Wikipedia talk:Article titles

Identification of national organizations esp. government ministries

[Slightly updated, final sentence added]

Recently, the article Federal Ministry of Health (Nigeria) was renamed Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare as an uncontested technical request. My interest is in whether the (Nigeria) should have been dropped: in fact, I want to propose that all national government departments should contain the national name: e,g. Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (Nigeria).

In this case, it is not a matter of current ambiguity: there seems to be no other "Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare" in another country at the moment. So my request is based on the requirement for current WP:PRECISION in the first place, and then as a general policy to prevent future or uncaught ambiguity in the second place.

In concrete terms, the policy would be something like:

The title of an article about a current or recent government agency or ministry or political unit should, for WP:PRECISION and to prevent ambiguity, contain the name of the nation or colonial grouping (and, if relevant, the state, province or territory etc.). Examples of existing precise (good) names are:
* Ministry_of_Education,_Science,_Culture_and_Sport_of_Georgia
* Government_of_Georgia_(U.S._state)

If the agency or ministry does not currently have the national name in it, the name should be added in parentheses: 
* Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (Nigeria)
* Federal Bureau of Investigation (U.S.)
* Province of Georgia (British America)

Exceptions: If the name is quirky, uniquely associated with a location with a unique or notable name, includes an unambiguous state name, or is a distinctive contraction, the national name does not need to be added or removed:
* MI5   <- OK
* CSIRO  <- OK
* Sichuan <- OK
* Taiwan <- OK
* List of governors of Okinawa Prefecture <- OK
* Biosecurity Queensland  <- OK
* Georgia Department of Community Health <- needs (U.S.)

This editorial policy would not extend to autonomous state-owned concerns, such as universities, utility corporations, etc. though it might be appropriate for editors to consider. It does not apply to town or local government.

Rick Jelliffe (talk) 01:53, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

Personally I'd prefer we do Ministry of XYZ of Country instead of putting the country in brackets. Hey man im josh (talk) 02:00, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

No strong objections: I think the important thing is the precision not the form. My weak objection would be that if the formal name of the ministry did not include the national name, it is better to have the fact that this is being added for editorial purposes made clear by using the parentheses: e.g. I think this is not right: "Federal Bureau of Investigation of United States". I thought of a compromise, Ministry of XYZ (of Country), but it looks silly to me...:-) Rick Jelliffe (talk) 02:13, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

I agree with your weak objection: the bracketed form is unambiguous, and also helps to avoid giving a body with an already long name an even longer and potentially erroneous one. Musiconeologist (talk) 03:29, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

This would be my suggestion as well, with parentheses largely reserved for further disambiguation (e.g. the Georgias, different iterations of an agency), in accordance with WP:NCDAB. But to OP's point, with very limited exceptions, I believe pages on government ministries and offices should have at least some geographic precision in the page title. And I'd say one of those exceptions should be for the handful of internationally ubiquitous agencies (MI5, MI6, FBI, CIA, possibly the NSA and TSA). Star Garnet (talk) 02:44, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

• Per WP:TITLEDAB: It is not always possible to use the exact title that may be desired for an article, as that title may have other meanings, and therefore may have been already used for other articles. According to the precision criterion, only as much detail as is necessary to distinguish one topic from another should be used - ie we don't add precision unless it is needed to resolve an actual article title conflict. See also WP:OVERPRECISION and WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. We also have the consideration of WP:COMMONNAME v official name. Any change mandating the inclusion of the country would need to be made as a naming convention or as part of an existing naming convention. It wouldn't go here. There is existing guidance at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (government and legislation). An argument to mandate would need to consider the existing situation (how are all of these articles already named and is there actually a problem that needs to be fixed - Federal Bureau of Investigation is arguably the primary topic. There is existing guidance at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (government and legislation). Cinderella157 (talk) 06:00, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

  This clearly isn't a formal proposal, more so OP testing the waters. A low-traffic subpage is hardly a great forum, so this seems fine, at least for a pre-RFC stage. The question would seem to be whether or not the likes of Department of Health and Aged Care, Secretariat of Health, Chief Scientist Office, Directorate of Health, Department of Health and Social Care, etc. are sufficiently precise/informative so as to be useful to the reader. To me, they would seem to be ambiguous to the point of uselessness, and perhaps a standard like UK parliamentary constituencies or US towns is warranted. Star Garnet (talk) 08:16, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

