Talk:John IV, Duke of Brittany

John IV or John V

I am not convinced he should be called John V. The French Wiki calls him Jean IV, the Breton Wiki calls him Yann IV. His father was not numbered, not because of a French bias, but because there was no peace treaty in his lifetime it was a civil war and nobody was duke of all the Bretons between 1341 and 1364.

The only reference in this article is a book from a well-known specialist … who calls him John IV: "Michael Jones, Ducal Brittany, 1364-1399: relations with England and France during the reign of Duke John IV" Patris22 (talk) 12:27, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Requested move 30 October 2015

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: moved. Clear consensus to re-title these articles and I note that, at least on this talk page, it has been a concern since 2013. Andrewa's links work for me, so we should be able to work from that if necessary – unfortunately he is correct that these will need to be done manually rather than by bot, but hopefully fixing the links in the navboxes should deal with a significant majority in one go. Pinging Whaleyland and Andrewa as they seemed most keen in helping clean up the links. Jenks24 (talk) 01:59, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

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• John V, Duke of Brittany → John IV, Duke of Brittany
• John IV, Duke of Brittany → John of Montfort
• John VI, Duke of Brittany → John V, Duke of Brittany

– Modern historiographical convention names these three individuals as John of Montfort; John IV, Duke of Brittany; and John V, Duke of Brittany. The current convention of numbering John of Montfort is a propaganda relic in specifically British history relating to the War of the Breton Succession. John of Montfort was never recognised as duke by the King of France, his overlord, and the title successfully was held by Charles, Duke of Brittany until his defeat and death in 1364, at which point John's son, John IV finally secured recognition from both the king of France and the king of England. Retaining the English numbering here is a Wikipedia anomaly and one that has divided and confused foreign language articles based on this topic. Significantly, though, both the French- and the Breton-language articles on this topic are clear in their numbering. In other words, the titling of these articles is primarily a legacy of the 1911 encyclopaedia that originally spawned them. Besides the citation referenced above by Patris22 back in 2013 (who was referencing page 239 of said book), see also John A. Wagner, Encyclopedia of the Hundred Years War (Greenwood Publishing, 2006), 63; Jonathan Sumption, Hundred Years War, Vol. 4: Cursed Kings (Faber & Faber, 2015), ebook; and Robert Knecht, The Valois: Kings of France 1328-1589 (A&C, 2007), 43.
–Darius von Whaleyland, Great Khan of the Barbarian Horde 12:12, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

• Comment: I've only skimmed the articles and sources in question, but this proposal seems sound. —GrammarFascist _contribs^talk 11:28, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
• Comment we need to make sure all the links go the right place 73.154.175.89 (talk) 21:30, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
  • Hence the multi-move request, but yes we do. Is there a way for a bot to do that? Because of the complexity of the names in this case, there don't appear to be any redirects involved except for that of John of Montfort's original page, John IV, Duke of Brittany. I think it would be best to move all those links to John of Montfort, then all of John V's to John IV, and then John VI to John V. Otherwise things are going to get confusing fast. But the move has to happen first, I think.
    –Darius von Whaleyland, Great Khan of the Barbarian Horde 05:55, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
• Support. Yes, it's going to be a big job and needs careful planning... not sure I'd trust a bot with it, though, it's a rather specialised case... and the closer we get to true artificial intelligence the closer we also get to true artificial stupidity. But we should take the trouble to get our titles into line with the almost universal current usage. Some carefully written and possibly unique hatnotes then needed to clarify confusion with older sources. Andrewa (talk) 17:06, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
• Weak support. Seems sound. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:02, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Post move

I've saved some information at

http://alderspace.pbworks.com/w/page/102759130/Duke%20of%20Brittany

some of which will be lost with the proposed moves and which might I hope be useful (even essential) afterwards.

It's just a copy and paste from the "what links here" pages, and doesn't tell us where the links are on the pages. But it at least tells us which pages are affected. In each case, fortunately and as you'll see, there are less than 500 incoming links so it's possible to list them all on one page, which is what I've done.

Comments welcome. In particular, is there a way of gathering more soon-to-be-lost information that I haven't thought of?

It might be good for someone to check the accuracy of what I've done, too, and confirm that you can use the page (for read at least) without needing to sign on the PBWorks (which is my intention and I think essential if the page is to be of use).

This information would be much better in a Wikipedia project, talk or user page, of course, I've used the PBWorks page just because I'm a little more comfortable with the editor there for such tasks. Feel free to copy to your user space or other places if that helps. Andrewa (talk) 17:42, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

Redirects

I've made a start on the links, but there's still a fair way to go. I've also updated most of the redirects, but there was a few I wasn't sure about that I'll list here:

• John VI the Wise and John VI, Duke of Brittany – I assume they are fine to point at John V, but just wanted to make sure there was no confusion with any other John VI
• Jean IV de Bretagne, Jean IV de Montfort, Jean IV of Brittany and John IV of Brittany all currently point to John of Montfort, but I assume most(?) should be retargeted to John IV

—Jenks24 (talk) 02:36, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

I've never actually heard of the surname "John the Wise". I'd say judge the relinking on context for that instance. When is the person the article is referencing alive/reigning? What I've found when I looked through the redirects earlier is that virtually all references that include "Jean IV de" something or simply "Jean" really mean John IV, Duke of Brittany, and not John of Montfort. But again, context matters. I did a few link changes a few days ago and found numerous errors in the links even before the move. I suspect that this mass-move will finally resolve a number of longstanding issues that have affected articles relating to these three men.
–Darius von Whaleyland, Great Khan of the Barbarian Horde 02:45, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

I've hacked away at this for a few hours and have got through a fair bit, but more probably needs to be done. Unfortunately there's no real indicator to see what links have been fixed and what haven't, you can check my contributions or the history of any article in question though. I've also retargeted the all the redirects from the second bullet point to John IV's article. Maybe Andrewa will chip in from here, but ultimately as the proposer of the move it's your responsibility to make sure all the links are fixed (I'm sorry if that sounds harsh). Jenks24 (talk) 06:10, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

Fair enough—I simply don't have time to do so currently. I've got a deadline on Friday and a number of other important things, but I'll see what I can do. At least we have the link list as a hard copy so we can continue to reference it. Thanks for all the work you've done so far. It's really appreciated.
–Darius von Whaleyland, Great Khan of the Barbarian Horde 06:35, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

To clarify, I think most of the urgent links are fixed, so it doesn't have to get done immediately and I apologise that I made it sound like that above. I do thank you taking this on, obviously it has been a problem here for many years and once everything gets fully resolved (I think we are most of the way there) this little corner of the encyclopedia will be in much better shape. Jenks24 (talk) 06:58, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

I'm afraid I'm not able to help much... I've moved bush and Telstra have just sold me a directional antenna saying I would get broadband with it, and three weeks later (during which time it was never true broadband but OK for email and Wikipedia) they turned off both of the transponders that serviced it. Looking at satellite... But I thought it was urgent to save the data.... one of the software limitations of our current setup is that it's not easy to recover such lists after a move (nor easy to imagine how to tweak the software so we could... articles are versioned, but not the entire database, and it would be an enormous overhead to do so). Glad it seems to have worked. Andrewa (talk) 06:38, 21 November 2015 (UTC)