Talk:Prayagraj

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Good articlePrayagraj has been listed as one of the Geography and places good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
On this day... Article milestones
DateProcessResult
August 5, 2012Peer reviewReviewed
January 16, 2013Good article nomineeNot listed
February 17, 2014Good article nomineeNot listed
August 20, 2014Good article nomineeListed
On this day... Facts from this article were featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on January 12, 2024, and January 12, 2025.
Current status: Good article

Requested move 28 October 2025

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
Not moved. There was extensive discussion of name frequency in sources in this and previous RFCs (which I considered because this would directly overturn one), which determines the title per WP:COMMONNAME. I would summarize the discussion this way: Statistics showing "Allahabad" is still more common in academic works were contaminated by references to entities that are not the city, including the university that shows up in a lot of academic citations. Better evidence from news media presented in this RFC, including style guide changes mentioned in the 2023 RFC, shows "Prayagraj" is used either exclusively or predominantly by almost all sampled major news outlets, domestic and international.
The 2023 RFC also mentioned page view stats; I looked at these, but they appear to be unreliable because the numbers swapped as soon as the page was moved. I assume this is because search engines accept either name, and link readers directly to the article as it is currently named.
Given that a solid case was not made that the old name is currently more common, and that the new name seems likely to become even more common over time, it seems counterproductive to move the article to the old name now and then back to the new name later. It is also not all that productive to keep having large discussions about the title of the article. I recommend waiting 3-5 years before calling another RM. If at that point it's clear the new name is a flop (for example, most news media have changed their style guides and practices back to the old name), then another move request would be helpful. In the meantime, readers searching either name should have no trouble finding the article, due to redirects. -- Beland (talk) 21:19, 5 December 2025 (UTC)

Prayagraj → AllahabadAllahabad – As seen from Google Ngrams, and the table given below, Allahabad is the WP:COMMONNAME and the sheer difference in the usage of "Allahabad" and "Prayagraj" in reliable sources is not even close. — EarthDude (Talk) 11:25, 28 October 2025 (UTC) — Relisting. Agent 007 (talk) 19:15, 4 November 2025 (UTC) — Relisting. Z E T A3 18:52, 11 November 2025 (UTC)

