Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)

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.

Shortcuts WP:EN WP:ENG WP:NCUE WP:ENGLISH

This page in a nutshell: This is the English Wikipedia. Article titles should be written in English.

The title of an article should generally use the version of the name of the subject that is most common in the English language, as you would find it in reliable sources (for example other encyclopedias and reference works, scholarly journals, and major news sources). 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.

If an examination of the sources in an article shows that one name or version of the name stands out as clearly the most commonly used in the English language, we should follow the sources and use it. Whenever 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, if there is a common English form of the name, this is preferred over a systematically transliterated name; thus, use Tchaikovsky or Chiang Kai-shek, even though those are unsystematic. For a list of transliteration conventions by language, see Wikipedia:Romanization and Category:Wikipedia Manual of Style (regional).

The native spelling of a name should generally be included in parentheses, in the first line of the article, with a transliteration if the Anglicization isn't identical. Redirects from native and other historically relevant names are encouraged. Where there is an English word or an 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.