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The titles of articles for immigrant and ethnic minority groups are a controversial issue on Wikipedia. Wikipedia does not have any required naming convention for such articles, and this proposed guideline does not seek to mandate one. Instead, it merely describes existing practises, expands on how existing guidelines and policies such as Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names) and Wikipedia:No original research apply to articles in this topic area, and points to previous discussions and other resources of interest.
If you would like to rename articles in this topic area, you should open a discussion on the Wikipedia:Requested moves page. Building consensus for article renaming helps to minimise friction between editors and ensures that a variety of options are explored before a decision is made.
One common way to describe immigrant groups is by combining the demonyms of their country/region of origin and country/region of destination. Pluralisation and hyphenation vary. For example, for immigrants from Fooland to Barland:
There is no grammatical requirement in the English language that the name of an immigrant group must have the country of ethnic origin first and the country of citizenship/residence second. Wikipedia:Naming conventions (categories)#Heritage permits both, stating:
- People are sometimes categorized by notable ancestry, culture, or ethnicity, depending upon the common conventions of speech for each nationality. A hyphen is used to distinguish the word order:
- Fooian Barians, nationality followed by heritage, such as Category:British Asians.
- Barian-Fooians, heritage followed by nationality, such as Category:Irish Americans.
In practise, this recommended use of the hyphen has often been disputed [1] because many Asian American groups object to the use of the hyphen, and because the United States Census Bureau explicitly does not use the hyphen. [2]
If reliable sources predominantly use one name (ordering and hyphenation) to refer to a specific group, and that title is reasonably unambiguous, it should be used as the article title. However, there are some reservations:
Frequently, these are also the self-identifying name of the group in question, and may be in the language of the origin or destination country. Examples include:
In some cases, these names help to delineate groups whose boundaries of membership cut across lines of residence, citizenship, and ethnicity. However, foreign-language terms are often opaque to non-specialist readers; per Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English), if the name is not widely used by English-language sources to refer to the group in question, Wikipedians should not seek to introduce such names for use as article titles, though they may still be mentioned in the article body.
In cases where reliable sources don't predominantly use any titles which belong to Option 1 or Option 2, the remaining option is to use a long title which explicitly spells out which country is the origin and which is the destination:
Some patterns which are also seen, but not accepted by all editors, include:
Decorating articles about immigrant ethnic groups with the flags of the country of origin and the country of residence is not recommended. See Wikipedia:Manual of style (flags).