Wikipedia:Naming conventions (royalty and nobility)

This guideline documents an English Wikipedia 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.

Shortcut WP:NCROY

As royalty and nobility often use titles rather than surnames, often change titles, and are often frequently referred to by names which are not unique, using a clear and consistent nomenclature can sometimes be difficult. This page contains a set of conventions for article titles that have been adopted through discussions between Wikipedia editors (see the talk page and its archives, and earlier, Wikipedia talk:History standards).

General policy on the naming of Wikipedia articles can be found at Wikipedia:Article titles. It is generally advisable to use the most common form of the name used in reliable sources in English ("common name" in the case of royalty and nobility may also include a person's title), but there are other things which should be considered: ease of use, precision, concision, and consistency among article titles; and a system constraint: we cannot use the same title for two different articles, and therefore tend to avoid ambiguous titles. For general guidance on finding titles for articles about people, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (people).

Most of the conventions below are intended to apply to medieval and modern European rulers and nobility, since in these civilizations the same given names are often shared between countries, so some disambiguation is often required, and disambiguation by territory is convenient. The principles used here may also be useful in titling articles on Muslim rulers and nobility. Elsewhere, territorial designations are usually unnecessary in article titles.

For guidance on how to use titles and names within articles, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies).

For clerical titles (popes, cardinals, etc.), see Naming conventions (clergy).