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The Palm Breweries in Belgium is owned by Palm nv (legal name) but due to an acquisation since 2016 the name became Swinkels Family Brewers Belgium (trade name). Should it be renamed after the legal name or trade name? Tomaatje12 ( talk) 10:09, 26 May 2023 (UTC)
The guideline says to follow "the company's own preference" for "whether or not to include a comma prior to the legal status" and whether or not to use "the abbreviated or unabbreviated form" of "Incorporated" as "Inc." In an RM that was just closed, there was a consensus declared to not do these things and instead favor being WP:CONCISE. Please see Talk:Mars Inc.#Requested move 3 December 2023. I therefore removed the "Mars, Incorporated" example from the guideline, since that article doesn't follow the guideline anymore. Should the guideline be changed? I'm generally not a big fan of deferring to self-published material, and only expressed opposition in that RM discussion based on the idea that we should follow our guidelines. If we don't want to follow our guideline, we should change our guideline. — BarrelProof ( talk) 02:28, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
Any move request that is out of keeping with naming conventions or is otherwise in conflict with applicable guideline and policy, unless there is a very good reason to ignore rules, should be closed without moving regardless of how many of the participants support it. We are disambiguating a company name with its legal suffix; this, by definition, refers to the official name rather than common name. Small details such as "Inc." vs. "Incorporated" and comma vs. no comma are so insignificant that there is no reason to deviate from the official spelling, which is why NCCORP instructs us to simply conform to the company's preference. It's not "superfluous". Changing "Incorporated" to "Inc." or removing a comma would result in an incorrect, made-up name. No such company called "Mars Inc." exists; neither does "Mars Incorporated". I find it odd that Monsters, Inc. was cited as an exemption when work titles function exactly like company names, in that they are both trademarks. InfiniteNexus ( talk) 03:12, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
Hold your horses. The erstwhile guideline at
WP:NCCORP says, in its entirety on this matter, If the legal status is used to disambiguate, it should be included in the article title using the company's own preference for either the abbreviated or unabbreviated form (such as Caterpillar Inc.). Likewise, whether or not to include a comma prior to the legal status should be governed by company usage (compare, for example, Nike, Inc. and Apple Inc.).
This is actually a direct
WP:POLICYFORK away from all of:
WP:COMMONNAME policy (and its associated
WP:OFFICIALNAME supplement),
WP:CONCISE policy, arguably
WP:CONSISTENT policy, the
MOS:TM guideline, and every other principle of MoS that is applicable to style variations in naming things. This is not actually permissible, and I'm surprised this has existed in such wording for so long without someone noticing this problem (this has to owe to the fact that nearly no one watchlists this or makes any use of it). All of the other P&G material applies a standard of not diverging from the consistent style (which in this case would be the use of "Inc." for CONCISE reasons) unless the company's style choice dominates in independent sources (and on a style matter like this, dominates in a strong majority of them):
Wikipedia does not necessarily use the subject's "official" name as an article title; it generally prefers the name that is most commonly used (as determined by its prevalence in a significant majority of independent, reliable, English-language sources) as such names will usually best fit the five criteria listed above.
to format a trademark, editors should examine styles already in use by independent reliable sources. From among those, choose the style that most closely resembles standard English – regardless of the preference of the trademark owner.Here, neither "Inc." nor "Incorporated" are non-standard, but the abbreviated form is vastly more common, and CONCISE militates against use of the long form just to please the trademark holder. The key point is "
regardless of the preference of the trademark owner"; this is in step with
Wikipedia does not necessarily use the subject's "official" name as an article titlein AT, and with all of OFFICIALNAME.
Clearly, the disused and rarely cited NCCORP (which has barely been substantively revised in its entire existence – its whole history fits in one history page, and shows a remarkably small number of editors' input, most of it trivial) needs revision to stop forking from policy and other guidelines. It has had no non-trivial editing since 2009, and most of what it says is simply summary of (and examples pertaining to) other guidelines, which it needs to cross-reference and summarize accurately and in an updated manner. If it's not fixed, it should probably be marked with . See
#Overhaul below. PS: {{
Historical}}
And it also has no business having a "First sentence" section, which is an article content matter governed by
MOS:LEAD and for trademarks by
MOS:TM. Fixed that last bit, by sectional merge to
MOS:TM. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 10:35, 11 December 2023 (UTC); rev'd. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 16:05, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
PS: The RM at Talk:Mars Inc.#Requested move 3 December 2023 concluded in favor the WP:COMMONNAME- and WP:CONCISE-compliant title, despite multiple respondents there citing WP:NCCORP against the move. This is a good indication that the idea of NCCORP somehow codifying an exception with the language quoted above does not have consensus. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:10, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
Names of organizations and institutions (e.g. orchestras, musical ensembles and groups, concert halls, festivals, schools, etc.) should follow official usage (i.e. the spelling, punctuation, etc. used by the organization's own publications). In the case of non-English names, we use official English versions if and when they have been established by the organization itself. If not, we use the native name.". Also see WP:NCTHE: "
... the names of some musical groups: The Bangles, The Beatles ... This only applies if the definite article is used by the band on their musical publications (CDs, audiotapes, records, etc.) or on their official website." As I said above, I'm not a fan of deferring to "official" sources either. I'm pretty surprised to find that statement in WP:MUSORG, since my recollection is that we routinely avoid silly self-published stylisms for group names, per MOS:TM. — BarrelProof ( talk) 02:32, 13 December 2023 (UTC)
bow to primary sources, especially if no disambiguation is needed. But if disambiguation is needed, COMMONNAME is only one thing we consider; NATURAL is another.
it'll probably move some day, considering the many RMs in the past as you noted and the fact that not a single editor in the current RM has supported a move; I assume it will be SNOW closed momentarily to avoid wasting editors' time. InfiniteNexus ( talk) 03:29, 13 December 2023 (UTC)
The one unaddressed thing I see above is your analogy to subtitles of published works; that doesn't seem entirely unreasonable, in a "longer form of the name" way, but it's a shaky analogy at best, mostly because the full titles of a work is very common in sources about the subject (reviews, etc.), while full legal name of corporate entity usually is not (and even when a longer form than a bare name like "Mars" is given it is most often abbreviated). It really does come down mostly to independent source usage, so analogy-based arguments tend to fail at RM if they're not backed by common usage in RS. PS: Requesting a move to a title that actually complies with the P&G, even if one expects topical WP:FALSECONSENSUS resistance, is by definition not disrupting Wikipedia (to make a point or otherwise); all article titles have to comply with the article titles policy, even if it takes multiple discussions to get us there. Immediately re-RMing the same article on the basis of guideline language subject to the ongoing dispute right above is what was POINTy. I'm not sure how long that disputation is going to take to resolve, but it is clearly not resolved yet, and seems to have faltered a bit because of the holidays. Should probably be RfCed for more attention. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:49, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
COMMONNAME is not "the first part" of WP:AT, but the second (not counting the lead). It's worth re-reading, especially for: 'Wikipedia does not necessarily use the subject's "official" name as an article title; it generally prefers the name that is most commonly used (as determined by its prevalence in a significant majority of independent, reliable, English-language sources) as such names will usually best fit the five criteria listed above.' Your belief that COMMONNAME somehow ignores most of the criteria but the first one is manifestly incorrect. Also, you may not have realized this, but the criteria are in a specific priority order for a reason, established in this order of most to least importance a long time ago. They are not coequal. E.g., if something is much more RECOGNIZABLE than another name, about the same NATURALness, and sufficiently PRECISE, then it will be used even if it is not the most CONCISE form, nor CONSISTENT with the naming pattern of similar articles. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:49, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
Prefatory to an RfC on this (if we really need one), I've done the legwork to trace the entire history of the matter, so others don't have to redundantly go diff-digging for hours.
