Help talk:Conventions/Name row

Type of Name [14 May 2017]

There is no type "nickname". See for example Person:John Spaulding (19). People are going to want the nickname as the prominent name title, just the way people want to call somebody "John Doe of Anywhere" or "John Doe, Texas Ranger". --Jrich 21:59, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

hmm... are you saying that yellow highlighting on yellow background doesn't work very well? ... Sorry about that. The highlighting dates to before the cards were yellow, is only temporary during drafting, and was marking for us that "Nickname" as type was still pending. We used to have it some years ago, but somewhere along the line it disappeared. Current help specifies that nicknames should not be entered in the first row, so this follows that established convention. Part of this exercise includes revisiting some of these old practices to see if they still make sense. --cos1776 18:10, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

You're right, I missed that because the difference in color wasn't very noticeable. I thought "will be changed or added" referred to more text likely to be inserted. Background, I was looking for a reference so I could fix the cited page. That is why I stumbled across all this rewriting of help pages. Nickname has been removed as a type, so how is it supposed to be handled correctly? I did nothing, as obviously, such stuff diff is important to people, and without a reference to hide behind, I can't justify changing it: it is common practice, so not really harmful to the understandability of the page. --Jrich 20:26, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

I'm thinking I would prefer an alternative to "Nickname", such as "Known as". The reason is that many people are known by their second name, and it might be worth noting that, as records such as census records or even gravestones may use the second name. If we don't have an alternative name that covers this, people find other ways to convey that the person was known by their second name (such as enclosing it in quotes or not even entering the first name). The definition of "nickname" does not really cover this situation, but something such as "Known as" should cover both being known by a second name and nicknames. Thoughts?--DataAnalyst 00:22, 15 May 2017 (UTC)