Talk:Samuel Lightfoot Flournoy (politician)/Archive 1

Archive 1

Requested move 9 November 2018

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 section.
The result of the move request was: consensus is to move. But as Brarcat mentioned below: "the disambiguator is based on what the person is notable for, not necessarily just on what they did." Including date of birth is unnecessary, and excluding will not lead to any confusion.
The articles have been moved to Samuel Lightfoot Flournoy (politician), and Samuel Lightfoot Flournoy (lawyer); respectively. —usernamekiran(talk) 18:10, 21 November 2018 (UTC)


– The "West Virginia" seems unnecessary for both articles, since they are the only two Samuel Lightfoot Flournoy topics discussed on Wikipedia. Both of them were West Virginia lawyers, so the article about the one who was born in 1886 has an ambiguous title. The current title of the article about the elder Flournoy is confusing as to whether he was a U.S. senator from West Virginia or a member of the West Virginia state senate. My understanding is that Wikipedia generally prefers "politician" rather than a role-specific title. But both of them are described as being politicians too, so there could also be some ambiguity with using just "(politician)" for the elder Flournoy (although his son's political career does not seem as substantial). —BarrelProof (talk) 20:10, 9 November 2018 (UTC)

  • I agree that "West Virginia" could be removed from both titles per WP:CONCISE, since that doesn't help disambiguate one from the other, but once we have one "senator" and one "lawyer" the years aren't needed, since the titles are not identical. The necessary further disambiguation can be handled by the current hatnotes, which will continue to be necessary no matter the titles, and in the bodies of the articles. Station1 (talk) 08:22, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Support Station1's alternate proposal. Although it's true that the lawyer born 1886 also held a political office, that was at the purely local level and would not have gotten him a Wikipedia article if that was the base notability claim in and of itself — so his disambiguator is correctly left at "lawyer", and therefore the politician/lawyer distinction is enough to not need the birth years. And since they were father and son, both articles naturally already link to each other anyway — so the relatively limited prospect of somebody still getting confused is satisfactorily resolved without needing to overcomplicate the titles. Bearcat (talk) 19:43, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Support per nom. Since both were lawyers and politicians it makes sense to include what each was most notable for plus the DOB. Otherwise we have incomplete disambiguation. -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:07, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.