The issue
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (companies) (hereafter
WP:NCCORP) is uncommonly cited in
WP:RM or other discussions (even about article titles of companies and other organizations), and most editors seem unaware of its existence. There is presently (the main thread above this) a dispute about its wording If the legal status is used to disambiguate, it should be included in the article title using the company's own preference for either the abbreviated or unabbreviated form .... Likewise, whether or not to include a comma prior to the legal status should be governed by company usage
. Both of these deferences to a corporation's own internal preference are inconsistent with the rest of the advice here, including the entire "Default to the most common name" section, and "an integral part of the company name (as determined by usage in independent reliable sources)" later in the document. Much more importantly, it is argued to conflict with policy about how primary sources are used and our strong preference for and reliance on secondary one (see
WP:PSTS and the supporting guideline
WP:RSPRIMARY), the
WP:COMMONNAME policy in
WP:AT (often also the
WP:CONCISE part) and its
WP:OFFICIALNAME supplement, the
MOS:TM guideline (the gist of which is "never defer to corporate preferences only to what strongly dominates in independent sources"), all of which (even singularly, never mind collectively) have a vastly higher
consensus level than WP:NCCORP , which has only had about a dozen substantive editors across its entire very minimal history (nearly none of them still active). Defenders of this guideline's current wording on this (the general intent of which dates back to 2006) deny that there is any such conflict. One argument raised is that having to disambiguate in any way at all invalidates any WP:COMMONNAME consideration. A second is that
WP:NATURAL and
WP:NATURALDIS somehow require defaulting to the company's official preference. Another possible countervailing factor is
WP:ABOUTSELF (though it addresses claims made and cited in the article body, not the titling of the article). A fourth idea was that WP:COMMONNAME equates directly to
WP:RECOGNIZABLE and can be overridden by any of the other
WP:CRITERIA. These objections seem to have been addressed entirely (in my opinion) but some of them have been recurrent anyway.
The issue of confusion sown by this deference to corporate primary sources and the incompatibility of this idea with other WP:P&G material was first (that I can identify) raised as early as 6 March 2008 [2], by TJ Spyke. So this is not a new concern, just one that has come to the fore, especially in the wake of a pair of back-to-back WP:RM discussions about the title of Mars Inc., in which the preferences of the erstwhile guideline material in this page have been rejected, despite spirited argument in their defense. But let's go over the history of this page in considerable detail.
Relevant page history and prior discussion
WP:NCCORP has been tagged with {{
Guideline}}
since 9 March 2006
[3], by
Reflex Reaction. I have been unable to locate any
WP:PROPOSAL process for making this a guideline in the first place, though there was
WP:Naming conventions (companies)/poll, about its details, opened also by Reflex Reaction, and running from 10 February – 5 March 2006, with a little over a dozen respondents (the only editors from that original poll who are still active are
ChrisRuvolo,
Masonbarge,
DS1953,
Golbez,
PedanticallySpeaking,
Lar and (within about a year)
TheGrappler,
Quadell,
TreyHarris, and
Noisy). This discussion was "intended to determine the naming conventions for businesses, corporations, ... and other types of legal statuses for companies" and "to achieve a naming convention consensus, or at least a sizeable majority vote". But at no point was it proposed as a
guideline, as far as I can find. The word "guideline", in fact, appears nowhere in that entire discussion. However, just "declaring" things to be guidelines was common in that early era of Wikipedia, and no one has challenged its guideline designation in the intervening years. This discussion is not a proposal to "demote" it (though such has sometimes been the result anyway, e.g. at
MOS:COMPUTING, when the material appears to be irredeemable
instruction creep after a community examination of it). Most of WP:NCCORP appears to have consensus and to be useful.
Nothing like the language that is the subject of this dispute was present in the early versions of the page, including when it was first designated with {{Guideline}}
[4]. The first version of something vaguely similar to the disputed wording was [with punctuation corrected here]: "company", "international", "group", "industries", or similar suffixes are not legal statuses and should be included as specified by the originating business.
, added shortly after the {{Guideline}}
tagging. This was a unilateral change by Reflex Reaction; while the 2006 poll included
9 editors who supported the idea of following "company preference" specifically in regard to abbreviations of corporate legal-status designators like "Incorporated" and "Limited", there was zero discussion regarding "suffixes" that are not legal-status designators. Later in 2006, Reflex Reaction applied this idea to corporate designations as well
[5] (which was at least supported by the poll, unlike the first assertion about "suffixes"). In the same year, Relfex Reaction again unilaterally extended this "company preference" idea, to include whether or not to use a comma between company name and legal status
[6].
Following a 2009 talk-page "discussion" which consisted of
J~enwiki saying what they wanted to do and getting no feedback of any kind from anyone
[7], they quite substantively changed this material to be much more emphatically deferential to corporate primary sources: If the legal status is used to disambiguate, it should be included in the article title based on the specific preference for the abbreviated or unabbreviated form as promoted by the company .... Likewise, whether or not to include a
comma prior to the legal status should be governed by company preference
[8]. This was arguably not procedurally invalid, under the "
silence equals consent" principle (though it
has substantial criticism when it comes to policy & guideline material). But it does indicate that there is no affirmative consensus for this.
Outright opposition was raised 13 May 2010 by
Skookum1: It's unwise to play into the hands of marketing people's manipulations of search engine parameters....
[9]. J-enwiki's version was somewhat softened in tone but not substantive meaning by
Jæs in April 2010
[10], to say "as prefered by the company" and "should be governed by company usage". Part of it was tweaked again in October 2010 by
Nurg to "using the company's own preference"
[11].
A proposal in November 2011 by Jheiv to switch to a convention of using full corporate names was rejected – for reasons that are remarkably salient here when it comes to "company preference":
We generally use the common name of subjects for the titles. Why do it differently for companies? ... consistency is important. A name change because of rebranding won't necessarily mean the title of the article should change—it would change only if RS reflected the change. ... to be consistent we should be using the common name, not doing something different just for company names. What is special about company names?
No need to do it differently here - and there's no reason you can't introduce the article with a bolded Full name as it is.
If there is a name that can be identitifed as being most commonly used then using that best meets readers' expectations. Companies do not change their names that often and even if they did that doesn't mean the company's selected name will be the name that is most commonly used. And if the common name changes it's no biggie to change the article title.
We go with the most common names of entities generally. Yes this is somewhat subjective sometimes (not usually) and the proposer's point that this sometimes leads to time wasted on figuring out the correct title occasionally is well taken, but I wonder if the cure isn't worse than the disease here.
Wikipedia is ... consistently reflecting in the title of each article the most common name used to refer to the topic of that article. Official/legal/formal names, on the other hand, are normally reflected in the lead sentence of the article. Yes, that means titles have to be changed when the common name for the topic changes, and some times the most common name is not obvious and discussion is required .... This proposal would undermine this valuable feature, for very little reason.
We're an encyclopedia for everyday people, and should use the common names generally in effect.
Unnecessary deviation from WP:COMMONNAME principle. The "the common name of companies is so subjective" could potentially be applied against any topic. That's the whole reason we have Wikipedia:Search engine test.
