Talk:King John

Common usage
Common usage demands we link to the person not the play, 9 out of 10 people will look for the King not the play using this search term. Thanks, SqueakBox 06:48, 23 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Disagee. There are dozens of "King Johns" - John of England is the proper usage. Please build a consensus for this change if you want to make it, and if you do, then make sure you fix all the related links - which is a key policy when you change an article name. Thanks.Smatprt (talk) 07:36, 23 May 2009 (UTC)


 * For example:

I'm also copying over this very discussion from the talk page at the play page:Smatprt (talk) 07:52, 23 May 2009 (UTC)
 * John of Bohemia
 * John of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden
 * John of England
 * John of Poland
 * John of Scotland Smatprt (talk) 07:48, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

There have been many kings called John, the page that the real King John of England is found at (John of England) is a lot more enlightening. To be honest this play is the only notable thing that is unambiguously called "King John" rather than "King John of England" or "King John IV" or whatever. ~ Mazca (talk) 14:18, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. Also, if you look at the List of English monarchs and List of British monarchs and click on the names of various monarchs to go to their articles, you'll find that articles have titles such as Richard I of England, Mary II of England, Anne of Great Britain, Victoria of the United Kingdom, etc. And if you look at a list of Shakespeare's plays, and click on the links to get to the articles, you'll see that we use Macbeth, not The Tragedy of Macbeth (which is simply a redirect to Macbeth), etc. We use Richard II (play), simply because Richard II is a disambiguation page. So the answer is that even if Shakespeare had never written his play about King John, the article about the person King John would still be called John of England, and our articles about Shakespeare's plays generally use the simple title of the play (without "the tragedy of", "the history of", etc.) except in cases where we're forced not to because a page with that name already exists. Cowardly Lion (talk) 14:39, 9 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Fine, we now have a dab page with all the above mentioned kings and the play, this isthe standard way to deal with this kind of issue. Thanks, SqueakBox 16:27, 23 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Did you go thru all the Shakespeare articles and fix the links? That is part of the process, which you apparently don't want to follow-thru on. You create a bigger problem than the one you want to fix. Any reason you are acting this way??Smatprt (talk) 04:09, 24 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Someone has, I do know that from the monarchs of England I have on my watchlist, but (a) this isn't really an issue with dab pages and (b) even for redirects a bot will do this within 2 or 3 days, its not like in the bad old days when this had to be done manually, so its ot the big deal you claim. And clearly what I have done is to improve the encyclopedia, no sniping please. Thanks, SqueakBox talk 08:39, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Misleading
I think it is misleading to have King John's dates as "1166-1216" after stating that he was King of England. This could give some people the impression that he was king from 1166 - 1216 - in fact, he was king fro 1199-1216. Would it not be more sensible to have "King John (1166-1216), King of England from 1199 to 1216 in this article? Vorbee (talk) 15:38, 25 August 2019 (UTC)