Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (companies)

What if the legal name is different from trade name?

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)

Trading names are usually also the common names. If the company is called (by people) the latter name, that should be the article name. The name on paper is rarely relevant enough for the title. IceWelder [✉] 14:03, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Use of comma and abbreviation of Incorporated

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)

What should happen is that a follow-up RM be initiated to overturn the recent one, which blatantly violates NCCORP. WP:RMNOMIN states: 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)

Pinging @SMcCandlish for additional comment before I open a follow-up RM. InfiniteNexus (talk) 03:29, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

If you're unhappy with the way the RM was closed, maybe you should consider an MR (after consulting with the closer, who was not SMcCandlish) rather than just submitting another RM. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 05:11, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

MR is for misreadings of consensus. The consensus in the prior RM was clearly in favor of a move, but it was misguided. InfiniteNexus (talk) 06:10, 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):

• WP:COMMONAME 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.
• MOS:TM 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 title in AT, and with all of OFFICIALNAME.
• In short, this comes down to independent source usage, and if there is any doubt, the default is that it leans per policy toward concision, and per guideline toward dominant or "standard" English which for such things also favors concision.

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 {{Historical}}. See #Overhaul below. PS: 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)

• Update - Agreed… it is time to update this so it is more in sync with COMMONNAME and other guidelines with broader acceptance. Favoring the “official” typography may have been what we did 20 years ago, but it is not how things are done today Blueboar (talk) 16:25, 11 December 2023 (UTC).

  This is not about common vs. uncommon name, and MOS:TM says to ignore weird quirks such as unusual capitalization or special characters. InfiniteNexus (talk) 18:48, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

  It's demonstrably about COMMONNAME (and its WP:OFFICIALNAME supplement) in many cases, including the Mars one this opened with. "Mars Inc." clearly dominates in indepenent source material [1]. And it's about MOS:TM, which is more general that you think: "When deciding how to format a trademark, editors should examine styles already in use by independent reliable sources. ... only names that are consistently styled a particular way by a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are styled that way in Wikipedia." I.e., it's agreeing with COMMONNAME and OFFICIALNAME. That the bulk of the examples deal with unusual style quirks is immaterial to the central point here (MOSTM covers all those quibbles because such matters kept coming up in "Well, what about this case?" fashion and needed to be addressed.) The central point is that WP does not bow to primary sources; this is a cornerstone of our core content policies, and of WP:AT policy, and it is reflected strongly across our style guidelines and other guidlines. Oh, except this one. Someone snuck in a personal preference for "obeying" corporate name-styling preferences years ago, and this page is so dis-used that no one noticed until now.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:25, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

  See WP:MUSORG: "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)

  (Responded to SMcCandlish below, this one is for BarrelProof) I'm not a fan of deferring to official sources either, nor does anyone — that directly goes against COMMONNAME. But if disambiguation is needed, and the official name provides a suitable method of natural disambiguation, we should absolutely go for it as long as some sources use it. (An excellent example is Amazon (company) — why don't we use the official name as natural disambiguation? Because absolutely no one on the planet says "Amazon.com, Inc.", or is even aware that is the company's legal name) What we should not do is pretend that something is the official name of a subject — that's what we're doing with Mars, readers will look at the fake legal suffix and assume that "Mars Inc." is the official name of the company. InfiniteNexus (talk) 03:38, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

• You don't seem to be understanding the problem. You are trying to use a descriptive disambiguation masquerading as a legal suffix. If you understand this concept with titles of works, such as preserving the styling of Monsters, Inc., then you should be able to understand this with company names. CONCISE means the shortest possible name that is also correct, for example "Mars" (which obviously wouldn't work). As such, we have no choice but to use the official name rather than the common name, which is not "Mars Inc." or "Mars, Inc." or "Mars Incorporated", but "Mars, Incorporated". You can't just make up a legal suffix and pretend that it's part of the proper name. This is like arguing that Tony Leung Chiu-wai should be moved to Tony C. Leung — that isn't the subject's name, but you're trying to pretend it is. The idea that Wikipedia editors can arbitrarily modify a trademarked name (that isn't a stylization nor a breach of our MoS) is bizarre. What's next, moving The Walt Disney Company to Disney Inc.? Because according to your logic, as long as a company is a corporation, we can arbitrarily attach "Inc." to its common name. InfiniteNexus (talk) 18:46, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

  'example "Mars" (which obviously wouldn't work)' - Well, Mars (company) would, and it already redirects there. It's actually a more usual disambiguation pattern than tacking on the corporate classification. 'This is like arguing that Tony Leung Chiu-wai should be moved to Tony C. Leung': But of course it's nothing like that at all. Using farcical false analogies does not help your argument in any way.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:34, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

• What the — you actually just sent The Walt Disney Company to RM?! Thank goodness the !voters there are showing some sense. InfiniteNexus (talk) 18:48, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

