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Latest comment: 4 months ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Something is weird with this title. I think it should be changed, but it's not clear what it should be. Viriditas (talk) 05:35, 2 January 2024 (UTC)Reply
Trying again -- I've replied as follows at the Information Desk UndercoverClassicistT·C 09:31, 2 January 2024 (UTC):Reply
Titles can be a tricky business in articles like this. What problem with the existing title were you looking to solve?
A couple of thoughts:
Italic titles should only be used for works of art that have definitive, agreed-upon titles (e.g. Great Expectations or "The Iliad", not for titles of convenience or descriptions (e.g. Aineta aryballos, Persian Rider.) Admittedly, the line is thin when we're talking about classical works, but in this case there's definitely no universally-used name, so the italics should go.
As to what the title should be: the overarching guideline is WP:COMMONNAME, which says to use the name by which that thing is generally known to our audience, but I don't think that's much help here; scanning through the sources, the object is generally described rather than named. MOS:TITLE gives five goals: recognisability, naturalness, precision, concision and consistency.
Honestly, I think the current title is fine for all of those: it isn't wonderfully precise, and there isn't a consistent style between similar articles (compare Three-Bodied Daemon (ACMA 35) vs. Euthydikos Kore vs. Kore 670). To answer the main question in your post, there isn't any specific guideline or house style as to how articles on objects like these should be titled: it's very much writer's preference, and in most cases we defer to that when there's no clear "right" answer (compare MOS:ERA, MOS:RETAIN etc.).
Another option would be to use a museum-number title, as with the so-called Three-Bodied Daemon, but I'm not generally a fan of those -- they improve precision but at the expense of all four of the other goals, and I don't think that's usually a good trade.
