Display Should Reflect History for Name Change for a Body

[RichardTaylor]

Currently when a body changes its name the requests from both before and after the change carry the new name of the body.

Ideally requests / correspondence from before the change ought be associated with the old name; and those after the change with the new.

[RichardTaylor]

Ben has noted that sometimes a name is changed because the old one was never correct - in these cases the name change should be retrospective.

Nothing is ever simple!

[bjh21]

And for added complication, sometimes we're late with a name change and so some requests should be updated and others not. I think the most general approach would be for the authority to have a list of names together with the dates from which they were correct, so then the right name can be attached to each request.

[sebbacon]

Or how about just when there has been a name change, a small indicator or link indicating "this authority has been called different things in the past", and listing its different names? Just as a cheap fix.

(Or just "previously called X, Y, and Z on this site" on the authority listing)

[bjh21]

I think that would be less good than what we currently do on WhatDoTheyKnow, which is to create a separate record for each name and link them together with notes. The major shortcoming of this is that we have n different pages of requests for the n different names. Your suggestion would solve this, but at the expense of putting the wrong names on all the old requests, which I think is worse.

[tmtmtmtm]

This explanation of how we currently create a new record on WDTK should be in the guide for people installing international versions.

[RichardTaylor]

#285 is the analogous ticket for username changes without changing history.

Current practice on WhatDoTheyKnow is to change the name of a body but note the previous names in the notes field.

We get examples where this feature would be useful reasonably regularly. A name change we carried out today was on:

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/body/nhs_digital