 | This guideline documents an English Wikipedia naming convention. Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. Substantive edits to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Use descriptive file names. Don't upload files with generic, non-specific file names. |
Wikipedia file names should be clear and descriptive, without being excessively long. While the image name doesn't matter much to the reader (they can reach the description page by simply clicking on the image), it matters for editors. It is helpful to other contributors and for maintenance of the encyclopedia if images have descriptive or at least readable file names. For example, "File:Skyline Frankfurt am Main.jpg" is more helpful than "File:Wiki.jpg".
To avoid accidental overwriting of images or other media, very generic filenames should not be used when uploading. For example, a picture of an album cover should not be given the name "File:Cover.jpg", as sooner or later someone else will try to do the same thing and overwrite the old image. The new image will then appear wherever the old one was used—in this case, an album article would then show the wrong album cover.
"KDE Kicker config screenshot.png" "1863 Meeting of Settlers and Maoris at Hawke's Bay, New Zealand.jpg" "Polyhedron with no vertex visible from center.png"
"Image01.png" "Joe.jpg" "DSC00001.JPG" "30996951316264l.jpg"Image names may be disallowed either by page protection or by blacklisting the title. There are also a few technical restrictions on what characters can be contained in a title.
For technical reasons, file names cannot contain any of the following characters, as these would conflict with wiki syntax: # < > [ ] | : { } / . For the same reason they also cannot contain sequences of tilde characters (~~~).
Like other wiki page names, file names are case sensitive except for the first character, which will always be normalized to uppercase.
Disallowing may be done via the MediaWiki:Titleblacklist and may then generate a variety of error messages—see MediaWiki talk:Titleblacklist. For example, highly generic filenames (such as those produced automatically by digital cameras) produce the error message at MediaWiki:Titleblacklist-custom-imagename.
Some file names are protected to prevent an image being uploaded with that name because they are too generic. For example, File:Image.jpg, File:Image.png, File:Image.gif and File:Image.svg.
Wikipedia:File names describes how files should be named. In general, Wikipedia aims to provide stable file names as these may be being used by tools outside of Wikipedia. Currently there are nine widely undisputed uses for rename requests:
| No. | Aim | Examples (old name) | Examples (new name) | Shortcut |
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| 1 | Uploader requested | WP:FNC#1 | ||
| 2 | Change from completely meaningless names into suitable names, according to what the image displays |
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WP:FNC#2 |
| 3 | Correct misleading names into accurate ones |
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WP:FNC#3 |
| 4 | Change generic bio-names into binomial scientific names |
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WP:FNC#4 |
| 5 | Correct errors in file names (e.g. wrong proper nouns or false historical dates) |
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WP:FNC#5 |
| 6 | Harmonize file names of a set of images (so that only one part of all names differs) to ease their usage in templates (e.g. diagram symbols, scans of pages of a book, maps) |
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WP:FNC#6 |
| 7 | Disambiguate files with overly similar names. The software allows for multiple different files to have the same name, but with different capitalization (see ninja example) or different expressions of the same filetype extension (see bunny example). However, these are not ideal situations. |
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WP:FNC#7 |
| 8 | Remove pejorative, offensiveorcrude language that would not be appropriate in the file description |
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WP:FNC#8 |
| 9 | Rename files that shadow a Commons file or redirect[1] |
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WP:FNC#9 |
After moving the file, please replace all uses of the old file link with the new one.
If a file name on English Wikipedia conflicts with a file name at Commons, please check the File usage on other wikis before deciding which should be renamed. Renaming a file at Commons might affect a lot of projects instead of just one.
If the file was moved per WP:FNC#9, after all of the links have been updated, please place {{db-redircom}} on the leftover redirect (file movers), or delete the leftover redirect using the summary generated by {{db-redircom}} (administrators). Please see speedy deletion criterion R4 for more information.
Additional naming conventions and exceptions from the above list might be discussed for specific projects.
As a matter of principle, it is best to leave all files with generally valid names at their locations, even if slightly better names may exist. So, for example:
However, situations that could cause confusion are to be avoided.
