Wikipedia:Naming conventions (schools)
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Version 1:
- Convention: school article titles should use the full official name of the school as provided by the school itself. If there are other school articles that would have the same name, to disambiguate, the most general location should be added as a qualifier in parenthesis.
Version 2:
- School articles titles should use the most common name for the school that does not conflict with the names of other schools. If there are other school articles that would have the same name, to disambiguate, the most general location should be added as a qualifier in parentheses.
Consider that some names of schools are so obviously generic (example: "Alternative High School" or "National Sport School"), that even if one can't yet find a school with the exact same name (using Google or other means), it often makes sense to qualify the name appropriately to avoid renaming later on.
Articles on schools preferably don't start with a definite article - this is similar as for universities, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (definite and indefinite articles at beginning of name)#When definite and indefinite articles should be avoided.
[edit] History and scope
This guideline stems from discussion at Wikipedia talk:Notability (schools)/Archive 3#Sidetrack: School article names in November 2005; a straw poll advertised on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions and Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Style issues determined that parentheses are appropriate to disambiguate schools with the same name. The content was split into the current page from Wikipedia:Schools in February 2006. In April 2006 the latter page was marked as obsolete.
The guideline was historically intended to address naming issues in primary and secondary schools, many of which have identical names and were accepted into Wikipedia only recently. It is disputed whether such a guideline should apply to colleges and universities as well. For more information, see the talk page.
[edit] Overview
| Generic school article title | [[Official School Name]] |
| Two articles with the same official school name | [[Official School Name (Country A)]] [[Official School Name (Country B)]] |
| Two articles with the same official school name in the same country | [[Official School Name (State/Province/City-if-no-State A)]] [[Official School Name (State/Province/City-if-no-State B)]] |
| Three articles with the same official school name, two in one country, one in another | [[Official School Name (State/Province/City-if-no-State A, Country A)]] [[Official School Name (State/Province/City-if-no-State B, Country A)]] [[Official School Name (Country B)]] |
| Three articles with the same official school name, in the same country, in the same province. | For example, states in the United States: [[Official School Name (City A, State)]] [[Official School Name (City B, State)]] [[Official School Name (City C, State)]] —note that there is no need to specify country, but simply disambiguating by City is too specific. |