  Of course I did; the current name is contrary to mutiple policies and guidelines. I didn't expect it to pass, given previous RMs; there's a "camp" of editors who badly want this at the long name for some reason. But it'll probably move some day. The arguments against moving it to Disney are silly. The main one is "users could also be looking for Walt Disney"; that is what hatnotes are for. The other one is that the "official name" is The Walt Disney Company, but we do not use official names, we use the WP:COMMONNAME which is overwhelmingly and provably just "Disney" (see also WP:OFFICIALNAME and MOS:TM which, while it covers mostly typographical quibbles, is making entirely the same point: the company's "official" preference is irrelevant). On top of that, we do not use a leading "The", per WP:THE and lots of MoS provisions, unless sources independent of the subject overwhelmingly prefer it for that name, but they actually demonstrably prefer just "Disney". And we don't use something like "Company" or "Inc." or "Ltd", again, unless indy sources near-universally do it for that case, but they don't: they use "Disney"; a potential exception is when it's useful for disambiguation, but only a guideline recommends this at all, while WP:AT#Disambiguation policy would have us prefer parenthetical (since comma disambiguation doesn't apply here); tacking on "Company" can't really be natural disambiguation if the natural name in indy sources is simply "Disney"; there's a reason that "(company)" (or something more specific like "(publisher)" or "(American company)" when necessary) is the more common disambiguation pattern. By your reasoning, Sony should move immediately to Sony Group Corporation, and Microsoft to Microsoft Corporation, but this will never happen, because there is not a weird faction of editors sitting on those pages urging for page titles that are contrary to the WP:P&G about such matters. Disney is a weird case that a few people are trying to IAR for reasons that don't track.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:49, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

  This comment and the one above regarding Mars (company) demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of WP:AT, which is alarming considering your deep involvement in article titles. Being commonly recognizable is only one of the five WP:CRITERIA, another of which is naturalness. WP:NATURAL, which deals specifically with disambiguation, delves into this further, noting that the most natural name may not be the most common name. So although "Disney" and "Mars" are the COMMONNAMEs, we first consider naturally disambiguating them before jumping to parentheses. This is why Meta Platforms and Paramount Global were moved to those titles when they changed their names recently, despite those expanded forms not being the most common names. The same concept applies to titles of works, as seen at WP:SUBTITLE: if a work has a subtitle, it is preferable to use that as disambiguation rather than parentheses, even if most sources omit it.

  As I have noted above, naturally disambiguating a proper name by definition disregards the most common name. Mars, Incorporated was already naturally disambiguated and common enough, so it should not have been moved to a made-up name. We can make things up if it's a common noun or descriptor, but we're now asserting that "Inc." (note the capitalization) is part of the company's name, which is false. The Sony and Microsoft examples are irrelevant — those are primary topics and do not require disambiguation. As for MOS:TM, no one is calling for articles to blindly 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.

  I'm not sure why you posted the Disney comment here instead of at the actual RM. And if you knew beforehand it was unlikely to pass, I'm not sure why you would send it to RM anyway, especially if you didn't have additional arguments that hadn't raised before. As you must know, disrupting Wikipedia to illustrate a point is not constructive. I also find it hard to imagine that 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)

  If you do not have additional comment, I will proceed with the Mars RM. InfiniteNexus (talk) 22:41, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

  Done; see Talk:Mars Inc.#Requested move 31 December 2023. InfiniteNexus (talk) 19:43, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

  Yes, and it's not going as you hoped. Most of what you say above has been addressed at the RM, including your novel and curious theory that "naturally disambiguating a proper name by definition disregards the most common name". It does not; it almost invariably uses a longer but also demonstrably common form of that same name (just as the naturally disambiguated Manx cat is a longer form the ambiguous "Manx", which is all someone would say/write in a cat-specific context). In most cases, it resolves to the secondmost common form. But what you've done with Mars is proposed a move to the least common form, against various policy provisions and other matter, so the WP:SNOWBALL forming there was predictable (despite prominent discussion here encouraging watchers of this page to rush over a pile on).

  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)

There is a potential crisis in just summarizing the first part of a policy without noting many of the critical and vital exceptions. The official Wikipedia policy on article titles is that "Article titles should be recognizable, concise, natural, precise, and consistent" and while this often refers to the WP:COMMONNAME that is only a small segment of our policy on article titles and this will only satisfy the first principle of recognizable while demoting the other principles. Sometimes the best name is when a WP:NATURAL but less than common name makes for a natural disambiguation because principles of being precise are important to avoid ambiguation and because using brackets like "Common Name (company)" is not a natural way to disambiguate at all. Jorahm (talk) 18:30, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

We do not use "less than common names"; a natural disambiguation is always a common name, just not the most common name. Review the actual wording at WP:NATURALDIS: 'Using an alternative name that the subject is also commonly called in English reliable sources, albeit not as commonly as the preferred-but-ambiguous title, is sometimes preferred. However, do not use obscure ... names.' Many company names with a corporate designation tacked on are in fact obscure. The vast majority of our articles are parenthetically disambiguated, and this is always preferred over using a name that someone incorrectly thinks is "natural" in some way (e.g. in structure) but which is demonstrably not actually common in independnent source material (i.e. is not actually natural, otherwise it would be in wider use). This is why bios are usually (whether you think it natural or not) parenthetically disambiguated as "Jane Smith (composer)" not done as "Jane X. Smith", unless for that specific person their middle initial is in fact quite common in the RS material, making it an actually natural disambiguation with which readers (at least ones interested in the topic) could reasonably be expected to be familiar with. That same principle applies here, and is why companies are usually disambiguated with "(company)" or a more specific parenthetical equivalent like "(publisher)" or whatever, not with a corporate designator; in most cases the designator being tacked on is not commonly used in RS, and the average reader has no idea which one actually applies to the entity they are looking for. (Much less which exact spelling – abbreviated or not, with a comma or not, with a dot or not in the case of "Ltd[.]", and so on.)

