Talk:Wenceslaus

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My edit of this talk page's Dab "article" is a bold, and multifaceted, one. I hasten to say that the crucial substance of the page rests solidly on the difficult and potentially maddening research done by Adam Bishop: my role involves only building, on top of that valuable base, a hopefully improved structure for helping users rapidly grasp the hard-won product of Adam's work.

Specifics of my edit:

  1. While i've not tried to judge about the U, i.e. whether Wenceslaus or Wenceslas is today the predominant English name for these 5 rulers, i first set out to bypass the redirects, mostly introduced when the U-less spelling was applied to Adam's final edit. I found that the duke's bio already avoided rdrs, and moved the 1st king to do the same. But i reversed direction on noticing two things: switching to U-less meant four renames, not one or two, and the number of bios someone would eventually edit to bypass those bios' via-rdr lks is much higher if we standardize on the U-less spelling. (And later i see as well that many, if not all, of the bios still use the ...aus one.) None of those factors ensures the best long-term choice, but IMO dabs deserve extra attention to stay free of rdr'd lks, and switching back to -aus gets us to a clean interim configuation, while wiser heads than mine settle the question of spelling, with the least work that may later need to be reversed. So i renamed Wenceslas I, Duke of Bohemia to Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia (and put back Wenceslaus I, King of Bohemia as i had found it), and changed all the lks in the Dab to -aus. (That means that the one i changed now has first and nearly all subsequent mentions not matching its title.),
  2. I'm leaving the texts of the bios alone, treating harmonizing their texts with their titles as something to be corrected in a final "polishing" phase.
  3. I'm adding vital dates, as the WP:MOS on dabs directs.
  4. _ _ The multiple titles for the first and last of the 5 Ws seem to me a pitfall, and i experimented with one entry for each person, with long entries for those who might be sought via any of multiple titles. But the key i come back to is that (to paraphrase, i think, Lenin on terror) the purpose of disambiguation is to disambiguate. That is, the problem at hand is to meet a user who has incomplete information, and to get that user to the article on the topic they have in mind. An entry per topic often does that efficiently, but it's a mistake to let that blind you. The MoS on Dabs includes bullet points for grouping similar articles, but IMO it could be fruitfully enhanced with this concept: the only reason for an entry per topic is topics happening to fall into one group each. When articles fall into multiple groups, and the user is reasonably likely to be thinking of only one of the topics, the situation almost demands multiple entries for the same article. W..s IV & St. W..s need to be in two groups each. Which is how i handled them.
_ _ I was uncomfortable disrupting the parallel structure of "Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia" and "Wenceslaus I, King of Bohemia", which is a powerful clarification, and a brilliant stroke (if it was more than the result of copying both designations ad literatim and eventually setting them side by side to spontaneously tell that story). But i don't think that is completely ruined by what i've done, and IMO the story of a user with incomplete information on one person is the crucial one here. That story is what the two-level bullet list that i settled on is trying to tell.

--Jerzy·t 21:30, 2005 July 28 (UTC)

[edit] Specific of my talking points...

1. "The name derives from the Slavic forename of Wenzel." This is incorrect as the letter "W" does not exist in the Old Slavonic alphabet or in any Czech alphabet [see Guide to the Slavonic Langiuages by R.G. A. DeBray]. The statement should read "The name derives from the Slavonic name Václáv." - note: this name has been used both as a forename and a surname over the last 1000+ years.

2. Wenceslaus (English form of the Czech name Václáv - other Czech verisons include: Věnceslav, and Većeslav. German/English/Latin versions include: Wenceslaus, Wenceslas, Wenzel, Wencil, Wenzeslaus and Wenceslao. Polish = Wacław)

72.222.217.127 17:22, 2 June 2007 (UTC)Tom