Talk:Akhenaten/rename

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I have a question about Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names), and after painful prior experience would like to get some guidance on what to do. The page says "Use the most common name of a person or thing" and "The Wikipedia is not a place to advocate a title change in order to reflect recent scholarship." OK, so far, so good.

Here's the problem. There is a person, in Wikipedia as Akhenaton, where seemingly every book in the field in the last 50 years (including the 6 most recent biographies of the guy) spell his name Akhenaten; but web pages about the guy (pace Google) use Akhenaton by 2:1 over Akhenaten.

Just to make it even crazier, both Wikipedia and web use prefer the Aten spelling for the god Aten, which he's named after, and common usage also prefers Akhetaten, (the name of the city he founded and named after the god (but not by so wide a margin).

So it's not exactly "recent" scholarship to spell him Akhenaten, but to strictly follow common usage (which is only 2:1, not like 10:1) puts his name at odds with long-standing practise, other Wiki pages, etc.

So what's the call here? I'd really prefer to switch to "aten", to match everything else - all the books on him, etc, etc. Noel 00:33, 20 Aug 2003 (UTC)

If you do a Google search just on English-language pages (by using their advanced search, "Akhenaten" has about three thousand more hits than "Akhenaton", so I'd certainly go with the E spelling. In fact, I'd go with it even if Google came out against it in this case - it's hard to ignore all those books (presumably written by paid experts). --Camembert

My rule of thumb is that I use the name most common in common sources, other encyclopedias, news articles, how people would search for it. Changing a name to reflect recent scholarship or spelling/naming change proposals should not be the way we do things. A redirect for new names may be appropriate, of course. Your situation is a bit tricky, but I'd go with Akhenaten. I think your Google stats are actually wrong. I tried a more specific search combined with a restriction for English-only pages:

• more Akhenaten dynasty OR egypt OR egyptian
• fewer Akhenaton dynasty OR egypt OR egyptian.

Daniel Quinlan

You spoke of "Changing a name to reflect recent scholarship", so I'd just like to point out that in this case "recent" means "last 50 years", which I think is tending to get a little out of the "recent" category! :-) Not that it matters, probably, as your Web search stats show. Noel 01:32, 20 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Just go with Google, dammit. Conventions are made by conventioneers -- Google has a decent enough read of the throng on matters of convention popularity.-戴&#30505sv 01:41, Aug 20, 2003 (UTC)

When I made my original comment, I was thinking somewhat of the recent change in spelling on Chernobyl and several worse instances which seem to be motivated by politics rather than actual usage. Chernobyl is actually a bit iffy and I'm somewhat ambivalent on that one, which is why I didn't make a fuss about it (perhaps the Russian spelling should always be used when referring to the nuclear incident, but the town spelling should be changed to reflect current the political situation), I've seen worse, though. Daniel Quinlan 01:49, Aug 20, 2003 (UTC)