For those unaware, Riot was a hard rock band popular in the '70s and ‘80s. They reformed under the name Riot V in 2013 after principal member Mark Reale died. However, they are still referred to as Riot in some markets. There has been some on-and-off debate about whether we should store the band’s name as Riot or Riot V; it’s come up again because of a currently open edit.
The current precedent/consensus states to use bands’ current names as artist names, but the facts of this particular case make the application of said precedent seem questionable.
EDIT: According to Wikipedia, the reason for the divide is due to a contractual issue with the band’s Japanese distributor. I’ll still leave this thread open, in case anyone has any better ideas/objections.
I am going to sit back and read comments on which name to use.
But I wanted to clarify something Hibiscus said regarding “reforming”.
I think “regrouped” is probably a better word than “reformed”.
The band was active in 2012, which is when the last original member died. At the time of Reale’s death, three other active members were there for 25 years. So, to say that they reformed in 2013 isn’t necessarily wrong, but it isn’t fully accurate either.
Reforming makes it seem like they had broken up in 1986 and came back in 2013. No, not at all. They took a year off because a principal member died. That is why I think regrouped is better. Their only inactivity was because they needed to mourn and then “figure things out” the way you and I would if our spouses died. You don’t start dating the next day. You don’t move into a “bachelor pad” the next day. It takes time to get regroup - to get the proverbial ‘house in order’.
We had a similar discussion on Wikipedia about the Eagles when Glenn Frey died. Don Henley, in a state of mourning, was even quoted as saying that the Eagles were over. But, after one year, they were back performing, even talks about a new album.
Also worth noting, is that the reason the name changed was because “at the request of Mark’s father, the name “Riot” was put to rest.”
You should put that in an edit note, so editors looking at the editing history 20 years from now will still have access to your thoughts on it, even if you don’t currently lean one way or the other…
I’ll take a look at the discussion there, but I’m not sure which way I lean. About the discussion taking place there rather than these forums, that rule of thumb is because the notes on the edit itself are (as I understand it) stored in the database and we know that they will last as long as MB does; the community, on the other hand, is much more reliant on the software we use, and may wind up disappearing. We apparently already lost everything on the pre-Discourse forums, several years before I got here, and we might find something better than this in the next decade – or less pleasently, we might need to restore everything from someone’s local copy of the database.
