Wikipedia:Naming conventions (geographic names)

The Wikipedia community has found it difficult to reach consensus, its preferred mode of dispute resolution, in several geographic naming debates.

These are advice, intended to guide, not force, consensus; but they are derived from actual experience in move discussions.

(It is technically possible to bold or italicize Greek or Cyrillic names; but there is consensus not to do so, because they are distinguishable from running text anyway.)

This will often be identical in form to the local name (as with Paris or Berlin), but in many cases it will differ (Germany rather than Deutschland, Rome rather than Roma, Hanover rather than Hannover, Meissen rather than Meißen).

For example, when discussing the city now called Istanbul, Wikipedia uses Byzantium in ancient Greece, and Constantinople for the capital of the Byzantine Empire.

Similarly, use Stalingrad when discussing the city now called Volgograd in the context of World War II.

Similarly, its GEOnet server normally presents local official usage in the country concerned (for example, Frankfurt am Main); in a handful of cases, like Florence, it has a conventional name field.

Where it acknowledges a conventional name, it is evidence of widespread English usage; where it does not, it is not addressing our primary question.

Another useful idea, especially when one name seems to be used often in the construct "X (also called Y)" in sources that consistently use X thereafter, is to search for "and X" against "and Y" (or "in X" versus "in Y") to see which is common in running prose.

This has been done, for example, with the municipalities of South Tyrol, based on an officially published linguistic survey of the area (see Italy below).

In some cases, a compromise is reached between editors to avoid giving the impression of support for a particular national point of view.

For example, the reasonably common name Liancourt Rocks has been adopted, mainly because it is neither Korean nor Japanese.

This should not be done to settle a dispute between national or linguistic points of view; it should only be done when the double name is actually what English-speakers call the place.

For example, we have articles called Istanbul, Dubrovnik, Volgograd, and Saint Petersburg, these being the current names of these cities, although former names (Constantinople, Ragusa, Stalingrad, and Leningrad) are also used when referring to appropriate historical periods (if any), including such article names as Battle of Stalingrad and Sieges of Constantinople; not to mention separate articles on Constantinople and Byzantium on the historical cities on the site of modern Istanbul – or part of it.

It is sometimes common practice in English to use name forms from different languages to indicate cultural or political dominance.

For example, Szczecin is often written as Stettin (the German name) for the period before 1945; likewise, Gdańsk is called Danzig (the detailed decisions at Talk:Gdansk/Vote apply to that dispute; they are older than this page).

That can be assessed by reviewing up-to-date references to the place in a modern context in reliable, authoritative sources such as news media, other encyclopedias, atlases and academic publications as well as the official publications of major English-speaking countries, for example the CIA World Factbook.

Nevertheless, other names, especially those used significantly often (say, 10% of the time or more) in the available English literature on a place, past or present, should be mentioned in the article, as encyclopedic information.

Two or three alternative names can be mentioned in the first line of the article; it is general Wikipedia practice to bold them so they stand out.

But titles should not be forced into uniformity when this would be a violation of idiom or otherwise inappropriate (for example, when the administrative unit is coterminous with an island and covered in the same article); it should be decided in each case on its merits.

For example: For a list of pages dealing with the transliteration of names from other writing systems into the Latin alphabet, see Wikipedia:Romanization.

Where there is no Wikipedia convention on a specific country and disambiguation is necessary, it is generally reasonable to use [[placename, nation]], as in Shire, Ethiopia.

Article titles should be in the majority language (Finnish or Swedish) of the province, municipality, region or sub-region, unless there is a well-established name in English.

Any second name needs to be referenced by a reliable secondary source; often the best will be recognition by the Institute for the Languages of Finland (see a list of Swedish-language placenames).

See Wikipedia:Manual of Style/France and French-related Where possible, articles on places in Germany use [[placename]] unless there is a common English name (e.g. Munich or Nuremberg).

Disambiguation should not normally be to England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, and never to post town, former postal county or postcode district.

If there are multiple places of the same name within the same district, then parishes, wards, or lowercase compass directions should be used as appropriate to identify the relative locations.

Where disambiguation is required, [[Placename, Statename]], is used (the "comma convention", as in Nogales, Sonora, or Córdoba, Veracruz).

Linking from a disambiguation page is required for all deviant spellings to enable a user to find the Hajjiabad in question.

The predominant usage in English is Falkland Islands, but the name Malvinas is encyclopedic information, of particular importance with respect to the disputed Argentine territorial claim.