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)

• Update - The guidelines are outdated and should be changed to reflect current practice, which is more in line with WP:COMMONNAME and WP:CONCISE. Nosferattus (talk) 15:14, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

  As explained in great detail above, COMMONNAME is not relevant as this is a style issue. Whether we use a comma in the article title will have virtually no impact on the five WP:CRITERIA: recognizability, consistency, naturalness, concision, and precision. As far as I can tell, the "current practice" is also the one documented by NCCORP, that is, to follow the official usage. Changing NCCORP would entail the mass move of multiple articles. InfiniteNexus (talk) 08:40, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

Summary of the issue, relevant page history, and prior discussion

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":

• ErikHaugen: 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?
• Philosopher: 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.
• Jojalozzo: 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.
• Herostratus: 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.
• Born2cycle: 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.
• NE Ent [under a different username then]: We're an encyclopedia for everyday people, and should use the common names generally in effect.
• NickCT: 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.
• There was a little support for the idea (one coming 4 years after the fact), generally on WP:CONSISTENT grounds or a notion of "objectivity", neither of which can apply to our present question of mimicking a corporation's own name-styling preferences when independent sources do not.

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)

Follow-up discussion

• Outstanding presentation. I would support a proposal to follow RS usage rather than company preference when deciding how to disambiguate. —В²C ☎ 11:21, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
• Much of this wall of text is misleading, or completely irrelevant to this dispute. No one has tried to argue that we default to company names by their own preference, and no one has tried to argue that we always use the extended legal name if the short name is unambiguous. In fact, I would oppose both suggestions if they ever came up. So I'm not really sure what the purpose of quoting seven users from the 2011 discussion was, except to perhaps subtly canvass users, but I am going to assume good faith and move on.
  Contrary to popular belief, WP:COMMONNAME does not prohibit the usage of official names. It only says (with empahsis added): 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)

  Isn’t the situation at issue here the title of an article about a company whose most common name must be disambiguated, and there are two natural options: the official company name and a name more commonly used by sources which may differ from the official name in comma usage, whether preceded by “the”, or whether certain words are used in full or abbreviated?

  By my reading of AT including COMMONNAME, CRITERIA, and OFFICIAL, we should go with the name more commonly used in sources. Of course COMMONNAME doesn’t prohibit use of official names. That’s not popular belief; I challenge you to find even one argument anywhere holding that viewpoint. If the most common name happens to be the official name, we use it, of course. What it prohibits is deferring to the official name when an alternative which is more commonly used in RS is available, whether that be the most common name or a natural disambiguation. —-В²C ☎ 12:28, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

  Specifically,

  • ”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.

  An “incorrect” name? Incorrect by what standard? If it’s “correct” by the standards of reliable sources, then it’s not for us to deem it “incorrect”; that’s the whole point in following usage in reliable sources. — В²C ☎ 15:20, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

  I've prepared a point-by-point refutation of pretty much every word of InfiniteNexus's post above, but I'll collapse box it because it's long (necessarily, because of IN's Gish gallop technique of throwing in as many extraneous arguments as possible as a flak-spewing technique, instead of sticking to the subject). The material below includes various reliable source quotations showing that publishers and style manuals treat both abbreviation of "Inc.", "Ltd", etc., and whether to use commas with them, as purely a matter of house style. There's not a single sustainable claim in what IN posted, especially about the policy matters; he's misinterpreting all of it, demonstrably, including just ignoring what he doesn't want to see, like commonness requirements in WP:NATURALDIS and WP:OFFICIALNAME, and independent reliable sources being required for everything.

