Talk:Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

The reason this should not be simply redirected is that the person who goes to an article called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone might not immediately understand that the page has been redirected, and when reading about HP and the Philosopher's Stone might very well be confused. It's just generally a good idea to take the opportunity to explain, as this article does, what relation the topic name in question has to the topic name where most of the info is filed.

This is true of many other redirections which I've undone in the past. For example, one might very well redirect materialism to physicalism in philosophy--except that, in fact, they don't mean exactly the same thing, and even if most of the information one might have about materialism is in the physicalism article (or vice-versa), the place to explain the nuances of meaning and history of the jargon is in the page about the jargon itself.

I'm pretty sure there's something about this in naming conventions (and if there isn't, there should be). --Larry Sanger

Thank you for this... I wrote a VERY brief entry for the book just saying it was the American title etc, and somebody else turned it into a redirect. I spelt the title wrong but my intentions were good :) Anyway, I agree. KJ

I confess: I did that redirect. I was motivated by the desire to avoid redundancy, but I hadn't read the naming conventions article first.

In the U.S., where I live in work, the movie was "Sorcerer's Stone", and I bought the book with the same title. I sure would have been confused if the bookstore only had "Philosopher's Stone".

I gather the "real" title for the book is "Philosopher's Stone" regardless of what we Yanks on this side of the pond choose to call it. Ed Poor
 * Actually, I guess they're BOTH titles for it... though if you mean 'real' as in originally thought of by the author then it's Philosopher... I think that if a subject has two different names then the one should have a line or two of explanation and a link to click manually rather than being a simple redirect - it avoids the confusion. The other way to do it is to have the very first sentence of the article being 'also known as' or 'originally known as' so that people know why they've been redirected. KJ

As long as we're talking about REAL titles, the "Philosopher's Stone" was the name used historically by alchemists for the reagent to turn lead into gold (or to grant immortality, depending on who you listen too) whereas I know of no provenance for the "Sorceror's Stone". Not that that matters much, but I figured it might interest someone. --Dante Alighieri

Is this page really necessary? There are loads of things in the Wikipedia that have alternative names, and we don't have stubs for all of the alternatives, just saying, "This is an alternative name," do we? I can't find a naming convention on this. Is there really one, or can we just make this a redirect again? -- Oliver P. 15:48 May 14, 2003 (UTC)


 * Agreed. a redirect is better. -- Tarquin 15:51 14 May 2003 (UTC)