Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)
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This page is a naming conventions guideline for Wikipedia, reflecting how authors of this encyclopedia address certain issues. This guideline is intended to help you improve Wikipedia content. Feel free to update this page as needed, but please use the discussion page to propose major changes. |
- WP:UE redirects here. For comments on unencyclopedic articles, see Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not.
These guidelines are under development. Please discuss and improve.
Article titles should use the Latin alphabet, not any other alphabets or other writing systems such as syllabaries or Chinese characters. However, any non-Latin-alphabet native name should be given within the first line of the article (with a Latin-alphabet transliteration if the English name does not correspond to a transliteration of the native name). Also, a non-Latin-alphabet redirect could be created to link to the actual Latin-alphabet-titled article.
If a native spelling uses different letters than the most common English spelling (eg, Wien vs. Vienna), only use the native spelling as an article title if it is more commonly used in English than the anglicized form.
If you are talking about a person, country, town, movie or book, use the most commonly used English version of the name for the article, as you would find it in other encyclopedias and reference works. This makes it easy to find, and easy to compare information with other sources. For example, Christopher Columbus, Venice.
If there is no commonly used English name, use an accepted transliteration of the name in the original language. Latin-alphabet languages, like Spanish or French, should need no transliteration, but Chinese names can use Pinyin, for example.
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[edit] Include alternatives
The body of each article, preferably in its first paragraph, should list all common names by which its subject is known. When the native name is written in a non-Latin alphabet this representation should be included along with Latin alphabet transliterations and English alphabet transliterations. For example, the Beijing article should mention that the city is also known as Peking, and that both names are transliterations of the 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.
All national standards of English spelling are acceptable on the English-language Wikipedia, both for titles and content. American spellings need not be respelled to British standards nor vice-versa; for example, both colour and color are acceptable and both spellings are found in article titles. On topics which relate specifically to one variant of English, spellings from the relevant national standard should be used. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style National varieties of English for more details on this topic.
[edit] Borderline cases
Some cases are less clear-cut. There is a trend in part of the modern news media and maps to use native names of places and people, even if there is a long-accepted English name. For example, US newspapers generally refer to the Olympics in Torino even though most English texts still call the city Turin. However, newspapers in other parts of the English speaking world still use Turin. One should use judgment in such cases as to 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.
At the same time, when there is no long-established history of usage of the term, more consideration should be given to the correctness of translation, rather than frequency of usage (in a typical example of testing the usage by counting Google hits, if one version gets 92 hits, while another one gets 194 hits, it can hardly be decisive).
[edit] Disputed issues
There is disagreement over what article title to use when a native name uses the Latin alphabet with diacritics (or "accent marks") but general English usage omits the diacritics. A survey that ran from April 2005 to October 2005 ended with a result of 62–46 (57.4%–42.6%) in favor of diacritics, which was a majority but was not considered to be a consensus.
There is disagreement as to whether German, Icelandic and Faroese names need transliteration for the characters ß, þ and ð.
There is disagreement over whether to use œ and æ.
There is disagreement on whether the availability of a letter in common fonts should affect its use on Wikipedia - for example whether the letter ī (i with macron) should have a different status from the letter í (i with acute) because the second is more widely available.
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 the poll mentioned above, e.g. Inishmore, not Inis Mór; Tomás Cardinal Ó Fiaich, not Tomas Cardinal O'Fiaich (see the mentioned MoS page for details).
Related proposals and active discussions:
Note: Because of the complexities involved, monarchical titles and noble titles are covered by a separate naming convention, namely Wikipedia:Naming conventions (names and titles).
[edit] See also
- Wikipedia:Manual of Style#National varieties of English - for handling differences between American and British English, and other national varieties
