Should author tags be in their original Roman form?

Question

It is good to have badges for important authors. At the moment we have the tag horace, but I created the tag horatius today when I asked about the same poet. This is because I strongly prefer using original Roman forms of the names of authors instead of the English ones — that is why I write Horatius instead of Horace.

Whether or not we decide to have our tags in Latin, I think the author tags should be in Latin. Some authors have different names in different languages (Horatius, Horace, Orazio…) so some users may be unaware of the English version. On the other hand, everyone who knows an author should know them by their original name. For me it took a considerable amount of time to figure out who Horace, Virgil and Homer are, although I had learned about Horatius, Vergilius and Homeros.

I propose a policy to have all author tags in their original form. Do you agree we should do this? It might make sense to keep the English versions as well but make them synonyms to the main tag. Another option is to edit all such tags to the classical form. What would be a good way to go about this?

Answer 1

My preference would be that we simply use Latin names for as many people tags as possible. A few points:

• This keeps things consistent with the general direction of using Latin for all tags.
• Because of the variety of countries of origin of Latin-writing authors, I'm not sure that it makes sense to rely on original names. For example, Aquinas seems preferable to d'Aquino. Similarly, Anselmus rather than Anselmo.
  • This proves especially valuable for popes from different countries: Ioannes Paulus instead of Polish Jan Paweł
• A strict interpretation of this would mean latinizing the names of contemporary authors, like Orberg, C. S. Lewis, Traupman, and others who write in Latin. Instead, here I'd make an exception: for those who do not have an attested Latin spelling for their names, use the birth name instead.
  • This is apparently the policy of the Latin Wikipedia: C. S. Lewis

Of course, each author would have the English version(s) of his or her name as tag synonyms pointing to the Latin tag. Other languages could be added as well, as needed.