Editing Encyclopedia:Naming conventions (use English-language sources) (section)

== Divided usage in English-language sources ==
{{policy shortcut|WP:DIVIDEDUSE}}
Sometimes, English usage is divided. For example, US newspapers generally referred to the "[[2006 Winter Olympics|Olympics in Torino]]", following official handouts; however, newspapers in other parts of the English speaking world referred to it taking place in [[Turin]]. In this case, we cannot determine which is "most common". Use what would be the least surprising to a user finding the article. Whichever is chosen, one should place a redirect at the other title and mention both forms in the lead.

[[Wikipedia:Search engine test|Search-engine hits]] are generally considered unreliable for testing whether one term is more common than another, but can suggest that no single term is predominant in English. If there are fewer than 700 hits,<ref name="GoogleHitCounts">{{Cite web|url=http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1943|title=Climategate, Tiger, and Google hit counts: dropping the other shoe|last=Nunberg|first=Geoff|author-link=Geoffrey Nunberg|date=7 December 2009|department=Language and politics|website=[[Language Log]]|location=[[University of Pennsylvania]]|publisher=[[Linguistic Data Consortium]]|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180619060512/http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1943|archive-date=19 June 2018|url-status=live|access-date=19 June 2018|quote=When Google reports hit count estimates over a few hundred, the results should never be taken at face value, or any value at all—they're not only too inaccurate for serious research, but demonstrably flaky.&nbsp;[...] In these cases we can assume that Google has tried to return all the pages in its index that contain the search string. (A figure between 700 and 1000 might be an accurate count, but might also be Google's effort to return around 1000 pages for a term that appears on thousands or millions of web pages.)}}</ref> the {{em|actual}} count (from the final page of hits) {{em|may}} be accurate for the engine's particular corpus of English, but whether this represents all English usage is less certain. If there are more than 700 estimated hits, the number from the last page {{em|will}} be wrong; a search engine loads only a limited number of hits, no matter how many there are.<ref name="GoogleHitCounts" /> Counts over 1,000 are usually estimates, and may be extremely inaccurate.<ref name="GoogleHitCounts" /> If several competing versions of a name have roughly equal numbers (say 603 for one variant and 430 for another), there may well be divided usage. When in doubt, search results should also be evaluated with more weighting given to [[WP:SOURCES|verifiable reliable sources]] than to less reliable sources (such as comments in forums, mailing lists and the like). Also, consult reliable works of general reference in English.

[[WP:NOT#CRYSTAL|Wikipedia is not a crystal ball.]] It is not our business to predict what term will be in use, but rather to observe what is and has been in use and will therefore be familiar to our readers. If ''Torino'' ousts ''Turin'', we should follow, but we should not leap to any conclusion until it does. 

When there is evenly divided usage and other guidelines do not apply, leave the article name at the latest stable version. If it is unclear whether an article's name has been stable, defer to the name used by the first major contributor after the article ceased to be a [[Wikipedia:stub|stub]].{{efn|This paragraph was adopted to stop [[Wikipedia:Page-move war|page-move warring]]. It is an adaptation of the wording in the [[WP:Manual of Style|Manual of Style]], which is based on [[Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Jguk]].}}