Talk:List of people by name

Note: The talk area for List of people by name is divided into multiple subpages. See the index to subpages below before posting a new topic and then place your comment on appropriate subpage.

It is recommended that if you have a comment, put a title on it so people can find it in the table of contents. If your comment is related to one prior one, add it to that so the comments are related to each other.


Contents
1 Organization of this Suite of Talk Pages and Sub-pages for LoPbN

1.1 Short Index to Subpages
1.2 Index to Subpages, with Their Section Headings
1.3 Sequential list of Edits and each one's Affected Section(s)
1.4 Refactoring of this set of talk pages

2 Use of MediaWiki msg and subst calls

2.1 Introduction of MediaWiki msg Calls
2.2 Pending Enhancements of msg facility in MW 1.3
2.3 MW 1.3 Features in Use Here

2.3.1 The Promised "specific examples"

2.4 Implications of Category Tags for LoPbN
2.5 Removing Boxes around Indexes

3 Toward Formal Documentation of Established Practice on the LoPbN Tree

3.1 Preliminary Outline of Topics for a "Guide to LoPbN"
3.2 Rough working draft of "Structure of the LoPbN Tree"

3.2.1 Primary relationships between pages
3.2.2 The other three trees

4 A Relevant Deletion Discussion
5 Alphabetizing

5.1 "Dictionary" versus "Phone-book"
5.2 The Prefixed-Surname Problem

6 Replacing groups of names by surname links on LoPbN
7 What Belongs in an Entry besides the Link?

Organization of this Suite of Talk Pages and Sub-pages for LoPbN

Short Index to Subpages

  1. Individual entries, or their relationships to near neighbors
  2. LoPbN list as a whole
  3. The LoPbN page
  4. "Sequential list of Edits and each one's Affected Section(s)" remains a sub-section (on this page) of this section, awaiting updating.
  5. "Use of MediaWiki msg and subst calls" remains a section on this page, awaiting more attention.

Index to Subpages, with Their Section Headings

  • Moved Sections
    • 1 Individual entries, or their relationships to near neighbors
      • 1.1 Got a Name for the List but There's no Page to put it on??
        • 1.1.1 People Waiting for a Page to be Listed on
      • 1.2 Name Formats & Order
        • 1.2.1 Name Formats & Order 1
        • 1.2.2 Name Formats & Order 2
        • 1.2.3 Alphabetizing these names
        • 1.2.4 Separating Surnames from Identical Given Names
      • 1.3 Multi-version names
    • 2 LoPbN list as a whole
      • 2.1 Name of page
      • 2.2 Structure that Integrates Pages into List
      • 2.3 Imputation of Design Rules for Structure
      • 2.4 Toward Exhaustive Enumeration of Title Formats
      • 2.5 Statistics about this article's data structure
        • 2.5.1 Large pages
    • 3 The LoPbN page
      • 3.1 Table Structure
        • 3.1.1 Code Saved for Row J of Table
        • 3.1.2 General Template for One-Page-Approach Table Row
      • 3.2 About missing letters
      • 3.3 Layout of 26x26 table
      • 3.4 Discussion of Implementation in the Article?
      • 3.5 Possible Reunification of Inter-Page Design
        • 3.5.1 Pilot Project: Rework of B Row of the table
        • 3.5.2 Ba/Be Outcome & J Row
        • 3.5.3 What Next
  • For details on the following sections that remain on this page, see this page's current ToC
    • 4 Sequential list of Edits and each one's Affected Section(s)
    • 5 Use of MediaWiki msg and subst calls

Sequential list of Edits and each one's Affected Section(s)

I believe the preceding list of edits is up to date including the last entry. --Jerzy 08:33, 2004 Feb 24 (UTC)

Refactoring of this set of talk pages

This page refactored by reordering sections, and subordinating most of them to new headings.

