

In addition to following the naming conventions it is also important to follow the linking conventions. Following consistent conventions in both naming and linking makes it more likely that links will lead to the right place.

General conventions

Lowercase second and subsequent words

Convention: Do not capitalize second and subsequent words unless the title is a proper noun (such as a name) or is otherwise almost always capitalized (for example: John Wayne, but Computer game).

Due to technical limitations inherent to the MediaWiki software, the first letter in an article title always needs to be a capital letter. Ordinarily this isn't a problem, but it poses an issue when a proper noun's first letter is lowercase (e.g. eBay). The first letter of an internal wikilink need not be capitalized and will direct the reader to the same page (e.g. computer game or Computer game can be used interchangeably as needed).

Rationale and specifics: See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization) and Wikipedia:Canonicalization.

Prefer singular nouns

Convention: In general only create page titles that are in the singular, unless that noun is always in a plural form in English (such as scissors or trousers).
Rationale and specifics: See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (pluralization)

Redirect adjectives to nouns

Convention: Adjectives (such as democratic) should redirect to nouns (in this case, democracy).
Rationale and specifics: See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (adjectives)

Use gerund of verbs

Convention: Use the gerund of verbs (the -ing form in English) unless there is a more common form for a certain verb.
Rationale and specifics: See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (verbs)

Use English words

Convention: Name your pages in English and place the native transliteration on the first line of the article unless the native form is more commonly used in English than the English form.
Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)

Use common names of persons and things

Convention: Use the most common name of a person or thing that does not conflict with the names of other people or things.
Rationale and specifics: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names)

Be precise when necessary

Convention: Please, do not write or put an article on a page with an ambiguously-named title as though that title had no other meanings.
Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (precision) and Wikipedia:Disambiguation

Prefer spelled-out phrases to acronyms

Convention: Avoid the use of acronyms in page naming unless the term you are naming is almost exclusively known only by its acronym and is widely known and used in that form (laser, radar, and scuba are good examples).
Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (acronyms)

Avoid the definite article ("the") and the indefinite article ("a"/"an") at the beginning of the page name

Convention: Except in titles of works (The Old Man and the Sea, "The Lady or the Tiger?", A Clockwork Orange) or in official names (The Hague), avoid the definite ("the") and indefinite ("a"/"an") articles at the beginning of a page name. This applies even if the subject of the page is usually preceded by the definite article "the" in speech or writing: Thus, for example, White House is preferred over The White House and Middle East is preferred over The Middle East.
Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (definite and indefinite articles at beginning of name)

Do not use an article name that suggests a hierarchy of articles

Since Transportation in Azerbaijan could just as well be considered a subdivision of Transport as of Azerbaijan, do not use a name like Azerbaijan/Transportation (the old Wikipedia software created a subpage when the article name contained a forward slash; this feature is discontinued for articles, but you may use it on user and talk pages).

Be careful with special characters

Some special characters either cannot be used or can but cause problems. For example you should not use a piping character (|), an asterisk (*), an ampersand (&), a plus sign (+), curly braces ({}), or square braces ([]) in a name.

Titles must not begin with an interlanguage link code followed by a colon. For example a page with the title FR:example will produce a "bad title" error.

Also, for naming pages the restriction to ISO-8859-1 is strict, no characters that are not ISO-8859-1 may be used. See Wikipedia:Special characters for a list of non-ASCII characters that are allowed.

See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (technical restrictions).

Other specific conventions

Aircraft names

Aircraft names are too varied to give full guidelines here; see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (aircraft).

Airports

see Wikipedia:WikiProject Airports/naming conventions

Animals, plants and other organisms

The capitalization on the common names of species has been hotly debated in the past and has remained unresolved. As a matter of truce both capitalized and non-capitalized (except for proper names) are acceptable, but a redirect should be created from the alternative form. Scientific names are always written in italics. The first name (genus) is capitalized, the second (species) is not. Examples: Homo sapiens, Tyrannosaurus rex, Velociraptor.
See: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Tree_of_Life#Article_titles_and_common_names
See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (fauna)
See: Capitalization

Arabic names

In an Arabic name, the format is as follows:

• AAA bin BBB (or AAA ibn BBB) (male)
• AAA binti BBB (or AAA bte BBB) (female)

where 'AAA' is the first name and 'BBB' is the father's name. The word bin means "son of"; likewise, bint means "daughter of". For example, Mahathir bin Mohamad is the name of the former Prime Minister of Malaysia. In the article, he is referred to as Mahathir.

