Will's introduction
I for one am very interested in Royalty and Nobility and this includes their genealogy. I know there are already some pages started with these individuals but I thought I would start a discussion about a standard way of naming. If this has already been discussed please forgive me. Here are a few points that I see: (Examples are fictitious).
1) For individuals whose title and last name are the same examples could be:
- Thomas Lovelace (?-?), 2nd Lord Lovelace
- Thomas, 2nd Lord Lovelace (?-?)
In this case the 1st example seems to me to be more usable, but then we could get some interesting xamples when we go to other national titles:
- Hermann von Hessen (?-?), Landgraf von Hessen
- Hermann, Landgraf von Hessen (?-?)
In this one, the latter seems to look nicer in my opinion. But I really do think it would be better to have one standard.
2) What language should the title be in? Do we call a German Graf a Count? or leave it Graf? As an example.
3) Royalty with "surnames" is another point. Do we want to include their surname or just their title?
- Paul Plantagenet (?-?), King of England
- Paul, King of England (?-?)
- Georg von Hohenzollern (?-?), Koenig von Preussen
- Georg, Koenig von Pruessen (?-?)
Anyway, these are just some problems I see with titled individuals and just wanted to know what everyone else thought. Thanks
Will 21:51, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
Responses
Robin's first set of responses
Good subject for discussion, Will! I don't remember it being seriously addressed here before. We all have such ancestors (though some contributors, poor chaps, can't trace the links!).
Format: for simplicity, I'd recommend that we start with the English-language Wikipedia page name (which is likely to exist for nearly all such people soon if not already); but after creating a matching page here (to catch links from other ex-WP articles) we redirect it by adding our standard " (YOB-YOD)" right at the end.
Language: as above for anything that's on the English-language Wikipedia. We've not progressed far into becoming multilingual; when we do, we may well have corresponding pages in other languages as do some existing Wikia. That will be a whole new field for us and we can learn from the other Wikia how to make it work. Freeciv is an example.) Until we go that way, I suggest inviting people to use whatever language seems appropriate but to redirect to the "standard" where there is a WP article as above.
Royalty: covered in the above two responses.
Robin Patterson 06:02, 23 September 2007 (UTC)