In summary
NCCORP has attracted little interest, use in actual RM discussions, or further substantive editing since 2011, until the recent dispute above erupted (and I incidentally did a cleanup pass on the page, without affecting the disputed portion). Probably due to the year-end holidays, the matter has yet to be resolved with a consensus on what the disputed section should actually be saying. PS: Someone in the discussion above pointed out that WP:MUSORG seems to have a similar issue, so that should be addressed after this is resolved. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:51, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia does not necessarily use the subject's "official" name as an article title. Common names are always preferred, as noted in NCCORP, but that is not to say that we should never defer to official names. I'll give an example: whether to include "The" in the names of periodicals. It doesn't matter if some sources write "The Los Angeles Times" ( [12] [13]), or "the New York Times" ( [14] [15]); we include "The" in the article title if that is part of its name. Why? Because the inclusion or omission of the word "the", or the inclusion or omission of a comma (or any other punctuation), has little to no effect on an article title's recognizability or searchability. You think referencing official names is a problem restricted to NCCORP and MUSORG? Wait till you read WP:THE, which makes extensive reference to official names. Is that guideline is also rarely cited, out of date, and unknown to most editors?If you omit the comma in a company name that includes a comma, you are using an incorrect name, not a more "concise" version. If you arbritrarily abbreviate a part of a company's name when it is not abbreviated, you are using an incorrect name. Because these distinctions are so minor and easy to miss, not only is it irrelevant to recognizability or searchability (as noted above), but it is also not surprising that sources sometimes overlook this. Why would we want to replicate that error on Wikipedia? Arguably, this is merely a matter of styling, whether to include a comma or abbreviations or the word "the". Many style guides actually have guidance on how to render company names. But we all know that Wikipedia follows its own house style.No one has also claimed that the other CRITERIA "overrides" COMMONNAME, only that one does not supersede the others. The idea that "XXX (company)" is preferable to an official name is puzzling, considering WP:NATURAL specifically acknowledges that natural names may not be the most common opion. And WP:RECOGNIZABLE redirects to WP:COMMONNAME, so I am not sure what your point was. MOS:TM is about quirks like stylization and capitalization, irrelevant to this discussion. TL;DR: The "official names" clause does not contravene Wikipedia's other policies and guidelines. COMMONNAME does not prohibit the use of official names, only preferring common ones if available. InfiniteNexus ( talk) 18:47, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
Long point-by-point response to IN
|
---|
Diffs and direct quotes don't lie. I did it this way for a reason, and pinged every single still-active editor involved; if I've somehow gotten their position wrong, they can tell me so themselves. Re-notifying every editor who is still around, regardless what their position was in prior discussions, is in no way canvassing. This entire discussion is and only is about NCCORP saying to defer to company preference when disambiguating non-parenthetically. There is no question about that. InfiniteNexus keeps repeating this fact (which no one has questioned and which I've said clearly myself) in various wording as if it is some kind of argument in favor of deferring to company practice, but that's nonsensical circular reasoning. "I'm not really sure what the purpose of quoting seven users from the 2011 discussion was" is disingenuous silliness; the reason was stated plainly, that the rationales provided "Contrary to popular belief, WP:COMMONNAME does not prohibit the usage of official names": there is no such "popular belief", and one would have to be very, very confused to hold such a belief, since the official name (usually without corporation-type legal designator) as used by the company is in the vast majority of cases also the common name. This debate is about the exceptions, when editors come to agreement to use some form of that designator as a disambiguator instead of using a parenthetical. What WP:COMMONNAME does do is effectively prohibit use of an official name when it is not the common name and in turn not the most common disambiguation; this is covered in more detail at the supplement
WP:OFFICIALNAME#Valid use of official names. Notice that there is no entry there along the lines of "automatically use the official name if you have to disambiguate" (or even "if you have to disambiguate in a particular way)". InfiniteNexus seems to believe that both the
WP:CRITERIA and
WP:PSTS go out the window any time disambiguation has to occur (or perhaps when it is occurring in a particular format), but of course there is no basis for this. OFFICIALNAME is particular is very clear: "that is not to say that we should never defer to official names": this is wrongheaded. WP will most often use an official name, when it is the most common, which is most of the time; if we have to disambiguate and choose not to do so parenthetically, then the most common non-ambiguous form is what will be chosen, and this really has jack to do with how the company officially prefers to write it (abbreviated or not, with a comma or not), unless that coincidentally is also the most common form in RS (which it usually is, but often is not when the company prefers the longwinded "Incorporated" or "Limited", in which case sources usually use an abbreviation, and they almost always punctuate it, abbreviated or not, according to their own style guide. It's only about what the independent sources do. There is no "deferring" to "official" anything in any of this decisionmaking, and that is where NCCORP has become broken and incompatible with policy and practice. Titles of publication have nothing of any kind to do with this, and are governed by a separate guideline, MOS:TITLES; they are not corporations. (The corporation that publishes a periodical may have a similar or even the same name, but the legal entity and the work are distinct topics governed by different rules.) This this has been explained to InfiniteNexus before, but he is playing WP:IDHT. Also, The Chicago Manual of Style explicitly rejects IN's analogy logic, which someone else tried with them before [16] (click "Answer" below the first question there). Next, WP:THE says "These conditions are sometimes met" ("sometimes" being the key word) when the official name of something starts with "The", which is about the base name before disambiguation, has no connection to the subject under discussion here, and cannot be generalized into "defer to company preference" in anything else. It's a special exception. The "sometimes" condition is also not considered met unless (and this is important here) the independent reliable sources go along with it also. Thus we have The Hershey Company, because sources rarely use just "Herhey Company", but we have Ohio State University despite that organization's insistence that it is officially The Ohio State University, a redirect – sources mostly just do not go along with it [17] [18] [19]. "If you omit the comma in a company name that includes a comma, you are using an incorrect name": This is a weird advocacy position, which is not going to be shared by any linguist, professional writer/editor, or much of anyone, anywhere. It's exactly equivalent to saying that if WP uses "Sammy Davis Jr." instead of "Sammy Davis, Jr.", if The New York Times writes "M.I.T." instead of " MIT" (which they do [20]), if you choose to write "Sir Ian McKellen CH KBE" instead of "Sir Ian McKellen, CH KBE", that these are all "errors" because they don't match the preferences of the subject. Balderdash. The only significance this punctuation has at all is that in some jurisdictions if it was present in the company's corporate registration then it must continue to be used in contracts and in legal filings with the government [21]. That's it. Some companies change style over time as far as their public-facing usage goes, or simply do not consistently use one spelling or the other in in public (e.g. Facebook before Meta, see [22] with "Facebook, Inc.", versus [23] with "Facebook Inc."). They are otherwise entirely matters of house style, and ours is generally to opt for concision. I can easily see a WP consensus coming to omit these commas in every case, but the current status quo is (let's see if a certain someone can pick up on the running theme here) to follow the dominant usage in reliable sources for the subject in question, as with everything else to do with corporate naming (per MOS:TM). This just came up in the back-to-back RMs at Talk:Mars Inc. and it did not go the way InfiniteNexus argued, but he just doesn't want to hear it and keeps circling back to the same already-rejected argument. Let's see if he'll hear reliable sources on English usage and writing:
"sources sometimes overlook this": No, sources have explicit style manuals that tell them to omit the comma, to abbreviate, to not use legal designations at all, and so on. IN's supposition that it's a random mistake is not just
WP:OR but disproved. (Yes, there are also some that say "do what company wants", too; the point is that this is provably and entirely a house-style matter, with the sole exception of legal documents within certain jurisdictions.) Stunningly, IN next tells us: "Arguably, this is merely a matter of styling" and "Many style guides actually have guidance on how to render company names" and "we all know that Wikipedia follows its own house style": Yes! So how is it even possible for IN to not understand that this is just a style matter, but to instead conclude that doing anything other than his bureaucratic and primary-source-dependent preference is "incorrect" and an "error"? It defies all evidence and reasoning, including
even his own. "No one has also claimed that the other CRITERIA 'overrides' COMMONNAME": Wrong; it's quite frequent for editors to incorrectly claim that COMMONNAME is simply a restatement of and elaboration on RECOGNIZABILITY in CRITERIA and therefore subordinate to it. "only that one does not supersede the others": finally a correct statement (aside from the strange plural). "The idea that 'XXX (company)' is preferable to an official name is puzzling": What's puzzling is IN bringing this up; such a name is preferable in some cases and not in others (depends on – guess what? – predominant usage in independent RS; if RS does not often use the corporate designator in one form of another then it should be at "CorpName (company)" or a similar parenthetical, thus
Wiley (publisher)), and the parts of NCCORP that are not broken already make this clear, and everyone seems to understand and agree with it. "[WP:NATURAL specifically acknowledges that natural names may not be the most common opion": A serious misstatement; IN is trying to imply that commonness is no longer a consideration if natural disambiguation is employed, but if mispresenting the material badly: "MOS:TM is about quirks like stylization and capitalization, irrelevant to this discussion": We've been over this before, so IN simply playing IDHT and proof by assertion games again, as usual. Exactly how to spell-out/abbreviate and punctuate these things is (I just proved it, remember?) a "style quirk", and MOS:TM being the guideline that governs trademarks (including company names) and everything like them, it is obviously and necessarily not only relevant but the most relevant guideline we have. Over and over again it says to do what is done in the prepondernance of independent RS; that really is the entire point of it. "The 'official names' clause does not contravene Wikipedia's other policies and guidelines." I've demonstrated clearly that it doesn, but obviously this is a question for the community. "COMMONNAME does not prohibit the use of official names": straw man; no one ever suggested it did; it requires using the most common name, or failing that, either using the most common longer form that can serve as a natural disambiguation or switching to parenthetical disambiguation. Nothing about it suggests deferring to company preference at WP:OFFICIALNAME is all about not doing that, as is MOS:TM. The only support anywhere for doing anything like for companies is WP:THE, but it is strictly confined to the question of a leading The. "only preferring common ones if available": this is the root of IN's failure to make his case: he believes that commonness of the name is somehow magically made irrelevant if the most common name turns out to not be the best choice due to ambiguity. But WP:NATURALDIS and WP:OFFICIALNAME both tell us very clearly that is wrong. IN just refuses to absorb it. PS: "And
WP:RECOGNIZABLE redirects to
WP:COMMONNAME": Someone's been screwing with the redirects (probably longer ago than I realize); I notice that
WP:NATURAL now also goes to where
WP:NATURALDIS does. What used to happen is that the former in both cases went to the
WP:CRITERIA line items about them, and this should not have changed since it will render many archived discussions confusing, and is confusing for editors used to the original targets (just as many people keep doing
WP:CONSISTENCY which got turned into an internal DAB page when they mean the target of
WP:CONSISTENT). The specific-CRITERIA links that still work are
WP:RECOGNIZABILITY and
WP:NATURALNESS. |
Tesla, Inc., also written as Tesla Inc. ..., so the discrepancy would have to remain. One more thing: if you really, really, really, really plan on opening an RfC if this dispute is not resolved by the end of this discussion, I would suggest that you present a draft for editors to review or have a third party write it. RfCs are supposed to be neutral and factual, not riddled with false statements such as the claim that NCCORP requires us
to default to the official name, any time the most common name is ambiguous and editors don't want to use parenthetical disambiguation(incorrect/misleading; NCCORP says to follow the official styling when using the legal suffix to disambiguate). InfiniteNexus ( talk) 23:16, 9 January 2024 (UTC)
If the legal status is used to disambiguate, it should be included in the article title using the company's own preference for either the abbreviated or unabbreviated form .... Likewise, whether or not to include a comma prior to the legal status should be governed by company usage. That exactly agrees with my description of this as defaulting to official names when using natural disambiguation. Your own summary of it is another way to put it (other than confusing "status" and "suffix"; the guideline is using those terms to mean different things). However, your version is very sharply at odds with your insistence that any variant style (abbreviated or not, comma or not) is a "different name" and thus an "error", "wrong", "incorrect", etc. You're trying to have it both ways: shoot out every argument that occurs whether it's self-contradictory or not as long as it may help sow enough FUD to prevent the rectification of this awful idea of bowing to primary sources. "it makes no sense to ... remove punctuation": Maybe not to you, but it does to others (including the "real world", e.g. AP Stylebook, etc.) You point out we do it (as most modern publishers do) with "Jr." names, and so on. So "it makes no sense" isn't sustainable. "the discrepancy would have to remain": As you say yourself, "the inclusion/omission of a comma are so minor, they would have virtually no effect on commonness or recognizability", ergo there is no reason to care. This is exactly analogous to Bob Odenkirk beginning with "Robert John Odenkirk", and MoS having a rule to not write "Robert John Odenkirk, best known as Bob Odenkirk", because it's obvious they're the same topic. It would be an order of magnitude more obvious that "Tesla, Inc." and "Tesla Inc." are the same topic. While I would prefer that this be treated as purely a style matter, it is unclear what the project-wide appetite for that would be.