Source Allahabad Prayagraj
JSTOR 31,805 137
Springer Nature 10,010 717
Taylor and Francis (Journals) 4,940 511
Taylor and Francis (Books) 9 None
Oxford University Press 4,820 85
De Gruyter 7,731 57
Wiley 4,474 679
Cambridge University Press 7 None
— EarthDude (Talk) 11:25, 28 October 2025 (UTC)
  • Comment - I skimmed over this. Allahabad Safeda is not relevant here. It is the name of a compound. And Indian Social Science Academy, Allahabad, India is similar to Allahabad High Court, not relevant either. Also WP:NAMECHANGES should be taken into consideration. - Fylindfotberserk (talk) 12:36, 28 October 2025 (UTC)
  • Taking WP:NAMECHANGES into account, the new table, given below, still shows that Allahabad is the WP:COMMONNAME. The following is the usage of the terms Allahabad and Prayagraj across reliable sources since November 2018/2019:
Source Allahabad Prayagraj
JSTOR 1,255 132
Springer Nature 2,114 712
Taylor and Francis (Journals) 1,120 508
Taylor and Francis (Books) 5 None
Oxford University Press 1,477 80
De Gruyter 1,459 51
Wiley 1,213 679
— EarthDude (Talk) 13:03, 28 October 2025 (UTC)
This is in addition to the fact that, as Google Ngrams has shown, the usage of Prayagraj has never overtaken that of Allahabad. — EarthDude (Talk) 13:07, 28 October 2025 (UTC)
This table of search results for Allahabad doesn't reference Allahabad for city always. For instance, check the search result from Wiley and the very second and third results are for Allahabad Safeda which is a veriety of fruit and here Allahabad is not referenced for city name. You further go down and after 5-6 results most of the articles/books are scientific/physics related books and those refer to Allahabd University not Allahabad city. Till the time Allahabad related results are not exclusively for Allahabad city, this argument of showing counts is not justified. You keep clicking on next page of Wiley's search and it always points to Allahabad University (In fact in most of the abstract, even Allahabad word itself is not present) because Allahabad University is a renowned university in the area of Physics.
What I mentioned for Wiley as reference is not limited to Wiley, in other searches also the same pattern exist. Oxford University results first reference is for Allahabad high court not Allahabad city.
Please go through the previous move discussions, where Allahabad Safeda, Allahabad Agriculture Institute, Allahabad High court, Allahabad University references were removed, which brought the search results for Allahabad well below Prayagraj.
Another problem with this search is that it references published work from year 2015 as well, when the city was still called Allahabad. So any reference prior to 2018 is anyway irrelevant.
Another important point - In scholarly articles, refrences are also cited for previous work, e.g. In a historical or political scholarly work it will reference old books which will have Allahabad reference and those can never be counted as the current city name being called as Allahabad.
I don't see any reason why people are still behind this move of renaming this article back to Allahabad. RohitSaxena (talk) 01:40, 4 November 2025 (UTC)
This reply was after analysing the second table. I still see almost 80-90% refereces not related to city or are from old work references. Prayagraj is the common name now wherever written, books, internet, newspaper etc. People living in the city or nearby areas may still be calling it Allahabad and it may be outnumbering those calling Prayagraj, but there is no way to identify it, we can't go and do a poll/survey there. On internet, it's Prayagraj as common name by a huge margin. I did a search on Wiley ("Allahabad" - "Allahabad University") and the result I got was just 270 (these 270 contains works as early as early 1900, any reference of Allahabad as city prior to 2018 is not relevant) compared with what you search with only Allahabad got 1200+. When I further applied filter to search 2019 onwards till today, the count was just 17. If you want I can create a similar table what you did with my findings, which support Prayagraj over Allahabad with a huge margin RohitSaxena (talk) 01:52, 4 November 2025 (UTC)
Search within Wiley or similar portal may not be working the way we may search on google. I don't really have a way to separate out references of Allahabad University, Allahabad High Court, Allahabad Agriculture Institute etc. From your provided table, the search results still contains major results from Allahabad University. I hope you get what I am trying to say here. Manually going over entire search results is not feasible and is not a verifiable way to put as an argument, but an argument enough to challenge the correctness of the count data provided by you. RohitSaxena (talk) 02:11, 4 November 2025 (UTC)
Search term Year Wiley Wiley
(open access only)		 Year Wiley
(open access only)		 Year Wiley
(open access only)
Allahabad202219835202427 202523
Institute of Technology Allahabad202222520243 20254
Allahabad safeda20225220241 20251
Allahabad University20224220241 20251
Allahabad High Court20223220240 20251
Allahabad Bank20223020240 20250
Allahabad Institute20221120240 20250
IIIT Allahabad20221120240 20252
Allahabad Agriculture Institute2022020240 20250
Allahabad Agricultural Institute2022020240 20250
Prayagraj202210416202422 202516
