cahn

The disambig language issue isn't quite right (probably my fault in not explaining properly). I'm planning on disambigging everything that needs it with (Don Carlos), as that's the fandom name in front of the pipe, and will use it for both opera and play. I was considering undoing the pipes for the opera and just listing the characters in French, but after reading the responses here I think I'll just leave them piped - it's easier for me, and the only reason I would change it is to make it less unwieldy for you (though of course things should just show up in the dropdowns).

Let me copy from the original email I sent cahn: What we usually do for fictional works based on historical characters is share the historical tags, unless the character is very very different (e.g. Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter) or the spelling used is very different and we need to make sure that taggers can find what they want (e.g. Aelswith (The Last Kingdom) is Alfred the Great's wife Ealhswith), in which case we create a disambigged canonical for the character and subtag to the historical char. The musical Hamilton, for example, shares the historical tags, even though one could argue that they are quite different; on the other hand, the decision was made at some point to make Reign characters all specific to that show as (to quote one of the wrangler tag comments) "I'm fairly certain it's only meant to bear a passing resemblance to historical fact."

I think in general these characters should be shared. However, we have certain guidelines governing canonical tags for historical characters, and I think some of the characters in Don Carlos fall under the exception that the 'proper' historical tag won't be the name in the opera, and so subtagging will be the way to go.

In addition, after checking out the existing tags I think (not definitely sure, but pretty sure?) that most of the relevant characters actually are not tagged for in historical RPF (yet). We don't create metatags until they're actually used, so this means that e.g. 'La princesse Eboli | La Principessa Eboli' is going to stay that way (with a disambiguation added), because nobody's yet tagged for the real historical character (who would be 'Ana de Mendoza de la Cerda Princesa de Éboli').

The only character/person for whom multiple canonical tags exist now (part of the mess I'm going to clean up) is 'Philippe II | Filippo II'. I can add a disambig and subtag him to 'Felipe II de España | Philip II of Spain', or just syn him. It's really up to you (that is, to the fandom) which you prefer - I'm tracking comments here, so I will pay attention to what you guys say!

(Also, we're doing a new round of recruitment this month, so if any of you have interest in wrangling...)