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. A renaming is decided in a single act; whether the new name takes hold is decided in the countless texts that mention the place only in passing. This paper follows that process 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). Articles mentioning the place before the act (358 to 9,805 per event) 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 % and 15.4 % of these articles after 600 days; where it kept the old name, of 0.04 % and 1.1 %. In the Gulf case, 1,617 of 1,620 insertions were undone within a median of about twelve minutes. Counting a name is not observing its use: after the 2025 Denali renaming, two thirds of sampled insertions placed the new name in glosses such as “Denali, federally designated as Mount McKinley”. The presence of the new name covaries with the article title; the design does not identify the title as the cause.
A companion study follows the US federal renaming of Lake Ontario as Lake America on YouTube. Both platforms will be observed on 22 December 2026 and again in 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.
Version 1.1 (20 October 2026) only completes the author contribution statement; it is available from the Zenodo record.
Comments
Comments, corrections and refutations are welcome: research@woidwide.net. If relevant work has been overlooked, I apologise and would be glad to be told.
AI use: the author designed the study and set all analytic decisions and decision rules; Claude (Anthropic) was used under his direction to draft text and analysis code and to compute the figures, and the author revised the text. The paper sets out the division of labour in detail.
Citation
Sedlmair, Max (2026). Official renamings and incidental mentions: Revision-level evidence from English Wikipedia. Preprint, version 1.0. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23477994