Does this help? -- Toddy1 (talk) 06:39, 09:42 10:38, 4 November 2025 (UTC)
Some of Wiley results only have Allahabad in the author details (you have to click on the author-link in the article to see it). This led me to trying "Institute of Technology Allahabad" as a search term, and I found that it produced a lot of results - and if you look at them, they say "Institute of Technology Allahabad, Prayagraj". This partially supports what RohitSaxena is saying. It does not necessarily invalidate EarthDude's conclusions either; remember "Institute of Technology Allahabad, Prayagraj" is a result for "Prayagraj" too.-- Toddy1 (talk) 09:47, 4 November 2025 (UTC)
If I put in the "last 12 months" filter, I will find (open access only) 20 results for Allahabad (excluding 4 for Institute of Technology Allahabad and 3 for High Court and University) versus 19 for Prayagraj. Without the open access filter it is 164 for Allahabad (excluding 34 for Institute of Technology Allahabad and 8 for High Court, University, Bank and Institute) vs 159 for Prayagraj. This is a quite significant shift in the ratio presented in your table for the year 2022. FromCzech (talk) 10:10, 4 November 2025 (UTC)
I have added data for 2024 and 2025 so far to the table - but only for open access, since that is easily verifiable.-- Toddy1 (talk) 10:39, 4 November 2025 (UTC)
Both Allahabad Prayagraj
Jan 2024 - Oct 2025
Author affiliation 177 230 237
Anywhere 203 392 286
Excluding author affiliation 26 162 49
Excluding author affiliation 14% 88% 26%
Jan 2022 - Oct 2025
Author affiliation 308 418 411
Anywhere 360 765 509
Excluding author affiliation 52 347 98
Excluding author affiliation 13% 88% 25%
Another way of examining this is to search on Wiley's author field (which shows the author's affiliation) and subtract this from the number found in a search anywhere in the article. This is not perfect, since the calculated result wrongly excludes papers where the author is affiliated with Allahabad/Prayagraj and mentions Allahabad/Prayagraj in the text. Note that the percentages must add up to more than 100 because the "both" numbers are counted under both names. -- Toddy1 (talk) 15:40, 4 November 2025 (UTC)
I wonder if the bulk of the "excluding author affiliation" figures refer to mentions of the city in the citations.-- Toddy1 (talk) 15:45, 4 November 2025 (UTC)
There are 12 uses of "Allahabad, Prayagraj" in the results . I noted below an example where this is counted as "Allahabad" but in fact indicates the usage of Prayagraj.
Excluding the author information mentions doesn't help either, since the institutions are commonly named in the text. You would need to produce a chart that excludes institutional names that appear outside of the author information text. 99% of the information about a place-name in a journal article is going to be about author information/institutional affiliation, this is why news articles are the proper source to analyze. Katzrockso (talk) 02:11, 18 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Comment: Courtesy link to previous move discussion. There have been 5 previous move discussions all mentioned in the header of this talk page. -MPGuy2824 (talk) 13:09, 28 October 2025 (UTC)
  • Support - As per EarthDude. "Allahabad" appears more commonly than "Prayagraj" in high-quality reliable sources. Zalaraz (talk) 13:37, 28 October 2025 (UTC)
  • Oppose: Pretty much all Indian news sources have accepted the name change and use the new name. Ngrams and raw result numbers are not useful here because they're contaminated by results for institutions like the Allahabad High Court that still have city's old name as part of their name. E.g. querying The Hindu for Allahabad, specially with the time setting of "previous year", only brings up results for the High Court, whereas you have to search Prayagraj to see results for the city. Similarly for other major English newspapers such the Indian Express, Hindustan Times, Deccan Herald, etc. regards, TryKid [dubious – discuss] 14:09, 28 October 2025 (UTC)
  • Oppose - Just doing a quick scan of the latest Indian press "Prayagraj" seems to be pretty common, plus it is the official name as per the local government.Davidstewartharvey (talk) 14:10, 28 October 2025 (UTC)
  • Support per the evidence provided by EarthDude that Allahabad is the WP:COMMONNAME 𐩣𐩫𐩧𐩨 Abo Yemen (𓃵) 15:32, 28 October 2025 (UTC)
  • Oppose* - It's been discussed multiple times and the search results mentioned still includes refrences of Allahabad University etc which is separate from city name. The same was proven and discussed at length in the past. Scholarly work will still refrence historical name, like referring a person was born in Allahabad. This discussion is irrelevant, as the usage of name Prayagraj over Allahabad was already proven with data and it is impossible that the old name comes in more usage after new name is being used more frequently. When the last discussion was closed within the current year then there is no point in showing search results starting year 2019. Scholarly work uses a lot of references of older work and those will still point to Allahabad. RohitSaxena (talk) 00:08, 30 October 2025 (UTC)
  • Oppose per RohitSaxena. The nomination does not respond in any way to the arguments from the 2023 move and what has changed since then. FromCzech (talk) 05:17, 30 October 2025 (UTC)
