One of the useful, but little known, features of Geni projects is that in project descriptions we can put profile-ID in double brackets, which becomes a link to the profile, with the name in accordance to the viewer's name preference (except perhaps for MPs). This makes writing the description a lot easier -- though in the edit dialog we can't see which person the profile-ID is referring to.
What I'd also like to see in the description are the dates (meaning just the years) right after the person's name, just like in the module of profiles on the right side. This would help bring out the historical context in the description (such as who might have interacted with or influenced whom, whatever the subject matter is), and is standard in historical (or any non-fiction) writing.
I would suggest to have something like this when writing in the dialog
and that it could be dragged around. Clicking on it would let you alter the display name (as well as dates, so we could write fl. for "flourished" or r. for "reign") as needed. If you did not modify anything, it would display according to the viewer's name preference, and would of course change if there were to be any edit on the profile.