Practically speaking, we really only have three options here, any time a legal status appears in the name (for being part of the actual most common name, which rarely is true, or much more often being a natural disambiguator):
an exception to normal policy and OFFICIALANAME. It is hypocritical of you to accuse me of IDHT when I have repeated again and again that a comma vs. no comma, and
Incorporatedvs.
Inc., are negligible distinctions that have zero effect on recognizability/searchability or concision. "Tesla, Inc." is just as recognizable as "Tesla Inc.", search engines do not care, and removing punctuation (or just anything in general) mid-sentence is not what CONCISE aims to accomplish. This is classic wikilawyering. If you want to propose a clause in MoS to standardize all instances of
Inc., just as we do with
Jr., that's a different matter, but you can't pretend the guideline already exists and therefore NCCORP is a breach of "normal policy".The point of my Tesla example was to show that overturning NCCORP would create apparent errors, especially in the eyes of readers. Readers who read "Robert John Odenkirk" on an article called "Robert Odenkirk" easily recognize that "John" is what's called a middle name, since it is common knowledge (at least, in the English-speaking world) that middle names are usually omitted. Here, we're talking about a comma in a corporate legal status suffix — quite the niche topic. Sure, you can argue that not every reader may be as pedantic or attentive to details such as commas, but it is almost guaranteed that there would be confusion. ("Is the article title wrong? Is there a typo in the lead? What is the actual name? Which spelling should the infobox title use?") But this is the type of thing that the MoS shouldn't enforce ( WP:MOSBLOAT and all that) — the status quo isn't hurting anyone, and a change wouldn't help anyone. InfiniteNexus ( talk) 23:15, 11 January 2024 (UTC)
Whenever possible, common usage is preferred [...] in some limited cases, Corporation may also be a key part of the company's name in common usage, rather than simply as a designator of its official legal status.It doesn't say anything about "if Corporation is part of a company's name, we must include it even if a more concise and unambiguous name is available".
[...] not going to convince anyone who has already noticed the conflictAnyone? So far, it's been mainly you and me, with a few comments from one or two other users sprinkled in between before they (presumably) got exhausted at this non-issue and your long-winded responses. I myself am beginning to get worn out as well, but it seems you are willing to keep this going forever.
After thinking about this some more, an RfC may be warranted after all — but for a different proposal. I think it would be beneficial for COMMONNAME to note a quasi-exception for trademarks where several styles exist with minor typographical distinctions that have virtually no effect on recognizability and searchability, in which case we should conform to the "official" legally registered style rather than inefficiently determine on a case-by-case basis which style most sources use (a faulty argument, since this is a style matter, so we are actually deferring to external style guides used by sources rather than the "common name"). This wouldn't apply only to company names, but also to product names, organizations, titles of works, building names, etc. For example,
The Godfather Part II doesn't include punctuation before "Part II" and uses Roman numerals. Neither distinction has discernible effect on recognizability and searchability, so even if some sources use The Godfather: Part 2
or The Godfather, Part II
, it is more efficient, consistent, and accurate for us to simply use the "correct" style. Of course, exceptions apply, such as when one style is overwhelmingly preferred over another (which is why this isn't an actual "exception" but more of an "additional considerations apply" situation) or when a style is expressly recommended in the MoS and its subpages (e.g. stylizations, en dashes,
WP:THE,
MOS:TITLECAPS, etc.). Would either of you support such a proposal?
InfiniteNexus (
talk) 01:14, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
When deciding how to format a trademark, editors should examine styles already in use by independent reliable sources.It's very vague, and the body doesn't elaborate, but we should continue to look at sources as the first step to see if there is an overwhelming, near-ubiquitous, unequivocally common style, before advancing to the next step of following the trademarked style. As for
a limitation to things that are legally trademarked, well, yes, that is what a "trademark" means... InfiniteNexus ( talk) 08:02, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
This page was an out-of-date trainwreck, poorly organized, and confusingly written. I've completely overhauled it, to: keep all of the original advice (even the bit subject to dispute in the thread above, but tagged as disputed); add missing but pertinent advice from other guidelines and policies (especially WP:COMMONNAME and MOS:TM; arrange material in a logical flow, with sections; provide more examples; remove a dubious example or two (e.g. one at WP:RM right now); use much clearer language; use example-formatting markup that is consistent with other guidelines; move the off-topic material about how to write a lead sentence to MOS:TM where it belongs; have much better cross-referencing to relevant policies and guidelines; etc. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:01, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
what specific issues do you want to raise with what it says?A "you should have asked permission instead of forgiveness" message tells me something about your views of revision process, but isn't pertinent as to the content. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:06, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
{{
Guideline}}
tag on (it too originated as "just an essay"); I proposed trying to salvage some parts from it, but in the end the community just deprecated it as {{
Failed proposal}}
in toto, but only about 7 years after it was created. I missed the "Bleach" dispute but have seen quite a bunch of silly ones. The whole problem of "subpages could proceed in creating policy that appeared to override the super-page’s by creating exceptions" mostly got solved in the MoS space by adding a "If any contradiction arises, this page has precedence" [over other MoS pages] codicil to the main
WP:MOS, and in the NC space by making
WP:NC, now
WP:AT, into a policy the topical NC guidelines can't override. And thus the above brouhaha; disused "guideline" wording dating largely to the mid-2000s hasn't been updated to agree with policy and other higher-consensus-level guideline requirements in many years. That disputation above does seem marked by "emotionality divorced from any pragmatics"; I don't think I've ever seen before such a spirited defense of a
WP:POLICYFORK (actually, I take that back; a wikiproject's deep desire to require capitalizing the vernacular names of species did result in a fork of
WP:NCFAUNA away from
MOS:LIFE that was zealously defended for several years and with a lot of drama). —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 19:15, 8 January 2024 (UTC)Most Historically Black Fraternities and Sororities (using Alpha Phi Alpha as an example) took as a point of pride that they as Black groups that they were able to Incorporate at the time, so they (and their members)will use "Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc." where "Alpha Tau Omega" (Historically White) would simply say Alpha Tau Omega. The general consensus in WP:FRAT wikiproject is to have it as Alpha Phi Alpha except in the header of the individual articles and in cases where the National Fraternity is specifically referenced. (John Smith became national president of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.). Comments? Naraht ( talk) 16:23, 22 December 2023 (UTC)
Several organisations are more commonly known under their acronym. UN is infinitely more common than United Nations [30]. EU is more common than European Union [31]. CDU is more common than Christian Democratic Union of Germany [32]. The present wording of the guideline – religiously based on incidence – essentially requires us to move the relevant articles to theit acronym forms. Yet it is the full form that appears more acceptable to the editors.
I hope you agree that the guideline needs to evolve so as to include such cases.
