Wikipedia:Article titles

One of Wikipedia's policies and guidelines

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

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.

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 As the Wikipedia grows and changes, some conventions that once made sense may become outdated.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

Lowercase second and subsequent words

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.

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 economics or trousers).
Rationale and specifics: See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (pluralization)

Redirect adjectives to nouns

Convention: Adjectives should redirect to nouns.
Rationale and specifics: See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (adjectives)

Use gerund of verbs

Convention: Use the gerund of verbs 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 (NASA and radar are good examples).
Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (acronyms)

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 Transportation 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 cannot be used, or can, but give problems. For example you should not use a piping character (|), an asterisk (*), an ampersand (&), 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

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, binti 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.

Elections

Use this form - political division, date. IE. Canadian federal election, 1867

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

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)

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 Sanskrit.
Rationale and specifics: See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (languages)

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 world, 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

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 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.

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).

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

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

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 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)). 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.

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)

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)

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.

Conventions under consideration

Initials

Initials in people's names, or companies named after them, should be written with 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 ocassionally done in informal discourse in reference certain US presidents: FDR, LBJ, or JFK.

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

Currency

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

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.

Places

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

Ancient Romans

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

Identity

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

Sexuality

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

Suffix

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

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