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Talk:Ellen DuBois

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Proposal to rename article

[edit]

Wikipedia guidelines at Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Lead_section#First_sentence say "If possible, the page title should be the subject of the first sentence". This page doesn't quite do that. The page name is "Ellen Dubois" but the subject of the first sentence is "Ellen Carol DuBois", which is the name that she uses for her academic articles and books. If no one objects, I will rename this page to "Ellen Carol DuBois in a couple of days. Bilpen (talk) 15:55, 2 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It is standard to start a biographical article with the full name of a person, but for the title of the article to be a shorter version of the name as commonly used by the subject. In this case, she has some publications under "Ellen Dubois" [1], is listed as "Ellen Dubois" in the UCLA History faculty listing [2] [3], and is called "Ellen Dubois" in other sources used in the article [4] [5]. On the other hand as you say she also publishes under the longer name and there are other sources that name her like that [6] [7]. So I don't feel strongly either way, but I don't think the case for renaming is as clear-cut as you make it. On the other hand I think the article is currently too short and would be improved by more efforts to add some more information based on those sources. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:06, 2 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Instead of renaming this article, I created a redirect using "Ellen Carol DuBois". I am trying to avoid having some material I am working on end up with her linked name in red font. I used "DuBois", not "Dubois", because that is how it almost always appears.Bilpen (talk) 23:11, 4 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Moving to Ellen DuBois instead of Ellen Dubois, at least, seems noncontroversial. I will go ahead and do that; we can always move back if enough others disagree. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:08, 5 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]