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 are remarkably salient here when it comes to "company preference", as demonstrated by the direct quotations themselves: the are uniformly in agreement to follow RS usage on how to name company articles. "No one has tried to argue that we default to company names by their own preference": False; see the original poll, in which this was an option, including legal status and not for disambiguation; some voted for it. "no one has tried to argue that we always use the extended legal name": False, and InfiniteNexus simply is not paying any attention at all; this was exactly the proposal from which I quoted so extensively, in which nearly everyone said to follow the common name in RS. "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: Official English names are candidates for what to call an article, because somebody presumably uses them. They should always be considered as possibilities, but should be used only if they are actually the name most commonly used. D'oh! As covered below, WP:NATURALDIS also has commonness requirements which IN ignores. "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: The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed. (2017), § 6.44: Commas are not required with Inc., Ltd., and such as part of a company’s name. A particular company may use such commas in its corporate documentation; articles and books about such companies, however, should generally opt for a consistent style rather than make exceptions for particular cases. Their usage blog provides an exellent reason for not using the commas (which are bracketing or "parenthetical" punctuation like the commas in "Fooville, Provincename," and in MDY dates, and in "Sammy Davis, Jr.," constructions): The trick in running text is that if you use one comma, you must use two. [24] The Associated Press Stylebook - company names: Do not use a comma before Inc. or Ltd., even if it is included in the formal name. ... incorporated: Abbreviate and capitalize as Inc. when used as a part of a corporate name. Do not set off with commas: Tyson Foods Inc. announced .... Previous editions said the same thing but used other examples: "J.C. Penney Co. Inc. announced its expansion this week." and "Time Warner Inc. announced its latest release." Note that AP, the overwhelmingly dominant source of news-journalism writing style in the US, also abbreviates "Company" to "Co." (regardless of corporate preference), but likes to keep a leading "The" when the company conventionally uses it: "Walt Disney Co., The: Entertainment company that owns ...". Butcher's Copy-editing: The Cambridge Handbook for Editors, Copy-editors and Proofreaders, 4th ed. (2006): [A company's] full name, including the 'Ltd' or 'plc', should be used. Thereafter, a shortened form of the name may be used. Use 'Ltd' rather than 'Limited', and 'plc' rather than 'p.l.c.' or 'Plc' or 'PLC'. ... [T]he simplest form is usually the best. For example: ... omission of points after contractions containing the last letter of the singular (e.g. Dr, St, Ltd) Doesn't address commas, but demonstrates that abbreviation of the long-form words is simply a style preference. Since the comma is not the only punctuation question in such titles, look further: European Commission English Style Guide: A handbook for authors and translators (2023) [25]: Truncations (in which the end of the word is deleted) are followed by a point (for example Co., Art., Chap.), but contractions (in which the middle of the word is removed) are not (for example Dr, Ms, Ltd). So, whether to include the dot is also a matter of house style. On abbreviating as a matter of house style: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing House Style Guide (2007) : Bro., Bros, Co., Corp., Inc., plc, Pty, Ltd (no need to spell out) Ditto: US Government Publishing Office Style Manual (2016) [26]: Abbreviations: Businesses: Co.; Corp. (includes all Federal corporations); Inc.; Ltd.; Bros. ... Names and titles: 9.25: In company and other formal names, if it is not necessary to preserve the full legal title, such forms as Bro., Bros., Co., Corp., Inc., Ltd., and & are used. Association and Manufacturing are not abbreviated. GrammarPhile Blog (2011) [27] "Inc.," "Ltd.," and the like. Commas are not required around Inc., Ltd., and such as part of a company's name. As with Jr., however, if commas are used, they must appear both before and after the element." I'm not sure this is a source I would quote in an article, but the odds of it incorrectly summarizing the general modern professional writing consensus on this are very low. For an "in the wild" example of the problems that can be caused at a Wiki in trying to determine and exactly mirror what the "official version" is, with or without a comma, see this discussion about the Discogs "Database Guide" in 2012: [28]. What a butt pain. I have a large collection of style guides; can do this all day. Well, except that I have way better things to do. "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: Using an alternative name that the subject is also commonly called in English reliable sources, albeit not as commonly as the preferred-but-ambiguous title, is sometimes preferred. However, do not use obscure or made-up names. Commonness is required for natural disambiguation. What happened at Talk:Mars Inc. is that IN proposed the company's own preference and it turned out to be the least common (the most obscure) in the independent RS out of all the available (not made-up) options. This is a slam-dunk illustration of why "the company's own preference ... governed by company usage" is not viable. "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.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:25, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:25, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

I think it would be useful to take a more functionalist than formalist approach, by discussing what article names would change (or at least — were they newly-created articles today — how what they should have been named would change), and what they’d change to.

In service of that I’d strongly suggest looking at articles on Japanese and Korean conglomerates (zaibatsu and chaebol), as these frequently show the kind of absurdities many overly-formalist approaches would land on. (International “holding companies” in general are where these issue arise most acutely, regardless of the home country; for instance, Google vs. Alphabet Inc., though in this case the latter has an overriding natural disambiguation from alphabet.)

(And, fwiw: I agree with you there were many separable issues in the earlier reply, and your putting them in a box was useful; however, I don’t think it’s fair to call it a Gish gallop, as that’s a) a bad-faith practice, and I’d prefer not to assume bad faith; and b) is used to describe a wealth of individually-rebuttable claims that are advanced with only tangential observance of relevancy or accuracy in service of overwhelming any opposition to a larger point. And I don’t think the arguments above were that—they were simply voluminous. Sometimes, a bunch of points is simply a bunch of points.) TreyHarris (talk) 18:57, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

(Oh, and to clarify something that I was unclear about above: I meant to suggest looking at zaibatsu and chaebol just as a way to see how much the well-known names for companies can differ from their true corporate names, as an extreme case of the “holding company” phonemenon; dragging in how foreign company names are translated is an entirely separate issue that I don’t think deserves discussion here. I would not expect changes in this policy to have terribly obvious effects requiring the renaming of articles about zaibatsu or chaebol.) TreyHarris (talk) 19:00, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

I hadn't really considered bringing foreign companies into the matter, but a requirement (such as the NCCORP wording is presently trying to impose) to default to the official name, any time the most common name is ambiguous and editors don't want to use parenthetical disambiguation, could result in some confusing or unrecognizable article titles in some cases. E.g. Riken would end up as one of "Rikagaku Kenkyūsho", or "Institute of Physical and Chemical Research" depending on exactly what one considered their "official name" (and that's not counting the full version of the transliterated Japanese one). More mildly, LG is commonly referred to as "LG Group" or "LG Corporation" in English sources, but has an official name that translates directly to "LG Company Limited" (or "LG Co. Ltd." if one prefers), which is not what sources ever use. As for "Gish gallop", I didn't mean to suggest bad faith; humans often use iffy debate techniques to get their way and are convinced in all good faith that their way is necessary. Our article on it (which might be unreliable!) is about a debate technique "to overwhelm ... by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments ... prioritiz[ing] the quantity ... at the expense of their quality", and that's how I saw it, especially since many of the arguments IN presented have been refuted multiple times already (without rebuttal, just met with silence or by re-repeating the same argument), and others are simply false on their face or even directly self-contradictory. But I happen to have the patience not to be easily deterred by this stuff.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:48, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Well, that was the point of my self-reply that perhaps didn’t really clarify things — at least, not as much as I had wanted…

I wasn’t suggesting looking at zaibatsu and chaebol to say, “imagine the havoc policy proposal X or Y would bring to these pages’ titles!”

To the contrary, it’s more that the zaibatsu frequently have no lexical relationship whatsoever to any product or service the conglomerate is well-known for, especially in English-language RS.

