Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2011 June 26

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June 26

Template:English name

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the discussion was delete. JPG-GR (talk) 17:58, 4 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Template:English name (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

This is the implicit default, so no clarification is required. Very few uses, none of which actually seem necessary. Cybercobra (talk) 01:41, 26 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed. This might possibly be the most useless name hatnote currently deployed. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) - talk 10:16, 26 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Maybe this template was used to differentiate the different names in those articles, since it is ambiguous whether the first 2 words are a first name, or the middle word is the middle name because the articles do not mention if those names are full names.Curb Chain (talk) 10:35, 26 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- I've looked at the articles it's used in, and they are all referred to by surname so this template seems unnecessary. Peter E. James (talk) 18:17, 26 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Indeed. Some of us may know which of the names in Lee Harvey Oswald is the last name, but others may not. Template was created to avoid confusion in names like "John Wilkes Booth", "Lauren Kelsey Hall", "Jared Lee Loughner", since it's common for some people to use English last names as middle names, and in other cases, like vi:Laurie Tamara, her entry in Vietnamese wikipedia had to be modified to use her actual surname Simpson. Not a mistake some of us would have expected to see, but expected if English wikipedia is used as the source of articles for other languages. --John KB (talk) 18:18, 26 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- But that isn't an English name - and I'm not sure the current title is correct as she is referred to as "Rivera" here and I can't find any reference to just "Simpson". I would make it clearer in the article if I knew which name to use. It's also unclear why the name was changed from the version in the English Wikipedia. Peter E. James (talk) 18:58, 26 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
~~Keep~~ Delete (see later on). English name is to be disambiguated. Possible confusion is well explained above (e.g. Lee Harvey Oswald: I wouldn't know otherwise). Also, this template is in a pattern: Category:Hatnote templates for names. -DePiep (talk) 00:36, 27 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
"Disambiguated" from what? Disambiguation serves a very specific purpose: it differentiates articles with similar names from each other. It is not simply "clarification of what the title means". Most of the name hatnotes are pointless and the trend has been to delete the more useless ones. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) - talk 08:27, 27 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguate "Middlename Familyname" from "Familyname Familyname" (so not directly as in the more narrow defined WP:DAB). If a reader is looking for the wrong familyname in such a situation, they will end up wrong, not finding the target.

Comment Chris Cunningham, name hatnotes are in Category:Hatnote templates for names. Since Februari when this category was created it contained about 28-30 pages. There has been no "trend" for deletion. Also, that would hardly be an argument, innit. -DePiep (talk) 11:13, 27 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've personally TfDed about half a dozen of these templates, and contributed to several more TfDs. There are less than there used to be, for good reason. As for disambiguating between Lastname Firstname and Firstname Lastname, why do we need one template per language for this? What's wrong with {{about}}? Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) - talk 11:51, 27 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

My comment point was only about the name hatnote TfD trend you mentioned. My datadump from February 9 lists exactly 28 templates in that category, today it's 29. So, that "trend" is not existing, and anyway in itself would not have been an argument here. Your TfDs may have occurred earlier, or you might be talking about hatnotes in general (of which I have TfD'ed some two dozen this year for various reasons). -DePiep (talk) 13:10, 27 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

They are hatnotes all right, but not WP:Disambiguation hatnotes. They explain family name intricacies. All this {{about}} and other WP:DAB hatnotes do not address. That said, I reread this TfD and must agree that this English one is superfluous, as the nom said. I change to Delete. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DePiep (talk • contribs)

Delete: Redundant with {{Persondata}} these days (we don't need two templates in the same article spelling out what the family/sur/last name is). And per all of Peter E. James's objections. Note further that "Oswald" isn't an English name either, but German, so the template keeps getting misused anyway. I'm a big fan of useful surname hatnotes (and principal editor of several of them), but this isn't one of the useful ones. All of its very few use cases simply need their text clarified where there is likely to be genuine, general confusion among native English speakers (it's not en.wp's job to explain at the start of every other bio article how to parse middle names and surnames in English). To the extent translation efforts make name order errors, they can and will be corrected on a case-by-case basis, like any other translation error. Hatnotes are not intended to be disclaimers, as someone recently noted about {{non-Germanic van name}}, also up for TfD. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 02:06, 27 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Irrelevant for this TfD, but interesting for the Thinking Editor: {{persondata}} does not has an option for 'family name', so can not replace this hatnote's intention: point to the family name. -DePiep (talk) 00:22, 2 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - probably unnecessary since it's the default in Western languages. Normally, people just assume the last word in a Western name is the family name, and most of the time they'd be correct. Where it isn't, we have existing templates like {{two-word family name}} to indicate the unusual cases. We don't need a template to explain the common use. Robofish (talk) 12:26, 30 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.