This will inform, e.g., move discussions such as this one. — kashmīrī TALK 01:55, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
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The Palm Breweries in Belgium is owned by Palm nv (legal name) but due to an acquisation since 2016 the name became Swinkels Family Brewers Belgium (trade name). Should it be renamed after the legal name or trade name? Tomaatje12 ( talk) 10:09, 26 May 2023 (UTC)
The guideline says to follow "the company's own preference" for "whether or not to include a comma prior to the legal status" and whether or not to use "the abbreviated or unabbreviated form" of "Incorporated" as "Inc." In an RM that was just closed, there was a consensus declared to not do these things and instead favor being WP:CONCISE. Please see Talk:Mars Inc.#Requested move 3 December 2023. I therefore removed the "Mars, Incorporated" example from the guideline, since that article doesn't follow the guideline anymore. Should the guideline be changed? I'm generally not a big fan of deferring to self-published material, and only expressed opposition in that RM discussion based on the idea that we should follow our guidelines. If we don't want to follow our guideline, we should change our guideline. — BarrelProof ( talk) 02:28, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
Any move request that is out of keeping with naming conventions or is otherwise in conflict with applicable guideline and policy, unless there is a very good reason to ignore rules, should be closed without moving regardless of how many of the participants support it. We are disambiguating a company name with its legal suffix; this, by definition, refers to the official name rather than common name. Small details such as "Inc." vs. "Incorporated" and comma vs. no comma are so insignificant that there is no reason to deviate from the official spelling, which is why NCCORP instructs us to simply conform to the company's preference. It's not "superfluous". Changing "Incorporated" to "Inc." or removing a comma would result in an incorrect, made-up name. No such company called "Mars Inc." exists; neither does "Mars Incorporated". I find it odd that Monsters, Inc. was cited as an exemption when work titles function exactly like company names, in that they are both trademarks. InfiniteNexus ( talk) 03:12, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
Hold your horses. The erstwhile guideline at
WP:NCCORP says, in its entirety on this matter, If the legal status is used to disambiguate, it should be included in the article title using the company's own preference for either the abbreviated or unabbreviated form (such as Caterpillar Inc.). Likewise, whether or not to include a comma prior to the legal status should be governed by company usage (compare, for example, Nike, Inc. and Apple Inc.).
This is actually a direct
WP:POLICYFORK away from all of:
WP:COMMONNAME policy (and its associated
WP:OFFICIALNAME supplement),
WP:CONCISE policy, arguably
WP:CONSISTENT policy, the
MOS:TM guideline, and every other principle of MoS that is applicable to style variations in naming things. This is not actually permissible, and I'm surprised this has existed in such wording for so long without someone noticing this problem (this has to owe to the fact that nearly no one watchlists this or makes any use of it). All of the other P&G material applies a standard of not diverging from the consistent style (which in this case would be the use of "Inc." for CONCISE reasons) unless the company's style choice dominates in independent sources (and on a style matter like this, dominates in a strong majority of them):
Wikipedia does not necessarily use the subject's "official" name as an article title; it generally prefers the name that is most commonly used (as determined by its prevalence in a significant majority of independent, reliable, English-language sources) as such names will usually best fit the five criteria listed above.
to format a trademark, editors should examine styles already in use by independent reliable sources. From among those, choose the style that most closely resembles standard English – regardless of the preference of the trademark owner.Here, neither "Inc." nor "Incorporated" are non-standard, but the abbreviated form is vastly more common, and CONCISE militates against use of the long form just to please the trademark holder. The key point is "
regardless of the preference of the trademark owner"; this is in step with
Wikipedia does not necessarily use the subject's "official" name as an article titlein AT, and with all of OFFICIALNAME.
Clearly, the disused and rarely cited NCCORP (which has barely been substantively revised in its entire existence – its whole history fits in one history page, and shows a remarkably small number of editors' input, most of it trivial) needs revision to stop forking from policy and other guidelines. It has had no non-trivial editing since 2009, and most of what it says is simply summary of (and examples pertaining to) other guidelines, which it needs to cross-reference and summarize accurately and in an updated manner. If it's not fixed, it should probably be marked with . See
#Overhaul below. PS: {{
Historical}}
And it also has no business having a "First sentence" section, which is an article content matter governed by
MOS:LEAD and for trademarks by
MOS:TM. Fixed that last bit, by sectional merge to
MOS:TM. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 10:35, 11 December 2023 (UTC); rev'd. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 16:05, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
PS: The RM at Talk:Mars Inc.#Requested move 3 December 2023 concluded in favor the WP:COMMONNAME- and WP:CONCISE-compliant title, despite multiple respondents there citing WP:NCCORP against the move. This is a good indication that the idea of NCCORP somehow codifying an exception with the language quoted above does not have consensus. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:10, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
Names of organizations and institutions (e.g. orchestras, musical ensembles and groups, concert halls, festivals, schools, etc.) should follow official usage (i.e. the spelling, punctuation, etc. used by the organization's own publications). In the case of non-English names, we use official English versions if and when they have been established by the organization itself. If not, we use the native name.". Also see WP:NCTHE: "
... the names of some musical groups: The Bangles, The Beatles ... This only applies if the definite article is used by the band on their musical publications (CDs, audiotapes, records, etc.) or on their official website." As I said above, I'm not a fan of deferring to "official" sources either. I'm pretty surprised to find that statement in WP:MUSORG, since my recollection is that we routinely avoid silly self-published stylisms for group names, per MOS:TM. — BarrelProof ( talk) 02:32, 13 December 2023 (UTC)
bow to primary sources, especially if no disambiguation is needed. But if disambiguation is needed, COMMONNAME is only one thing we consider; NATURAL is another.
it'll probably move some day, considering the many RMs in the past as you noted and the fact that not a single editor in the current RM has supported a move; I assume it will be SNOW closed momentarily to avoid wasting editors' time. InfiniteNexus ( talk) 03:29, 13 December 2023 (UTC)
The one unaddressed thing I see above is your analogy to subtitles of published works; that doesn't seem entirely unreasonable, in a "longer form of the name" way, but it's a shaky analogy at best, mostly because the full titles of a work is very common in sources about the subject (reviews, etc.), while full legal name of corporate entity usually is not (and even when a longer form than a bare name like "Mars" is given it is most often abbreviated). It really does come down mostly to independent source usage, so analogy-based arguments tend to fail at RM if they're not backed by common usage in RS. PS: Requesting a move to a title that actually complies with the P&G, even if one expects topical WP:FALSECONSENSUS resistance, is by definition not disrupting Wikipedia (to make a point or otherwise); all article titles have to comply with the article titles policy, even if it takes multiple discussions to get us there. Immediately re-RMing the same article on the basis of guideline language subject to the ongoing dispute right above is what was POINTy. I'm not sure how long that disputation is going to take to resolve, but it is clearly not resolved yet, and seems to have faltered a bit because of the holidays. Should probably be RfCed for more attention. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:49, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
COMMONNAME is not "the first part" of WP:AT, but the second (not counting the lead). It's worth re-reading, especially for: 'Wikipedia does not necessarily use the subject's "official" name as an article title; it generally prefers the name that is most commonly used (as determined by its prevalence in a significant majority of independent, reliable, English-language sources) as such names will usually best fit the five criteria listed above.' Your belief that COMMONNAME somehow ignores most of the criteria but the first one is manifestly incorrect. Also, you may not have realized this, but the criteria are in a specific priority order for a reason, established in this order of most to least importance a long time ago. They are not coequal. E.g., if something is much more RECOGNIZABLE than another name, about the same NATURALness, and sufficiently PRECISE, then it will be used even if it is not the most CONCISE form, nor CONSISTENT with the naming pattern of similar articles. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:49, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
Prefatory to an RfC on this (if we really need one), I've done the legwork to trace the entire history of the matter, so others don't have to redundantly go diff-digging for hours.
