Talk:Ellen Tigh/Archive 1

Unless you intend to change all of the Colonel's single-name references to "Saul", Ellen Tigh gets to be "Tigh" when we refer to her by a single name, just like every other character on the show. Note that Laura Roslin is usually Just referred to as "Roslin".

Since the article is about Ellen Tigh in particular, there should be no room for ambiguity. Lee Adama's article should also follow this principle - it's clearly out of line to refer to "women and children" on a first name basis when trying to disambiguate them from their husbands and parents. --Peter Farago 11:13, 13 Aug 2005 (EDT)

While I understand the need for consistency, I'm not sure if a first name used for disambiguation is necessarily discriminatory. Military culture often puts people on a "last name basis", even in informal settings. When multiple of a same last name are present, there is usually some effort made to use a different name for the second person. First names, nicknames, or other substitutes are often found ("Big Spiegel or little Spiegel").

Perusing a sampling of wikipedia articles, I found that most main articles do use the last name in one name references. However, I found that wives often end up with the first name (or a Mrs.)

Examples:

Eleanor Roosevelt

Martha Washington

The way the characters in the show refer to each other seem to be consistent with this. I can't recall Ellen Tigh ever being referred to as simply "Tigh," nor Lee Adama being referred to only as "Adama." While both of them theoretically have just as much right to those names, an admittedly arbitrary social convention substitutes some other name. I'm not spoiling for a fight or anything, just scanned by the article and was getting confused whenever I saw "Tigh." I guess the instances where this is actually going to be an issue will be relatively small. (So maybe I shoud just deal with it.) Steelviper 17:12, 29 November 2005 (EST)

Yeah, you should just deal with it, SV. :) Their argument for the use of Ellen's last name in her own page was sufficiently convincing, so I made the changes throughout the article except where sentence structure would have made it too confusing. I won't be as "nice" in other articles, since the Colonel, not Ellen, is a major character and most use of "Tigh" would presume him, not her. --Spencerian 09:27, 30 November 2005 (EST)

An archive of the discussion is available here. --Peter Farago 23:33, 30 November 2005 (EST)