  The first question is: How does the guidance at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (government and legislation) not already adequately deal with this? The role of an article title is to be an unique identifier for information about a particular topic. Recognizability states: The title is a name or description of the subject that someone familiar with, although not necessarily an expert in, the subject area will recognize. An Australian (ie somebody reasonably familiar with the Commonweath government) would recognise and search for Department of Health and Aged Care. There is only one article with this title. Adding Australia to the title (eg Department of Health and Aged Care (Australia)) doesn't make this easier to find. There are though, thirty odd articles for a government entity called Department of Health (without anything else). These do need to be disambiguated (see List of health departments and ministries, which is a hat note from Department of health (Health department). WP:PRECISION (I previously linked to WP:OVERPRECISION which targets the same section at WP:AT) is often poorly understood. As I indicated above, we only use sufficient precision to disambiguate a particular title from other actual articles that would otherwise have the same name. Anything more is OVERPRECISION and not as WP:CONCISE. Different governments use different terms for similar administrative bodies such as: department, ministry, secretariat or bureau. We are not going to mandate calling everything a department. Good use of hat notes and other navigation aids make things easier to find if someone is not sufficiently familiar with the subject to recognise the name and will be more efficacious than the suggested proposal. I just did this for Chief Scientist Office. Cinderella157 (talk) 11:44, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

  A) It's irrelevant whether or not the naming convention deals with it in a discussion of whether or not the convention should be adjusted. Even if it wasn't, the phrasing is less than clear regarding natural disambiguation vs. unique names. Also, the guidance to avoid "Something of Something of Jurisdictionname" significantly predates the creation of WP:NATURAL and any discussion of that guidance isn't readily apparent. B) Those familiar with the subject would not merely be Australians, but those familiar with health ministries. While debatably irrelevant due to the existence of the Department of Health (Australia) redirect, how many Australians familiar with the government would know the name of a recently renamed agency? C) I (and I believe OP) understand WP:PRECISIION plenty well; the question is whether or not a systematic exception is desirable for one of the subject areas that WP covers most systematically.

  To add a bit of data (and realizing that it doesn't do much to aid my suggestion above vs. OP's): regarding the examples I mentioned above, results on EBSCOhost and Science Direct provide natural disambiguation for the Department of Health and Aged Care and the the Chief Scientist Office in about 5% of cases, the Secretariat of Health and the Department of Health and Social Care in about 20%, and the Directorate of Health in about 35%. And with that, I will bow out of this discussion unless it attracts more attention. Star Garnet (talk) 20:33, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

• Concur with User:Cinderella157 that this is the wrong place for such a proposal and it needs to be raised at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (government and legislation). On the merits, I strongly disagree because it conflicts with WP:COMMONNAME. No further precision is required when the name is globally unique. For example, DARPA is globally unique. --Coolcaesar (talk) 06:38, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

Proposed change to WP:CONSISTENT

Currently, WP:CONSISTENT reads: To the extent that it is practical, titles should be consistent among articles covering similar topics. I believe that text should be added to clarify that a title consistent with other similar articles should not be chosen over a title that best matches the topic's treatment in sources. Topics that appear to be nominally similar, but whose respective bodies of sources treat them differently enough that the topics' names do not correspond, are clearly not similar enough that consistency should trump the following of sources. As an example, Chinese Americans is inconsistent with Chinese people in Korea. WP:CONSISTENT would allow for these articles topics to be designated as "similar", and thus for their titles to be consistent with each other. But "Chinese Americans" is the designation used in sources about Americans of Chinese descent or origin, while "Chinese people in Korea" matches the language used in sources discussing that population. Obviously, we should not override the literature's treatment of a topic because we judge the topics to be similar. ꧁Zanahary꧂ 18:25, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

I note that this is already addressed at WP:TITLECON: "Consistency is only one of several title considerations, and it generally falls below several other considerations in the hierarchy of title determination." 162 etc. (talk) 19:49, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

Good note! WP:CONSISTENT should reflect this. ꧁Zanahary꧂ 20:33, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

Also note that in the section of the policy that outlines all 5 of our article title criteria, we note that these are goals, not rules… and we explicitly say: “It may be necessary to favor one or more of these goals over the others. This is done by consensus.”

Sometimes our consensus is to favor consistency over the others … but at other times we favor one or more of the others over consistency. Use common sense. Blueboar (talk) 20:53, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

I think it’s important to identify consistency as distinctly below NDESC and COMMONNAME, as a violation of the latter two in the name of consistency goes against Wikipedia’s central convention of following sources. ꧁Zanahary꧂ 20:57, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

Transliterating rare Latin scripts (Qьzьl Armies, Lenin–Stalinnьꞑ tugunuꞑ adaa-pile)

Yañalif is an alphabet that was used during the 1920s and 30s for the Soviet latinisation of various Turkic languages. We currently have the articles (both recently DYKs):

• Qьzьl Armies (formerly Qizil Armies)
• Lenin–Stalinnьꞑ tugunuꞑ adaa-pile

There was a contested technical move request to move Qizil Armies to Qьzьl Armies, arguing that "Qьzьl" is already in Latin script and WP:TRANSLITERATE does not apply.