  • Support - Evidence confirms that Allahabad is still the WP:COMMONNAME. THEZDRX (User) | (Contact) 03:29, 1 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Support per nom. The name is still widely used outside some partisan Indian media sources. Orientls (talk) 06:21, 1 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Support - per WP:COMMONNAME. Freedoxm (talk · contribs) 07:40, 2 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Support - per WP:COMMONNAME. The evidence in favour of "Prayagraj" has always been underwhelming (as pointed out in previous move discussions). The best arguments in favour of "Prayagraj" are (1) that India's lapdog Godi media use it, and (2) the oft-quoted (but dubious) argument that results include references to Allahabad University/Institute/Bank/Safeda. We can address the latter with ngrams comparing the use between 2017 and 2022 of these terms with the usage of "Allahabad" and "Prayagraj", which show that in 2022 "Allahabad" was about eight times more common than "Prayagraj", but that if we excluded those terms it would have been only seven times more common. Changing the "corpus" terms, shows that in American-English, the usage of "Prayagraj" is rising, and "Allahabad" is falling (in 2022, excluding those terms "Allahabad" is only four times more common than "Prayagraj"). Whilst in British English, the usage of "Allahabad" is rising (in 2022, excluding those terms "Allahabad" is ten times more common than "Prayagraj", compared with eight times more common in 2021).-- Toddy1 (talk) 14:58, 2 November 2025 (UTC)
    @Toddy1: re: Godi media, I'm not sure why a few editors here think a news source being insufficiently critical of a government they don't like is a reason to ignore their usage. As is often repeated at RSN, sources can be biased and that's fine. Additionally, newspapers like The Hindu and the Deccan Herald are pretty leftwing and so presumably do not count as "lapdog media", and they prefer Prayagraj all the same. Unless you intend to ignore the usage in every single Indian source, which would be absurd when deciding the "common name" of an Indian city.
    Instead of unreliable ngrams from 3 years ago, we can simply look at current usage by hand. Here's what the Guardian's coverage of the Kumbh Mela had from this year: the floodplains of Prayagraj, a city in Uttar Pradesh known as Allahabad until 2018, and that's the only place Allahabad is used, the city is referred to as Prayagraj in the rest of the article. Same for the New York Times: it mentions the older name several paragraphs deep. Does any of this suggest that Allahabad is the common name of this city in 2025, in India, or outside of it? regards, TryKid [dubious – discuss] 17:06, 2 November 2025 (UTC)
    I am not ignoring its usage; I am recognising it as the very best argument in favour of "Prayagraj".-- Toddy1 (talk) 17:15, 2 November 2025 (UTC)
    The ngrams are not "from 3 years ago"; the current set were issued in July 2024, and contain data up to 2022.-- Toddy1 (talk) 17:20, 2 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Support as per excellent research by EarthDude. The original name is still predominant in reliable sources and has continued to remain so. Koshuri (あ!) 16:10, 2 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Support - See no issue in restoring the original and more commonly known title. Capitals00 (talk) 15:42, 3 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Oppose per TryKid, the recent sources seem to support WP:NAMECHANGES. Also the second table doesn't seem to be anymore reliable or helpful when compared to the first. Glancing through it, it still includes mentions of non-related topics. For example, looking at just the first page for the JSTOR results it's picking up "Allahabad Agricultural universities", "Allahabad High Court", "Allahabad University", "THE TREATIES Of ALLAHAbAD", " Second Pillar Edict at Allahabad" and "The Allahabad Pillar Inscription of Samudragupta I". Looking through Springer Nature results, 7 of the articles on the first page alone are about guava and other references to "Allahabad Safeda" guava plant. EM (talk) 18:49, 4 November 2025 (UTC)
    As shown from Toddy1's evidence, excluding all similarly named terms, Allahabad is still the WP:COMMONNAME. — EarthDude (Talk) 13:22, 5 November 2025 (UTC)
Relisting comment: Need a clear consensus per earlier discussion Agent 007 (talk) 19:15, 4 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Support - Search results from academic sources, which are the best sources per WP:SOURCETYPES show that Allahabad is more common than Prayagraj. It makes no sense to keep the article at the current title. Ratnahastin (talk) 10:26, 5 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Support - per WP:COMMONNAME. Allahabad appears to be more common and predominant than Prayagraj, as per the evidences.
Hbanm (talk) 08:39, 7 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Oppose Prayagraj is now the widely accepted name for this city same as Eswatini is for Swaziland. There's no need to change the name.~2025-38600-79 (talk) 07:49, 5 December 2025 (UTC)
  • Comment:
Number of results with the time setting of "Past year"
Source Allahabad Prayagraj
New York Times675
The Guardian963
Reuters972
Associated Press144
BBC46101
Deutsche Welle970
Al Jazeera210

