Talk:Doc Holliday
Rename possibility
This is a genuine question, and I'm neither FOR nor AGAINST it... I was wondering whether it would be better to rename the page to "Holliday" or "John Holliday" given the fact that "Doc" was not actually his name, but a nickname given to him since he was the local doctor of O.K. Corral, Tombstone? --DCLM ☎ 13:02, October 22, 2019 (UTC)
- Unfortunately, the novelisation is irrelevant here - per Thread:232143#4, names given in novelisations cannot be used for page titles. – N8 (☎/👁️) 23:42, October 23, 2019 (UTC)
- Sometimes technical issues trump other policies. See the specific point cited by User:NateBumber in the post above yours for User:CzechOut's explanation. Shambala108 ☎ 04:31, October 24, 2019 (UTC)
- NateBumber is wrong here on two accounts. Firstly, the novelisation is relevant because without it, "John H. Holliday" would have been a real-world bleed, not allowed in the in-universe portion of the page. Ascertaining it to be an in-universe name was necessary before continuing with the renaming debate. Put in simple terms, without that name mentioned in the novelisation, the proposed renaming would have been a direct violation of the policies.
- Secondly, the cited CzechOut's reasoning was primarily focused on fictitious characters. In particular, the following passage "if the majority of users can't possibly know that name from experiencing the most ubiquitous version of a story" does not automatically apply to a real historical person, especially a famous one. Incidentally, the same would apply to names of famous fictional characters from the real world. For instance, even if most stories only mentioned "Holmes" and only some novelisations gave the full name of "Sherlock Holmes", still he would be most recognisable as Sherlock Holmes to the majority of the people.
It was incorrectly stated at another talk page that this discussion was over. Since it isn't, here are some relevant quotes from our policies:
In most cases, you should title an article with the first and last name of a character. But you should use the last name by which the character was most often known.
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By forum consensus, the titles of articles about individual characters should be the name by which the character was most commonly known in the Doctor Who universe. If a full name is provided, though is not generally used, the body text of the article itself should start with it.
Don't include Mr, Mrs, Dr, or any other honourific in a page title — unless you have no other reasonable way to disambiguate.
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Honourifics are titles that come before a name, such as Mr, Mrs, Dr, Professor, religious ranks, or military ranks. These should generally not be included in article titles, unless they provide the only reasonable means of disambiguation.
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Finally, if a character is widely known by a title, such as Sergeant Benton, then a redirect can be created under that name, pointing to the proper article title — in this case, John Benton. This however should only be done sparingly, and only with major characters.
Some of the explanatory text is not applicable for this case, mind. It is still quoted to give a full context.
If there are other relevant policies, please do not hesitate posting a quote below. Amorkuz ☎ 23:48, October 29, 2019 (UTC)
A new suggestion: let's not
"Doctor" is an honorific. If the character was called "Doctor Holliday", T:HONOR would tell us to name the page Holliday (or perhaps Holliday (The Gunfighters)). An example of this is Talk:Marple. But this character is not called "Doctor Holliday". He is called "Doc Holliday". "Doc" is neither a title nor an honorific but a nickname. Far be it from me, a lowly editor, to attempt to infer or apply this wiki's policies, but it appears that nicknames are often allowed in page titles, eg Amy Pond and Sam Jones. So I don't think it's a problem to follow Wikipedia's lead and keep the most used and most recognizable name - "Doc Holliday" - as the title for this page. – N8 (☎/👁️) 18:55, October 30, 2019 (UTC)
