Talk:John Codner

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Name[edit]

John Codner's full name appears to be: John Whitlock Codner. It cannot therefore be: John Whitlock Orby Squires Codner.

I have confidence that the Wikipedian who introduced that element did so in complete good faith, transcribing accurately and providing a link to the originating source. The link no longer works, so the original evidence is unavailable.

The article mentions war-service: in the British Army, enlistment is permitted only under the legal name. John Whitlock Codner was therefore his legal name in 1940. Remarkably, the details of essentially every officer of WW1 and WW2 and inter-war and post-war are online in at least one reference. Even more remarkably, that includes many 'spies' and other undercover officers.

That is definitive, but the question then is, was he ever: Orby Squires? Middle names are often given to commemorate valued family links that would either be extinct or who have contributed (ie. with a legacy) to the welfare of that individual. If John was given the names Whitlock and Orby and Squires at birth and got used to them at school, then When, and Why, did he drop them? And, more so, why Orby and Squires, but not Whitlock. It best it sounds implausible...

One very popular but flawed Wikipedia methodology (actually valid in this case - maybe it required more time or wider interest; or maybe the methodology is correct after all) is to google two options and determine the result by which variant has most hits. This supposes that everybody else researches carefully and then posts their research online. Spoiler-alert! They don't. They usually cut-and-paste other people's work (in turn cut-and-pasted...) and pass it off as their own original research. Usually their source is WP, so if an error is on WP long enough, it is often 'Verified' by being propagated onto many other apparently reputable and erudite sites. Where it is a phrase, every word will be the same, and the order of every word will be the same. Even government departments, etc, who ought to know better, do this (well, maybe not in your country, but definitely in mine...). In this case, it has been interesting to see the art galleries and auction-houses whose research is based largely on a cut-and-paste of WP; perhaps that was the intent of the original non-WP poster. In fairness, not too many here (JWC: 13, 300 hits, JWOSC: 1, 010 hits) and all the major art houses and the government art-collection kept to John Whitlock Codner. It is hard to explain to a smart teenager that many adults write stuff that really does need to be checked (rather than 'verified' by transcription with reference). For instance, Freddie Starr (who he?) never ate a rodent, even if the front-page of the most widely-read paper in the UK, still a G7 country, suggested he did. The truth is almost always out there, but it does often require going beyond page 1 of the search-engine response.

Is that just me going off on a rant, or me performing a valuable public service education on various research methodologies? I think WP is often very narcissistic, so I'm choosing option 1...

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