Template talk:Citation Style documentation/author: Difference between revisions

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== Honorifics and suffixes ==
 
I was taught that citations should follow the form of the person's name, only inverted, with a comma, followed by a space, going where the space between the first and last names fell. Thus "Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.", would become "King, Jr., Rev. Martin Luther"; however, the style manuals I've perused specifically state not to use honorifics unless they're needed to identify the person, so this would become "King, Jr., Martin Luther". In the case of Bill Graham, the rock promoter, versus Billy Graham, the minister, it ''might'' be appropriate to cite the latter as "Graham, Rev. Billy", but even that is not strictly necessary because of the difference in the first names they used.
 
What I'm proposing is that the usage documentation be modified to instruct editors to include any ''necessary'' suffixes (Jr., Sr., etc.) in the {{para|last}} field, and any ''necessary'' honorifics, such as "Rev.", in the {{para|first}} field; but titles such as "Dr." and other honorifics should be omitted. If it is important, for reasons of distinguishing an author, to include a title, it should be done in the formal style: "Welby, M.D., Marcus", rather than "Welby, Dr. Marcus", and certainly "Hill, Robert, Ph.D.", rather than "Dr. Robert Hill". Additionally, omitting unnecessary prefixes and suffixes surely must help when COinS metadata is extracted?
 
Also, do we need to include the case of an author that is known by a titled position, rather than a name, e.g., "Queen Elizabeth II"?
 
I apologize if this has been discussed before; I was away from Wikipedia for some time and missed a lot of conversations about stuff like this. Thanks!&mdash;[[User:D'Ranged 1|<font color="FF6600">'''D'Ranged&nbsp;1'''</font>]]&nbsp;[[User talk:D'Ranged 1|<font color="66000"><sup>'''VTalk'''</sup></font>]] 01:11, 25 May 2014 (UTC)