Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (royalty and nobility)

Baron according to modern doctrine, but who was never so styled

Please see WT:PEERAGE#Baron according to modern doctrine, but who was never so styled and to keep the conversation in one place if you have an opinion about how such articles should be named please express it there. -- PBS (talk)

Baudouin of Belgium

How do we handle this article? Should it be Baudouin, King of Belgium or Baudouin, King of the Belgians. GoodDay (talk) 23:14, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

We should move it back to Baudouin I of Belgium but we can't because of the most recent debate. So what's wrong with leaving it as it is? Deb (talk) 11:14, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

For the normal reasons - this isn't what he's called. The convention tells us to use Baudouin, King of Belgium; personally I would prefer King Baudouin of Belgium or King Baudouin; anyway, any of these options (or Baudouin, King of the Belgians) would be preferable to what we have now.--Kotniski (talk) 11:21, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

(Formal move request now opened, by the way.)--Kotniski (talk) 11:31, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Should royals have their names in their native tongues?

WP:SOVEREIGN says that royals should have their names in English or in the way most historians use. This rule led to situations where a list of monarchs is inconsistent, such as with German Emperors, where we can find William I, German Emperor and Wilhelm II, German Emperor. One name in English and the other in German. Another good example is John VI of Portugal (João VI), whose mother was Maria I (not Mary I) and whose children were Pedro I (not Peter I) and Miguel I (not Michael I).

I've seen a few editors claim that anglicized names are preferred because they are easier to pronounce. This would make sense if everyone else, not just royals, had their names in English. We have a Kaiser William I among Albrecht von Roon, Karl Friedrich von Steinmetz and Helmuth von Moltke. Another example would be Charles IV of Spain (Carlos IV), surrounded by Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, Francisco Javier de Balmis and José Moñino y Redondo.

Thus, should royals have their names in their native tongues instead? Jean II of France, Nikolay II of Russia, Carlos III of Spain, Karl VI, Holy Roman Emperor, etc...

I'd like to warn you all that I'm talking about royalty that uses the Latin Alphabet. This discussion does not involve Arab, Chinese, Indian and other royals. Also, in the case of Roman Emperors, names wouldn't be spelled as AVGVSTVS or VITELLIVS, but Augustus and Vitellius, respectively. As they already are, in fact. --Lecen (talk) 16:10, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

Articles should have the name by which their subject is best known in English. Opera hat (talk) 16:30, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

I agree, the current practice of common name in English is the best approach and avoids potential conflict. What are we supposed to do with someone like Charles I of Austria and IV of Hungary (use Karl or Karoly?), Baudouin of Belgium or Boudewijn? Which native language do you choose. - dwc lr (talk) 16:48, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

If it is "of Austria" then it should be in German. Belgium would be an exception to the rule, mainly discussed and settled on articles related to it. --Lecen (talk) 17:05, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

The common English name, with others as redirects. Dougweller (talk) 17:18, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

• There has been a long and heated debate over John V of Portugal and John VI of Portugal, which has resulted in them being restored to that format. I think that, having settled that one, we should not reopen it. Some people clearly found the Portuguese name João VI too unfamiliar. I think we may need separate conventions for each country or even each name in each country. For Belgium, so few foreigners know Flemish that the French form is to be preferred. However, whatever the outcome, it is important that rediurects exist for all credible search terms. Peterkingiron (talk) 18:58, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

Established English-language exonyms only, escept for people who lived beyond the year 1900 by which they all had/have legal names with legally registered spellings which it would inappropriate to translate ever.

My very strongly held views and motives on this are the results of decades of trial and error and etymological research and are clearly expressed on my talk page beginning with the pivotal question what is phonetic empathy?. SergeWoodzing (talk) 20:40, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

I've read that, and find it an abhorrent philosophy that is culturally hostile. Fortunately, it is merely an opinion, not anything anyone else need be guided by. Alarbus (talk) 07:19, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Rubbish. It makes a lot of sense unless you like forcing English-speakers to try and learn a myriad different and often unintelligible foreign words for no good reason. We're here to help our readers not confound them. --Bermicourt (talk) 20:48, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

