Talk:Peter Bence

His name
I suppose the answer will come down to "What do the sources (in English) call him?" but, for the sake of having this discussed: Why is he listed at Peter Bence instead of Bence Peter or Bence Péter?

In Hungarian, the convention is for the family name to precede the given name. Convention in English for the names of Hungarians is to follow conventional English naming: family name last, which amounts to reversing the order of the names, which is why Hungarian president hu:Orbán Viktor, for example, is called Viktor Orbán in English, and why actress Eva Gabor is discussed in Hungarian Wikipedia under the name hu:Gábor Éva.

As far as I can tell (based on hu:Péter Bence and this video in which Csilla Szentpéteri's name is in Hungarian ordercompare hu:Szentpéteri Csilla), the pianist's name in his native Hungarian is Péter Bence. If that's correct, then Bence (which corresponds to Vincent) is his given name, and Péter is his family name, so normal English convention would be to name him Bence Peter. Largoplazo (talk) 05:21, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

Discussion
Whew; when I started to reply to you, I had no idea what I was getting into. This ended up getting really long, so I've broken it up into subsections to try to make it manageable. Here goes: Mathglot (talk) 03:44, 29 July 2020 (UTC)


 * When he started his career, he used the Hungarian style of his name. Since he became internationally known, the artist himself changed the style to Peter Bence, see his website: „Peter Bence is an internationally acclaimed virtuoso pianist, recording artist, composer, and producer who holds the Guinness World Record for being the “Fastest Piano Player”.“ So it seems to me, this is the version we should also use. Best, --NiTen (talk) 06:35, 29 July 2020 (UTC)


 * thanks for your response. Two issues:
 * First, he didn't change the style of his name. Changing the style of name display, only means that Hungarians normally report their family name first, e.g., it is "Orbán Viktor" on hu-wiki, but it's "Viktor Orban" on en-wiki. This isn't a name change; Orban has not changed his family name; it's merely displayed differently at en-wiki and hu-wiki because of conventions about where the surname should be displayed in each language, first or last. When named in a news report, he is "Mr. Orban" in Hungarian, English, German, or any language. This is not the case however with Mr. Péter, as he appears to have changed his name, and is now "Mr. Bence".
 * Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, en-wiki has its own rules, which are different from de-wiki. Your comments here are most welcome, but when doing so, it helps if you are aware of en-wiki rules, and especially the areas where they differ. In fact, in this situation, the rules are not only different, but nearly opposite. De-wiki, at de:WP:AG (Namenskoventionen, Personen, Allgemeines) says: "Wenn für eine Person unterschiedliche Namen bzw. verschiedene Namensvarianten kursieren, sollte im Artikeltitel in der Regel ein amtlich registrierter Name verwendet werden" (emphasis added) . But at en-wiki, as described at WP:COMMONNAME it's different: "Wikipedia does not necessarily use the subject's "official" name as an article title; it generally prefers the name that is most commonly used." In fact, there is an entire page about this, at Official names. The en-wiki Manual of Style goes further, stating: "When there is a discrepancy between the term most commonly used by reliable sources for a person or group and the term that person or group uses for themselves, use the term that is most commonly used by recent reliable sources." (emphasis added, in both cases) So, it's important to keep that en/de policy difference in mind, when discussing at en-wiki.
 * So, WP:COMMONNAME trumps self-identification per MOS:IDENTITY but in the end the difference won't matter, because most likely the result from COMMONNAME will be congruent to the artist's self-designation, as the news reports and other coverage now appear to support. Mfg, Mathglot (talk) 23:35, 30 July 2020 (UTC)


 * I was fully aware of the two issues, you mentioned above. Maybe I was not really precise in my answer. :) Sorry! Anyhow, I don‘t really see a problem here. The naming conventions in :en and :de are clear, the given name is displayed first, the surname is displayed second.
 * But I also think that the common name (from a worldwide perspective) now is Peter Bence, as the artist uses it since years, on his website, facebook, YouTube videos and hence it appears in news reports. So I think, we should stick with Peter Bence. Best, --NiTen (talk) 05:51, 31 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I think I agree that it is Peter Bence, not because of what the artist does, but because of what everybody else does. But since the outcome is the same, and it's based on sound policy reasons, that differnce doesn't really matter. Mathglot (talk) 11:51, 31 July 2020 (UTC)