For instance, the state of affairs pre-2008 was that the Panasonic Corporation was Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.. The “Panasonic” pages were redirects. In 2008 the company legally changed its name, and the Wikipedia articles followed suit.

(I think a good analogy is to imagine if the company first incorporated as Google had always been named “Alphabet”, but the service names had always been “Google”. We’d probably initially have had a Google article with Alphabet Inc. being a redirect—a bit like Subway and Doctor’s Associates. I’m pretty sure that — in that alternate universe — when the Google subsidiary began having sibling ventures of note, then — and only then — would Alphabet have likely been turned into its own separate page.)

---

p.s.: Taking a look at the Panasonic article history in 2008 after the company’s official name change, beginning with the first page move from Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. to Panasonic Co., and then the numerous followup moves resulting in its finally landing at its current title (simply Panasonic), is, I think, illuminating to the present question.

From a quick search of English-language business publications from 2007–8 before the name change, it looks like “The company that owns the Panasonic brand” or “Panasonic’s parent company” was its most-common sobriquet. Imagine if one of those had been the only alternatives to titling the page as Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.!

But it’s not where I was going bringing up zaibatsu/chaebol in general. TreyHarris (talk) 21:52, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Ah! Yes, that sort of stuff could complicate matters a whole lot.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:36, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

I have limited time on my hands, so I am not going to type up a 2,680-word (!) rebuttal to everything you just said. But if you agree this is a matter of style, why are you invoking COMMONNAME? COMMONNAME applies when deciding whether to use, say, Subway (restaurant) or Doctor's Associates Inc. The MoS informs us on the formatting of article titles, and nothing there says to "defer to secondary sources" (which implies deferring to external style guides, many of which opt to sacrifice accuracy for old-fashioned standards of uniformity or to save space; Chicago, for example, says to insert extraneous colons and commas in titles, and that ampersands may be changed to "and") except in the case of capitalization. For instance, MOS:JR says to (almost) never put a comma before "Jr" — regardless of what sources use). Secondly, to repeat (a point which you have thus far ignored), distinctions like the inclusion/omission of a comma are so minor, they would have virtually no effect on commonness or recognizability — people tend to omit punctuation and disregard capitalization when searching anyway. While it is reasonable to truncate a name (that is, remove leading or trailing words) per WP:CONCISE, such as shortening Microsoft Corporation to Microsoft, it makes no sense to refactor a name to casually remove punctuation midway. Imagine if we were to move Tesla, Inc. to Tesla Inc. (please don't; at least wait until this discussion has concluded, and be aware that this is merely one example of many); the lead would continue to use the official name/styling, but it would no longer match the article title. Normally, when this happens, we would list both names in the lead, but it would be redundant to say 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)

COMMONNAME is relevant because you've advanced an argument (in defense of poor wording in this guideline) that commonness is suddenly of no relevance if disambiguation happens, and that we must/should use the official name. The long community-accepted OFFICIALNAME interpretation on application of that policy with regard to official names requires the commonness. So does NATURALDIS in the policy itself. There's nothing incorrect/misleading about what I said about the meaning of NCCORP. Let's just quote it directly again: 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):

1. Treat it as just a style matter, which would probably resolve to using the minimal form ("Foo Inc.", "Bar Ltd") for concise and consistent reasons, because the punctuation is not necessary, and because the real world treats the long and abbreviated forms as equivalent; will qualify under all of natural, recognizable, and precise.
2. Treat it as a non-style matter, and use the most common such form in independent sources for that entity, no matter what; recognizable, natural, and precise, but discards consistency and sometimes concision.
3. Treat it as an exception to normal policy and OFFICIALANAME, and require doing precisely what that particular entity prefers; may or may not fail recognizble, natural, and/or precise, and does discard consistency and sometimes concision, along with our principle of not deferring to primary sources, especially when it comes to name stylization.

I personally like option 1, you like option 3, but I would bet good money (based on feedback here and at the Mars RM) that the community's preferred approach would be 2; I can live with that result without any issue, but I get the strong feeling you would oppose it tooth and nail (based on what you've written here so far). Each option has strengths and weaknesses, but no. 3 is the weakest because it conflicts the most with other P&G principles, and is rooted in making the trademark holder happy (and/or satisfying The One True Name nonsense from a handful of editors who don't understand the difference between a name and a stylization of it), and is not rooted in serving the reader with any of the criteria. From an encyclopedic perspective, no. 3 doesn't appear to have any strengths of any kind, only for CoIs and for people with unfounded notions of what "name" means.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:36, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

Arguments against "Option 3" hinge on Option 2's interpretation that this is a matter of WP:AT rather than WP:MOS being correct. So does your claim that it is 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 Incorporated vs. 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)

You're trying to have it both ways again. It cannot be simultaneously true that taking a comma out or abbreviating "Incorporated" or "Limited" means "it is almost guaranteed that there would be confusion" and yet that "a comma vs. no comma, and Incorporated vs. Inc., are negligible distinctions that have zero effect on recognizability/searchability or concision". I have not ignored your arguments at all; they simply are not consistent or otherwise cogent. Recognizability and searchability are not the same concept, and the former is not completely dependent on the latter (much more dependent on treatment in the source material - that's where readers get familiarity from in the first place). Concision is by definition affected when unnecssary characters are added, whether that is " ," or "orporated"; that's what concision even means. Arguments against no. 3 do not at all hinge on what you say they do (namely arguments for no. 2); arguments in favor of no. 1 are equally against no. 3, and so is our principle of deferring to secondary not primary sources, which is actually the main concern that has been raised by everyone. PS: I just noticed that Talk:Famous Players–Lasky#Requested move 23 August_2023 also rejected a different NCCORP demand, and there are probably a bunch of others; it is starting to look questionable whether this "guideline" has any consensus at all (though I would seek to repair the "follow the primary sources" problem before going in that direction). The status quo is causing problems, most often at RM discussions. It's an "anti-rule" against other rules, and the community never tolerates those for long after they've been detected. Just repeating your "there is no conflict" mantra over and over again is not going to convince anyone who has already noticed the conflict.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:39, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