(The last non-minor edit preceding refactor was 07:44, 2004 Jan 21)

--Jerzy 08:33, 2004 Feb 24 (UTC)

I'm not sure i'd realized before now how large this page has become: over 50 kB. My previous refactoring may not be perfect, but i'm using it to parcel out the top level sections into subpages.
- - - -
OK, we're down to 17-18 kB, before i start adding more.
--Jerzy(t) 04:26, 2004 Sep 24 (UTC)

I have moved the section about commas to Talk:List of people by name/Individual Entries --jni 08:06, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)


Use of MediaWiki msg and subst calls

This section is a very rough & stubby draft, but may be of some immediate interest, since documentation has been lacking.

Two important developments for the List of people by name tree are

  • The introduction of MediaWiki msg calls and
  • the pending enhancements of that facility when MW 1.3 is introduced.

Jerzy(t) 18:57, 2004 Apr 23 [missing sig added Jerzy(t) 03:43, 2004 Jun 20 (UTC)]

Introduction of MediaWiki msg Calls

I am referring to the introduction of MediaWiki msg calls for providing the links from a given page to others in the tree. User:Timwi initiated this, and he and User: Angela did nearly all the dog-work of installing it on every page of the tree except the master-table page.

One MediaWiki page, for use in such calls, now exists for each LoPbN page that has children within the tree; it links to

  • that LoPbN page's siblings in the tree (lateral links),
  • the siblings of its ancestors (upward links), and
  • its children.

And of course those links appear on any (non-MW name-space) page that has a msg call to that MW page. That MW page is in fact the target of an msg call

  • on that LoPbN page, and
  • on each of its children in the tree, that don't themselves have children. (The reason for this exception is that the MW page doesn't link to the childrens' children:
  • it shouldn't, since this MW page will also be called not only from the page with the children, but also from "aunts and uncles" of those grandchildren, where links to the grandchildren would function as "niece/nephew" links that would be of little use but offer significant confusion, and
  • it can't, since in many cases, there would be multiple "families" of niece/nephew links, stacked one above another in an intolerable clutter.)
An important change this implies is that it eliminates the (IMO) most important of the former reasons for using redirects between the 26x26 master table on LoPbN (the root page) and the pages that "span" several entries in the same row of that table. I became an avid supporter of the redirects when i realized that linking the table entries and "lateral links" (see above for definition) meant that merging or splitting LoPbN-tree pages that are linked from the table would require editing not only the table but each of the other pages linked from the same row.
In contrast, such a change now requires a change to the table and a change to any of the MW pages that mention the merged or split page(s): usually only one, and three would be exceptional until the list gets at least several times larger.

Jerzy(t) 18:57, 2004 Apr 23 [missing sig added Jerzy(t) 03:43, 2004 Jun 20 (UTC)]

Pending Enhancements of msg facility in MW 1.3

A meta article (http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_roadmap#Template_syntax) describes these. The nested calls will make it possible for a single edit of one MW page (not among the ones described above) to cause immediate update of all of the needed changes in the MW pages described above, and thus of all the affected pages (other than the master table, where relevant). The parameter facility will make it easier for non-experts to create the MW pages and calls needed when LoPbN pages become "first-time parents". More to follow.
Jerzy(t) 18:57, 2004 Apr 23 [missing sig added Jerzy(t) 03:43, 2004 Jun 20 (UTC)]

MW 1.3 Features in Use Here

I did a pilot use of the MW 1.3 Template facility with Template:List of people Z; the restrictions imposed by the exact specs of the facility disappointed me, but the enhancements are still very welcome.

It may not be obvious why that example represents an advance -- especially since Z was specifically chosen as a low-impact test bed, and since it followed from that choice that the main benefit of the new capability does not accrue in that case. Briefly, and barely less cryptically, Template:List of people Z is the only page that needs to reference Template:List of people Z Links, and much of the point is that a change to, say, Template:List of people H Links, reflecting, say, the breaking up into multiple pages of List of people by name: Ho will (once the technique used on Template:List of people Z is extended to its logical limits) affect the appearance of 4 templates beyond the new Template:List of people Ho that the breakup would require.