As Wikipedia's policy is "common name" and not "academic name", and since usage in news sources is an easily verifiable way to check what the common name is, I've compiled this table for the number of search results for each term from various news sources popular in the West, with the time setting of "past year", which you may have to manually set each time you visit the link since it's not part of the URL parameters.

cc: @Toddy1: what do you make of this evidence? Does it sway you? regards, TryKid [dubious – discuss] 23:14, 5 November 2025 (UTC)

Three kinds of evidence have been presented in this move discussion.
  • The proposer presented evidence from November 2019-2025 from academic sources supporting "Allahabad". It was pointed out that results included (a) "Allahabad Safeda" [a plant], and (b) the names of institutions. An effort has been made to see what effect excluding the names of the plant and of institutions has on the results from Wiley [an academic publisher], and these still support "Allahabad", though the evidence from 2024-25 is weaker than evidence from longer periods.
  • Both you and the proposer mentioned ngrams. You said that ngrams were unreliable because the results included the plant and institutional names. An effort has been made to see what effect excluding these has, and the results massively support "Allahabad" after excluding them.
  • Newspapers and magazines support "Prayagraj"; this applies to both Indian and international publications. This is particularly true for the past 12 months, because of the 2025 Prayag Maha Kumbh Mela. This represents a change since I did this exercise for non-Indian newspapers in April 2023, when [except for the New York Times] the results showed equal usage. In April 2023, the New York Times showed 98 results for "Prayagraj" and 5 for "Allahabad" - but this was mainly because of the way the newspaper website was structured so that stories that did not mention the city showed as results for "Prayagraj" because a side bar had links to other stories covered by the newspaper. My searches in April 2023 did not include The Grauniad.
-- Toddy1 (talk) 11:03, 6 November 2025 (UTC)
1 Jan 2024 to 31 Oct 2025
Allahabad Prayagraj
Financial Times 0 7
The Daily Telegraph 3 5
The Times 0 0
Daily Mail 1 9
Daily Express 0 2
Morning Star (British newspaper) 1 0
The Economist 2 1
The New York Times 15 16
The Washington Post 1 3
Time (magazine) 0 0
The Wall Street Journal 1 2
The Australian 0 3
Total2448
The table uses the same newspaper and news magazines that I examined in the April 2023 move discussion.-- Toddy1 (talk) 22:36, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
I do not get the same numbers as you for The New York Times, so I am unsure where you numbers are derived from. I was able to reproduce the results for The New York Times that @TryKid linked, with slightly increased numbers perhaps resulting from additional articles published since he wrote that text. Your results seem to be some artefact of the search results (perhaps identifying a similarly spelled word or something?) as introducing quotation marks into the search from 1/1/2024 to 10/31/2025 provides 9 results for Allahabad , while 73 for Prayagraj . (both in the period 1/1/2024 - 10/31/2025 that you used in your analysis). Katzrockso (talk) 02:16, 18 November 2025 (UTC)
@Toddy1 I think your NYTimes search results, by virtue of not using quotation marks, are including results for Prayagraj in your search for Allahabad. For example, your link here (supposedly search results for Allahabad from 2024-2025) has this as the 3rd result . This article includes Allahabad nowhere in the article, it only includes the name Prayagraj (5 times to boot!)
You need to use quotation marks. Katzrockso (talk) 02:19, 18 November 2025 (UTC)
1 Jan 2024 to 31 Oct 2025
"Allahabad" "Prayagraj"
Financial Times 0 7
The Daily Telegraph 2 6
The Times 0 0
Daily Mail 1 7
Daily Express 0 3
Morning Star (British newspaper) 1 0
The Economist 1 1
The New York Times 9 18
(20 with omitted results included)
The Washington Post 0 5
Time (magazine) 0 0
The Wall Street Journal 1 2
The Australian 0 2
Total1551
(53 with omitted results included)
I have redone the searches in the table with quotation marks as requested. For the New York Times, it displayed 18 results for the P name, or 20 with omitted results included, so I showed both. The claim that doing the New York Times search with quotation marks increases the number of search results for "Prayagraj" to 73 could not be be verified - Katzrockso's URL gave exactly the exactly the same results as mine did. It is possible that search results vary from day to day. But it seems more likely that he/she made a mistake (I do too).-- Toddy1 (talk) 12:15, 21 November 2025 (UTC) corrected Excel error - it had treated 18 as a text rather than a number
  • Support per analysis from EarthDude and Toddy1. The case is pretty clear that Allahabhad is more in line with Wikipedia's policies. desmay (talk) 02:15, 7 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Support. I agree with the evidence provided in support of the move. It seems that moving the page in the first place was a mistake. Lorstaking (talk) 04:41, 9 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Note: This was closed by Abhiimanyu7 (Diff) and subsequently reverted by Abo Yemen (Diff). I am endorsing Abo Yemen's action here and would have reverted it as a blatantly improper close. I am only doing this to reduce bureaucracy and would normally take this to move review. Abo Yemen, do not revert a close like this again; you are clearly involved. Abhiimanhu, do not close a discussion in this fashion again; you have an opinion that you made known in your close rationale that you should have made as a participant to the discussion, not as a closer. Sennecaster (Chat) 16:49, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
