Forum:Page names for individuals

This subject seems to deserve more attention. Many aspects of it have never reached consensus. The bigger we get, the more important it becomes, or we will get an escalating number of duplicate pages and finally get snowed under with corrective work that might have been avoided.

Here, mostly worth at least a skim through as background reading, are some of the earlier forums on the subject (probably all that have had any change since the end of 2008):
 * Forum:Noble/Royal Titles
 * Forum:Page names
 * Forum:People with no birth or death dates
 * Forum:Proposed change to name/date convention so as to eliminate the question-mark
 * Forum:Standardising page names for individuals (and its archives)
 * Forum:Standards on dateless individuals
 * Forum:Value of page name standards

The most recent version of anything on which we get a reasonably comprehensive consensus should be reflected somewhere on the "project" page Familypedia:Page names.

Matters that are still under some sort of dispute include:
 * Titles and job descriptions - I'm not even sure that we agree on "Henry II of England (1133-1189)"
 * Sr, Jr, and Roman numerals for untitled people
 * Middle name(s) - none, one, two, or just initials, except where a person was commonly known by a "second" name
 * Qualified or omitted dates when actual dates are not known - (1650-) and (-1790) seem to be acceptable but some of us have reservations, and at least two keen contributors have wanted "c" to be restricted to a 5-year range at the most
 * Languages for people who were not born in an English-speaking country (but what if their parents were English on holiday and took the child straight back on the next boat? - or if they were born in a disputed territory such as Alsace and we are not sure what was the official language because we are not sure when they were born? - or if they and their parents almost certainly spoke Anglo-Saxon and most documents give them a name in that language but we want to modernize it?)

Discussion threads under separate headings, please, and even maybe subheadings.

-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 11:29, December 30, 2012 (UTC)