Talk:Edwina Mountbatten, Countess Mountbatten of Burma

Requested move 28 June 2024

Edwina Mountbatten, Countess Mountbatten of Burma → Lady Mountbatten – Per WP:COMMONNAME and WP:CONSISTENT. The Ngram shows "Lady Mountbatten" to be way more common than "Edwina Mountbatten". Google also points to the subject of this page as the primary result for the term "Lady Mountbatten". The move would also make the page consistent with the one on her husband, Lord Mountbatten, which was moved following this RM. This form of naming also has precedent (Lord Byron and Lady Byron, etc.). Keivan.f^Talk 04:54, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

Note: WikiProject Military history, WikiProject Peerage and Baronetage, Noticeboard for India-related topics, WikiProject England, and WikiProject Women's History have been notified of this discussion. Векочел (talk) 07:54, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

• Support as WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, WP:COMMONNAME, and consistency with Lord Mountbatten. Векочел (talk) 07:55, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
• Support per WP:CONCISE and WP:PRECISE. Ratnahastin (talk) 08:20, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose. I object to this approach entirely. We do not do this, nor should we, in case of most biographies. Ngrams favours "Picasso" over "Pablo Picasso". How many people know his first name anyway? Same with Descartes. Or Beethoven. Dickens. Mussolini. —Srnec (talk) 19:31, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

• All of this doesn't alter the fact it is still her common name. And this approach has been used for many pages incidentally. Precedent in RMs for Lord Byron (2010), Lady Gregory (2021), Lord Dunsany (2021), and Lord Kelvin (2023). Keivan.f^Talk 00:24, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose I agree with Smec. And FWIW "make the page consistent with the one on her husband" sounds like a classic piece of "everyday sexism" to me. I'm sure it's not intentional, but it is reducing a woman to an appendage of her husband. DuncanHill (talk) 19:35, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

• This is not the platform to right the wrongs of the society; we just go with what sources say. I'm sorry, but she drew her title from her husband and was evidently happy to use it. Even the current article name features the title that she acquired by marriage. Keivan.f^Talk 00:24, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

• It was your reasoning "make the page consistent with the one on her husband" that I was calling out as sexist. DuncanHill (talk) 00:32, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

• That was in terms of using common names for both. She could have been called an entirely different name and I would have stilled advocated for the page to be moved to that title. Keivan.f^Talk 02:38, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose per Srnec and DuncanHill. This is completely unencyclopaedic. The article on her husband should not have been moved either. What sort of populist trash website is Wikipedia degenerating into? -- Necrothesp (talk) 12:25, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose, and like Necrothesp I would have opposed the move of her husband's article as well. They aren't even correct: they were "Lord Mountbatten of Burma" and "Lady Mountbatten of Burma", and the inclusion of the "of Burma" is not optional. Proteus (Talk) 12:32, 2 July 2024 (UTC)

  None of these arguments hold water and sound more like WP:IDONTLIKEIT. Lord Dunsany was also "Baron of Dunsany" but the RM resulted in the page being moved to WP:COMMONNAME. The suggested title is overwhelmingly more common than "Lady Mountbatten of Burma" and "Countess Mountbatten of Burma". Keivan.f^Talk 16:00, 2 July 2024 (UTC)

  I wonder how many of those instances of "Lady Mountbatten" in the ngrams are second (or subsequent) mentions, like "Picasso" tout court (to use one of the examples above). I note that the only biographies cited in the article which are specifically about Lady Mountbatten are titled Edwina Mountbatten: A Life of Her Own and Edwina, Countess Mountbatten of Burma. Her ODNB article cites another book called Edwina Mountbatten: A Life in Pictures, and there was an Edwina Mountbatten Trust (mentioned here).

  Lord Dunsany and Lord Byron at least were writers, whose names appear that way on the covers of their books. This may be a flaw with WP:NCPEER's allowing exemptions from the usual naming convention "[w]hen one holder of a title is overwhelmingly the best known", when the only examples it gives were both writers: Tennyson and Byron. Ham II (talk) 20:24, 2 July 2024 (UTC)

  Good point. "Edwina Mountbatten" appears to be more common than "Lady Mountbatten of Burma" and "Countess Mountbatten of Burma" but not as common as "Lady Mountbatten" 1. I think what matters when it comes to determining common names is the frequency with which the name is used. Concision can be another point of argument for retitling this page. Keivan.f^Talk 00:58, 3 July 2024 (UTC)