Why not "Emperor X of Japan," which is one normal way of referring to kings, emperors, etc.? [Japanese emperor--X]
? seems rather awkward to me. --
LMS
Hi Larry, I started preparing this 3-4 weeks ago, and this format was at the time the suggested replacement for subpages. (you might even have suggested it yourself at some stage :-) )- clasqm
Heh, but subpages are evil :-) Acually, in this instance, I think "Emperor X of Japan" (or even "Emperor X" if there are no name collisions) would be nicer, since all other monarchs seems to get their own pages (as well as all other historical persons). I'll pitch in and help you convert the references if you'd like. --Anders Törlind
I converted them to "Emperor X of Japan" style (it only took a couple of minutes in Emacs). But I think "Emperor X" would be better, since collisions with non-Japanese emperors seem unlikely. We need to decide this before too many articles on individual emperors get written. --Zundark, 2001 Nov 22
Thanks, Zundark - I fixed the half-dozen empresses that you gave a posthumous sex change :-). I think "Emperor X of Japan" might have advantages when it comes to search engines and so on, though - clasqm
- Oops, sorry about the empresses - I didn't notice them. --Zundark, 2001 Nov 22
I think this "Emperor X of Japan" business is kind of silly. Why should the Gemmei article not be at Gemmei? rather than Empress Gemmei of Japan, if there is no other use of that word. Articles about people should be titled with either their names [Mary Stuart]? or the most common usage [Mary, Queen of Scots]?.
- Because the average reader of an English-language encyclopedia probably won't know that Gemmei was an empress, or that she was japanese. Even [[Henry I} is currently being redone as Henry I of England to distinguish him from [Henry I of France]? etc etc. What you suggest is great in terms of pure hyperlinking, but people also come to these pages through our own search function and outside search engines, and the first thing they see in the search results is the page title. The more relevant info in there the better. let's say I came here because I did a search for Japan on Google. "Gemmei" is meaningless unless you already know Japanese history. "Empress Gemmei of Japan" is meaningful. - clasqm
The naming conventions for Wikipedia hold that we should a) Use common names of persons, amd b) Use simple titles. Read Naming conventions to see why. Empress Gemmei of Japan vioaltes these conventions. Gemmei? does not. In the case of ambiguous article titles such as Henry I, we have established protocols for dealing with this. Article titles are not supposed to be meaningful. They are supposed to be titles. The erbium title should be Erbium, not [Erbium the rare earth element]?. - Tim
- I quote from naming conventions:" As to names of persons, there are two schools of thought: use the most commonly used name, or use the person's full name. After a vote among those interested, we've come down in favor of the former". Now we need to ask what is the most common name: Are you royalty yourself, that you are prepared to address the emperor of Japan with "Hey, Akihito, baby?" There are rightwing elements in Japan that would be happy to show you the true meaning of martial arts for that, from the punchbag's pov! :-) A truly formal Japanese address to the current emperor would be Heisei Tenno, or "peace emperor". His full names and titles would take about half an hour to pronounce. Emperor Akihito of Japan is a description that makes a decent title: in an English-language wikipedia, Akihito? by itself is a collection of nonsense syllables (though it would not be in the Japanese wikipedia). And if we are going to be at all consistent in this, perhaps you should look at Pope - plenty like Pope Anterus are perfectly unambiguous and could just be Anterus?. And then you might as well take those that are ambiguous, like Pope John II and make them [John II of the Vatican]?, why not, after all we want simple titles, regardless of how crazy the result and however little it resembles what people are actually called most commonly! - clasqm
Kanji and furigana, please. -- Juuitchan
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