1. That a comma has no impact on recognizability, searchability, and concision does not contradict with the fact that being inconsistent with comma usage in the lead and article title would cause confusion. Recognizability, searchability, and concision are things we strive for in article titles, which are independent from the lead. However, I was noting that a lead–title mismatch would certainly appear strange to readers, being an apparent error.
2. You're the one trying to advance two contradictory arguments (again): one, that we should look to secondary sources per COMMONNAME, and two, that it is a style matter. If it is a style matter, an interpretation that we seem to both agree on, then what secondary sources use does not matter. Surely you recognize this, as other sources have their style guides and we have ours, WP:MOS, which makes no mention of deferring to secondary sources for punctuation. If it is a style matter, this also has nothing to do with COMMONNAME or CONCISION, or really anything on WP:AT.
3. You continue to wikilawyer over the literal meanings of certain policies and guidelines. The goal of COMMONNAME is to ensure we do not use an obscure name that readers will not be able to easily recognize; readers will not go, "What's Tesla, Inc.? Never heard of it." because there is a comma. The goal of CONCISION is to ensure we do not use excessively long names that would be too awkward or cumbersome; readers will not go, "Tesla, Inc. is such a long name — there's a comma! It's a hassle to type and an eyesore to read!". A comma takes up about one millimeter on a screen. This actually goes to show why none of this is relevant — minor formatting tweaks have nothing to do with the principles laid out at AT, so we should strive to follow the advice of the MoS instead, rather than blindly following COMMONNAME and the like.
4. Talk:Famous Players–Lasky#Requested move 23 August 2023 was closed correctly. The original text of NCCORP does not support the nom at all; it says, 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".
5. [...] not going to convince anyone who has already noticed the conflict Anyone? 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.

InfiniteNexus (talk) 01:56, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

But it’s not a style issue, is it? There’s no reference to the MOS in this guideline. There’s nothing there that calls for style consistency. The default is to use the most common name, which means following usage in secondary sources, regardless of style. The issue is about what to do when disambiguation is required. Here, the guideline calls for following the legal name, with parenthetical disambiguation when necessary. Again, without regard to any consistent style.

I see what you’re saying about consistency between the title and the reference in the lead, but isn’t this inconsistency also a potential problem in the default case (no disambiguation issue to resolve) where the most common name differs from the legal name? If this title—lead inconsistency issue is truly significant, why address it only when disambiguating?

I don’t think it’s significant at all. For example, for the article titled General Motors the lead references General Motors Company. 🤷‍♂️ And the lead for Porsche references Dr. Ing. h.c F. Porsche AG. These title—lead inconsistencies are just not an issue. Why would they be in a disambiguating case? — В²C ☎ 21:36, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

It makes no reference to the MoS because the MoS has no stance on the formatting of company names. When a style matter is not discussed in the MoS, it means that it is left to editorial discretion as long as it doesn't contradict the MoS. Per MOS:VAR, this usually just means the status quo remains. Now, regardless of how many editors are aware of NCCORP and how it came to be, it is still a guideline, and since the contested material has never been challenged and removed, there is at minimum an WP:IMPLICITCONSENSUS. Again, this cannot be a "policy fork" if the MoS gives no preference. Furthermore, if it is true that most editors are unaware of NCCORP, the fact that all of our articles (except Mars, Incorporated) still follow its "legal status clause" further reinforces the implicit consensus.

The more I think about it, the more undeniable it is that this is a style matter rather than an AT matter. COMMONNAME applies when we decide to use, for example, Kanye West over Ye (musician) because the former is more widely recognizable and easier to search for; but in cases like Minneapolis–St. Paul, we don't use Minneapolis-St. Paul per our MoS regardless of how many sources use a hyphen instead of an en dash. I think a key difference between company names and other article titles is that these are legally registered trademarks: "Jr." and "Sr." are not actually part of a person's legal name, nor are initials, so we are given a certain degree of freedom with MOS:JR and MOS:INITS to "override" sources because there are multiple acceptable ways to format them. (By the way, if the goal of CONCISE was truly to remove as many characters as possible, as SMcCandlish tried to claim, then we wouldn't call for spaces between initials.) On the contrary, company names have a "correct" legal name and sometimes a common name that is significantly more recognizable than the actual name. Removing a comma is not using the "common name"; it's refactoring the official name. We retain the comma in The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. despite MOS:JR. SMcCandlish recognizes this, as he agrees Monsters, Inc. should also retain the comma, but refuses to acknowledge that company names are trademarks just like titles of works.

