==Empress Matilda== 

 Hello, I noticed you edited my Empress Matilda page to redirect to the Empress Maud article little more than an hour after I created it. I want to forestall any potential edit warring over this by making the following case for the use of Matilda in the relevant articles: 
 *Although I am by no means the most widely read person in the world, nor am I a classically trained historian (of Britain or anywhere else), nonetheless, in all the reading I've done of the Norman era I had never seen a reference to Maud until I read the King Stephen article a couple of days ago in Wikipedia. 
 *Virtually every link and reference in the article refers to Empress Matilda (my Matilda article is a virtual cut-and-paste copy of the Maud article, changing the name solely in the narrative where necessary). 
 *Virtually all of the various language versions of the article use derivations of Matilda as the name. 
 *Many articles in Wikipedia pertaining to the era use Matilda (even though they link to the Empress Maud article, no doubt by default absent the previously unavailable Empress Matilda article). 
 *In the internet search I did, there were approximately 50% more hits on Empress Matilda (≈34,000) than on Empress Maud (≈24,000) (NB these figures are somewhat skewed as in the lower order of percentage of quality hits, many links will be presented due to hits on individual, unconcatenated words of the search string). 
 *Of the Empress Maud hits in the preceding search a great deal of the hits linked to articles that were either at Wikipedia or were clearly derived from Wikipedia. 
 If you have any serious concerns about the use of Matilda vs Maud, or if you could cite authoritative references indicating that any of the foregoing is misinformed, please let me know. Otherwise, I would be happy to collaborate on any of this to the extent of my limited knowledge, beginning with my intent to rework pertinent articles to indicate Matilda (and link to Empress Matilda) in the near future. I look forward to your thoughts.   5 July 2005 20:44 (UTC)