Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (people with the same name)

• Piet Hein
• John Brown

This issue has been discussed at Talk:John Brown.

Quoted discussion:

Maybe we should disambiguate by year of birth, eg "John Brown (1859)". I don't think we'll ever come up with a satisfying, simple, intuitive qualifier. "John Brown (Queen Victoria)" is a bit long and unwieldy. -- Tarquin 13:52 Aug 26, 2002 (PDT)

I was thinking of birth and death dates in parentheses and/or nationality: Scot and American. The only alternative I can see is to call one a lover and the other a fighter. -- isis

We have used nationality before. See Piet Hein (Denmark) and Piet Hein (Netherlands). Rmhermen 16:24 Aug 26, 2002 (PDT)

I would much prefer to use dates to distinguish them, but that's not helpful in this case, because their lives overlapped [(1800 - 1859) for the abolitionist and (1826 - 1883) for the ghillie], so a person who knew the man they were looking up lived in the middle half of the 19th century would not be able to tell which it was. I think the nationality would be more helpful, but I'm not sure someone would know Victoria's John Brown was a Scot (if they just had his name mentioned in passing in some article about her), and Buchanan's John Brown could have been a Scot by birth (tho he wasn't).
So I would like to distinguish them by what they did, which raises the issue of how to label them. I was born and reared in Virginia, and the first epithet that comes to my mind for Buchanan's John Brown is "terrorist," which may not be NPOV enough, altho he WAS executed for treason and murder, and if that's not terrorism, what is? (Same problem with "fanatic," plus the other John Brown was gaga about Victoria, too, and so could merit that description.) I'd like to label Victoria's John Brown "ghillie" and then define that in the article, but that wouldn't help the person looking them up who didn't already know that term.
So the best I can suggest, thru gritted teeth, is "abolitionist" and "servant." Can anyone else, please, please, please, do better? -- isis

It would make far more sense to me to have the person's most historically significant profession in parens after his name and then add birth years to further differentiate if needed (similar to Titanic (1997 movie)). Of course if one person by a certain name is more famous than another person by the same name, then the more famous one gets the non-parenthetical page title. However, we can often avoid the use of parenthesis by disambiguating by middle names or initials (George H. W. Bush vs George W. Bush or John Adams vs John Quincy Adams, John Smith vs John Maynard Smith for example). --mav

John Smith ambiguities still existed prior to my latest edits. I think that if I were a newbie looking for precedents I might well try a search on John Smith, so it was worth getting into a defensible state. -- Alan Peakall 16:38 Dec 20, 2002 (UTC)