This is what I found at WP:SOVEREIGN: "Monarch's first name should be the most common form used in current English works of general reference. Where this cannot be determined, use the conventional anglicized form of the name, as Henry above." My question is whether the subject of the article will always be recognizable under the English version of their name, which I know is why there have to be redirects.Coaster92 (talk) 23:13, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

• For the most part, yes, names should be their proper names not some anglicised form that are hold-overs from the nineteenth century age of empires. Modern historians are largely using proper names these days and we should sync with that, not with what Britanica did in 1911. Alarbus (talk) 07:19, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Non one has given any good reason to keep the names in English when it has been causing inconsistency among monarchs' names (some with their names in their native tongues and others in English) and the most serious problem: everyone else has their names kept in their native tongue. Why only monarchs' names are "difficult" to pronounce? --Lecen (talk) 13:00, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

It's not only monarchs - anyone else whose name is normally anglicized (John the Baptist and so on) will also have it anglicized on Wikipedia.--Kotniski (talk) 13:16, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

That's an exception, not the rule. --Lecen (talk) 13:31, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

It's not an exception. It follows the rule that we used the name that is most common in English. We do the same for Joan of Arc, Avicenna, Christopher Columbus, Sitting Bull ... it would be possible to sit here and come up with examples all day long. --FormerIP (talk) 13:43, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

It isn't? Does every German, French, Brazilian, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian politicians, military officers and others have their names in English? --Lecen (talk) 14:07, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

No, because that is not "the name that is most common in English". Deb (talk) 14:10, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

I know that. It's precisely what I'm talking about. Having a monarch with an anglicized name surrounded by people with their names in their original tongue makes no sense. It's unnecessarily complicated. --Lecen (talk) 18:05, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

If we changed "Joan of Arc" to "Jeanne d'Arc", most English-speaking people would not be familiar with the title. That is the point. We use what is the most familiar/commonly-used title for English speakers. Deb (talk) 18:28, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

I'm no talking about everyone, but just royals. But nevermind. --Lecen (talk) 18:34, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

You're argument is not with us, but with the countless historians who have used Anglicised names for a long time. Part of the reason is that in many cases no-one is sure what name they would have used themselves as the sources are in Latin and also "Pierre of Frenchland" might have been a German or Pole who spoke no French and did not call himself Pierre, but just inherited the territory. There were no English newspapers, the English records of the time were in Latin, etc, etc.. In fact there is no guarantee that, even if Pierre was French, he would have used the modern version of the name. There is a modern trend to try and use (or is that "guess") the original name, but unless it becomes widely accepted, it will just generate inconsistency and confusion. By the way, you will find other languages do the same: William the Conqueror is Wilhelm I. on German Wikipedia, Guillaume le Conquérant on French Wikipedia and Guglielmo I d'Inghilterra on Italian Wikipedia. Who is right? All of them! --Bermicourt (talk) 18:52, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

The difference is that monarchs are known in histories primarily by their first names, while nearly everyone else is known by their surname (or estate). So in the past historians have translated the first names to the English form, while leaving the untranslatable surnames as they were. This may be increasingly less acceptable now, but as a result of this historical practice English forms of foreign names for monarchs are often still the norm in English-language sources. Wikipedia should reflect this, until it can be shown that a balance of reliable English-language sources supports a change. Opera hat (talk) 02:19, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

So why does the Portuguese Wikipedia use pt:Isabel II do Reino Unido for HBM? Because the Portuguese will understand it? We do the same thing. JCScaliger (talk) 01:15, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

If I may interject, why is it you compare this wikipedia to other language ones? Who is to say that they are correct? This discussion is on what the correct thing to do is and it is on this wikipedia. Whatever the other wikipedias use is irrelevant, for their correctness is not credited nor discredited. Thank you, Cristiano Tomás (talk) 01:37, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

So you support a double standard, then? JCScaliger (talk) 03:11, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

It's not exactly a double standard. Our standards on English wikipedia are not project-wide, they are for English wikipedia. We just happen to employ the same standards as most other language wikipedias in this case. And, as you say, it is with good reason. Deb (talk) 12:32, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

