Talk:Life of Charles Townshend (1861-1914)

Requested move 23 August 2024

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: consensus to remerge the articles back to Charles Townshend (British Army officer), per the discussion below; not moved to the proposed titles at this time. The specific shape of the merge is an editorial decision and merging can be performed by any interested editor outside of the RM process per WP:MERGECLOSE. Dekimasuよ! 01:41, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

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• Life of Charles Townshend (1861-1914) → Early life and career of Charles Townshend (British Army officer)
• Life of Charles Townshend (British Army officer) → Later life of Charles Townshend (British Army officer)

– or just delete these or remerge them back into Charles Townshend (British Army officer). The "1861-1914" timespan in the title of the first of these articles looks like it is a lifespan range, perhaps to identify which Charles Townshend is being discussed, but that's not what it is. These two articles are about the same Charles Townshend who is covered in the article entitled Charles Townshend (British Army officer). Townshend lived another 10 years after 1914 and had further major events in his career until retiring in 1920. The timespan actually indicates the years of Townshend's life that are covered by a content fork subarticle that was created at 01:12, 15 May 2023 (UTC) by A.S. Brown (an indef-blocked sockpuppet acccount), saying "Start article to deal with the length problems on the main article". There was also apparently another article similarly created at Life of Charles Townshend (1914-1924) at 01:14, 15 May 2023 (UTC) by A.S. Brown to cover the remaining decade of Townshend's life, and Tbhotch then moved that one to Life of Charles Townshend (British Army officer) at 07:58, 18 September 2023 (UTC), saying "Matched main". —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 00:40, 23 August 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. BilledMammal (talk) 07:39, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

• • With all due respect, I am not an "indef-blocked sockpuppet acccount" and that is very rude of you to make such an accusation. That aside, I would prefer the original titles. "Early life" seems an odd way to title the first 52 years of someone's life. But I will not be dogmatic about this. Anyhow, I am really not happy about making you baseless accusations against me like this. --A.S. Brown (talk) 04:59, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

    Yikes! Deep apologies for that. I was editing and looking up information about several different articles today, and I appear to have gotten your account mixed up with that of E.M.Gregory, an account with a similar naming pattern that made a key edit in the history of another article that used a hyphen instead of a dash in an 18xx–19xx date range in its title, The Conservative (1898-1902). —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 05:05, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

    • Thank you! Apology accepted. That was a honest mistake and I will be not bitter over that. On a more substantial matter, I still prefer the original title, but I will not object too strenuously to a move. Just give a little time and let's me see if I think of a title which I will run by you here. Thank you, best wishes and cheers! --A.S. Brown (talk) 05:22, 23 August 2024 (UTC)
• Merge back to Charles Townshend (British Army officer). Odd to divide a biographical article like this. Much of the narrative about the campaigns and battles would be better off under their articles rather than his. -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:05, 29 August 2024 (UTC)
• Merge both Life of Charles Townshend (1861-1914) and Life of Charles Townshend (British Army officer) back into Charles Townshend (British Army officer) as this name is both CONCISE and PRECISE. The words "Life of" are redundant and simply means the article is a biography. Biographies should be presented in chronological order from birth to death, for completeness. See MOS:CHRONOLOGICAL. Naming a biography with numbers within parentheses the title implies the person's birth and death years are being used for disambiguation and is confusing to readers. Both articles are content forks of the same type, and are thus redundant. All the information about a person should be in one article. If the issue is that particular activities by Townshend are of such significance that these need to be covered in greater detail, then a sub-article about those activities might be applicable, but a summary of those activities should still appear in the main biography. Biographies should not be split in two, because this invites editors to fill in the missing part the person's life and results in inconsistencies, which are already obvious in these two articles. For example: the different articles give 1911 and 1914 as dates of promotion to Major-General. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 11:08, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

  I did a test merge here (diff) to get an idea of how difficult this will be to process, where I replaced the existing content in Charles Townshend (British Army officer) with the content of the two pages to be merged, and there are a lot of differences, some minor, some major, as well as sources that will need to be fixed as the refs have been changed in the articles, leading to some naming conflicts. I was seeing if I'd be able to process this myself but after looking at that it might need some care and attention to ensure we keep the right parts. Just wanted to put this here if it helps the closer, or if anybody wants to discuss the content before this is merged. ASUKITE 16:28, 11 September 2024 (UTC)