The issue
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (companies) (hereafter
WP:NCCORP) is uncommonly cited in
WP:RM or other discussions (even about article titles of companies and other organizations), and most editors seem unaware of its existence. There is presently (the main thread above this) a dispute about its wording If the legal status is used to disambiguate, it should be included in the article title using the company's own preference for either the abbreviated or unabbreviated form .... Likewise, whether or not to include a comma prior to the legal status should be governed by company usage
. Both of these deferences to a corporation's own internal preference are inconsistent with the rest of the advice here, including the entire "Default to the most common name" section, and "an integral part of the company name (as determined by usage in independent reliable sources)" later in the document. Much more importantly, it is argued to conflict with policy about how primary sources are used and our strong preference for and reliance on secondary one (see
WP:PSTS and the supporting guideline
WP:RSPRIMARY), the
WP:COMMONNAME policy in
WP:AT (often also the
WP:CONCISE part) and its
WP:OFFICIALNAME supplement, the
MOS:TM guideline (the gist of which is "never defer to corporate preferences only to what strongly dominates in independent sources"), all of which (even singularly, never mind collectively) have a vastly higher
consensus level than WP:NCCORP , which has only had about a dozen substantive editors across its entire very minimal history (nearly none of them still active). Defenders of this guideline's current wording on this (the general intent of which dates back to 2006) deny that there is any such conflict. One argument raised is that having to disambiguate in any way at all invalidates any WP:COMMONNAME consideration. A second is that
WP:NATURAL and
WP:NATURALDIS somehow require defaulting to the company's official preference. Another possible countervailing factor is
WP:ABOUTSELF (though it addresses claims made and cited in the article body, not the titling of the article). A fourth idea was that WP:COMMONNAME equates directly to
WP:RECOGNIZABLE and can be overridden by any of the other
WP:CRITERIA. These objections seem to have been addressed entirely (in my opinion) but some of them have been recurrent anyway.
The issue of confusion sown by this deference to corporate primary sources and the incompatibility of this idea with other WP:P&G material was first (that I can identify) raised as early as 6 March 2008 [2], by TJ Spyke. So this is not a new concern, just one that has come to the fore, especially in the wake of a pair of back-to-back WP:RM discussions about the title of Mars Inc., in which the preferences of the erstwhile guideline material in this page have been rejected, despite spirited argument in their defense. But let's go over the history of this page in considerable detail.
Relevant page history and prior discussion
WP:NCCORP has been tagged with {{
Guideline}}
since 9 March 2006
[3], by
Reflex Reaction. I have been unable to locate any
WP:PROPOSAL process for making this a guideline in the first place, though there was
WP:Naming conventions (companies)/poll, about its details, opened also by Reflex Reaction, and running from 10 February – 5 March 2006, with a little over a dozen respondents (the only editors from that original poll who are still active are
ChrisRuvolo,
Masonbarge,
DS1953,
Golbez,
PedanticallySpeaking,
Lar and (within about a year)
TheGrappler,
Quadell,
TreyHarris, and
Noisy). This discussion was "intended to determine the naming conventions for businesses, corporations, ... and other types of legal statuses for companies" and "to achieve a naming convention consensus, or at least a sizeable majority vote". But at no point was it proposed as a
guideline, as far as I can find. The word "guideline", in fact, appears nowhere in that entire discussion. However, just "declaring" things to be guidelines was common in that early era of Wikipedia, and no one has challenged its guideline designation in the intervening years. This discussion is not a proposal to "demote" it (though such has sometimes been the result anyway, e.g. at
MOS:COMPUTING, when the material appears to be irredeemable
instruction creep after a community examination of it). Most of WP:NCCORP appears to have consensus and to be useful.
Nothing like the language that is the subject of this dispute was present in the early versions of the page, including when it was first designated with {{Guideline}}
[4]. The first version of something vaguely similar to the disputed wording was [with punctuation corrected here]: "company", "international", "group", "industries", or similar suffixes are not legal statuses and should be included as specified by the originating business.
, added shortly after the {{Guideline}}
tagging. This was a unilateral change by Reflex Reaction; while the 2006 poll included
9 editors who supported the idea of following "company preference" specifically in regard to abbreviations of corporate legal-status designators like "Incorporated" and "Limited", there was zero discussion regarding "suffixes" that are not legal-status designators. Later in 2006, Reflex Reaction applied this idea to corporate designations as well
[5] (which was at least supported by the poll, unlike the first assertion about "suffixes"). In the same year, Relfex Reaction again unilaterally extended this "company preference" idea, to include whether or not to use a comma between company name and legal status
[6].
Following a 2009 talk-page "discussion" which consisted of
J~enwiki saying what they wanted to do and getting no feedback of any kind from anyone
[7], they quite substantively changed this material to be much more emphatically deferential to corporate primary sources: If the legal status is used to disambiguate, it should be included in the article title based on the specific preference for the abbreviated or unabbreviated form as promoted by the company .... Likewise, whether or not to include a
comma prior to the legal status should be governed by company preference
[8]. This was arguably not procedurally invalid, under the "
silence equals consent" principle (though it
has substantial criticism when it comes to policy & guideline material). But it does indicate that there is no affirmative consensus for this.
Outright opposition was raised 13 May 2010 by
Skookum1: It's unwise to play into the hands of marketing people's manipulations of search engine parameters....
[9]. J-enwiki's version was somewhat softened in tone but not substantive meaning by
Jæs in April 2010
[10], to say "as prefered by the company" and "should be governed by company usage". Part of it was tweaked again in October 2010 by
Nurg to "using the company's own preference"
[11].
A proposal in November 2011 by Jheiv to switch to a convention of using full corporate names was rejected – for reasons that are remarkably salient here when it comes to "company preference":
We generally use the common name of subjects for the titles. Why do it differently for companies? ... consistency is important. A name change because of rebranding won't necessarily mean the title of the article should change—it would change only if RS reflected the change. ... to be consistent we should be using the common name, not doing something different just for company names. What is special about company names?
No need to do it differently here - and there's no reason you can't introduce the article with a bolded Full name as it is.
If there is a name that can be identitifed as being most commonly used then using that best meets readers' expectations. Companies do not change their names that often and even if they did that doesn't mean the company's selected name will be the name that is most commonly used. And if the common name changes it's no biggie to change the article title.
We go with the most common names of entities generally. Yes this is somewhat subjective sometimes (not usually) and the proposer's point that this sometimes leads to time wasted on figuring out the correct title occasionally is well taken, but I wonder if the cure isn't worse than the disease here.
Wikipedia is ... consistently reflecting in the title of each article the most common name used to refer to the topic of that article. Official/legal/formal names, on the other hand, are normally reflected in the lead sentence of the article. Yes, that means titles have to be changed when the common name for the topic changes, and some times the most common name is not obvious and discussion is required .... This proposal would undermine this valuable feature, for very little reason.
We're an encyclopedia for everyday people, and should use the common names generally in effect.
Unnecessary deviation from WP:COMMONNAME principle. The "the common name of companies is so subjective" could potentially be applied against any topic. That's the whole reason we have Wikipedia:Search engine test.