    see also: Special:PermanentLink/1321612561#Rm close revert 𐩣𐩫𐩧𐩨 Abo Yemen (𓃵) 16:55, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Consensus is against the proposed move. While the nominator presented data showing continued academic and historical use of "Allahabad", most current reliable sources including both Indian and international media have adopted "Prayagraj" following the 2018 name change. Per WP:NAMECHANGES and consistent with prior discussions (2023, 2025), "Prayagraj" remains the appropriate title. (closed by non-admin page mover) --Warm Regards, Abhiimanyu7 talk  12:23, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
    If I'm following this right, Abhiimanyu7 posted most of the text of this comment as their closing statement when they closed it as described by Sennecaster above. After the close was reverted, Toddy1 copied the text of the close here and added the bolded "Oppose". I'm commenting to note this series of events and also to ask Abhiimanyu7 if they'd like to let the !vote stand as is. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 14:05, 12 November 2025 (UTC)
Relisting comment: Don't see a clear consensus here, so relisting Z E T A3 18:52, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Support Allahabad as I think that has more long-term significance and is more common. One of the above opposers said that Wikipedia uses the common name and not the academic name. I think this is flawed. Firstly, if we were to combine the media analysis and academia analysis tables, we would still see Allahabad as the common name. Also, the common name is determined by reliable sources and I think the weightage of a source for commonname should correlate to how reliable it is. Almost always, academia will be more reliable than news papers. Also, I think that if we were to look at long-term significance, Allahabad clearly wins out even if we were to apply WP:NAMECHANGE because it says sources after the name change are given more weight, not that those before the name change are worthless. If this was considered an edge case for whatever reason, even though Allahabad is more prevalent, the lower-weighted sources before the name change would edge out Allahabad as the common name. User:Easternsaharareview and this 21:29, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Support move. Allahabad is the obvious WP:COMMONNAME. O.N.R. (talk) 18:04, 12 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Oppose: The efforts to demonstrate that Allahabad remains the commonly used name after the change have not led to a definitive conclusion emerging. The new findings since the 2023 discussion (which concluded with the move to Prayagraj) or since the 2025 discussion (which closed with the decision not to revert the name) are the same old. When the question of which is more common between the former and current name is so closely contested, I would definitely lean towards the current name rather than moving backward. ~2025-33599-14 (talk) 09:04, 16 November 2025 (UTC)
    You do not prove that it is closely contested, or that no definitive conclusion has emerged. User:Easternsaharareview this 00:51, 17 November 2025 (UTC)
    The move was relisted only two users above me, that's enough proof there's no definitive conclusion. I do not find the evidence above compelling enough to supersede what was brought up during the past two discussions. ~2025-34343-92 (talk) 16:09, 17 November 2025 (UTC)
    If we go by !votes, then those supporting the move outnumber those opposing it by almost double. If we go by arguments given, those supporting the move have provided a lot of high quality evidence which states that Allahabad has always been the WP:COMMONNAME. — EarthDude (Talk) 12:44, 18 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose. As per above. Kalpesh Manna 2002 (talk) 12:40, 18 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Weak oppose. The relevant data is the most recent data and I find the newspaper information provided by TryKid to be convincing. In my own Ngrams search, I looked at "Allahabad is" vs "Prayagraj is" and I did indeed find that Allahabad is more common . However, a manual inspection of the search results found that many sources were using it to refer to the historic city e.g. . We can also see this by adding "Allahabad was" and "Prayagraj was" to the ngram , where "was" outnumbers "is" significantly for the name Allahabad.
The final piece of evidence editors looked at was mentions in academic databases (e.g. Wiley). Editors attempted to remove the impact of institutional affiliations on the search result, as some institutions like IIIT Allahabad, etc are still included in the results. For example, I checked Toddy1's open-access searches from 2022. I found only 2 articles where the author information indicated the use of Allahabad out of the entire first page, the remainder were mentions to institutional names. Even worse, there were examples of uses of "Prayagraj" being counted as Allahabad - See e.g. , where "Centre of Bioinformatics, University of Allahabad, Prayagraj, India" is counted for Allahabad in Toddy1's results. Katzrockso (talk) 02:07, 18 November 2025 (UTC)
