This page is a list of guidelines on how to name pages.
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. Beyond this general statement, the most important sections to read are the first few sections: Simplicity, Precision, Capitalization, and Pluralization.
The purpose of these policies is to make creating new pages with appropriate links easier. When writing Wiki pages on any subject, names, words, or phrases that you think should be linked to further information should be [[bracketed]] so that they will appear as links. Following consistent conventions in both naming and linking makes it more likely that these links will lead to the right place.
It is important to note that these are conventions, not rules written in stone. As the Wikipedia grows and changes, some conventions that once made sense may become outdated. But when in doubt, follow convention.
General conventions
Convention: Unless the term you wish to create a page for is a proper noun or is otherwise almost always capitalized, do not capitalize second and subsequent words.
Rationale and specifics: See
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization) and
wikipedia:Canonization.
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
economics or
trousers).
Rationale and specifics: See
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (pluralization)
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)
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)
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
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 (
NASA and
radar are good examples) .
Rationale and specifics: See:
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (acronyms)
Since
Transportation in Azerbaijan could just as well be considered a subdivision of
Transportation as of
Azerbaijan, do not use a name like
Azerbaijan/Transportation (a so-called subpage, formerly used to indicate that the page is a subdivision of the topic Azerbaijan).
For an exception, see
Wikipedia:Subpages in the user and talk namespaces.
Some special characters can not be used, or can, but give problems. For example you should not use a piping character (|), an asterisk (*), an ampersand (&), or curly braces ({}) or square braces ([]) in a name. See
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (technical restrictions).
Other specific conventions
Convention: In general, use the most common form of the name used in 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
Convention: In general the use of number-only page names should only be used for Year in Review entries. So call it
Form 1040, not
1040, and
Intel 386, not
386. That way, if we ever want to add a page about what happened in the year 1040 or the year 386, we won't have a collision with the other uses of numbers. --
Simon J Kissane
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)
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
Sanskrit.
Rationale and specifics: See:
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (languages)
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)
Conventions under consideration
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),
Piano Sonata, K. 331 (Mozart). See:
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (pieces of music)
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)
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)
There are many other specific issues still being discussed on the
talk page.
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