In summary
NCCORP has attracted little interest, use in actual RM discussions, or further substantive editing since 2011, until the recent dispute above erupted (and I incidentally did a cleanup pass on the page, without affecting the disputed portion). Probably due to the year-end holidays, the matter has yet to be resolved with a consensus on what the disputed section should actually be saying. PS: Someone in the discussion above pointed out that WP:MUSORG seems to have a similar issue, so that should be addressed after this is resolved. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:51, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia does not necessarily use the subject's "official" name as an article title. Common names are always preferred, as noted in NCCORP, but that is not to say that we should never defer to official names. I'll give an example: whether to include "The" in the names of periodicals. It doesn't matter if some sources write "The Los Angeles Times" ( [12] [13]), or "the New York Times" ( [14] [15]); we include "The" in the article title if that is part of its name. Why? Because the inclusion or omission of the word "the", or the inclusion or omission of a comma (or any other punctuation), has little to no effect on an article title's recognizability or searchability. You think referencing official names is a problem restricted to NCCORP and MUSORG? Wait till you read WP:THE, which makes extensive reference to official names. Is that guideline is also rarely cited, out of date, and unknown to most editors?If you omit the comma in a company name that includes a comma, you are using an incorrect name, not a more "concise" version. If you arbritrarily abbreviate a part of a company's name when it is not abbreviated, you are using an incorrect name. Because these distinctions are so minor and easy to miss, not only is it irrelevant to recognizability or searchability (as noted above), but it is also not surprising that sources sometimes overlook this. Why would we want to replicate that error on Wikipedia? Arguably, this is merely a matter of styling, whether to include a comma or abbreviations or the word "the". Many style guides actually have guidance on how to render company names. But we all know that Wikipedia follows its own house style.No one has also claimed that the other CRITERIA "overrides" COMMONNAME, only that one does not supersede the others. The idea that "XXX (company)" is preferable to an official name is puzzling, considering WP:NATURAL specifically acknowledges that natural names may not be the most common opion. And WP:RECOGNIZABLE redirects to WP:COMMONNAME, so I am not sure what your point was. MOS:TM is about quirks like stylization and capitalization, irrelevant to this discussion. TL;DR: The "official names" clause does not contravene Wikipedia's other policies and guidelines. COMMONNAME does not prohibit the use of official names, only preferring common ones if available. InfiniteNexus ( talk) 18:47, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
Long point-by-point response to IN
|
---|
Diffs and direct quotes don't lie. I did it this way for a reason, and pinged every single still-active editor involved; if I've somehow gotten their position wrong, they can tell me so themselves. Re-notifying every editor who is still around, regardless what their position was in prior discussions, is in no way canvassing. This entire discussion is and only is about NCCORP saying to defer to company preference when disambiguating non-parenthetically. There is no question about that. InfiniteNexus keeps repeating this fact (which no one has questioned and which I've said clearly myself) in various wording as if it is some kind of argument in favor of deferring to company practice, but that's nonsensical circular reasoning. "I'm not really sure what the purpose of quoting seven users from the 2011 discussion was" is disingenuous silliness; the reason was stated plainly, that the rationales provided "Contrary to popular belief, WP:COMMONNAME does not prohibit the usage of official names": there is no such "popular belief", and one would have to be very, very confused to hold such a belief, since the official name (usually without corporation-type legal designator) as used by the company is in the vast majority of cases also the common name. This debate is about the exceptions, when editors come to agreement to use some form of that designator as a disambiguator instead of using a parenthetical. What WP:COMMONNAME does do is effectively prohibit use of an official name when it is not the common name and in turn not the most common disambiguation; this is covered in more detail at the supplement
WP:OFFICIALNAME#Valid use of official names. Notice that there is no entry there along the lines of "automatically use the official name if you have to disambiguate" (or even "if you have to disambiguate in a particular way)". InfiniteNexus seems to believe that both the
WP:CRITERIA and
WP:PSTS go out the window any time disambiguation has to occur (or perhaps when it is occurring in a particular format), but of course there is no basis for this. OFFICIALNAME is particular is very clear: "that is not to say that we should never defer to official names": this is wrongheaded. WP will most often use an official name, when it is the most common, which is most of the time; if we have to disambiguate and choose not to do so parenthetically, then the most common non-ambiguous form is what will be chosen, and this really has jack to do with how the company officially prefers to write it (abbreviated or not, with a comma or not), unless that coincidentally is also the most common form in RS (which it usually is, but often is not when the company prefers the longwinded "Incorporated" or "Limited", in which case sources usually use an abbreviation, and they almost always punctuate it, abbreviated or not, according to their own style guide. It's only about what the independent sources do. There is no "deferring" to "official" anything in any of this decisionmaking, and that is where NCCORP has become broken and incompatible with policy and practice. Titles of publication have nothing of any kind to do with this, and are governed by a separate guideline, MOS:TITLES; they are not corporations. (The corporation that publishes a periodical may have a similar or even the same name, but the legal entity and the work are distinct topics governed by different rules.) This this has been explained to InfiniteNexus before, but he is playing WP:IDHT. Also, The Chicago Manual of Style explicitly rejects IN's analogy logic, which someone else tried with them before [16] (click "Answer" below the first question there). Next, WP:THE says "These conditions are sometimes met" ("sometimes" being the key word) when the official name of something starts with "The", which is about the base name before disambiguation, has no connection to the subject under discussion here, and cannot be generalized into "defer to company preference" in anything else. It's a special exception. The "sometimes" condition is also not considered met unless (and this is important here) the independent reliable sources go along with it also. Thus we have The Hershey Company, because sources rarely use just "Herhey Company", but we have Ohio State University despite that organization's insistence that it is officially The Ohio State University, a redirect – sources mostly just do not go along with it [17] [18] [19]. "If you omit the comma in a company name that includes a comma, you are using an incorrect name": This is a weird advocacy position, which is not going to be shared by any linguist, professional writer/editor, or much of anyone, anywhere. It's exactly equivalent to saying that if WP uses "Sammy Davis Jr." instead of "Sammy Davis, Jr.", if The New York Times writes "M.I.T." instead of " MIT" (which they do [20]), if you choose to write "Sir Ian McKellen CH KBE" instead of "Sir Ian McKellen, CH KBE", that these are all "errors" because they don't match the preferences of the subject. Balderdash. The only significance this punctuation has at all is that in some jurisdictions if it was present in the company's corporate registration then it must continue to be used in contracts and in legal filings with the government [21]. That's it. Some companies change style over time as far as their public-facing usage goes, or simply do not consistently use one spelling or the other in in public (e.g. Facebook before Meta, see [22] with "Facebook, Inc.", versus [23] with "Facebook Inc."). They are otherwise entirely matters of house style, and ours is generally to opt for concision. I can easily see a WP consensus coming to omit these commas in every case, but the current status quo is (let's see if a certain someone can pick up on the running theme here) to follow the dominant usage in reliable sources for the subject in question, as with everything else to do with corporate naming (per MOS:TM). This just came up in the back-to-back RMs at Talk:Mars Inc. and it did not go the way InfiniteNexus argued, but he just doesn't want to hear it and keeps circling back to the same already-rejected argument. Let's see if he'll hear reliable sources on English usage and writing:
"sources sometimes overlook this": No, sources have explicit style manuals that tell them to omit the comma, to abbreviate, to not use legal designations at all, and so on. IN's supposition that it's a random mistake is not just
WP:OR but disproved. (Yes, there are also some that say "do what company wants", too; the point is that this is provably and entirely a house-style matter, with the sole exception of legal documents within certain jurisdictions.) Stunningly, IN next tells us: "Arguably, this is merely a matter of styling" and "Many style guides actually have guidance on how to render company names" and "we all know that Wikipedia follows its own house style": Yes! So how is it even possible for IN to not understand that this is just a style matter, but to instead conclude that doing anything other than his bureaucratic and primary-source-dependent preference is "incorrect" and an "error"? It defies all evidence and reasoning, including
even his own. "No one has also claimed that the other CRITERIA 'overrides' COMMONNAME": Wrong; it's quite frequent for editors to incorrectly claim that COMMONNAME is simply a restatement of and elaboration on RECOGNIZABILITY in CRITERIA and therefore subordinate to it. "only that one does not supersede the others": finally a correct statement (aside from the strange plural). "The idea that 'XXX (company)' is preferable to an official name is puzzling": What's puzzling is IN bringing this up; such a name is preferable in some cases and not in others (depends on – guess what? – predominant usage in independent RS; if RS does not often use the corporate designator in one form of another then it should be at "CorpName (company)" or a similar parenthetical, thus
Wiley (publisher)), and the parts of NCCORP that are not broken already make this clear, and everyone seems to understand and agree with it. "[WP:NATURAL specifically acknowledges that natural names may not be the most common opion": A serious misstatement; IN is trying to imply that commonness is no longer a consideration if natural disambiguation is employed, but if mispresenting the material badly: "MOS:TM is about quirks like stylization and capitalization, irrelevant to this discussion": We've been over this before, so IN simply playing IDHT and proof by assertion games again, as usual. Exactly how to spell-out/abbreviate and punctuate these things is (I just proved it, remember?) a "style quirk", and MOS:TM being the guideline that governs trademarks (including company names) and everything like them, it is obviously and necessarily not only relevant but the most relevant guideline we have. Over and over again it says to do what is done in the prepondernance of independent RS; that really is the entire point of it. "The 'official names' clause does not contravene Wikipedia's other policies and guidelines." I've demonstrated clearly that it doesn, but obviously this is a question for the community. "COMMONNAME does not prohibit the use of official names": straw man; no one ever suggested it did; it requires using the most common name, or failing that, either using the most common longer form that can serve as a natural disambiguation or switching to parenthetical disambiguation. Nothing about it suggests deferring to company preference at WP:OFFICIALNAME is all about not doing that, as is MOS:TM. The only support anywhere for doing anything like for companies is WP:THE, but it is strictly confined to the question of a leading The. "only preferring common ones if available": this is the root of IN's failure to make his case: he believes that commonness of the name is somehow magically made irrelevant if the most common name turns out to not be the best choice due to ambiguity. But WP:NATURALDIS and WP:OFFICIALNAME both tell us very clearly that is wrong. IN just refuses to absorb it. PS: "And
WP:RECOGNIZABLE redirects to
WP:COMMONNAME": Someone's been screwing with the redirects (probably longer ago than I realize); I notice that
WP:NATURAL now also goes to where
WP:NATURALDIS does. What used to happen is that the former in both cases went to the
WP:CRITERIA line items about them, and this should not have changed since it will render many archived discussions confusing, and is confusing for editors used to the original targets (just as many people keep doing
WP:CONSISTENCY which got turned into an internal DAB page when they mean the target of
WP:CONSISTENT). The specific-CRITERIA links that still work are
WP:RECOGNIZABILITY and
WP:NATURALNESS. |
Tesla, Inc., also written as Tesla Inc. ..., so the discrepancy would have to remain. One more thing: if you really, really, really, really plan on opening an RfC if this dispute is not resolved by the end of this discussion, I would suggest that you present a draft for editors to review or have a third party write it. RfCs are supposed to be neutral and factual, not riddled with false statements such as the claim that NCCORP requires us
to default to the official name, any time the most common name is ambiguous and editors don't want to use parenthetical disambiguation(incorrect/misleading; NCCORP says to follow the official styling when using the legal suffix to disambiguate). InfiniteNexus ( talk) 23:16, 9 January 2024 (UTC)
If the legal status is used to disambiguate, it should be included in the article title using the company's own preference for either the abbreviated or unabbreviated form .... Likewise, whether or not to include a comma prior to the legal status should be governed by company usage. That exactly agrees with my description of this as defaulting to official names when using natural disambiguation. Your own summary of it is another way to put it (other than confusing "status" and "suffix"; the guideline is using those terms to mean different things). However, your version is very sharply at odds with your insistence that any variant style (abbreviated or not, comma or not) is a "different name" and thus an "error", "wrong", "incorrect", etc. You're trying to have it both ways: shoot out every argument that occurs whether it's self-contradictory or not as long as it may help sow enough FUD to prevent the rectification of this awful idea of bowing to primary sources. "it makes no sense to ... remove punctuation": Maybe not to you, but it does to others (including the "real world", e.g. AP Stylebook, etc.) You point out we do it (as most modern publishers do) with "Jr." names, and so on. So "it makes no sense" isn't sustainable. "the discrepancy would have to remain": As you say yourself, "the inclusion/omission of a comma are so minor, they would have virtually no effect on commonness or recognizability", ergo there is no reason to care. This is exactly analogous to Bob Odenkirk beginning with "Robert John Odenkirk", and MoS having a rule to not write "Robert John Odenkirk, best known as Bob Odenkirk", because it's obvious they're the same topic. It would be an order of magnitude more obvious that "Tesla, Inc." and "Tesla Inc." are the same topic. While I would prefer that this be treated as purely a style matter, it is unclear what the project-wide appetite for that would be.