However, evidence has already been provided which shows that even if we exclude similarly named sites such as the University of Allahabad, Prayagraj Airport, or the like, Allahabad continues to be WP:COMMONNAME for the city in scholarly and academic sources, the best sources as per WP:SOURCETYPES. Also interesting to note that many who have opposed this move only state similarly named sites for Allahabad but have not mentioned the aformentioned Prayagraj Airport, Prayagraj Junction railway station, Prayagraj district, Prayagraj division, Prayagraj Metrolite, or the countless other sites which also include the term Prayagraj in their names. — EarthDude (Talk) 12:50, 18 November 2025 (UTC)
The Wiley site did not allow "but excluding" searches. So what was done was to do a search for the city name, and then do other searches for institutional names. And this is recorded in the tables that Katzrockso criticised. If a source said "Allahabad University, Prayagraj" then it would show in the rows for (a) Allahabad, (b) Allahabad University, and (c) Prayagraj. If it is fair to exclude "Allahabad University, Prayagraj" from Allahabad, one might think it was also fair to exclude it from Prayagraj.
The advantage of the "open source" searches is that we can all check the results of the search. But the full searches include larger numbers of papers, which makes it easier to draw conclusions from them, and are almost certainly more representative.-- Toddy1 (talk) 22:29, 18 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Support move per proposal. Allahabad is clearly the common name among reliable sources. The table provided by Toddy is seemingly more convincing. Wisher08 (talk) 09:31, 18 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Oppose as obsolete request. Time to move on.
Also: Sources identified that Prayagraj is getting used more in newly published sources that are reliable and have significant coverage in media from multiple big media houses like BBC. The debate is again going to the old new v. old sources in which old sources used Allahabad. zglph•talk• 09:37, 20 November 2025 (UTC)
Only among pro-BJP sources. Not independent reliable sources. Centralknights (talk) 12:59, 21 November 2025 (UTC)
never knew BBC is pro-BJP. Must be a thing in the parallel world. zglph•talk• 11:12, 22 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Support move. Fairly clear that Allahabad is still dominant and it will take more time for Prayagraj to become common. Centralknights (talk) 13:02, 21 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Support - Per WP:COMMONNAME. As per the evidence provided so far, it is still more common among reliable sources. NavjotSR (talk) 05:33, 22 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Oppose: First, Wikipedia is a global website. As such, when we determine the WP:COMMONNAME, we should give greater weight to major, reliable publications with international reach like the NYTimes, Washington Post, Reuters, and Associated Press that use the contemporary name of Prayagraj over academic journals and publications that to be frank are obscure outside of India. Secondly, even if we grant the premise that this page should be titled for the convenience of the consumer of Indian academia, the supporters of the move have not demonstrated that their sources are using the name in the contemporary rather than historical context. A simple search of NGRAM data would demonstrate that Constantinople is more common than Istanbul, because when a name change has occurred, prevalence of a word in academic sources is evidence for which time period is more studied, not what the contemporary name is. ~2025-35584-41 (talk) 16:24, 22 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Support I disagree with the above comment which is providing the example of Istanbul which nobody disputes as being a more common name. The case of Allahabad is different which is without a doubt still predominantly supported by the sources than Prayagraj. Hislem213 (talk) 12:33, 24 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Oppose - this seems to conflate research articles and common name in practice. Even at a cursory glance, Prayagraj seems to be far more common in usage *today* AlbusWulfricDumbledore (talk) 21:51, 30 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Support - It makes more sense to name it back to "Allahabad", which is still prevalent in search results and is more common overall. MapSGV (talk) 03:30, 1 December 2025 (UTC)
  • Comment* - There is no good data provided by anyone supporting name changing back to Allahabad. None of the search counts provided purely have Allahabad name referred to city. Academic articles can never provide this as supporting evidence of more common usage, as those will always have one or another refrence to old name. Current news articles show more use of word Prayagraj than Allahabad. Vote count can never be a decisive factor to keep the name or change the name of the article, unless supported by concrete evidences. Following are the institutions which frequently appear as searches for word Allahabad -

