Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 21:28, 15 June 2011

This guideline documents an English Misplaced Pages naming convention. Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. Substantive edits to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on this guideline's talk page.

Shortcuts WP:EN WP:ENGLISH

The title of an article should generally use the version of the name of the subject which is most common in the English language, as you would find it in 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 and IAST) are preferred. Nonetheless, 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 word, or exonym, for the subject but a native version is more common in English-language usage, the English name should be mentioned but should not be used as the article title.

Include alternatives

• WP:UEIA

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 for whether one term is more common than another, but can suggest that no single term is predominant in English. If there are fewer than 700 hits, the actual count (gotten by paging to the final page of hits) may be accurate for Google's particular corpus of English, but whether this represents all English usage is less certain. If there are more than 700 estimated hits, the number gotten by going to the last page will be wrong; Google only loads a limited number of hits, no matter how many there are. Counts over 1000 are usually estimates, and may be seriously wrong. If several competing versions of a name have roughly equal numbers (say 603 for one variant and 430 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.

Misplaced Pages is not a crystal ball. It is not our business to predict what term will be in use, but rather 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.

Modified letters

• WP:DIACRITICS

The use of modified letters (such as accents or other diacritics) in article titles is neither encouraged nor discouraged; when deciding between versions of a name which differ in the use or non-use of modified letters, follow the general usage in English reliable sources (for example other encyclopedias and reference works). In general, the sources in the article, a Google book search of books published since 1980, and a selection of other encyclopaedias should all be examples of reliable sources; if all three of them use a term, then that is fairly conclusive. If one of those three diverges from agreement then more investigation will be needed. If there is no consensus in the sources, either form will normally be acceptable as a title. Place redirects at alternative titles, such as those with or without diacritics. Add {{R from title without diacritics}} after the redirect to properly categorize it, e.g. for print editions.

Search engines are 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.

One recurrent issue has been the treatment of graphemes such as ae and oe. By and large, Misplaced Pages uses œ and æ to represent the Old Norse and Old English letters. 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 has not always: 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 Misplaced Pages: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 Ó Fiaich, not Tomas O'Fiaich (see the mentioned MoS page for details).

No established usage

It can happen that an otherwise notable topic has not yet received much attention in the English-speaking world, so that there are too few English sources to constitute an established usage. Very low Google counts can but need not be indicative of this. If this happens, follow the conventions of the language in which this 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. The sections "multiple local names" and "use modern names" in WP:NC (geographic names) express some ideas on resolving such problems.

See also

• Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style (proper names) – guideline for proper names, such as place names and personal names.
• Misplaced Pages: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.

• Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (royalty and nobility) – specific rules for Western royalty and nobility.
• Misplaced Pages:Romanization – an overview of the conventions for transliterating various languages into the Latin alphabet.

Notes

1. "Climategate, Tiger, and Google hit counts: dropping the other shoe". Language Log, December 7, 2009
2. This paragraph was adopted to stop move warring. It is an adaptation of the wording in the MOS which is based on Misplaced Pages:Requests for arbitration/Jguk

• Misplaced Pages naming conventions