Based on further thought about the problem, i am about to move forward with a more thorough approach to it (which will be easier to describe clearly when i can refer to specific examples). But barring surprises, i will rewrite all of the existing templates whose names are of the form

Template:List of people #

where # is a string of 1 to 3 letters.
--Jerzy(t) 04:56, 2004 Jun 20 (UTC)

The Promised "specific examples"

I have just merged two pages, namely List of people by name: Hp and List of people by name: Hq; the merged page is List of people by name: Hp-Hq. Besides

  • the two redirects involved,

such a change has traditionally required editing

(which i also did),

The introduction of indexes based on (un-nested) template calls in recent months reduced those 18 edits to one, in this case namely Template:List of people H. Nevertheless, a certain amount of dog-work remained: in this case, Template:List of people Ha, Template:List of people He, and Template:List of people Har also linked to List of people by name: Hp and List of people by name: Hq, and thus, until this weekend, each would have required an edit to replace the two links with a single link to the replacement page.

(I hasten to mention that while reducing the time spent editing is nice, a greater concern is reducing the opportunity for typos and errors of omission. It is desirable that those who may make such merges, and more often splits of pages, not need to track down the pages needing changes.)

Because i had converted all four of the templates just mentioned to in turn call Template:List of people H Links, the only changes i had to make to fix links to Hp and Hq were the one to List of people by name (mentioned above) and another to Template:List of people H Links. (The name of the page in question will become apparent to any editor who understands that double-braces imply reference to the Template: namespace; examining the markup for any of the pages formerly needing changes leads to a template whose markup includes a call to one of the templates already mentioned, and its markup includes a call to Template:List of people H Links.)
--Jerzy(t) 06:13, 2004 Jun 21 (UTC)

Implications of Category Tags for LoPbN

I am enthusiastic about the jobs that tags using the

Category:

namespace can take over from LoPbN; i gather users will be able to refer to [[Category:People]] for a list of narrower categories, and, by steps progressively narrow further and further to the point where they have a small list of names of people who have a lot in common, so that for instance Cohen, Cohn, Cohan, and Kohane (all of them American actors, or all of them British political leaders, or what have you) will be isolated in close proximity to each other, instead of being separated by lots of obviously irrelevant names and spread across many headings or even pages.

It may be that Category:People can do most of the jobs that people use LoPbN for now.

Nevertheless, i hope to see a continuation of this list (enhanced by the addition of names added from a master list of people built automatically using Category: -based info), and of more specialized lists (that i have paid little attention to), similarly enhanced by smaller lists generated similarly. I hope for that continuation for the sake of jobs that categories alone cannot fulfill. These are some that occur to me:

  • Listing people not deserving full bio articles, but well enough known to occasionally cause confusion with similarly named people with articles.
  • Listing likely mis-spellings or mis-filings (e.g., Thich Nhat Hanh under T, Japanese names with the surname and given name misidentified, or people with a "von" or an Arabic article in their name (where do those belong, BTW? Our practice is inconsistent at present)), whose redirects, as i understand, don't fit into the category system.
  • Listing people who should have articles, when someone is adding enough of them at once that starting a page and putting even an minimally adquate set of Category: tags on each of them would be burden that would limit the number of names added, or when the adder is clueless about Category: tags.
  • Searching for an existing article, in order to pursue a reference to a person whose relevant field is unclear from context, or too minor among their minor talents for their article to deserve (or at least to yet have) a category tag referring to it, especially when the reference is misspelled or is less than a full name.

--Jerzy(t) 04:56, 2004 Jun 20 (UTC)

Removing Boxes around Indexes

Until the box-describing facilities can be made to work better in conjunction with a new means of implementing the indexes at the tops of LoPbN pages, i am implementing a new version of the indexes that avoids some major problems by just leaving the boxes off. I favor boxes in the long run, but for reasons i will explicate here in the next week (largely by showing how the new implementation works), they are a serious problem for now.