• Follow the Notability rules. There can be no single rule for all names in the English Wikipedia, and that includes the names of royals. It all depends on how the person is mostly known in the English-speaking world. We are not here to redress some percived injustice about a particular state of affairs, because that would be blatant original work from our part. If a German emperor is historically known in the English world as "Wilhelm", he should be denoted as such in the English Wikipedia. If he is known as "William", then "William" it should be. Search and create. -The Gnome (talk) 10:59, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

• Follow reliable sources. I would mostly second what The Gnome has just said. If English language sources tend to use "William" we should use "William". If they also tend to use "Wilhelm II" then we should use "Wilhelm II". If English language sources are inconsistent in using William for one king and Wilhelm for the other then we should be inconsistent too. Alex Harvey (talk) 12:22, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

• Use the name most commonly used in English-language sources. As has been stated above, historical sources are inconsistent, so we should be no more and no less consistent. We are not writers, just editors, so it would be wrong-headed of us to try to establish order among chaos by assigning consistent naming practices where no such consistency exists among our sources. Wilhelm Meis (Quatsch!) 13:02, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

• Use common names. If we'd always stick with native names, what would happen when we'd get to Henry III of France, who was also King of Poland? Would we call him Henri? Or Henryk? Here's an idea: if 60% or so of an article's sources use a certain name when describing the subject, use that spelling. dci | TALK 02:52, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

• Use the common English name. What's the point in having different guidelines according to script used? Why would we apply one naming guideline to monarchs using the Roman alphabet and another (the normal) guideline to monarchs using an eastern script? Nightw 11:41, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

• WP:COMMONNAME exists for a reason; follow it. Whether some random list article is 100% consistence is completely trivial to whether or not people can find the article they're looking for earlier. We cannot possibly expect people not familiar with, say, Spanish to know that "Carlos" = "Charles", and such glosses are actually moving targets anyway, as languages change over time. I have no opinion to express right now on SergeWoodzing's ideas, other than that his "legal name" distinction may be a good argument for not renaming recent people. Saying "follow reliable sources" is essentially meaningless, because reliable sources will differ, depending on whether they are specialist works or generalist ones. There's a whole essay about this now at WP:Specialist style fallacy. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒〈°⌊°〉 Contribs. 18:30, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

(Further comment) -- This is largely about non-British monarchs. The question is what is the common usage in English, and should reflect current practice. I would suggest that the test should relate to the usage of academic historians, and normally to recent ones. Ghits statistics are unlikely to be helpful, as they are liable to pick up a lot of very ancient historians, now out of copyright, whose work is available on websites. Names normally written in non-Roman scripts clearly need to be Romanised, but that hardly takes the argumetn further. Peterkingiron (talk) 18:42, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

I'm baffled as to why this discussion is continuing. The question was asked and answered. There appears to be general consensus. Why are we prolonging the argument. Deb (talk) 22:09, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

I agree. Our approach is to follow the sources. Let's cut the debate and get on with producing and improving articles! --Bermicourt (talk) 08:23, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

Tradition is that nobility, not only royalty, have their names always translated. Unfortunately, specially in America (North & South) it has became an assumption of knowledge to use original language names, no matter how unpronunceable in the speaker’s language. I would vote for native languages. — 189.61.24.117 (talk) 23:42, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

Infante

A rule needs to be made for the Spanish and Portuguese title of Infante. --Queen Elizabeth II's Little Spy (talk) 02:01, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

RFC – WP title decision practice

Over the past several months there has been contentious debate over aspects of WP:Article Titles policy. That contentiousness has led to efforts to improve the overall effectiveness of the policy and associated processes. An RFC entitled: Wikipedia talk:Article titles/RFC-Article title decision practice has been initiated to assess the communities’ understanding of our title decision making policy. As a project that has created or influenced subject specific naming conventions, participants in this project are encouraged to review and participate in the RFC.--Mike Cline (talk) 17:56, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Alleged princes

