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.
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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.
Well, disambiguating phrases have always been used, first by Wikipedia and now by CZ, to distinguish titles of articles about any item that shares a descriptor with another item. I'm not sure what problem Noel is trying to solve with his proposal. It is a great
advantage that we have such disambiguating phrases, not only in the URL/database identifier, but also in the human-readable page title (what goes in the <title> tag) as well as the title at the top of the page. We need to make distinctions in all three places. That's because humans get confused even more than computers do, and the more we make distinctions, the less confused we'll be, and less confusion is good!
I don't know, but I suspect the reason you don't want the human-readable title at the top of the page to include the parenthetical disambiguating phrase is that the phrase is not part of the name of, e.g., Charles II. And that's right, Charles II was
never called "Charles II (France)." But that's OK, of course, because with the human-readable title at the top of the page, we are naming the
article, not the human being.
Do you think anybody gets confused by something like "Apollo (Greek god)," as if that whole thing, including the parentheses and the words "Greek god," were somehow part of the
proper name of Apollo? Of course not. Nobody will get confused that way. Similarly, I doubt that many people will get confused about "Charles II (France)." And if you think they will, then by all means, unconfuse them in the first paragraph of the article.
The way I see the issue, we are trying to decide whether
(1) the confusion suffered by people who mistakenly take the title of
the article to be the title of
the thing the article descibes, e.g., the article title "Charles II (France)" is taken to imply that the king's name was "Charles II (France),"
is greater or less than
(2) the confusion suffered by people who see an obviously ambiguous title, "Charles II," and are forced to look at the first line of the article or follow a disambiguation notice link in order to determine whether the article concerns what they're interested in, and then if necessary to find the appropriate article.
Surely there are indeed both potential confusions, and other related confusions. But I think (2) is the greater danger. Generally, by being explicit in the article title itself about which Charles II we mean, we make it maximally clear which Charles we're talking about. That avoids a confusion and navigation problem that everyone will have. (1) describes a confusion that
relatively few readers will have, and it can be solved by bolding the correct name, as we should do anyway, in the first line of the article. Besides, Noel's proposal, if I'm not mistaken, essentially would have us do away with disambiguating phrases in page titles, while such phrases cause confusion only with regard to only a very small class of articles (about monarchs).
Maybe Noel et al. are operating on the mistaken/simplistic assumption that people will always arrive at a "Charles II" via a disambiguation page...that's what this might suggest:
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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.
But people arrive at wiki pages in all sorts of ways. The most common way, I'll bet, is via a Google search. The <title> tag should have the disambiguating info in the title, and I assume that it does on Noel's proposal, so that isn't a problem. They also arrive via links-in-the-text from other articles. Here is an example where the disambiguating phrase helps. Anyone who has the slightest bit of historical knowledge knows that monarchs share names (and titles), and so if they come to an article that is titled
simply, "Charles II," they are going to immediately ask themselves, "Err...am I on the right page? And do these geniuses know that there were other Charles IIs?" That is going to be a far bigger and more important problem, it seems to me, than school children running around thinking that the monarchs could bear a title of the form "Charles II (France)."
If you search for "Charles II" on Encyclopedia Britannica, you'll see that they actually do include the disambiguating phrases "king of Spain," "king of Great Britain and Ireland" (etc.--but not of France!!!) not just in the search results but also just below the word "Charles II" at the top of the article page as well.
Finally, Noel--I agree that natural language is full of wonderful ambiguities. But encyclopedia articles are supposed to be about specific topics, and our readers will naturally expect it to be made clear as quickly as possible which topic an article is about. We should not tolerate ambiguity in page titling simply because the language is ambiguous; that doesn't show any sophistication on our part, just a willful disdain of the patience of readers...
