Let's think about this...
I've been enjoying reading all of the comments on the post, watching as people try different search strategies to get at this question. (A general comment--they're mostly pretty good! Nice job, SRS-folk!)
This week I asked about characters with a distinctive names (to wit, Starbuck and Queequeg from Moby Dick by Herman Melville), and I asked "... how often these names from Moby Dick appear as characters in other works of fiction." Specifically:
1. Can you find a way to identify other major works of fiction (leaving out fan-fiction for the moment) in which the names of "Starbuck" and "Queequeg" appear (either independently or together)?
This is very much like a standard Library Reference Question (see this list for some actual reference questions that have been asked by library patrons). It's a bit, shall we say, "open ended."
There are several ambiguities here:
a. what languages are covered here? I realize that, implicitly, I meant English--but that's doing a disservice to the rest of the world. For all I know, Queequeg might be HUGE in German-speaking countries. Let's include all languages.
b. what counts as a "major work of fiction"? Again, I had meant to say "written works of fiction," but as SRS regulars point out, that leaves out a lot of content (esp. television, movies, etc.) So let's modify our Challenge to include "fiction in whatever medium that is larger than a niche publication." (I leave it to you to define niche.)
My approach to this question came from a realization when I was reading the Wikipedia entry about Queequeg. Two things caught my attention. First, was the section called "Cultural references" -- meaning, references to the topic (Queequeg) in other cultural uses.
That's one source of insights about "other works." Another is the purple box at the bottom of the Wiki page:
You can see a list of other works here as well. See, for instance, the book by Ray Bradbury, Green Shadows, White Whale, a book that gives a fictionalized version of his trip to Ireland. This book includes a few references to Queequeg, and counts as a major work. (Check out the Queequeg mentions on Google Books.)
But.. I realize that this is an automatically generated figure. THIS means that there's some database somewhere in Wiki-land that's creating the box table and its contents.
That's right! I recall that Wikipedia has an entire Wikidata underneath it.
I did a quick Command-F/Control-F for Wikidata on the page and was taken to a new land of discovery--the Wikidata! If you click on the Wikidata link you'll be taken to the Wikidata item for Queequeg!