The return of boxes will be a very minor editing editing task, under the new implementation, once a solution to the problems emerges. (Someone may already know how that solution, or it may require MediaWiki changes.)
--Jerzy(t) 17:59, 2004 Jun 19 (UTC) [, w/ touch-ups Jerzy(t) 04:56, 2004 Jun 20 (UTC)]

Toward Formal Documentation of Established Practice on the LoPbN Tree

This list has evolved with WP-typical informal consultation, and reached a state where changes in approach require either bots or major efforts. IMO, that justifies more effort to clarify what has been working here and why. The following are very rough working documents that nevertheless may already have some value in orienting those interested in doing more than adding additional names.

Preliminary Outline of Topics for a "Guide to LoPbN"

  1. Purposes served
    1. Relationship to Categories
  2. Structure of an entry
  3. Ordering of entries
    1. People known by given names
    2. Nobility & Hierarch issues
    3. Phone-book vs. dictionary sortings
    4. Compound surnames
  4. Structure of the list
    1. Primary relationships among pages
      1. Page tree (see draft below)
      2. Top-down indexes
      3. Neighbor-page indexes
    2. Primary structure within pages
      1. Access headings
      2. Instructional headings
    3. Secondary structure: confused-with; missing-here
    4. Up-scaling
    5. Human engineering
  5. Projects
    1. Currently feasible and efficient
      1. Statistics
        1. LoPbN per se
          1. Page, entry, & redirect populations
          2. Article-completeness rates
          3. Distributions:
            1. Page sizes
            2. Section sizes
            3. Section counts per page
            4. Children and descendants per page
            5. Page depths per page and per section
            6. Section depths within page
            7. Page-plus-section depths per page and per section
            8. Exceptional inter-page or inter-section structures
          4. Population-penetration rates by nationality (might guide some research)
        2. Inward links from rest of en:WP
        3. Mutual penetration rates with Categories, other lists, and bios
        4. Inter-language
      2. Identification of statistically outlying pages, sections, etc.
      3. Redirect checking (doubles, red redirs(?)
      4. Format rectification
      5. Consolidation of past bot-based expansions
    2. Future
      1. Automated harvesting of entries from and to Categories
      2. Standardizing descriptions to a series of Category names

Rough working draft of "Structure of the LoPbN Tree"

LoPbN is a page in the article namespace; it can be described as a list (actually, the iceberg-top of a multipage list) rather than a true article, and arguably that exempts it from the principle that there is no hiearachy among articles. It is in fact explicitly the top of a hierarchy whose lower elements seldom have occasion to have attention except as part of the hierarchy, and whose existence would be ill-conceived but for the existence of the hierarchy. The hierarchy can be described as the LoPbN tree, and the root of that tree is "LoPbN", the List of people by name page.

Primary relationships between pages

In speaking of this tree, it is worth being precise, as there are in fact four trees here, three of them being discussed at #The other three trees. (At this writing, only one of the four is discussed outside that section.) Unless otherwise specified, "the tree" is a logical structure of pages; the root, corresponding to the LoPbN page, has 26 children, one for each letter of the alphabet. Some of them have no children, but most have up to 26; some and about a dozen (so far) 27 or theoretically even 28 (see the next few paragraphs); this pattern continues for, at this writing, up to 4 generations of pages below the root.

Any hierarchy’s basic nature is described by subordinate and superordinate relationships, principally the immediate-subordinate relationship of the subordinate unit being the child of its immediate superordinate, and the inverse relationship of being the parent of that child.

