Talk:Alphonse (given name)

Arrangment of entries

@Bkonrad: @Swpb: I was led here by talk-page-watching BK's user talk page... If this page is to be arranged by field of activity (it was previously A-Z by name), then surely people with "shared names" must be unbundled and listed individually. In a list by surname, it was reasonable to include Alphonse Desjardins (disambiguation), but with a by-subject list, why should it be impossible to find Alphonse Desjardins (politician), Canadian politician, just because he happens to share his name with the founder of some credit unions. And if bishop Alphonse John Smith is listed but Alphonse James Schladweiler is not (because there's another "Alphonse James" out there), the reader will be confused.

I'm not sure of the usefulness of this sort of list of people anyway - we don't have such a list for "John" as a given name, so why for "Alphonse"? (Certain people - those without surnames, and fictional characters - are listed in the dab page at John, and the name is discussed at John (given name).

But if this list is here, it's presumably because someone believes that a reader might want to use it to find a person "In religion and mysticism" called Alphonse, and to hide those with "Shared names" away in a different section seems singularly unhelpful. The discussion whether or not "Alphonse James" is a "name" worthy of an anthroponymy page is a different discussion: I don't see it as any different from any other combination of two given names, and we certainly don't have pages for all of those. PamD 14:47, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

I don't have any problem with listing all those Alphonses in the appropriate subject sections (I've now done so). I have no opinion on whether the page is useful to begin with; I just came across it in the course of dab cleanup, somewhat randomly. —swpb^T 15:09, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for retrieving the hidden shared-names people. And for the new surname dab page! PamD 15:40, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

Surname

Another problem is that despite this huge structure for given-named Alphonses, people with the surname "Alphonse" don't appear to get listed anywhere. There are seven of them at Category:Living_people?from=Alphonse and presumably many more who are dead. They aren't listed on this page, and the link Alphonse (disambiguation) at the bottom leads to Alfonso (disambiguation) where there are no surname holders. A quick scan through the first page of 500 hits for "Alphonse" finds S. Peter Alphonse, Lylah M. Alphonse, Kódjo Kassé Alphonse, Mickaël Alphonse, Alexandre Alphonse, Eloi Maxime Alphonse, Nadine Alphonse, Gerard A. Alphonse, as a start. Sportspeople, diplomat, engineer, etc. I'm sure that for encyclopedia purposes it's far more useful to provide access by surname than by first name - a reader may well come across a references to "Alphonse's previous work on the topic" or even "Alphonse's stunning goal in the 1953 match", and it'll be a surname-holder they want to find, not Alphonse Bloggs. PamD 15:07, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

Aaargh. Two, and only two, are listed in Alphons#As_a_surname! PamD 15:09, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

Yes, Alphonse (surname) should surely exist, and now it does. —swpb^T 15:10, 24 August 2016 (UTC)