Practically speaking, we really only have three options here, any time a legal status appears in the name (for being part of the actual most common name, which rarely is true, or much more often being a natural disambiguator):
an exception to normal policy and OFFICIALANAME. It is hypocritical of you to accuse me of IDHT when I have repeated again and again that a comma vs. no comma, and
Incorporatedvs.
Inc., are negligible distinctions that have zero effect on recognizability/searchability or concision. "Tesla, Inc." is just as recognizable as "Tesla Inc.", search engines do not care, and removing punctuation (or just anything in general) mid-sentence is not what CONCISE aims to accomplish. This is classic wikilawyering. If you want to propose a clause in MoS to standardize all instances of
Inc., just as we do with
Jr., that's a different matter, but you can't pretend the guideline already exists and therefore NCCORP is a breach of "normal policy".The point of my Tesla example was to show that overturning NCCORP would create apparent errors, especially in the eyes of readers. Readers who read "Robert John Odenkirk" on an article called "Robert Odenkirk" easily recognize that "John" is what's called a middle name, since it is common knowledge (at least, in the English-speaking world) that middle names are usually omitted. Here, we're talking about a comma in a corporate legal status suffix — quite the niche topic. Sure, you can argue that not every reader may be as pedantic or attentive to details such as commas, but it is almost guaranteed that there would be confusion. ("Is the article title wrong? Is there a typo in the lead? What is the actual name? Which spelling should the infobox title use?") But this is the type of thing that the MoS shouldn't enforce ( WP:MOSBLOAT and all that) — the status quo isn't hurting anyone, and a change wouldn't help anyone. InfiniteNexus ( talk) 23:15, 11 January 2024 (UTC)
Whenever possible, common usage is preferred [...] in some limited cases, Corporation may also be a key part of the company's name in common usage, rather than simply as a designator of its official legal status.It doesn't say anything about "if Corporation is part of a company's name, we must include it even if a more concise and unambiguous name is available".
[...] not going to convince anyone who has already noticed the conflictAnyone? So far, it's been mainly you and me, with a few comments from one or two other users sprinkled in between before they (presumably) got exhausted at this non-issue and your long-winded responses. I myself am beginning to get worn out as well, but it seems you are willing to keep this going forever.
After thinking about this some more, an RfC may be warranted after all — but for a different proposal. I think it would be beneficial for COMMONNAME to note a quasi-exception for trademarks where several styles exist with minor typographical distinctions that have virtually no effect on recognizability and searchability, in which case we should conform to the "official" legally registered style rather than inefficiently determine on a case-by-case basis which style most sources use (a faulty argument, since this is a style matter, so we are actually deferring to external style guides used by sources rather than the "common name"). This wouldn't apply only to company names, but also to product names, organizations, titles of works, building names, etc. For example,
The Godfather Part II doesn't include punctuation before "Part II" and uses Roman numerals. Neither distinction has discernible effect on recognizability and searchability, so even if some sources use The Godfather: Part 2
or The Godfather, Part II
, it is more efficient, consistent, and accurate for us to simply use the "correct" style. Of course, exceptions apply, such as when one style is overwhelmingly preferred over another (which is why this isn't an actual "exception" but more of an "additional considerations apply" situation) or when a style is expressly recommended in the MoS and its subpages (e.g. stylizations, en dashes,
WP:THE,
MOS:TITLECAPS, etc.). Would either of you support such a proposal?
InfiniteNexus (
talk) 01:14, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
When deciding how to format a trademark, editors should examine styles already in use by independent reliable sources.It's very vague, and the body doesn't elaborate, but we should continue to look at sources as the first step to see if there is an overwhelming, near-ubiquitous, unequivocally common style, before advancing to the next step of following the trademarked style. As for
a limitation to things that are legally trademarked, well, yes, that is what a "trademark" means... InfiniteNexus ( talk) 08:02, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
This page was an out-of-date trainwreck, poorly organized, and confusingly written. I've completely overhauled it, to: keep all of the original advice (even the bit subject to dispute in the thread above, but tagged as disputed); add missing but pertinent advice from other guidelines and policies (especially WP:COMMONNAME and MOS:TM; arrange material in a logical flow, with sections; provide more examples; remove a dubious example or two (e.g. one at WP:RM right now); use much clearer language; use example-formatting markup that is consistent with other guidelines; move the off-topic material about how to write a lead sentence to MOS:TM where it belongs; have much better cross-referencing to relevant policies and guidelines; etc. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:01, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
what specific issues do you want to raise with what it says?A "you should have asked permission instead of forgiveness" message tells me something about your views of revision process, but isn't pertinent as to the content. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:06, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
{{
Guideline}}
tag on (it too originated as "just an essay"); I proposed trying to salvage some parts from it, but in the end the community just deprecated it as {{
Failed proposal}}
in toto, but only about 7 years after it was created. I missed the "Bleach" dispute but have seen quite a bunch of silly ones. The whole problem of "subpages could proceed in creating policy that appeared to override the super-page’s by creating exceptions" mostly got solved in the MoS space by adding a "If any contradiction arises, this page has precedence" [over other MoS pages] codicil to the main
WP:MOS, and in the NC space by making
WP:NC, now
WP:AT, into a policy the topical NC guidelines can't override. And thus the above brouhaha; disused "guideline" wording dating largely to the mid-2000s hasn't been updated to agree with policy and other higher-consensus-level guideline requirements in many years. That disputation above does seem marked by "emotionality divorced from any pragmatics"; I don't think I've ever seen before such a spirited defense of a
WP:POLICYFORK (actually, I take that back; a wikiproject's deep desire to require capitalizing the vernacular names of species did result in a fork of
WP:NCFAUNA away from
MOS:LIFE that was zealously defended for several years and with a lot of drama). —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 19:15, 8 January 2024 (UTC)Most Historically Black Fraternities and Sororities (using Alpha Phi Alpha as an example) took as a point of pride that they as Black groups that they were able to Incorporate at the time, so they (and their members)will use "Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc." where "Alpha Tau Omega" (Historically White) would simply say Alpha Tau Omega. The general consensus in WP:FRAT wikiproject is to have it as Alpha Phi Alpha except in the header of the individual articles and in cases where the National Fraternity is specifically referenced. (John Smith became national president of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.). Comments? Naraht ( talk) 16:23, 22 December 2023 (UTC)
Several organisations are more commonly known under their acronym. UN is infinitely more common than United Nations [30]. EU is more common than European Union [31]. CDU is more common than Christian Democratic Union of Germany [32]. The present wording of the guideline – religiously based on incidence – essentially requires us to move the relevant articles to theit acronym forms. Yet it is the full form that appears more acceptable to the editors.
I hope you agree that the guideline needs to evolve so as to include such cases.
This will inform, e.g., move discussions such as this one. — kashmīrī TALK 01:55, 16 February 2024 (UTC)