What is our attitude to people who claim titles like prince or princess where this is not associated by a currently existing monarchy? This has come up in relation to Paul-Phillipe Hohenzollern, who describes himself as "Prince Paul of Romania". His supporters have argued that it could be inconsistent or biased to deprive him of this title when e.g. a descendant of the last de facto king of Romania is described as Princess Margarita of Romania. I would prefer not to use titles like this to describe anyone who was never recognised by a ruling monarchy. Just saying "look at reliable sources in English" may not be very easy since e.g. with Paul most of the sources are in Romanian, the few English sources which refer to people like these may be by their supporters or people with a monarchist bias. Or do we just treat them as like Lady Gaga or Screaming Lord Sutch? PatGallacher (talk) 21:23, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

This is a real conundrum, and in many cases the tensions are political: communists and other anti-monarchists, when in command of a state, generally do all they can to abolish all inherited titles; monarchists and conservatives generally consider many or even all such titles to be living - indeed, often consider them to be an integral part of their own country's cultural heritage. I do not think it will do to say "Grimmland is now a republic, therefore the Duke of Grimmstad is not a duke and should be called Augustus Werister" if in fact most people (and most reliable sources) still call him the Duke of Grimmstad. Of course, many titles of the German-speaking world were created by the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, which was wound up in 1806, and subject only to mortality those titles have sailed on obliviously to the present day. If Wikipedia wishes to minimize the number of future battles between warring factions, often accompanied by a host of IPs and by sockpuppetry, it seems to me the best line for us is simply to use the name most commonly used in reliable sources. For instance, I am completely comfortable with the page name "Henri d'Orléans, Count of Paris", because in English-language sources this important prince's title is nearly always included. Often, of course, tensions simply can't be resolved. I remember in my own distant youth Dimitri Obolensky was usually referred to as "Professor Obolensky" by those on the left and as "Prince Obolensky" by those on the right (who included myself). He rose above it. Moonraker (talk) 21:52, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

As a pretender to the throne of Roumania and the grandon of a king, I think he is probably entitled to call himslef Prince (if he wishes). The claim to the throne presumably depends of Michael's (forced) abdication having deprived him of a claim to the throne, and male primogeniture: Michael only has daughters. Peterkingiron (talk) 23:00, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

Actually it's based on the disputed validity of the annulment of Carol II's (Michael's father) first marriage which produced Paul's father, Carol Mircea. Carol Mircea's status as a legitimate son of Carol II has been ruled on in Romanian courts, with appeals by Michael over the years. This is one of the even more tricky cases of legitimism - and those tend to get even more vicious than monarchists vs republicans. Timrollpickering (talk) 21:01, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Right to expand a bit the issue of pretenders and princes of abolished monarchies has come up a bit before and the rest of the world has a general solution which we've followed. Ex Kings who didn't abdicate are normally accorded their title for the rest of their lives, however once they die the new Pretender doesn't get the King title. The same applies for Crown Princes. (And in some republics you also get titles applied to people when they no longer hold the office - former US Presidents are often still called "President Carter" etc..., ditto former Senators and Governors.) The title of Prince (and other associated titles) is a little different as these are hereditary titles not tied to a current office and they carry on through the family line. These conventions are followed by nearly all countries, whether monarchies or republics themselves. A few countries have tried to go against them and seek to wipe out the titles completely - the Greek republic is probably the best known case, complaining to everyone from foreign presidents to newspaper editors who still call the ex King by his title and getting no result beyond increasing sympathy for him. The main exceptions on Wikipedia tend to be cases where the ex monarch or prince has gone into public life by another name - Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha springs to mind. Otherwise the problem is normally restricted to dealing with objections from a mixture of republicans and followers of rival pretenders & their lines, usually in the form of badly formatted comments from anonymous IPs. The situation with Paul-Phillipe Hohenzollern/Prince Paul of Romania/Paul Lambrino is different as the claims to both the title of prince and to be pretender to the throne are rooted in the validity of his grandparents' marriage, which was ruled legally invalid (but not religiously?) during the monarchy but where since the abolitions courts both outside Romania and within have ruled otherwise. The case this seems most reminiscent of are the Russian Romanovs, who have various rival claimants each based on the validity of particular marriages under various interpretations of royal marriage laws, though I don't know if the courts and/or churches have ever weighed in on that one, and where many would rather run a mile than wade into that dispute. Timrollpickering (talk) 16:37, 23 February 2012 (UTC)