I am unable to find any English-language sources about the two articles above, and applying WP:TRANSLITERATE seems questionable due to the rarity of the Yañalif script which is ostensibly Latin, even though the titles are unpronounceable to an English reader unfamiliar with it. 9³ (talk) 08:17, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

Pow-wow (folk magic)

Over at pow-wow (folk magic) there is an effort to move the article's title to the Pennsylvania German word Braucherei. This is in part because the nominator deemed it to be "cultural appropriation". These editors have arrived at the page from a request made at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Indigenous peoples of North America. :bloodofox: (talk) 16:35, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

Is WP:COMMONNAME still consensus for people's names that have diacritics

My question is prompted by the names of two recent articles, Deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García (which was just moved from Deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia) and Detention of Rümeysa Öztürk. In both cases, it looks to me like the names that appear most often in English reporting do not use diacritics. I'm uncertain whether this means that people are unaware of WP:COMMONNAME or simply ignore it when they want, or if instead consensus has changed, and for articles involving people's names, editors now prefer to use the spelling in the person's native language, as long as the language's alphabet is similar to the English alphabet. Has consensus changed? Thanks, FactOrOpinion (talk) 23:19, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

I'm not sure that there's ever been a true consensus on this issue. I've seen requested moves that have been argued both ways. Raul Julia is one example. As to the two articles mentioned, Deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García could be reversed as a recent undiscussed move. Detention of Rümeysa Öztürk was recently created at that title, so if that name is usually written without diacritics, a formal move request could be started there. Station1 (talk) 07:47, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

I see Deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia has now been moved back to its title without diacritics. Station1 (talk) 20:12, 10 April 2025 (UTC)

I saw, thanks. (It turns out that it's also unclear whether his name in Spanish is Ábrego García or Abrego García; I've seen it spelled both ways in reporting about his case in Spanish.)

I'm still curious about the general question. You may be right that there is no consensus. I agree with Mathglot that COMMONNAME is likely the simplest guideline, in the sense that it generally answers the question regardless of the person's mother tongue. I suppose that it would also be pretty straightforward to always use the person's mother tongue as long as it uses some variant of a Latin alphabet. FactOrOpinion (talk) 20:54, 10 April 2025 (UTC)

Based on a cursory look at the Ozturk article, I agree, and added a discussion section at Talk:Detention of Rümeysa Öztürk to raise the issue, without making it a formal move request (but feel free to do so). My general feeling is that many article creators who are still relatively new give extra weight to the "real" name (i.e., how the person spells it themselves) and may never have heard of COMMONNAME, or if they have, give the foreign spelling more weight. This seems roughly analogous to how title discussions of organizations, place names, and the like frequently run into official name vs. common name arguments, in the sense that the original name in the home language is "official" in a real sense, and some editors fail to see why Wikipedia should spell it the way the majority of sources in English do, as the English sources "all get it wrong", as was recently explained repeatedly in a move discussion. I see no carve-out for diacritics, and can't think of a good reason to avoid using the common name in reliable, published sources in English.

If we do start using diacritics for names in order to match usage in their mother tongue, where does it stop? Only for letters that 90% or more of monolinguals can easily guess the sound of, or 50%, or where do we draw the line? We currently spell the Polish labor leader and ex-President Lech Wałęsa, though almost no English sources do that. Do we also rename our articles to Novak Đoković and Carl Friedrich Gauß? The way to sanity, reasonableness, and consistency is to apply the current norm, which is COMMONNAME, and then all these questions go away, at least to the extent that common name can be determined. That is at last a well-defined goal to aim for, rather than the haphazard pattern of everybody doing it however they like, which seems to be the current pattern. Mathglot (talk) 09:25, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

COMMONNAME is pretty much the opposite of consistency. And scholarly sources will often have the diacritics, while newspapers will not have diacritics. Anyway, dropping diacritics in names of living people who use the diacritics themselves is extremely disrespectful, so for BLPs COMMONNAME is not the only consideration we should apply. —Kusma (talk) 21:17, 10 April 2025 (UTC)

