Talk:John Reynolds

Merge from John W. Reynolds

I support the merge proposed by User:Boleyn3 of John W. Reynolds into John Reynolds.--Baron Larf
I oppose it. Why? Where is User:Boleyn3's and your rationale for the merge? Pdfpdf (talk) 11:31, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The reason I put in the edit summary was we don't usually dab by more than personal name and there seems nothing unusual here. 2 dabs means potential confusion. What tends to happen in these situations is that if there are two potential dabs to add it to, people may add it to the wrong one; it does have the potential to cause confusion. It can also set a bad precedent; I've seen it where one personal name, with no more entries than this page, had a dab for [name], [name S. surname], [name (American football)] and [name (born 1986)]. Some entries were on two or three of theses and it made it difficult for anybody, especially those unfamiliar with disambiguation pages, to use and edit them. Starting a separate dab by personal name plus middle initial can on a very rare occasion be useful, e.g. if we're talking about an extremely long page for a common name, such as John Smith, but there seems to be no reason to do that here.

This is an issue that isn't set in stone in MOS:DAB or WP:DAB, as it shouldn't be. I think it comes under the variant names sections of Wikipedia:Disambiguation#Disambiguation pages#Combining terms on disambiguation pages. Boleyn3 (talk) 18:53, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. If, say, someone went to "John Reynolds" looking for either Wisconsin politician, she would not find them listed there simply because she did not know their middle initial. But both of the "John M. Reynolds" and "John H. Reynolds" on wikipedia are indeed listed at John Reynolds. Doesn't make sense to me. --Baron Larf 22:58, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]