WikiQueer:Naming conventions (use English)


 * WQ:UE redirects here. For comments on unencyclopedic articles, see WikiQueer:What WikiQueer is not.

''These guidelines are under development. Please discuss and improve.''

Article titles should use the Latin alphabet, not any other alphabets or other writing systems such as syllabaries or Chinese characters. However, any non-Latin-alphabet native name should be given within the first line of the article (with a Latin-alphabet transliteration if the English name does not correspond to a transliteration of the native name). Also, a non-Latin-alphabet redirect could be created to link to the actual Latin-alphabet-titled article.

If you are talking about a person, country, town, film, book, or video game, use the most commonly used English version of the name for the article, as you would find it in other encyclopedias and reference works. This makes it easy to find, and easy to compare information with other sources. For example: Christopher Columbus, Venice; often this will be the local version, as with Edvard Beneš. Always transliterate names from languages which do not use a Latin alphabet, using the most common transliteration.

Include alternatives
The body of each article, preferably in its first paragraph, should list all common names by which its subject is known. When the native name is written in a non-Latin alphabet this representation should be included along with Latin alphabet transliterations and English alphabet transliterations. For example, the Beijing article should mention that the city is also known as Peking, and that both names are transliterations of the name 北京. It is also useful to have multiple redirects to the main article, for example Sverige is a redirect to Sweden. If there is a significant number of alternative names or forms it may be helpful to keep only the most common two or three in the first paragraph and a list of them in a separate section or footnote to avoid cluttering the lead.

All national standards of English spelling are acceptable on the English-language WikiQueer, both for titles and content. American spellings need not be respelled to British standards nor vice-versa; for example, both colour and color are acceptable and both spellings are found in article titles. On topics which relate specifically to one variant of English, spellings from the relevant national standard should be used. See WikiQueer:Manual of Style National varieties of English for more details on this topic.

Borderline cases
Some cases are less clear-cut. There is a trend in part of the modern news media and maps to use native names of places and people, even if there is a long-accepted English name. For example, US newspapers generally refer to the Olympics in Torino even though most English texts still call the city Turin. However, newspapers in other parts of the English speaking world still use Turin. One should use judgment in such cases as to what would be the least surprising to a user finding the article. Whichever is chosen, one should place a redirect at the other title and mention both forms in the lead.

At the same time, when there is no long-established history of usage of the term, more consideration should be given to the correctness of translation, rather than frequency of usage (in a typical example of testing the usage by counting Google hits, if one version gets 92 hits, while another one gets 194 hits, it can hardly be decisive).