Chinese

See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Chinese)

City names

Convention: In general, there are no special naming conventions for cities, unless multiple cities with the same name exist. Discussion, rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (city names)

Comic books

See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (comic books)

Elections

Use this form: political division, date. For example, Canadian federal election, 1867. For future elections of uncertain date one can use either the 39th Canadian federal election format or the UK general election, 2005/06 format.

Historical names and titles

Convention: In general, use the most common form of the name used in English (not necessarily the name translated into English) and disambiguate the names of monarchs of modern countries in the format [[{Monarch's first name and ordinal} of {Country}]] (example: Edward I of England).
Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (names and titles) and Wikipedia:History standards

Isotopes/Nuclides

Convention: Isotopes should begin with the capitalized element name, folowed by a hyphen (not —) and then the mass number. For example, Helium-10, or Uranium-235.

Japanese

See: Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Japan-related articles)

Korean

See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Korean)

Languages, both spoken and programming

Convention: Languages which share their names with some other thing should be suffixed with "programming language" in the case of programming languages, or "language" in the case of spoken languages. If the language's name is unique, there is no need for any suffix. For example, Python programming language and English language, but VBScript and Esperanto.
Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (languages)

Lists

Convention: Put a list of Xs as list of Xs, rather than Xs, famous Xs, listing of important Xs, list of noted Xs, list of all Xs, etc. See wikipedia:list. Consider making a category instead of a list: categories are easier to maintain.

Literary works

Suggested convention: Use the title of the work as the article's title, following all applicable general conventions. To disambiguate, add the type of literary work in parentheses, such as "(novel)", "(novella)", "(short story)", etc. You may use "(book)" to disambiguate a non-fiction book. If further disambiguation is needed, add the author's surname in parentheses: "(Orwell novel)", "(Asimov short story)", etc.

Mormonism

See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Mormonism)

Movie titles

Convention: Oftentimes movies share the same name as other movies, books or terms. When disambiguating a movie from something else use (movie) in the title when only one movie had that name and (YEAR movie) in the title when there are more than one movies by that name (example: Titanic (1997 movie)).

Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (movies)

Music

Pieces of music

Convention: Name the article in its most common form, adding the composer's surname in parentheses after it if more than one piece has that title. For example, War Requiem, Violin Concerto (Berg), Symphony No. 6 (Mahler). See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (pieces of music)

Album titles and band names

Convention: In titles of songs or albums, unless it is unique, the standard rule in the English language is to capitalize words that are the first word in the title and those that are not conjunctions (and, but, or, nor), prepositions (to, over, through) or articles (an, a, the). When necessary, disambiguation should be done using (band), (album) or (song) (such as Iron Maiden (band) or Insomniac (album)); use further disambiguation only when needed (e.g. X (U.S. band), X (Australian band)). Unless multiple albums of the same name exist (such as Down to Earth), they do not need to be disambiguated any further. For example, Down to Earth (Ozzy Osbourne album) is fine, but Insomniac (Green Day album) is unnecessary. When a track is not strictly a song (i.e. a composition without lyrics, or an instrumental that is not a cover of a song), disambiguation should be done using (composition) or (instrumental).

Numbers

Articles about numbers and related meanings are at N (number), e.g. 142 (number), not One hundred forty-two nor One hundred and forty-two nor Number 142. 142 is for the year (see above). See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers).

Organizations (e.g. political parties)

Convention: For articles on organizations (like political parties) the general rule applies. That means: Name your pages with the English translation and place the original native name on the first line of the article unless the native form is more commonly used in English than the English form. Examples of the last are names of organizations in India, Ireland, Israel, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Quebec, Sri Lanka (English is or was an official language in most of these countries, which led to the general use of the native name) as well as some in Spain (Batasuna), Indonesia (Golkar), Iran (Mujahedden al-Khalq), Russia (Yabloko and Rodina, Republic of China (Taiwan) (Kuo Min Tang) and Cambodia (Khmer Rouge). Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)

Russian names

Many Russian names have a conventional English spelling. For others, use Wikipedia's modified BGN/PCGN transliteration, documented at Transliteration of Russian into English

Ship names

Convention: Articles about ships that have standard prefixes should include them in the article title; for example, HMS Ark Royal, USS Enterprise. Note that although in text the name but not the prefix is italicized, this is not indicated in the article name, so pipe links are used, e.g. for the above [[HMS Ark Royal|HMS ''Ark Royal'']], [[USS Enterprise|USS ''Enterprise'']]. Articles about ships that do not have standard prefixes should be titled as (Nationality) (type) (Name); for example, Soviet aircraft carrier Kuznetsov ([[Soviet aircraft carrier Kuznetsov|Soviet aircraft carrier ''Kuznetsov'']].
Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ships)

Spanish family names

In the Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking worlds, individuals customarily carry both the their father's and mother's surnames. In the Anglophone world, they are generally referred to with just the paternal surname. For example, Augusto Pinochet rather than Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. However, their full Hispanic-style name is supplied at the top of the article. As an exception to this guideline, the maternal surname may be used to disambiguate between individuals with the same first and paternal surname. For example:

• Eduardo Frei Montalva, president of Chile 1964-1970
• Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, president of Chile 1994-2000

Ukrainian names

See Romanization of Ukrainian for details of transliteration systems.

