Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Fabergé eggs)

There appears to be a fair amount of confusion and inconsistency regarding how to name the current (and possibly future) articles on the various Fabergé eggs. Some articles use parenthetical disambiguation when such disambiguation is clearly necessary (e.g., Pelican (Fabergé egg), Rosebud (Fabergé egg)), others use it when it is not clearly necessary but makes the subject of the article more obvious to the reader (e.g., Cradle with Garlands (Fabergé egg)), others use the epithet "Egg" or "egg" as part of the namespace (e.g., Cherub with Chariot Egg, Nécessaire Egg) and still others leave it up to the reader to figure out what the subject of the article will be based on its title (e.g., Royal Danish, Alexander III Commemorative). Some of these have been moved from one type of name to another over the course of time in an attempt to follow general naming policies with regard to disambiguation, naturalness, common use, museum titles, etc., and because there is no formal convention, new articles on the eggs end up with any of these types of titles.

At one point the world had more than five dozen Fabergé eggs, and each of these almost certainly warrants a standalone article (which most of them have). It seems like it would be a good idea to create a naming convention so that they all can have related and consistent namespace titles, but I am not altogether certain how this should go.

I recently placed a move request at Talk:Red Cross with Triptych egg asking to move this article to Red Cross with Triptych (Fabergé egg) over an already existing redirect, and the request got a mixed response. After reviewing other editors' comments and all of the guidelines and policies on article titles I could find, I subsequently asked to withdraw it. The thrust of the withdrawal (which I am repeating here) is that I had accepted that parentheses were perhaps not the right way to title an article that did not require disambiguation from any other article (not everyone agreed with that for this article), though I was not satisfied that some way of harmonizing the egg article titles was unnecessary. This is because as works of craftsmanship, their maker, Carl Fabergé, did not assign the eggs titles (as would be done with a work of art). For him, they were all simply Easter eggs made for the Tsars. The eggs have been assigned many different titles by art dealers, museum curators, and researchers, all basing their decisions on some distinguishing character or another of a given egg but not with reference to each other. To make matters worse, some of the eggs have been lost— and as the original cataloging of the eggs by the Bolsheviks was sometimes done rather carelessly, the result was descriptions that did not always match up with those of any now known egg. Lastly, there is the very real possibility that one or more known eggs may also be inauthentic ones that have been shoehorned into the shaky descriptions of once-thought-lost eggs, and the recent discovery of what looks a genuine once-lost egg in 2012 (Third Imperial Egg).

All of this led me to want to come up with a naming convention for the eggs that would follow the general article naming conventions but would take into consideration their unique status as a class of untitled but specific, unique works of craftsmanship which we now consider works of art but for which we (and everyone) have inconsistent titles.

One of the few consistencies I did find was that the majority of modern references to the eggs include the final word "Egg", and that they are seldom described anywhere without this final word (e.g., neither art dealers nor museum curators nor book publishers refers to the pelican Fabergé egg as "Pelican" or "the Pelican"; they call it "The Pelican Egg", usually with a capital "E" on "Egg"). A number of sources will also include a date with a name ("The 1885 Pelican Egg"), some stretch it out even further ("the 1885 Tsar Imperial Pelican Egg with Surprise", which has a lot of redundant information), and many references use all of these within the same work, depending on the needs of the work's context.

My current sense, then, is that perhaps all of the Fabergé egg articles aught to end either with the word "Egg" with capital "E" or with the parenthetical disambiguation "(Fabergé egg)". This means we would have "Pelican (Fabergé egg)" and "Constellation (Fabergé egg)" and "Moscow Kremlin (Fabergé egg)" as well as "Third Imperial Egg" and "Alexander III Equestrian Egg" but never "Memory of Azov" or "Danish Royal" (which would be harmonized as "Memory of Azov Egg" and "Danish Royal Egg"). I do not like the idea of repeating the world "egg" twice in an article title, so am against such things as "Pelican Egg (Fabergé egg)" (Obviously the ambiguity of the title "Pelican Egg" is what makes some disambiguation necessary there, but saying egg twice feels like article title length creep, which I really am trying to avoid in this proposal).

Caveat: I have never created a proposal for a naming convention before, and there doesn't seem to be a clear set of instructions on how to go about doing this. If I have not created this page in the correct namespace, please feel free to move it to an appropriate location and to add additional tags that other editors might be useful. I will make an effort to advertise this discussion on as many other relevant pages as I can think of. KDS4444 (talk) 23:37, 16 February 2017 (UTC)