Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (people)/Archive 1

Initial discussion
Several solutions have been proposed and implemented for the case of several people who share the same name: eg
 * Piet Hein
 * John Brown

This issue has been discussed at Talk:John Brown.

Quoted discussion:


 * Maybe we should disambiguate by year of birth, eg "John Brown (1859)". I don't think we'll ever come up with a satisfying, simple, intuitive qualifier. "John Brown (Queen Victoria)" is a bit long and unwieldy. -- Tarquin 13:52 Aug 26, 2002 (PDT)

I was thinking of birth and death dates in parentheses and/or nationality: Scot and American. The only alternative I can see is to call one a lover and the other a fighter. -- isis
 * We have used nationality before. See Piet Hein (Denmark) and Piet Hein (Netherlands).   Rmhermen 16:24 Aug 26, 2002 (PDT)
 * But in the particular case of Piet Hein, surely it's better to use his middle name for disambiguation, thus Piet Pieterszoon Hein. Gdr 11:57, 2004 Aug 23 (UTC)

I would much prefer to use dates to distinguish them, but that's not helpful in this case, because their lives overlapped [(1800 - 1859) for the abolitionist and (1826 - 1883) for the ghillie], so a person who knew the man they were looking up lived in the middle half of the 19th century would not be able to tell which it was. I think the nationality would be more helpful, but I'm not sure someone would know Victoria's John Brown was a Scot (if they just had his name mentioned in passing in some article about her), and Buchanan's John Brown could have been a Scot by birth (tho he wasn't). So I would like to distinguish them by what they did, which raises the issue of how to label them. I was born and reared in Virginia, and the first epithet that comes to my mind for Buchanan's John Brown is "terrorist," which may not be NPOV enough, altho he WAS executed for treason and murder, and if that's not terrorism, what is? (Same problem with "fanatic," plus the other John Brown was gaga about Victoria, too, and so could merit that description.) I'd like to label Victoria's John Brown "ghillie" and then define that in the article, but that wouldn't help the person looking them up who didn't already know that term. So the best I can suggest, thru gritted teeth, is "abolitionist" and "servant." Can anyone else, please, please, please, do better? -- isis

It would make far more sense to me to have the person's most historically significant profession in parens after his name and then add birth years to further differentiate if needed (similar to Titanic (1997 film)). Of course if one person by a certain name is more famous than another person by the same name, then the more famous one gets the non-parenthetical page title. However, we can often avoid the use of parenthesis by disambiguating by middle names or initials (George H. W. Bush vs George W. Bush or John Adams vs John Quincy Adams, John Smith vs John Maynard Smith for example). --mav


 * John Smith ambiguities still existed prior to my latest edits. I think that if I were a newbie looking for precedents I might well try a search on John Smith, so it was worth getting into a defensible state.  -- Alan Peakall 16:38 Dec 20, 2002 (UTC)


 * The point still stands of course, but John Maynard Smith's surname is Maynard Smith, not Smith. Duncharris 13:46, Apr 10, 2004 (UTC)

Dates in titles
Even though this seems to have quieted down, I'd like to make one more plea for using dates in article titles. I agree with Mav that we should use extended names where feasable. But where not, I prefer dates.

The guideline given for multiple names emphasizes the use of a primary role or function as the desired way to distinguish between two people known by the same name. I'd propose that we set birth and death dates as the normal use guideline. Using William Bradford as an example, under the existing guide we would have:
 * William Bradford (Pilgram leader)
 * William Bradford (printer) (colonial printer?)
 * William Bradford (printer) (revolutionary printer?)
 * William Bradford (senator)
 * William Bradford (Attorney General)

To me the dissambiguation page for Bradford speaks for itself. This gets only worse as we have several people with the same natural disambiguator. For example, the United States has had three generals named Philip Sheridan, two of them prominent....Lou I 19:23, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * I don't think it's a good idea to use dates to disambiguate when they can be avoided - it makes linking much harder, because one either has to know the person's dates or else look them up. If you're linking to one of the William Bradfords, chances are you don't know his dates, but you do know what he did. To give an example of a page where this has helped me: I don't know the dates of the Engelbert Humperdincks, and it would be very annoying to have to look them up every time I wanted to link to one of them, but I do know that one was a singer and one was a composer, so if they're disambiguated in that way, I've got no problem and linking is easy. --Camembert


 * Please use disambiguators that readers are most likely to know. Ease of use is far more important than consistency.  In many cases profession will be a good disambiguator, but if there are four people with the same name and profession, then obviously profession isn't a disambiguator in that case, and something else should be used.  What's important is (a) that the user knows it; and (b) that it disambiguates -- not that it is stylistically consistent.  -- DBooth 05:07, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Numbering for disambiguation
I've run into a problem that I've temporarily solved, but not really to my satisfaction. The famous mystery writer Ellery Queen also wrote 4 novels under the byline of Barnaby Ross. Barnaby Ross wrote about a Shakespearean actor/detective named Drury Lane. I wanted to make a link to Drury Lane in the "Category:Fictional detectives" and the Queen and Ross articles. But when I made this link and then click on it, it takes me, of course, to the already existing article about Drury Lane the London street and theatre. I've worked around this by renaming my detective, at least in the Ellery Queen and Barnaby Ross articles, "Drury Lane 2". But this is surely an unsatisfactory way of doing things. What do you suggest?66.1.40.242 00:20, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)