Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)

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Main page: Wikipedia:Naming conventions

Use the most commonly used English version of the name of the subject as the title of the article, as you would find it in verifiable reliable sources (for example other encyclopedias and reference works). This makes it easy to find, and easy to compare information with other sources. Often this will be the local version, as with Madrid. Sometimes the usual English version will differ somewhat from the local form (Aragon, Venice, Normandy; Franz Josef Strauss, Victor Emmanuel III, Christopher Columbus); rarely, as with Germany or Mount Everest, it will be completely different.

The references for the article should themselves be reliable sources; if one name is clearly most commonly used in the English-language references for the article, we should probably use it. If (as will happen occasionally) something else is demonstrably more common in reliable sources for English as a whole, and this is not a question of national varieties of English, use that instead.

Names not originally in a Latin alphabet, as with Greek, Chinese or Russian, must be transliterated into characters generally intelligible to literate speakers of English. Established systematic transliterations (e.g. Hanyu Pinyin) are preferred. Do not substitute a systematically transliterated name for the common English form of the name, if there is one; thus, use Tchaikovsky or Chiang Kai-shek even though those are unsystematic.

The native spelling of a name should generally be included in the first line of the article, with a transliteration if the anglicization isn't identical; redirects from non-English names are encouraged. Where there is an English exonym for the subject, it should be mentioned, even if it is not the most common name in English language usage.

Include alternatives

The body of each article, preferably in its first paragraph, should list all common names by which its subject is widely known. When the native name is written in a non-Latin alphabet this representation should be included along with Latin alphabet transliteration. For example, the Beijing article should mention that the city is also known as Peking, and that both names derive from the Chinese name 北京. It is also useful to have multiple redirects to the main article, for example Sverige is a redirect to Sweden. If there is a significant number of alternative names or forms it may be helpful to keep only the most common two or three in the first paragraph and a list of them in a separate section or footnote to avoid cluttering the lead; see Freyr for an example of this.

Divided usage

Sometimes, English usage is divided. For example, US newspapers generally referred to the Olympics in Torino, following official handouts. However, newspapers in other parts of the English speaking world still use Turin. Use what would be the least surprising to a user finding the article. Whichever is chosen, one should place a redirect at the other title and mention both forms in the lead.

Google hits are an unreliable test, but can suggest that no single term is predominant in English. If several competing versions of a name have roughly equal numbers (say 1803 for one variant and 1030 for another), there may well be divided usage. When in doubt, search results should also be evaluated with more weighting given to verifiable reliable sources than to less reliable sources (such as comments in forums, mailing lists and the like). Do consult reliable works of general reference in English.

Wikipedia is not a crystal ball. It is not our business to predict what term will be in use; but to observe what is and has been in use, and will therefore be familiar to our readers. If Torino ousts Turin, we should follow; but we should not leap to any conclusion until it does.

When there is evenly divided usage and other guidelines do not apply, leave the article name at the latest stable version. If it is unclear whether an article's name has been stable, defer to the name used by the first major contributor after the article ceased to be a stub.

No established usage

It can happen that an otherwise notable topic has not yet received much attention in the English-speaking world, so that no established usage exists. Very low google counts can but need not be indicative of this. If this happens, follow the conventions of the language in which the entity is most often talked about (German for German politicians, Turkish for Turkish rivers, Portuguese for Brazilian towns etc.).

If, as will happen, there are several competing foreign terms, a neutral one is often best. For example see the suggestions in the sections "multiple local names" and "use modern names" in WP:NC (geographic names) for ideas on how to deal with this problem.

Modified letters

Wikipedia does not decide what characters are to be used in the name of an article's subject; English usage does. Wikipedia has no rule that titles must be written in certain characters, or that certain characters may not be used. Versions of a name which differ only in the use or non-use of modified letters should be treated like any other versions: Follow the general usage in English verifiable reliable sources in each case, whatever characters may or may not be used in them.

English usage is often best determined by consulting works of general reference which deal with the subject and seeing what they use. Search engines are always problematic, unless their verdict is overwhelming; modified letters have the additional difficulties that some search engines will not distinguish between the original and modified forms, and others fail to recognize the modified letter because of optical character recognition errors. If there is a consensus on spelling in the sources used for the article, this will normally represent a consensus of English usage.

One recurrent issue has been the treatment of ae and oe and their variants. By and large, Wikipedia uses œ and æ to represent the Anglo-Saxon ligature. For Latin or Greek-derived words, use e or ae/oe, depending on modern usage and the national variety of English used in the article. German proper names should be treated with care, and attention to English practice. Not all German proper names use umlauts (for example, Emmy Noether is correct in both languages); English resolves umlauts where German need not: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is standard English usage, although both forms have been found in German.

Beware of over-dramatising these issues: as an example Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Ireland-related articles) may be mentioned, which, as a side-effect, regulated use of diacritics regarding Ireland-related articles – peacefully – before, during and after an extensive dispute on the question of diacritics in 2005, e.g. Inishmore, not Inis Mór; Tomás Cardinal Ó Fiaich, not Tomas Cardinal O'Fiaich (see the mentioned MoS page for details).

See also

• Wikipedia:Naming conventions (geographic names). More on use of alternate names, and of contemporary names and transliterations. Some advice may be applicable to non-geographic names.
• Wikipedia:Naming conventions (names and titles) – specific rules for Western royalty and nobility.
• Wikipedia:Romanization – an overview of the conventions for transliterating various languages into the Latin alphabet.