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Here are two pivotal cases, the second of which is mine: About 9 months ago Tybort suggested to rename Alexandra (The Wages of Sin) to something identifying the Empress Alexandra, the Tsarina of Russia more clearly. Here is a quote: While dab rules make sense for fictional characters only known by a single name, historical figures with one name probably need an easier name to search for rather than trying to see if it's somewhere on a disambiguation page.
I would support such a renaming as the referenced novel is unknown to me, and Alexandra is a common name that can refer to absolutely anyone, while I would appreciate something in the name identifying the royal status.
Another rename is my recent proposition, and I would really hate it if it also hangs in an uncertain status forever. The page is currently called Elisabeth of Bavaria, the Empress of Austria, which is wrong because "of Bavaria" is not used in-universe, the standard name per policy would be probably Elisabeth (Empress of Austria): she does not appear in the story, she is only referenced and is not directly called Elisabeth of Austria or Elisabeth of Bavaria. My proposition was to rename the page to Sisi, a name used in-universe and also uniquely identifying the person.
It would be good to formulate a policy on what to do with such characters. Category:Royalty from the real world contains many examples of characters only known by one name who, instead of being disambiguated, are identified by an additional nickname or number (presumably used in-universe, of course). In my suggestion below, I try to cover these existing names too, although probably not all cases (neither does the current naming policy).
From my point of view, the current policy works well when the last name is omitted or unknown or the first name is the only means of identifying a person (Socrates). For royalties, first/last name is simply not the naming scheme used. I propose to record this objective difference in how we name royalties in the policy by the following amendment: If
- a character is clearly a royalty from the real world,
- a character is called in-universe by a unique name, involving his/her number, or country, or nickname that distinguishes him/her sufficiently to avoid the need for disambiguation, and
- this unique name was/is also used in real life, which would help to easily identify the character during searches,
then this unique name is preferred to First name (first story) for characters who appear in some story and to First name (description) for those who do not appear in any story.
Note that royalties are likely to be referenced only, but it is hard to guess whether a particular royalty actually appeared in some story in the DWU. This difference in handling royalties based on their cameos in the DWU makes searching even more convoluted.
PS I've just noted another seemingly systematic problem: royalties with several names but without a last name, e.g., Franz Joseph and Kublai Khan, are alphabetized on the second of the names, which I would consider incorrect.