Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of people whose full names are not commonly known

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was Delete. Geez, people, let's take a solid look at this list. Think about it for several seconds, there are a great deal of people that their actual full names are not known. More imperative for any name like this to be on an individual page. Yanksox 15:17, 8 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

List of people whose full names are not commonly known[edit]

Delete normally I'd PROD first but I see no way this article can ever be anything other that unsourced/original research/arguing the point. What third-party sources exist that prove the qualification inherent in the title? Remember Wikipedia is based on verfication not truth - while it might be self-evident to us all that Buzz Aldrin's first name is not commonly known (truth), how do we prove verfication for such a claim? Charlesknight 23:16, 2 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per nom. Tulkolahten 23:17, 2 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per norm. Known by whom exactly? This list could include everyone. If you wanted to know a celeb's real name you would just go to their page, most provide a redirect for common aliases. meshach 23:56, 2 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom. Not commonly known by whom? Some of these are ridiculously pointless: Bobby Cox is actually named Robert? Who'd have thought? Frank Zappa's first name was Francis? Duh! Fan-1967 00:37, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Comment There was once a List of people known by one name but it has been merged into Stage name. Fg2 03:51, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom. Danny Lilithborne 12:37, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delete, useless. Punkmorten 14:42, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Comment What is odd about all this, is the fact that I actually found the article rather informative.. I never knew the names to half these people. Praedon 23:39, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Me too - I found lots of interesting things on there, HOWEVER it still doesn't mean that it should be here, as we are unable to provide verification. --Charlesknight 23:43, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Keep and rename Couldn't this be transformed to become List of famous nicknames, or something like that? Then we would just have to verify that the nicknames are used publicly, and that the person is in some way notable. Regarding nom - it seems to me that the current claims could be verified if a news organization ever did a survey (my local news outlets often do surveys to 'prove' how bad our education system is!)... or is that a cop out? I agree with pruning some of the obvious 'Bobby'-type names. 99of9 07:08, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Keep The name's slightly off - I'd prefer something that suggests these people are more commonly known by these shorter names, even if their full names are known to some extent (example: Gaius Julius Caesar). Even so, this list is as useful as the other list of names here - I learned a couple things reading it myself. Re: Notability - anyone who isn't notable should not be on the list. Verification: the ratio between 11,100 g-hits for Thomas Sean Connery and 2,430,000 g-hits for Sean Connery makes it clear which name he is more commonly known by. (Applying those standards, some of the entries on the current list are questionable, but the list itself is valid.) Quack 688 09:49, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

But your methodology is original research. (yes I know we use g-hits ABOUT articles but not WITHIN articles) --Charlesknight 10:30, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I wasn't suggesting that we add g-hits to the article text, just that we use it as a tool when assessing it. Right now, we can use g-hits to assess notability, without having to explicitly add "Joe Bloggs is notable because he has 50,000 g-hits" to an article. If the tool is accepted for use there, then it can also be used for other purposes.

I understand that we have to be careful to avoid WP:OR, but there must be some point where consensus can be used to say that if someone is referred to as "Sean Connery" in published sources 220 more times than he is referred to as "Thomas Sean Connery", then his common name is, in fact, "Sean Connery". I'd suggest that such reasoning is already used implicitly on Wikipedia when dealing with abbreviated and stage names. "L. Ron Hubbard" gets 1,130,000 g-hits, versus 21,800 for "Lafayette Ronald Hubbard". And there are plenty of references in the L. Ron Hubbard article which use this shorter name. But there is no reference there saying why that is used as his common name. Such a reference is unnecessary, and trying to guess why one name is preferred over another would be OR. All we are doing is stating what the most common name is. Quack 688 14:22, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per nom. Rename As the examples above illustrate, almost anyone could be on this list. L. Ron Hubbard, Sean Connery, etc. - what about John F. Kennedy, since most people include only his middle initial rather than full middle name? George W. Bush? Mel Gibson? (To my view, the only names that could not conceivably be on this list would be Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wilkes Booth.) When a list is that ill-defined, I think it should be deleted under WP:OR (because choosing the names for a list that could conceivably include anyone inherently involves original research and decision-making). If it's possible to re-define this list, great - but I don't see a way to do that, so I think it should be deleted. --TheOther Bob 16:55, 4 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think you'll find none of the extra names you've mentioned above are on the list. I agree that listing names like those would be ridiculous, so you're right - the list does need to be redefined. What about changing the name to List of people whose first names are not commonly used? In fact, the intro paragraph already states that, but it could be clearer, so I've had a go at reworking it. How does the new version look to you? Quack 688 00:11, 5 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

(edited proposed name change, replaced "commonly known" with "commonly used") Quack 688 13:40, 7 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I definitely think that's better, and have amended my "vote" - there are examples (e.g. Alfonse Capone) on the list that don't meet that, but that can be cleaned up. I still worry that it could be an unmanageably long list - but think it's worth keeping and renaming to see if it can be managed (if not, then we can reconsider it). You didn't raise this, but I don't share the concerns of the nominator about verifying common usage of these names (with a few exceptions). I think that's do-able - my only worry is definability of the list. (I also think it might be worth considering whether to include both real and fictional people - but that doesn't weigh directly on this debate.) --TheOther Bob 00:45, 5 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Strong keep A very useful list, but hard to keep straight what is what--needs to be redone, probably as a table.DGG 04:27, 5 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom. How does one determine commonly known? Verify this? Also, this information is already presumably contained on the articles about each of this people. If a user wishes to know the full name of a celeb that is where they will find it. To whom would it even occur that such a list exists? WJBscribe 10:26, 5 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Some ideas on verification, using both published works and community consensus, were already mentioned above. If you're worried about the title saying "commonly known", we could always change it to "commonly used", which is easier to verify. How do users find this list, you asked? If someone wants a list of names for whatever reason, I'm guessing they'd start at the "list of names" category and work from there. Quack 688 00:08, 6 December 2006 (UTC) 00:06, 6 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Delete, as doesn't provide user with anything new. A user wanting to read about Yogi Berra will simply type his name into the search box, and be taken there directly. Even if the user knows that Yogi Berra's first name isn't actually "Yogi" he's not going to try to find this page: he'll simply type Berra, then click the 'Search' button, and Yogi is second on the list. It's a mildly interesting list, but virtually impossible to maintain over time - very few article creators would be likely to know of its existence, so plenty of people would be missing from this list as biographies are added, and I can't imagine someone dedicated enough to watch and read every new biographical entry just to maintain this. It's not for us. WMMartin 18:28, 7 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

By that reasoning, no list is safe, since people would only look up individual subjects directly. WP:LIST makes it clear that lists are allowed on Wikipedia. I refer you to this section in the "Navigation" section:

If the user has some general idea of what they are looking for but does not know the specific terminology, they would tend to use the lists of related topics (also called list of links to related articles).

Several people have commented that the information presented here is useful - this list provides an easy portal for people trying to find this information. Without this list, the only way to find the people listed would be to type in their name directly, but that's a catch-22. If I don't know that Yogi Berra isn't known by his first name, how am I supposed to type "Yogi Berra" into a search bar? Quack 688 22:39, 7 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.