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The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.
The result of the move request was: page moved. There was only one opposition to the new title, and little support for Shudde(tc)'s suggested title. —Darkwind (talk) 19:16, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Reginald Baker (sportsman) → Snowy Baker – A fairly straightforward case of WP:COMMONNAME I would have thought. Certainly a more elegant name that the current one. I would have moved it myself except that Good Olfactory (talk·contribs) has made the claim earlier that "was always known as "Reginald Baker", which is not correct - he was billed in movies as Rex "Snowy" Baker and in boxing was always Snowy Baker.--Relisted.Natg 19 (talk) 07:40, 3 July 2015 (UTC) Mattinbgn (talk) 23:57, 21 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Support. I've always heard him referred to as Snowy Baker (or at the very least Reginald "Snowy" Baker). The only biography of him that I can find is calledThe Snowy Baker Story. Trove also seems to support this. IgnorantArmies(talk) 07:01, 22 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
neutralOppose: From the brief list of sources I've read ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5]) his biographies seem to be titled either Reginald Baker, Reginald 'Snowy' Baker or (in only one case) Snowy Baker. Would people be happy with Reginald 'Snowy' Baker? -- Shuddetalk 05:08, 23 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Changed to oppose, see below. -- Shuddetalk 05:21, 2 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Support. I disagree with Shudde above; I don't think that list of sources supports "Reginald 'Snowy' Baker", I think it supports plain "Snowy Baker". Three of them include the full name in the title, as you would expect of a biographical dictionary and a database of Olympians. Frickeg (talk) 08:56, 25 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Or an online encyclopaedia? -- Shuddetalk 10:14, 25 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
To quote it, Other encyclopedias are among the sources that may be helpful in deciding what titles are in an encyclopedic register, as well as what names are most frequently used. I would include both a "biographical dictionary and a database of Olympians" among those. -- Shuddetalk 02:52, 2 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, but not their titles. Sources like the ADB list every biography under the full name, sometimes (but not always) including nicknames within that. Put it this way: even if Baker was called "Snowy Baker" 99.9% of the time, the ADB would still list him as "Baker, Reginald Leslie (Snowy)". Unless you're saying we should move the article to Baker, Reginald Leslie (Snowy), I'm not sure I see your point. To quote the ADB article: "he was called 'Snowy' from childhood", and the picture is captioned "Snowy Baker". So, to follow that logic, the ADB source you brought up supports "Snowy Baker" as the common name, which was my original point. Frickeg (talk) 03:43, 2 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Those are credible sources (not just ADB, but also the SAHOF and the ARU) that have similar aims to us, and they either don't use Snowy, or include it along with Reginald in their titles. So I give them all a lot of weight. RS's use Reginald in the title, and so I think it's prudent to do so here. Having both names in the title seems completely harmless and is certainly consistent with the RS that I've found. It should certainly make it clear and unambiguous to all readers who the subject of the article is. This conversation has helped crystallised in my mind what I believe the title should be. But if you don't see my point (even if you disagree with it), then there is not much more I can do, and we'll just have to agree to disagree. -- Shuddetalk 05:21, 2 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Fair enough. But the specific reason I objected to the "Reginald 'Snowy' Baker" formulation (which I should really have articulated before!) is that I don't believe I've ever seen the "Firstname 'Nickname' Lastname" on any other article. I mean, my fundamental attitude to WP:COMMONNAME is not exactly adoring (if I could go back to the dawn of Wikipedia and change one thing, it would be that), but this does seem to be the way it's done. Ah! I've found it: (from WP:COMMONNAME) avoid (for example) adding a nickname, or a contracted version of the original first name(s) in quotes between first and last name. That seems pretty definitive to me, and given that it leaves our options as either Reginald Baker (sportsman) or Snowy Baker, there's a clear winner. Frickeg (talk) 07:57, 2 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
That's a shame. I don't quite understand how we can allow adding a bracketed disambiguation after a name (and some can get very long-winded), but having a bracketed (or whatever) nickname is against policy. -- Shuddetalk 08:47, 6 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Hey, if I'd been making the decisions we would have been naming all articles "Baker, Reginald Leslie (Snowy)" right from the start. But, well, I pick my battles. The amount of work such a changeover would take alone convinces me that it would be a totally pointless exercise, and that WP:COMMONNAME is what we have to work with. Frickeg (talk) 09:37, 6 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Looking at this ngram, "Snowy Baker" seems to be more common than "Reginald Baker" and that's even without taking into account the fact that not all "Reginald Baker" hits would be referring to the sportsman. Plus we prefer natural disambiguation over parenthetical disambiguation. Jenks24 (talk) 11:13, 14 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.
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