Talk:Mark Welser

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Best name for the article?

I translated this article from Italian Wikipedia, which uses the first name "Mark". As "Mark" is not a common Italian name, it did not seem likely that this was an Italianization, so I took it at face value.

However, none of the articles in other Wikipedias call him "Mark". The German, French, and Portuguese articles all call him "Markus", and the Russian one is in Cyrillic script but also looks like it could be "Markus". Honestly that does sound more German to me.

There seem to be lots of variations on the name. Others are Marcus Welser, Marcus Welserus, Marco Velseri, Marc Welser. We should have redirects from all the plausible ones, I think. But which should be the name for the article? Personally I'm leaning to a move to Markus Welser. Anyone have direct sources on, I don't know, lots of possibilities:

What name he was known under in his own time and country,
what name he was best known under in his own time, but worldwide,
what name he used most in publication,
what name he is best known by in the English-speaking world, now,

or failing that, a good knowledge of Renaissance German? --Trovatore (talk) 09:06, 24 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Normally we would go by 4., "best known by in the English-speaking world, now". If the sources are all non-English that presents a problem and I don't know what we should do in this case. I have no knowledge of Renaissance German but I do read some Russian if that helps. Kendall-K1 (talk) 13:11, 24 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Some of the sources (for this article or the ones in other Wikipedias) are in English, but so far all the ones I've seen are just webpages, not actual scholarly works. I would tend to rank those on the same level as tertiary sources, not to be taken extremely seriously.

I guess my feeling is that, for figures from the Renaissance and later, the name most used in English (at least in scholarly discourse) is usually the one the person used in his/her native language. So if we can identify that, then I think we have a rebuttable presumption that that should be the name of this article. And I have to say, I don't think "Mark" is a German name. I was led astray by seeing it in an Italian article (as it is also not an Italian name).

All of which boils down to, I think it would probably be a good idea to move the page to Markus. Thoughts? --Trovatore (talk) 19:48, 24 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'm finding many sources in English that give his name as Mark, and none that use Markus. [1] [2] [3] [4] Kendall-K1 (talk) 00:23, 25 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

OK, a bit surprising to me, but good finds. One of my peeves is when people refer to Georg Cantor as "George"; I didn't want to make that mistake here. But your sources don't seem to be doing that sort of thing; I see other names in the text (e.g. "Paolo") that could have been Anglicized, but weren't. So I guess I buy it, pending contradictory information.

Any idea why this would be? Can you find any German sources that use "Mark", or is there some other explanation? --Trovatore (talk) 01:13, 25 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]