Separating article page-names and titles

[Aleta Curry]

Noel says: I will note in passing that both Britannica and World Book seem to find it perfectly OK to have several different articles with the title "Charles II".

 the change to allow us to have 8 articles titled "Charles II"  will serve no useful purpose - someone would arrive at a Charles II article, realize they're on the wrong one, and not know how to find the right one.

Oh, my giddy aunt!  This *does* sound like a large and highly-avoidable headache.

I haven't been to the relevant talk page in a couple of weeks, so I will read up before making any further comment

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

The relevant Talk page is on Naming Conventions, Aleta.

[Robert_W_King]

Maybe we should re-think disambiguation pages.  Given this particular scenario, maybe it would be unwise just to have a list of the various 'Charles II' in history.  Maybe this calls for a special disambiguation page that is more like a "catalog" page.

[J. Noel Chiappa]

We need an editorial agreement on how to name people whose titles are identical but span different time periods and continents.

The problem is not limited to royalty, and I can give you examples of people who are involved in the same field (computer networking) and at the same time (now) and have the same name.

The naming systems used by people have this tendency to produce clashes - the same name being used for different things. It's a common artifact of human naming systems. Rather than try to change deeply entrenched human naming practises, I thought it would be easier to make a simple change to allow us to have more than one article with the same title (i.e. large name displayed at the top).

I had hoped that everyone would be enthusiastic about removing the limitation of "page identifier" must= "article title", because it gives us scope to, if we wish, have two articles with the same title. I would have thought the extra flexibility would have been welcomed, not questioned, and am frankly somewhat flabbergasted at the reception. I mean, just because it's there, that doesn't mean we have to use it; it's just one more tool in the toolbox.

Again, naming clashes are endemic to human naming systems. Why are we trying so hard to swim against that tide?

Noel

[J. Noel Chiappa]

Citizendium is not paper.

The World Book I was looking at was on a CD.

making the change to allow us to have 8 articles titled "Charles II" will serve no useful purpose - someone would arrive at a Charles II article, realize they're on the wrong one

You think this can't happen with the existing naming system, where every article has to have a different title? Someone goes to, I don't know "Charles V (Spain)" and then realizes they really wanted some other Charles V (e.g. Charles I of Spain, the HRE Charles V)?

And how exactly did they arrive at the wrong Charles II article anyway? (Remember, the title "Charles II" is only in the text of the article.) If they got there through a "Charles II" disambiguation page (or perhaps a search results page), it listed them all - presumably in enough detail to easily pick the right one. If they get the wrong one, no biggie - hit "Back", and try another one. (Lord knows I've done that more than once on Wikipedia.)

and not know how to find the right one.

Search for "Charles II", and up will pop a list of page-identifiers (i.e. things like "Charles II (Spain) - even if the title, once they click to the page, says only "Charles II"), along with the dab page, and they pick either the one they want, or the dab page.

Try it on Wikipedia; our results would be identical.

The only difference will be that when they get to the page, the large-font title will be "Charles II", not "Charles II (Spain)".

Noel

[RJensen]

Thew problem arises mostly because we are translating names into English from another language. The Spanish called their king Carlos II....it's the enyclopedia authors who are renaming him Charles II.  The simplest solution is to use Charles II (Spain).

[J. Noel Chiappa]

and not know how to find the right one.

Oh, another idea. If the title is stored in the metadata, and it's different from the pagename, we could automatically do something, maybe display some text - e.g. look for a page of the form "<title> (disambiguation)", and if it exists, display a link to it. So our hypothetical article might look like this:

  Page identifier: David Dwight Clark
  David Clark
  For other 'David Clark' articles, please see this page

  David Dwight Clark (born mumble) is an American computer scientist who
  played a key role in the development of the Internet.


Please, all, I'm sure some of you must think I've gone off the deep end about this idea, but human naming systems duplicate names all the time. Unlike computers, where every name refers to only one thing, and every thing has only one name, people just don't work that way. We give the same name to different things all the time.

Rather than continue to force ourselves into the 'every article must have a unique title, even if it's ugly' Procrustean bed, can we please give this serious consideration? It's not a big change (technically), and I am absolutely certain that it will save us untold grief down the line.

Noel

[Derek Harkness]

I'm in agreement with Noel here. There's allot of confusion between how you display content (an editorial issue) and the technical problem of how to store, search, locate and link content. Many people seem to be under the impression that storage and search must exactly match presentation but this is not so. There are smarter ways to do this than adding (parenthesis) onto the end of every article title.

[RJensen]

Derek and Noel have said it very well and I agree.

[Hayford Peirce]

Who am I to argue?  If the three of you can agree on something, then I will join hands with you on it. Just as long as I can easily get to [[Dwight Clark]], 49ers football player and not [[David Clark|David Dwight Clark]]....

[J. Noel Chiappa]

There's allot of confusion between how you display content (an editorial issue) and the technical problem of how to store, search, locate and link content. ... storage and search must exactly match presentation but this is not so. There are smarter ways to do this than adding (parenthesis) onto the end of every article title.

That was my thinking exactly. I would have moved to turn this into a formal proposal by now, however, Anthony Argyriou really doesn't like the idea, and I'm reluctant to proceed because of that. Let me continue my sideline dialogue with him and see if we can make any progress on why he find this approach problematic.

Noel

[Robert_W_King]

If I ever have children I'm naming them both J. Noel Chiappa and forcing them to get degrees in mathematics and computing.  And grow beards.  Even if one is a girl.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

There is a general guiding principle in life that things should be as they appear, which is why I am less than enthusiastic about this technical innovation. If several things or people have the same names, then something has to identify them as being different. We can either do that in a concealed technical way [this proposal] or in a more obvious way such as using a middle initial or adding a bracketed suffix such as (France). My preference is for the latter.

[J. Noel Chiappa]

There is a general guiding principle in life that things should be as they appear ... If several things or people have the same names, then something has to identify them as being different. We can either do that in a concealed technical way [this proposal] or in a more obvious way such as using a middle initial or adding a bracketed suffix

I definitely understand, and sympathize, with that reasoning, but... it can also lead to some really ugly names - ones that can, as Prof. Jensen points out, potentially confuse readers, who will think that e.g. "David Clark" is normally referred to as "David Dwight Clark" because we had to put his article there to disambiguate him.

And yes, I'm sure that there's probably some elegant for this particular example, but... I'm sure we've all seen articles on Wikipedia that had totally abnormal titles - a title nobody would ever actually use in real life for the subject of the article - because the name we would have liked to use for it was already used, or a dab page, or something.


To put it another way, with the mechanism I propose, it allows us to have duplicated titles, it does not mandate that we ever use them. So we can have a policy that says "try to avoid using duplicated titles, because they are confusing", and then only allow use of them in those (possibly rare) cases where we feel that the benefits of doing so outweigh the disadvantages. In other words, it gives us the freedom to occasionally do it, instead of mandating that we can never do it.

Noel

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

To put it another way, with the mechanism I propose, it allows us to have duplicated titles, it does not mandate that we ever use them. So we can have a policy that says "try to avoid using duplicated titles, because they are confusing", and then only allow use of them in those (possibly rare) cases where we feel that the benefits of doing so outweigh the disadvantages. In other words, it gives us the freedom to occasionally do it, instead of mandating that we can never do it.

Yes, the existence of a technology to facilitate alternative solutions when needed is fine by me.