Narutopedia:Naming policy

This is the policy for the naming of Naruto articles, characters, places, skills, and techniques.

General notes
There are a few small important notes in the naming policy that applies to all categories of names rather than just a specific group.

Rōmaji
The Narutopedia uses Revised Hepburn for the romanization of kanji, like Wikipedia does (to some extent; They have their own tweaks to that system but it's primarily revised hepburn).

The primary point here is that fandubs and scanalations commonly use Wāpuro rōmaji. In addition to that the net has a bad habit of spreading bad translations around enough that people begin to believe they are the official only way to write something. So the net is a bad place to hunt down the proper rōmaji to use for a character's name.

The most relevant point here is the difference in treatment of long vowels. In wāpuro the long o and u vowels are written using an extra u, so long o would be ou and long u would be uu. However in revised hepburn they are represented using macrons, long o being ō and long u being ū. This means that some names like Chōji, Hyūga, and Jyūgo are mistakenly entered into the wiki as Chouji, Hyuuga, and Jyuugo by newer editors.

For the most part if you see a uu, or ou used on the wiki it's a mistake that can be cleaned up. Read the rest of the policy to understand what form of the name you should clean that up to.

Italics and Macrons
On the wiki we use italics in some locations to indicate that the written form of a term we are using is in Japanese (commonly rōmaji) rather than English. And we also use the macrons inside of rōmaji to give a pronunciation guide to the reader. However for ease of editing we only require these in certain locations, as it would be a strain to write articles and reformat them when names change if we were to use the stylization everywhere.

Basically, we use italics and macrons in any unique location, ie: one that isn't repeated and bears some significance to the reader. Basically it boils down to:
 * Macrons are not used in the English forms of words (The English translation Hyuga uses no macrons, but the rōmaji Hyūga does use macrons)
 * Macrons and Italics are used inside of the template.
 * The translation template is primarily only used at the top of the article on a topic. In that location the primary name in the first parameter is normally bolded.
 * The third parameter to the translation template (the romaji parameter) already contains code to italicize the romaji so 's aren't needed there, but if you are using rōmaji in the main parameter 's are needed to italicize it.
 * Macrons are used in the romaji parameter for infoboxes. However italics are not since the infobox adds those automatically.
 * However macrons and italics are not used in the repeat occurrences of names inside of articles or links.

Use of names
In articles we refer to the character by a single primary name, aliases are not used unless relevant to the context of the paragraph. (ie: We use Minato Namikaze unless specifically refering to him as the Hokage).

We also list all the versions of a name. English, Kanji, Romaji, and aliases are listed in their article, and all of those, as well as some misspellings or shortened names are redirected.

Characters
For reference the following paragraphs will refer to certain terms:
 * Primary name
 * The name primarily used for a character. This name is used as the page title for that character, listed in bold in the first parameter in the template used at the start of that character's page, inside the name parameter (header) of the infobox, and is also used throughout the wiki to refer to the character.

Primary names should use the character's name from the English Anime Dub.
 * (Might Guy not Maito Gai)
 * (Choji Akimichi not Akimichi Chōji)

When a character has not yet appeared in the English dub then the Official name listed in the latest version of the databook should be used as the primary name.
 * (Pain not Pein)

When a character has not appeared in the dub or been listed in a databook, then Japanese romaji for their name is used for the primary name.
 * (Kushina Uzumaki not Uzumaki Kushina)

When a character has an alias their real name is used as the primary name. However if relevant to the context the alias my be used in a section of an article (such as using Tobi instead of Madara Uchiha when talking about him in the context of Akatsuki)
 * (Madara Uchiha not Tobi)
 * (Minato Namikaze not Fourth Hokage)

Jutsu Names
Jutsus are listed using the literal translation of the Kanji for their name. Even if a jutsu has been used in the English series it's name is not used.

Do note that the jutsu name discussion has not finalized whether it is best to use Jutsu or Technique, or how to deal with names like Chidori or Rasengan. For now we use Technique, Rasengan, and Chidori. Editors are still welcome to open the discussion.