Wikipedia:Arabic names
- This page is to help you, the editor, work on pages dealing with Arabic names. See Arabic name for general information. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Arabic) and Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Arabic) for standards.
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Arabic names raise quite a few problems on Wikipedia. In Arabic, the name can be written under different forms (depending of how many titles and ancestors you want to include - see Arabic name), and what's more, these forms may be transliterated in different ways. Some, like Saladin, have a conventional form in English.
For this reason, articles about a person with an Arabic name typically have many redirect pages (which is not a problem); in addition, many broken links correspond to existing articles with different spellings.
The Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Arabic) defines what form should be used. However, it's very likely that some articles have not used the correct form.
Imagine you're writing an article for "Joe ibn Bob al-Builder" ("Joe son of Bob the Builder" - "Builder" would be the "surname" (nisba), Bob's full name might be "Bob ibn Ben al-Builder"). You should probably look for the following variants:
- "Joe al-Builder" (the patronimic part (nasab) is dropped)
- "Joe-al-Builder"
- "Joe al-Builder”
- "Joe ibn Bob" (the surname (nisba) is dropped)
- "Joe bin Bob"
- "Joe al-Builder" (the article is not assimilated)
- "Joe ibn Bob" ibn Ben al-Builder
- ... and all the possible combinations, such as "Joe bin Bob bin Ben al-Builder"
See Arabic name for more fun possibilities with variant names. Also, different transliterations may be used.
You probably don't want to look for all the variants, but the information above should allow you to recognize them, and find enough of them with some searches for the right keywords.
Some extra notes on Arabic:
- The prefix "al-" ("the") is sometimes pronounce as-, ad-, etc. depending on the following consonont (hence al-Something would be pronounced as-Something). Stick to using al-, but look for articles that use as-, ad-, etc. "Al" is also sometimes transliterated as "el"
- "Ibn" ("son of") seems to be spelled "ibn" when used at the beginning of a name, and "bin" when preceded by another bit of the name (Joe bin Bob, or just Ibn Bob). Or it's "Ibn" in the Middle east and "Bin" in north Africa. If somebody who actually knew something about Arabic names could confirm/give more details, it'd be swell.
Note that in some families (mostly living in Morocco or France) it's spelled "ben".
- The three Arabic vowels are sometimes rendered as u, a, and i, sometimes as o, e and i. The first form should be preferred, but you may want to check for the second form too.
- In the page name, you should never have Arabic characters or weird characters with dots and dashes above and below them. Keep everything nice and ASCII.
If enough diligent souls help on this, it may become a useful guide to fight the tides of red links to Arabic names! (Or, maybe it could be included in the manual of style?)