 * All in all, his being Hungarian was the key complication for the rest of us. I suspect that Reggie Dwight's choice to perform under the name "Elton John", didn't lead to him having to deal much or at all with people calling him "John Elton".
 * Mathglot, thanks for your comprehensive research and analysis! Largoplazo (talk) 12:14, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

Sources and theories
, yeah, it will/should come down to en sources. If there is some confusion here, I believe it is partly due to how Mr. Péter (clearly his birth surname) handled this, both in the public sphere and on his domain as he started to gain some visibility, as well as on Wikipedia itself, where he apparently registered as a user in 2008 as a minor, and created the article in a somewhat confused manner, which then led to confusion among editors here, who started to alter the content, and then the title, ultimately leading to analogous confusion in sister Wikipedias, which translated or adapted the English article at different points along its evolution, leading to different treatments, depending when their articles were first created.

There are a couple of things going on here, and it might be somewhat analogous to a Brandon Teena situation, where the names got reversed, possibly by himself, likely imho, because he saw the confusion others (foreigners) were having with his name, and then as the mistake was perpetuated, he may have sort of given up on people getting his name right, and just went with the flow and accepted the reversal, even altering his website and domain name to match. If that is the case, that should be dealt with in a "Name order" section in the article, addressing the naming issue itself. Normally, Wikipedia (and ROW) gets Hungarian names right; we know they put surname first; so that Eötvös Péter becomes Péter Eötvös (and all the other Wikipedias get it right as well). But when someone has a name where the last name looks like a first name (Rózsa Péter) then it can be tougher; but we got this one right, since both given name and surname look like given names, and they figured it out. But when someone, like Mr. Péter, has a surname that looks like a given name, and a given name (Bence) that looks like a surname, well, that's just a lot tougher and confusion is likely.

It should come down to what reliable English sources say (which I believe will result in a confused mess, thus demonsrating the need for a "Naming" section all the more). It's worth noting that that is the case per MOS:IDENTITY even if Mr. Péter objects (which I don't think he will). There is also a bigger issue here, in that a sort of "Wikipedia-Heisenberg" principle may have made the situation worse, as Wikipedia was already an elephant in the room, when bencepter.com was a mouse, or maybe an ant; and mistakes or confusion here may have led to confusion on the internet, in legitimate media, finally leading to a change in how the person involved dealt with their own name and their website. That would be unfortunate, if true; but that's a bigger issue that needs to be dealt with at WP:MOS or somewhere else.

So, what happened? Imho, this could be a case of Mr. Péter just yielding to the confusion and giving up, following what other sources were doing. (I really hope Wikipedia doesn't have a part in contributing to the mess.) As to what to do now, other than add as section to the article concerning the naming issue, I think there is one thing: someone here should reach out to Mr. Péter (I'm using his birthname, to be consistent at least here) and ask him. per MOS:IDENTITY, that won't trump usage in English sources, but it could help us resolve some of the backstory, in particular, why he changed his website content, and domain name. Ideally, someone could email him, and point to this article, asking that he log on and respond here. That won't necessarily be decisive, but it could help. Mathglot (talk) 03:44, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

Undisputed facts
We know some facts: Mr. Péter's birth surname is without a doubt 'Péter', and he registered at Berklee Music under the name "Bence Peter" and received certificates and awards under that name. We know that he created a website under the domain bencepeter.com, and content which identified him as "Bence Peter" in English, and which still had that domain and content in 2015, but by 2018 redirected to peterbence.com.

We know that a user of the name User:bencepeter created a user page on 23 October 2008 when the young pianist was 17, with this content: Bence Peter is a Hungarian Composer and Pianist. He studying in the Zoltán Kodály Secondary Music school in Debrecen, Hungary. He has two CDs Green Music (2006) and Nightfall (2008). He compose music in many styles (all of genres) from classical to jazz and world music. Within the hour, this user created the article Bence Peter with the same content, and stopped editing Wikipedia later that day after a couple dozen more edits to Bence Peter (and no edits to anything else) leaving the article in this state, listing his name in the lead sentence as "Bence Peter" and his "birthname" "Péter Bence". There were no further edits until 2015, when they blanked their user page. They have no edits to any other pages except their user page and the article, both of which consistently identified him in English as "Bence Peter". And we know that other language Wikipedias sometimes have it with "Peter" as the surname (ru, eo, it) and sometimes with Bence as the surname (ar, az, en, fr, es, de; see ).