Besides running text describing the table, and links to other lists of people in WP, the LoPbN page has two indexes internal to the LoPbN tree. One, introduced 18:19, 2004 Jun 28, is hiearchically laid out, and includes exactly one link to every other page in the tree. The other index, in use at least since 16:36, 2003 Jun 22, is (as a first approximation that will be refined just below) a rectangular grid with at least one link to each child of the root and to each of their children (who are also grandchildren of the root, though both these indexes make ....). (Multiple links reflect the existence of redirect pages that link to pages that could include "LoPbN Bb-Bd", which would embody three positions in the grid corresponding to three "virtual children" of "LoPbN B". And, more precisely, several letters of the alphabet have pages that are children of pages like List of people by name: Q, which has a child whose only entry is for Arthur Quiller-Couch, widely known as simply Q; these pages have no link directly from this table.)

In the LoPbN tree, children of a page may be subdivided as follows: proper and improper children; the propers may be further subdivided into populated, index-only, and contingency children.

At this writing, there are perhaps a dozen improper pages (out of several hundred) and all are of one kind: a page dedicated to a single primary name, with that primary name also being a leading substring of other primary names on other LoPbN pages. An example of why such improper pages exist makes this less obscure: one improper page lists only people with the surname "Li"; they appeared on the populated page LoPbN Li until that page became too large (and became an index-only page as described below). Since then, LoPbN Li’s proper children might at a given time include LoPbN Lin and LoPbN Lio-Liq, and in any case cover the whole range from Lia to Liz. "Li" is of course a leading substring of the surnames "Liddell Hart", "Lin", "Lind", "Lindy", "Litton", and "Livingstone", and of the given names "Licinius" and "Livy", within the range Lia to Liz. The surname Li, however, lies outside the Lia-Liz range (specifically, just before it), and names of people named Li have been accommodated, since then, on an improper page (entitled either List of people by name: named Li or List of people named Li).

Proper pages are called "proper" by virtue of their ranges fitting an orderly pattern that accomodates most of the list (and improper pages almost literally fill in the cracks between them). Having an example of a proper-range spec is a help to grasping their definition, and Lib-Lin is an example. Another help is the term "a completion of" a given string, defined as any string having the given string as a leading substring. A proper page is one exactly containing, or having exactly contained in its descendant LoPbN pages, the LoPbN-tree entries whose primary names satisfy one of these two criteria, relative to the page’s descriptor:

  • the descriptor is a string, and each is a completion of it, or
  • the descriptor is a proper range, and each is "in that range"; more precisely, it either is a completion of one of the two strings specifying the descriptor, or lies, in the LoPbN alphabetization scheme, between the two strings.

For the Lib-Lin example, LoPbN Lib-Lin could be a proper page encompassing all primary names in the range from "Lib" to, but not including, "Lio". The precise definition of a proper-range spec is: a pair of alphabetic strings of the same length that differ only in the last letter; the specific description of the set it specifies is: all primary names in the LoPbN tree that either

  • have one of them as a leading substring, or
  • lie between two names that do so.

To the time of writing, improper ranges such as "Li-Liz" or "Lib-Loa" have been avoided as invitations to confusion, but the impropers described seem necessary.

A populated proper page has at least one name on it; such pages hold over 90%, and probably well over 99%, of the tree. While a substantial number of them have no more than a few dozen names, most entries lie on populated pages with hundreds of names.

Contingency pages have no entries, and probably most of them never will. They exist solely to ensure that no editor wishing to add a name will lack an existing page where it could properly be placed; lack of contingency pages has in the past led to names being place on pages whose scope does not include them. It would also, and presumably has, faced some editors who grasp the placement scheme with the choice among

  • studying the complexities of creating properly linked new pages,
  • taking a guess (and perhaps creating a lost page),
  • knowingly putting an entry on a page where it may not be found by those seeking it, and
  • forgetting the whole idea of adding that name.

Index-only pages contain no entries, and serve only as embodiments of nodes in the tree providing access to other pages.