Regarding your General Motors and Porsche examples, again, that is shortening a name by cutting off its beginning or end. We're not changing anything within the name, which would create the appearance of an error. And, no, this error does not exist with correct applications of COMMONNAME where the common name is vastly different than the legal name, because both names would be present in the lead. InfiniteNexus (talk) 19:56, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

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)

Bears some thinking out. WP:Policy writing is hard, so every way to system-game this would have to be to be worked out in the analysis. I've put this aside for some time, due to heat and circularity of the argument. No hurry. My initial reactions are: A) This idea's not nuts. B) It's a proposition to add to several other possibilities already laid out. C) RfCs and other proposals that provide only one option tend to be rejected, while those that provide all the reasonable ones (even if sharply conflicting, but still defensible by one reasoning or another) do tend to settle on something. D) This would be a substantive change to policy, and getting that is vastly more difficult than getting a change to a guideline to better agree with the policy as-is, so it's not the most likely outcome. E) That said, there are enough fans of the idea of closely following the official styling of names of things that this proposal might grow some legs, though it could require significant rewriting of MOS:TM, or careful crafting to avoid conflicting with MOS:TM. Probably other parts of MoS and NC; e.g., I can see this, if poorly written, causing a great deal of capitalization-related fighting (cf. the recent "NFL draft" RfC) to mimic exactly what the primary sources are doing (e.g. "NFL Draft") even though this is not the usual independent source treatment. (A fix for that particular case would be a limitation to things that are legally trademarked, which capital-D "NFL Draft" is not except for a line of clothing, which is not the subject of our article.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:31, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

The bulk of MOS:TM is about typographic stylizations, which we should continue to avoid. Then there's guidance on similar trademarks, non-free logos, and the formatting of the lead. (There's a section about mergers, but half of it is just saying "there are many ways companies name themselves after a merger"?) The only part that would possibly cause problems is the part in the lead that says 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)

Overhaul

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)

It seems more appropriate if you had formally proposed your changes on the talk page first before overhauling a sitewide guideline. InfiniteNexus (talk) 18:59, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

I concur with Infinite's sentiments. One person should not dictate a change in policy, especially when some of their actions are a misunderstanding of said policy's intentions. Trailblazer101 (talk) 02:37, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

Well, what specific issues do you want to raise with what it says? A change in the formatting and cross-referencing of a guideline isn't a "change in policy". I have a better track-record than anyone else, I think, in doing guideline cleanup, in part because I take a great deal of care to close loopholes (and open no new ones), resolve apparent or actual conflicts, and patch any glaring gaps; and in part because I take specific issues/problems/concerns seriously and try to resolve them.

I do this kind of cleanup WP:BOLDly because if it's not done that way it simply never gets done. Normalizing guidelines to be back in synch with each other is very different from proposals to add, delete, or substantively change a rule: e.g., adding a rule to always use the name and spelling the company prefers, deleting the apersands rule, or flipping the capitalization rule to call for "SONY" instead of "Sony". Changes like those would bring it into direct conflict with other rules and be something that probably an RfC would have to settle if it didn't iron out on its own quickly, and then there's be a re-normalization of multiple guidelines and such to reflect whatever that new consensus result was. Thus I did not remove or substantively change NCCORP's disputed and conflicting line item about "using the company's own preference"; that would be a substantive change, and resolving it is going to take time and discussion since it involves WP:COMMONNAME, MOS:TM, WP:OFFICIALNAME, etc., too.

Anyway, if I've accidentally boogered something, then let's fix it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:11, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Fully concur with User:InfiniteNexus and User:Trailblazer101. --Coolcaesar (talk) 12:26, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Repeat: 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)

Look, you were being BOLD, and multiple users have agreed that this wasn't appropriate. Even if the community approves of your changes, you should have said something on the talk page before editing, not the other way around. Our comments here are not saying that your changes were problematic; your actions were. It's a reminder not to jump the gun in the future when it comes to editing PAGs. InfiniteNexus (talk) 05:16, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Is there some kind of purpose to re-observing that I was bold after I said I was bold, and telling me you didn't like me being bold after already telling me you didn't like me being bold? You seem to be trying to raise a behavioral concern (in very vague terms and apparently with little awareness of the actual content of WP:BOLD and WP:PGCHANGE). That belongs in user talk. This talk page is for improving the material in the page to which it pertains (and to some extent for discussion of how that material might be applied, since this is a guideline page not an article). Whether a particular part of this page is actually applicable at all is its own thread already, and I did not substantively change the wording under question. Meanwhile, no specific issues with my non-substantive copyediting and cross-referencing have been raised, here in this thread about that editing. So, can we just give this a rest now and get back to something more useful? If you really need more personalized venting time, you know where my user talk page is.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:42, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

I see nothing wrong with BOLD changes to policy pages that don’t change policy (the change doesn’t affect how the policy applies to articles). Even minor fixes of contradictions or other obvious issues that the editor genuinely believes are not controversial deserve accolades, not chastisement, especially if the changes and corrections truly are not controversial. And it’s absolutely correct that if one has no specific material objection to an edit on this page, then this talk page is not the place to discuss that edit. Complaining about any BOLD edit solely for being BOLD—without having any substantive objection to what was changed—is the epitome of burdensome bureaucracy. —В²C ☎ 11:40, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

So, I’m one of those voters from the 2006 poll mentioned above…

I still believe the particular examples I raised were correct and note they still obtain today—e.g. The Coca-Cola Company and Microsoft. I'll also note that I haven't been involved in WP policy in 10+ years, so I'm going to throw around words like 'policy', 'guideline', and 'sub-page/policy/guideline' in ways that are surely incorrect by today's definitions; please bear with me. I make no judgment of, and take no sides on, the current issue; I’m just offering a first-person historical perspective.

I’d first point at one bit of anachronism that I think may help understanding some of the perceived oddity: WP:COMMONNAMES was created on 9 May 2007, over a year after the Wikipedia:Naming conventions (companies)/poll was closed on 6 March 2006.

