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Wikipedia has over 700,000 articles about geographical entities such as villages, districts, lakes, rivers, mountains and protected areas. Their infoboxes vary considerably in layout and the information they support. The article title holds the common English form but the article may also give the common names used in the local language(s), official names, former names, other names and nicknames. Non-Latin script may be followed by a romanized or phonetic form.
All non-English forms of a name should be marked up so they are rendered correctly by a screen reader. This essay proposes standard ways to gather, validate and format the different names in the article text and in infoboxes, and outlines a migration approach. The core proposal is to adapt all the geographical entity infoboxes to use a standard child template, {{infobox geonames}}, which will undertake validation and formatting of the names.