Talk:Ewa Bandrowska-Turska

Other names

Hi Gerda, I'd like to discuss your recent edit to this article's infobox. It certainly isn't a standard practice in Wikipedia biographies to provide possible declensions of a person's name in that person's native language. Your choice of case also seems arbitrary: why did you only provide the nominative and dative and not the remaining five cases that exist in Polish? Neither is it evident why the infobox should provide a Cyrillic transription of the person's name, if the article doesn't mention that she ever lived in a country where the Cyrillic alphabet is used. I would be grateful for your explanation of this choice. — Kpalion^(talk) 16:31, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

I only restored what was there before you removed it, without much thinking, I confess. I hope those more active in writing can answer better. I saw Chinese for Chinese people and think it's good to have the original, even if I don't understand it. I can see that Cyrillic here is different and may be not a good idea. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:52, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

I wrote the article. I input whatever name variants I find in sources, as what women are called is changeable. It is helpful for others who may be interested in furthering research. "Standard practice in Wikipedia biographies", using the same name from birth to death, determining some non-existent "common name" which is supposed to reflect how a woman whose name may have changed multiple times in her life should be called for "consistency", clearly shows that the practice is unreliable and biased. However, that being said, I recognize it will not change. Do as you wish, I refuse to editwar over anything. SusunW (talk) 17:12, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

I fully agree with the need to list all of a person's names if that person used various names during her lifetime. This has nothing to do with declension by cases, which I understand may be difficult for a person not familiar with inflected languages to grasp. It's like claiming that "Jane Doe's" is another name of "Jane Doe" just because you found the form "Jane Doe's" used somehwere in a sentence. There is no indication in the sources referenced in the article that Ewa Bandrowska-Turska changed her name at any point in her life. I will therefore revert to the version without "other names" in the infobox. If a source is found that she did actually change her name (it's possible, for example, that she was born Ewa Bandrowska and changed her name when she married a Mr Turski), by all means please add it to the article. — Kpalion^(talk) 18:10, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

IMHO, it doesn't matter in the slightest what she called herself or what her legal name was. It matters what sources called her. Lauren Bacall, as did most of her friends, called herself Betty. What her legal name may or may not have been doesn't remotely matter, her notability and sources are under Bacall. Same for Bandrowska-Turska. Doesn't remotely matter what her name was or whether she changed it. It only matters what sources called her and that those sources can be identified as speaking of the same person. SusunW (talk) 19:56, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

I agree, and think a revert while we discuss is no good style, sorry. Where, Kpalion, do you see different declensions? I saw different names, but agree that the Cyrillic probably could go in the English Wikipedia. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:03, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

Apart from the Cyrillic version, there were the two following forms:

• Ewie Bandrowskiej-Turskiej, the dative form of Ewa Bandrowska-Turska (which is the article's title);
• Ewie Helenie Turskiej-Bandrowskiej, the accusative form of Ewa Helena Turska-Bandrowska (the middle name is already noted in the birth name).

Again, this is not a matter of legal versus familiar name. These are just different grammatical forms of the same name. — Kpalion^(talk) 21:48, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

I am not being remotely argumentative and because tone is impossible to generate via text, I assure you that I truly am not remotely concerned, frustrated, or angry over what you do with the names. I don't care whether any of the forms stated are forms of her name. It is irrelevant to a researcher. True story, I once spent years searching for a man by the name of James Parrick in a place I knew he should have been in the records, without any luck. I finally spent weeks doing a systemic line by line search of a definitive document which listed him as Jame Sparrick. All subsequent sources listed him as the same and all indices showed his entries under "s" instead of "p". From a researchers standpoint, knowing the variants that appear in the records is valuable, regardless of how they are derived, regardless of whether they are diminutives, datives, etc. or what the person called themself. As I said in the beginning, it will not matter what I put there, someone who wants to follow "Standard practice in Wikipedia" will come along and change it. The research always suffers for policy, but it is what it is. SusunW (talk) 22:21, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

Would you say it would be valuable from a researcher's point of view to list, let's say, Barack Obama's as an alternative name of Barack Obama in the article about him? Here's one source that calls him by this name. — Kpalion^(talk) 22:51, 10 February 2016 (UTC)