At the time, we actually were at two levels of indirection (not including the shortname): back then, there was a separate page at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names), with company names becoming a sub-sub-guideline. The sub-guideline went away as it was rolled in to the larger document, making this former sub-sub-guideline a free-floating orphan—which, IMO, gave it even greater apparent force than it was worthy of.

Looking at the final version of that separate page is instructive, as is looking at the version of 20 January 2006 which was then-current when the poll was opened.

A bit of historical social context is also useful, but I’ll summarize since it’s a pain to divine from article history: WP:BOLD being applied to Wikipedia policy and guidelines was… a bit of a “thing” at the time. I don’t mean boldness in policy suggestions on policy talk pages; I mean boldness in the article-space sense of willy-nilly changes directly to the main page (i.e., the policy itself!) without prior notice.

This sounds like what people have mentioned here about the recent ‘bold’ edits — but it’s very much not, I don’t think, because the present edits have been done (at least, by an assertion I’ll take in good faith) with an attempt to preserve the salient policy, even in points the editor personal disagrees with. What I’m describing then was quite different — it didn’t even pay lip-service to the idea that blatant policy changes should only be taken after some consideration.

Basically, some egotistical strong-willed people simply created policies by wholesale deletion or creation of sections; and, if that got too much attention (usually via revert wars), they turned to inserting links to initially-explanatory subpages which later were edited into sub-guidelines. People who cared about the larger policy often didn’t have these subpages—which originally appeared to simply be exegeses—in their watchlists.

So after a short wait, the creators of these subpages could proceed in creating policy that appeared to override the super-page’s by creating exceptions—all without any oversight from the larger-policy's maintainers. (All that said, I think this particular case of company-naming was fairly benign compared to some of the truly toxic ones that resulted in a great deal of admin burnout and eventual large-scale changes in how volunteer-Wikipedian leadership worked.)

Overall, this was a case of the now-classic functional/formal question that, back then, could still seem novel and interesting: is it better to have a simple, universal, easy-to-understand policy that occasionally produces bizarre results (like, say, insisting that Subway (sandwich) be titled Doctor's Associates Inc.), or a looser policy that can handle real-world messiness at the expense of more judgment calls?

(As I think an illustrative example of the kind of emotionality divorced from any pragmatics going on then with regards to article naming: contemporaneously there was actually an absurdly-passionate edit war going on as to whether Bleach should point at the chemical (as it obviously does today) or (no joke!) to Bleach (manga) — with many insisting the fact of the dispute necessitated making the disambiguation page primary!) TreyHarris (talk) 17:23, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

@TreyHarris: Thanks for the detailed response; I did not detect in my history digging that there had been a "sub-sub-page" phase. As for Microsoft and The Coca-Cola Company, I don't think anyone's proposing a change to such article titles; the disputation above is just about "the company's own preference ... should be governed by company usage" (only written to apply to natural-disambiguation cases) conflicting with the principle to follow predominant usage in independent sources. There's lots and lots of verbiage above about it, but it's really a simple matter. :-) I was aware of the BOLDness of the era; I came on board in late 2005, and there was still a lot of that going on (I even participated in a bit of it). Toxic stuff: yeah, I remember a two-editor and mostly daft "mandate how to write about computers and computing" MoS subpage (MOS:COMPUTING) someone stuck a {{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)

Does this convention affect Fraternities/Sororities?

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)

See all the above disputaton about whether what this page says is in conflict with other policies and guidelines (which seems to be the case, at least with regard to certain points). The short answer is: see WP:COMMONNAME policy. If most sources refer to it as Alpha Phi Alpha, then it should be at that title. If most of them refer to it as Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., then it should be at that title (though the odds of that seem very low to me). See ngram [29], though one has to subtract the long-name results from the short-name ones, since any thing that matches "Alpha Phi Alpha Inc." will also match "Alpha Phi Alpha" (and it's possible there is something else named "Alpha Phi Alpha" that could contribute to hits for the short name). If the long name is not the most common name, then using the long name as the title would also fail WP:CONCISE policy.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:30, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

There is no "conflict". NCCORP clearly says to default to the most common name (a version of this wording existed even before SMcCandlish's BOLD overhaul), and there is no requirement to use "Inc." anywhere on the page. Only if Alpha Phi Alpha is an ambiguous term in need of disambiguation would Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. (with the comma) be preferred over other forms of disambiguation, per WP:NATURAL. InfiniteNexus (talk) 19:52, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

This is basically just reiterating what I already said ("If most sources refer to it as Alpha Phi Alpha, then it should be at that title", per COMMONNAME, unless it's ambiguous), just clouded with extraneous finger-pointing at me. The "with the comma" claim, however, is precisely the matter subject to dispute about policy/guideline conflict in a thread above, exactly as I said. One view, grounded in current wording of the rarely-cited WP:NCCORP (material with very little and very old community input), is that we should defer to the organization's own internal preferences on such a question, and other editors (backed by WP:AT policy and by other guidelines with more, and more recent, community involvement) say we should be following what the independent sources do. This latter point probably has no implications for Naraht's exact question about APA in particular (per the ngram I provided, and probably also because it's unlikely in this particular case that the organization prefers ", Inc." and sources prefer "Inc." with no comma), but "There is no 'conflict'" obviously is not the case.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:43, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

Acronym vs full name

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)

Firstly, this page is about companies only, not organizations. Secondly, the page you're looking for is MOS:ACROTITLE, which this page doesn't overlap with. InfiniteNexus (talk) 16:11, 16 February 2024 (UTC)