1. Allahabad High Court

2. University of Allahabad

3. MNNIT Allahanad

4. Allahabad Agricultural Institute

5. Allahabad Museum

6. Railway Recruitment Board, Prayagraj (Formerly RRB Allahabad)

7. IIIT, Allahabad

8. Harish-Chandra Institute, Prayagraj (Allahabad)

9. Indian Bank (Allahabad Bank)

10. JK Institute (University of Allahabad)

11. United Institute of Management, Allahabad

12. NSTI(W), Allahabad

13. Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute, University of Allahabad

14. The Regional Training Institute, Allahabad

15. Allahabad Institute of Medical Sciences

16. Allahabad College of Polytechnic

17. United Medicity, Allahabad

18. United Institute of Technology, Allahabad

19. Allahabad Institute of Engineering and Technology

20. State Institute of Education, Allahabad

21. Allahabad Agricultural Research Institute

There are many more which still have Allahabad in their names or reference as formerly Allahabad. Most of these are prominent institutions and frequently appear in searches. Apart from these, there is a fruit variety Allahabad Safeda, which is referenced frequently.

It is near to impossible to filter out these from Allahabad search results.

Till the time one can provide a concrete result, filtering out all the above mentioned references to Allahabad from searches, the article name should remain what it is at present.

It's not about 'support' or 'oppose' vote count to decide article name. Even if one person provides a verifiable data with no cross reference of Allahabad for other than city name out numbering usage of Prayagraj as city, that should suffice to change the article name to Allahabad. It's about what is logical and verifiable data, rather than just the opinion of people supporting or opposing a specific name. RohitSaxena (talk) 02:01, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

Opppse Kalpesh Manna 2002 (talk) 11:49, 3 December 2025 (UTC)
Kalpesh Manna 2002, you cannot vote twice. You wrote: Strong oppose. As per above. at 12:40, 18 November 2025 (UTC). You are, of course, welcome to make more comments. -- Toddy1 (talk) 12:30, 3 December 2025 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Semi-protected edit request on 2 November 2025

https://nayeekhabar.com/education/prayagraj-history-sangam-mahakumbh/ Nayeekhabar (talk) 07:39, 2 November 2025 (UTC)

 Not done - I have no idea what you mean to specify, because you did not add anything but a link. Freedoxm (talk · contribs) 07:41, 2 November 2025 (UTC)