Consistency is followed *when practical*, but does not overrule COMMONNAME, which is key, and which by the nature of foreign scripts and pronunciation leads to inconsistent usage. That's okay, and COMMONNAME recognizes this in its language about "most commonly used". What is extremely disrespectful is using a spelling that causes everybody abroad to say your name wrong. What is extremely disrespectful is forcing people who learned a different alphabet to use your alphabet instead and take a wild guess how to pronounce your name. I am sure Milovan Djilas and Novak Djokovic are extremely happy that we spell their names this way in English, and not how they spell it. For BLPs, COMMONNAME is the main consideration we should apply, because the majority of reliable sources are much more likely to yield the best solution for any given foreign name than a bunch of Wikipedia editors expressing their opinion, however derived or deeply held. Mathglot (talk) 21:54, 10 April 2025 (UTC)

Interesting comments above. I think the intention to add more perceived importance or weight to a name is the primary reason for adding diacritics to words that have an established English spelling, which is usually a variant, without diacritics, of the foreign language word. I have noticed this habit of using the "proper" foreign spelling is practised more by novice editors who are unfamiliar with wp:commomname, but in that opinion I am generalising a lot. There does appear to be a social shift towards using the original foreign language word or name, which we often see in the media, which might eventually mean the foreign spelling becomes the English common name, but that will be determined on a case by case basis. I do not believe Wikipedia has any guidelines on how to handle this problem. Another consideration is that there are sometimes laws in a country that demand the use of a particular non-English name. That then raises the question of the independence of many of the secondary sources being used to confirm the foreign name is the English common name. My current area of interest in this topic is NZ where it is quite common in the media to see or hear a Maori name or word randomly and artificially thrown into an English article or TV report. The NZ editors have spent endless hours coming up with a clumsy solution to this problem, a solution heavily influenced by the need to 'do the right thing' and at the very least to add diacritics to words of Maori origin, or just to use a Maori word that differs entirely from the English word because that is "the correct spelling". I think it would be useful for Wikipedia to establish guidelines on how to use established English spellings and original foreign language spellings. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 22:04, 10 April 2025 (UTC)

Roger, do you think that such guidelines, if established, would sometimes disagree with using the most commonly used spelling in English reliable sources, and how would you decide in which cases that would happen? That seems to me like a recipe for endless strife based on conflicting guidelines. One way to prevent conflict would be simply to have the guideline say, "Always use the spelling given in the person's native language if it is written in any of the Latin Extended alphabets." That is simple, unambiguous, and consistent. But then we end up with Novak Đoković and Großglockner in English Wikipedia; would you support that? Mathglot (talk) 22:34, 10 April 2025 (UTC)

I think part of the issue is whether there are established transliterations for anglicising the spelling. The fact that ⟨ß⟩ and ⟨ö⟩ have since typewriter days been represented as ⟨ss⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ means that Gauss and Schoenberg are effectively directly equivalent to Gauß and Schönberg rather than an arbitrary change of the name to English version. Though at the same time, it's now trivially easy to type ⟨ß⟩ and ⟨ö⟩, so the need for transliterating is gone, especially since anyone who mispronounces ⟨ö⟩ will most likely mispronounce ⟨oe⟩ in the same way. Is ⟨Dj⟩ systematically used to represent ⟨Ð⟩? If so, then to my mind it's OK. If it's done in an ad hoc way, maybe it's not. (And what about Erdős, by the way? I think he definitely needs the ⟨ő⟩, which I can only type without hassle because I saved a copy of his name several years ago.) Musiconeologist • talk • contribs 23:34, 10 April 2025 (UTC)

M*n*ist, not sure how you determine standard transliterations (maybe a table per language?) but let's say that is solved and we have it. What happens when a majority of reliable sources in English do it a different way for a particular name, then what? Stick with the tables? Mathglot (talk) 00:23, 11 April 2025 (UTC)

One thing to bear in mind is that for most speakers of the English language most diacritics are meaningless. Most people can handle André or José, and maybe even an occasional umlaut, but beyond that diacritics are meaningful only to those who speak the foreign language. Most English speakers will read and pronounce an unfamiliar foreign name as if it had no diacritics. Station1 (talk) 00:30, 11 April 2025 (UTC)

In that case, their meaning becomes This is how the name is spelt,¹ which might be a reason for putting them in. Musiconeologist • talk • contribs 01:26, 11 April 2025 (UTC)

I don't actually think a rigid rule can be made. I did write part of the issue is whether there are established transliterations. It's a factor to be weighed along with the others, like most editorial decisions in fact. If the majority of reliable sources use a particular spelling, it makes sense to use it (as long as the spelling is something they can be considered reliable about.) If they don't, then other factors come into play. The existence of an accepted way of treating a particular letter helps to make that treatment a more logical choice, but ultimately I don't think there's some algorithm that can determine the appropriate spelling. Musiconeologist • talk • contribs 01:12, 11 April 2025 (UTC)

García and Garcia are pronounced the same way in English, so it's not really a matter of transliteration. It's in Spanish that they're pronounced differently.

