Official renamings and incidental mentions: Revision-level evidence from English Wikipedia

Abstract

Place names are never just labels. Throughout history, names of cities, rivers, mountains and seas have been contested, renegotiated and changed back again — Constantinople and Istanbul, Danzig and Gdańsk, Bombay and Mumbai. A renaming is decided in a single act. Whether the new name takes hold is decided elsewhere: in the countless texts that mention the place only in passing — an article on a hurricane, a fish, a climber or a railway. This preprint watches that second process where every change is recorded: in the revision history of English Wikipedia. Four official renamings were followed: Mount McKinley to Denali (2015), Swaziland to Eswatini (2018), Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America (2025), and Denali back to Mount McKinley (2025). For each, the articles that mentioned the place in running text before the act (358 to 9,805 per event, as far as still traceable in October 2026) were followed revision by revision for 600 days, under a design frozen before data collection. Where the place's own article took the new name, the new name stood in the running text of 40.8 % (Denali) and 15.4 % (Eswatini) of these articles 600 days later; where the article kept the old name, of 0.04 % (Gulf of America) and 1.1 % (Mount McKinley). In the Gulf case, 1,617 of 1,620 insertions of the new name were undone, with a median interval of about twelve minutes. Counting a name, however, is not observing its use: in the second Denali event, 24 of 36 sampled insertions placed "Mount McKinley" in glosses such as "Denali, federally designated as Mount McKinley" — the official name is acknowledged, the established one keeps doing the referring. The presence of the new name covaries with the article title; the design does not identify the title as the cause. The study is one half of a two-platform design. A companion study follows the same kind of event on YouTube: after the US federal renaming of Lake Ontario as Lake America in August 2026, ten of the first eleven comments containing "Lake America" discussed the name rather than used it. On 22 December 2026, both platforms will be observed on the same day — an encyclopedia with a written naming rule and a comment section without one. The expectation, stated in advance and descriptively: as long as the lake's article keeps its title, "Lake America" will appear on Wikipedia mainly as a gloss beside "Lake Ontario", not as the name in use. A second observation follows on 22 December 2027. The analysis is descriptive and takes no position on the merits of any renaming, on the governments that enacted them, or on Wikipedia's naming policies. English text authoritative; German translation included. Data, code, frozen design and correction register: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23477782