• Most personal names have a conventional English spelling, rendered phonetically. This is usually very close to transliteration by the BGN/PCGN system, which is quite intuitive for English speakers to pronounce. Some Ukrainian names have conventional spellings that come from other languages, like Polish, transliteration from Russian, transliteration into German, etc.
• For geographic names in Ukraine, the Ukrainian National system is used. For historic reasons, many names are also presented in Russian, Polish, etc.
• Linguistics topics often use "scholarly", or "scientific transliteration" within the text.

Years: use plain numbers only

Convention: In general the use of number-only page names should only be used for Year in Review entries. So name the article Form 1040, not 1040 (the year Macbeth became King of Scotland), and Intel 80386, not 386 (the year the Northern Wei Dynasty began to rule China). See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers).

Years in titles

Convention: In general, there are no special naming conventions for articles on recurring events, such as elections or the Olympics. See: wikipedia:Naming conventions (years in titles)

Conventions under consideration

Ancient Romans

Convention: in progress, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ancient Romans)

Chemistry

Convention: This convention is in progress; see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (chemistry)

Currency

Convention: This convention is in progress; see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (currency)

External links

Should external links of non-html type files (such as doc, pdf and xls) be in the following format?

• World Port Rankings 2002, by metric tons and by TEUs, American Association of Port Authorities (xls format, 26.5kb)

Genres

Gamelan gong kebyar is often referred to as kebyar. Article should be at gamelan gong kebyar with a redirect at kebyar. See other types of Indonesian music.

Government departments, ministers etc.

Convention: in progress. See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (government departments and ministers)

Identity

Convention: in progress, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (identity)

Initials

Initials in people's names, or companies named after them, should be written with full stops (periods) after them, with a space between the initials and the name, and between initials. Thus, W. E. B. Du Bois, I. F. Stone, T. E. Lawrence, and F. W. de Klerk. (See Oxford Style Manual 3.2, Chicago Manual of Style 8.6). (This convention is under discussion; see Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions.) An exception is a reference to someone using only initials, such as is occasionally done in informal discourse in reference certain U.S. presidents: FDR, LBJ, or JFK.

Acronyms and initialisms such as IBM, NATO, and WYSIWYG are likewise written without periods (see: Naming conventions (acronyms)).

Manuscript names

Convention: in progress, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Middle Ages/General#Proposal for convention for manuscript names.

Military units

Convention: getting started, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (military units)

New Zealand placenames

New Zealand placenames are written simply as the place name, unless confusion is likely to occur with duplicated names within the country or outside it.

If confusion is likely with places outside New Zealand, then the format "Placename, New Zealand" is used, irrespective of the type of location (e.g., Mount Hopkins, New Zealand). Confusion has to be likely, not merely possible: for example, Wellington, the capital, is known all over the world, whereas the other 30 or so places with the same name have fairly local significance only.

If the name is used for more than one type of place, then the type of place is given in parentheses (e.g., Lake Tekapo (town)). (This convention is not formalised, but is general usage on NZ articles in Wikipedia).

Ohio school districts

Convention: In progress. See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Ohio school districts) for more.

Old Norse/Old Icelandic/Old English names

Convention in progress: Old Norse/Icelandic names appear differently in various modern English texts: for example Baldr, Balder, and Baldur; or Aesir and Æsir, or Óðinn, Odin, Ódin, Óthin, and Odhinn. Similarly Old English names appear in variant forms, such as Aelle against Ælle. Please provide input at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Old Norse/Old Icelandic/Old English). Should one default to vanilla US-ASCII forms or to forms (also found in modern English texts) that more closely represent the original spellings with special letters and diacritics?

Places

Convention: in progress, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (places)

Sexuality

Convention: in progress, see: Wikipedia:WikiProject Sexology and Sexuality.

Suffix

Convention: in progress. Page names should use the least number of suffixes possible???

Television series and shows

Convention: in progress. See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (television)

Old Norse and subgroups

Convention: in progress. See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Old Norse, dates and subgroups)

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More issues

There are many other specific issues still being discussed on the talk page.