Talk:John Young

I turned this page into a disambiguation page, moving the Australian and US politicians to their own pages, and reformatted to wiki style a bit. Does anyone know if the John Young who was the US Navy officer is someone distinct from the astronaut? The astronaut was in fact an officer in the Navy.

FelineAvenger 22:57, 14 May 2004 (UTC)Reply

There is a John Young referenced in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngs who is not listed here. 86.130.212.14 23:34, 4 January 2007 (UTC)Reply

Sir John Young (jurist)

Latest comment: 16 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

There's been some toing and froing with his name. The way I see it is as follows: the list is in alpha order by disambiguator, so we need "(jurist)" to appear, to explain why he's after (Hawaii) and before (musician). We need "Sir" because that was part of his name. We need to link Victoria, because otherwise it could be seen as a reference to a non-Australian Victoria. I'll make the change. -- JackofOz (talk) 23:14, 17 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

As per the manual of style WP:MOSDAB the name should not be piped. Nor should Victoria be linked as it goes against one of the primary rules for disambiguation pages, that they should have only 1 blue link per line. As explained at the style page (and in reply to another editor here) disambiguation pages are not articles, they are navigation aids, and as such follow much stricter guidelines. The addition of Sir to the front of the name, and Australia to the end ensures that this person is identified with no ambiguity. Tassedethe (talk) 05:03, 18 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

Tass speaks wisely.
--Jerzy•t 18:27, 20 October 2008 (UTC)Reply

Alpha per dab'g sufx is not quite as bad an idea as is separating those with middle initials or names. Users come to a Dab page (or get brought to it) bcz of what they don't know; in this case clearly the middle initial, so that ordering is of no use to them. By dab'g sfx is slightly less useless, bcz it's not impossible to guess at that:

jurist?
justice?
Chief Justice?
Supreme Court?
Victoria?
barrister? (or if he was a solicitor, someone might know only that)
Lieutenant-Governor?
KCMG?
AC?
Chief Scout?

On the other hand, everyone looking for a bio is aware of some kind of context, and such contexts virtually always include some sense of the time period. And, wonderfully, while it's not particularly common to know the exact year of death, all of the lesser degrees of knowledge of your subject's timing are useful in rough proportion to the precision of that knowledge. That's in contrast to, say, middle name, where if you happen to know the initial, you'd seldom be better off by knowing the exact spelling of the middle name, and if you know less than the initial, the middle-name organizational scheme is worthless to you. The most valuable single thing you can know is the year of death (since you are most likely to know the time of their most notable accomplishment, which is likely to be closer to their death than their birth or their last degree (if any) -- and bios almost always include either YoD (or a fl.-date). I'm reordering by year of death for the dead ones, and by year of birth (best easily available gauge of future death date) for the BLP kids.
--Jerzy•t 18:27, 20 October 2008 (UTC)Reply