@Kusma, I'm curious about your statement that "dropping diacritics in names of living people who use the diacritics themselves is extremely disrespectful."

In part, I'm curious why you limit that to living people, and whether you also find transliterations from languages like Chinese or Arabic to be disrespectful.

In part, I'm wondering if we're in a good position to figure out how someone spells their name, especially if they speak more than one language and/or have moved to a different country where they may adopt a different spelling. In the article about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran who had been living in the US since 2011 but was recently deported and is now being held incommunicado in a prison, we don't know how he is currently spelling his name. We only know how his lawyers spell it in court filings (without accents) and how English and Spanish news are spelling it (the news in Spanish have spelled it both Ábrego García and Abrego García, and the news in English mostly use Abrego Garcia).

Personally, I don't find it disrespectful if someone in a non-Anglophone country spells my name differently in order to capture the sound of my name in their language. I'd probably rather that they spell it differently and pronounce it well than that they spell it correctly and mispronounce it. FactOrOpinion (talk) 00:38, 11 April 2025 (UTC)

Claims have been made above that there is no solid guidance on names with diacritics, but this is not so; there is. Article title policy says (at WP:Article titles § Foreign names and anglicization):

The choice between anglicized and local spellings should follow English-language usage, e.g. the non-anglicized titles Besançon, Søren Kierkegaard, and Göttingen are used because they predominate in English-language reliable sources, whereas for the same reason the anglicized title forms Nuremberg, delicatessen, and Florence are used (as opposed to Nürnberg, Delikatessen, and Firenze, respectively).

This seems very clear and is pretty much exactly the COMMONNAME answer to the question, "What about foreign names that have diacritics?", along with illustrative examples. I fail to see any reason to change existing guidance only to deal with foreign names with diacritics; we already cover that above and adding anything would be WP:CREEP. On the other hand, if we are not happy with this policy, that is a different matter: in that case, there should be a proposal to change it, but otherwise we should simply follow it. Mathglot (talk) 06:52, 11 April 2025 (UTC)

"Nuremberg" and "Munich" are overwhelmingly used in English instead of the native versions. As the names differ from the native "Nürnberg" and "München" by more than a dropped diacritic, they are usually uncontroversial. Those where the only difference is a dropped diacritic (which just looks like a misspelling) are significantly more controversial, and often English usage isn't clear. For example, Zürich was recently moved to Zurich despite other encyclopaedias like Britannica using "Zürich". COMMONNAME can be quite difficult to establish sometimes, and then falling back on the native form is usually more helpful than choosing an Anglicised version. —Kusma (talk) 08:56, 11 April 2025 (UTC)

I simply quoted the policy exactly, but your point is fair, and perhaps there should be more examples like Montreal, Quebec, and Istanbul among the policy examples (or Zurich, if usage is clear) but the policy statement remains and is clear. Mathglot (talk) 09:40, 11 April 2025 (UTC)

In reply to Mathglot's question to me above, if I understand correctly, yes, there would be problems. Moving on... Some points in list form, 1/ I might be wrong but I think a diacritic is not classed as part of spelling, so Zürich and Zurich are spelt the same but Nürnberg and Nuremberg are spelt differently. 2/ In the NZ case, that would likely apply elsewhere too, NZ editors have chosen to use the 'use the local English varient' rule with respect of ANY English word that has a connection with NZ, especially an English word derived from a Maori language root. This means that Māori is the correct spelling of Maori anywhere in the world. World-wide sources would differ. 3/ My point made earlier above is that in many countries there are laws to promote a certain minority language, which creates an artificial weighting in many sources, especially locally published maps and guidebooks that are often the only sources available for place names. Does that make those sources unreliable because they are not independent - they publish a certain minority spelling because they have to. 4/ I don't pretend a solution is easy but I do think this is sometimes overthought. The guideline above is pretty clear which basically says use the majority spelling in English RSSs. Guidelines elsewhere say that in order to use a minority spelling as well, that minority spelling should feature in a 'significant' number of sources. That practice is often not followed so we end up with three or four alternative spellings of a place or name given in the article lead. In conclusion, a useful approach be editors might be to focus more on the existing guideline quoted above and use it more rigidly. If an alternative non-English word with diacritics or a different spelling is used, then remove it unless it can be clearly shown it is used in a significant number of RSSs. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 21:21, 11 April 2025 (UTC)