Article history
Some history of the article: First, the English article was created in 2008 by User:bencepeter, in this edit under the title Bence Peter and with the lead sentence "Bence Peter is a Hungarian Composer and Pianist." seeming to show he already knew at age 17 (as all Hungarians learn fairly early) that their names are reversed almost everywhere else in the world. It stayed that way until 11 August 2017 when User:Multiverse91 came around in this edit, changed the Infobox and the lead sentence around so it placed "Peter" as the first name. (He also swapped the url www.bencepeter.com around to www.peterbence.com, but this now works due to a redirect.)

The title remained the old way until 20 Feb. 2018, when User:NiTenIchiRyu moved the page from Bence Peter to Peter Bence in this edit, based on the content of the about page according to his edit summary, by this time bearing the domain peterbence.com (earlier, 'bencepeter.com'; see ). Mathglot (talk) 03:44, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

Other Wikipedias
The German wiki tries to deal with that confusion in their lead sentence, saying, "Peter Bence, auch Bence Peter (* 5. September 1991) ist ein ungarischer Pianist..." but they name the article Peter Bence.

What do other wikis do? Russian wiki has "Peter" as the last name (all Russian bios are in the format, "LAST, FIRST"): Russian (created by Павло Сарт in 2015), as do Esperanto and Italian (Matteo Crinò in 2016, translated from Bence Peter); while other wikis have it with 'Bence' as the surname: Azerbaijani, Arabic, Spanish (2018), French (2018, tr. from Peter Bence), and German. Mathglot (talk) 03:44, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

Domain history
Some internet domain history: The earliest capture at archive.org is in Feb. 2011, but that appears to be a domain squat by newhosting.hu. By 2013, there's something there, but looks like an all-Flash site, and I can't see it. By July 2015, at this archive page, there's an "under construction" on a website which still has domain bencepeter.com, the large headline at the top says "bence peter" (all lower case), and the content copyright is "(C) 2013 Bence Peter". The "contact page" is archived, has a Hungarian and a U.S. phone number (Boston area), and the email info@bencepeter.com. By 2018, the archive page shows a 301 redirect to peterbence.com, with an "ABOUT" headline, and content starting, "Peter Bence is an internationally acclaimed virtuoso pianist...". So somewhere between July 2015 and November 2018, he (presumably he) changed it. I didn't bother looking for the exact point it switched over, but there are around 30 captures between them, so it should be possible to find it. The live site currently identifies him as if 'Peter' was his first name. (Note that the page seems to have been written by a Hungarian ("Zold", missing the umlaut, is a common surname meaning "Green"). Mathglot (talk) 03:44, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

English sources
So what do the English sources say? As soon as I saw that he attended Berklee, I figured they would get it the right way (or at least, the right way at that time) since it would be based on his enrollment information. This link from the article starts off with the tag line, "The following blog post was written by Bence Peter, a third semester film scoring/EPD major from Debrecen, Hungary." The caption under the image says the same thing. The image of the Guinness Book of World Records certificate (in English) has it the same way. In a way, as you pointed out in the very first sentence of your post, this is really the only thing that matters in the end. However, it's a confusing situation, as you found, and the more I looked into it, the more confusing it became.

I'm leaning towards the view that Mr. Péter has given up and switched, and whatever sources didn't switch before that, switched after he did. If that is the case, we have no choice but to go along with it. But it bears explaining in the article. (And I do hope your next question, is of the yes-or-no variety. ) P.S. In case you're curious, I got here from WT:NCP. Hope this helps, Mathglot (talk) 03:44, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

Update: I sent him an email, at the "info" address on his website. Let's see if that helps. Mathglot (talk) 04:59, 29 July 2020 (UTC)


 * , He mailed me back, and pretty much confirmed what we thought; he goes by "Peter Bence" now (in the West; i.e., "Bence" as surname), and has since 2015. I wrote back and asked if I could quote his email here, and if I get a positive response, I will. Mathglot (talk) 10:48, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Published videos section
I blanked the videos section because it was unsourced, but I've left a message at WT:MUSICIAN for assistance with this, as I'm not familiar with convention in this area. Mathglot (talk) 00:26, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Birthdate update - lacking
How come his Birthday is not updating, is the Wiki algoritm broken? I am assuming should update. 73.19.91.231 (talk) 22:45, 6 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Why would you expect his birthday to change? Do you mean his age? It currently shows his correct age, 32 as of his birthday on September 5, which, for me at this moment, was yesterday. Largoplazo (talk) 23:07, 6 September 2023 (UTC)
 * I see it updated now. 73.19.91.231 (talk) 05:22, 11 September 2023 (UTC)