The other three trees

Besides the logical tree of pages that captures the letter-by-letter progression to pages whose descendants are smaller subdivisions that have longer leading sub-strings in common, three more trees may be discussed:

  • The tree, each of whose paths from its root to its leaves starts with one or more nodes embodied by pages, and ends with either a contingency page, a sectionless populated page, or nodes embodied by one or more sections within the last of those pages.
  • The tree whose branches are wiki-links in the shortest chain of links, starting from the root-page’s grid index, to populated and contingency pages. (This tree is one level shorter than the usual logical tree of pages, due to the direct links from that index to pages that are grandchildren of the root in the usual tree, but by virtue of those links, children in this one.
  • The tree whose branches are links in the shortest chain of links, starting from the root-page’s hierarchical index, to populated and contingency pages. (This tree is a poster child for bushy trees: all other pages are children of the root.)

A Relevant Deletion Discussion

[At some point (and no later than if & when it starts to get long) this discussion will be moved to Talk:List of people by name/Individual Entries. (I propose to subordinate both it and "Got a Name for the List but There's no Page to put it on??" under a new heading "The Future-Entry Problem".) Those interested would be wise to Watch-list that page now.] --Jerzy(t) 07:36, 2004 Oct 21 (UTC)

I think the vote may already be shifting to a clear Keep, but some readers of this page may be interested by my long defense of that action, at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/List of people by name: Db-Dd. --Jerzy(t) 22:43, 2004 Oct 6 (UTC)

The VfD process ended in a vote of 10 for Keep and 4 for Delete or Merge; details have been moved to Talk:List of people by name: Db-Dd --Jerzy(t) 07:36, 2004 Oct 21 (UTC)

Alphabetizing

[At some point (and no later than if & when it starts to get long) this discussion will be moved to Talk:List of people by name/Individual Entries; those interested would be wise to Watch-list that page now.]

"Dictionary" versus "Phone-book"

With only the slightest previous discussion (probably in summary fields of some edits, or in my still unimproved partial first draft of LoPbN documentation, on a sub-page), i've made it a firm principle to apply what i call "phone-book alphabetizing" rather than "dictionary alphabetizing" to this list. Without rigorously defining the difference, please note that you expect to find "dark horse" after "darken" in a dictionary, but to find "Smith, Zeke" before "Smithson" in a phone book.

(One big reason for that difference: Most of us consider "head-wall", "head wall", and "headwall" interchangable (in fact, many of us will think, at first reading, that one version appears twice in that list!); in contrast "Dick Smith" and "Richard Smith" are likely to be the same person, while "Dick Smithson" is no more likely to even be associated with either of them than is "Dick Wagner".)

My firm principle is rigid as to consulting the given names only if the surnames are identical. Likewise where a compound surname has two surnames as its components: "Garcia Marquez, Gabriel" follows all of those whose sole surname is "Garcia".

The Prefixed-Surname Problem

I have been less certain, and less consistent, with compound surnames that are formed by other principles than juxtaposing two surnames. Usually and perhaps always those principles are ordinary grammatical principles. I consider "O'Rourke" to be compound because of both the embedded capital and the punctuation mark, and it means something like "[son] (or is it [grandson]?) of Rourke"; likewise, because of the spaces, with "van den Berg", meaning "of (from?) the Berg". (Despite having the "same spelling", it seems clear that "Vandenberg" is just as much a different (and non-compound) surname, as "Fischer" is from its Anglicized respelling as "Fisher".)

Such surnames are arguably a special case:

  • Single-word given names and surnames are independent units; you can refer to people by their given names, or their surnames; many surnames are other people' given names, and vice versa; and it seems any surname can become a given name if the family involved is sufficiently determined to assert the importance of their female ancestors' families;
  • The units of a double surname are other people's surnames, and could make another double surname by reversing their order, or by substituting a third surname for either of them;
  • Yet the "O'" or the "van den" of our examples are so subordinate to what follows them as to be ineligible to function as surnames, even tho what follows them usually could stand alone as a different surname.

Two approaches to such names are possible:

  • At List of people by name: Du, the presence or absence of the space following du or Du does not affect order.
  • At List of people by name: Van, one person with surname separate Van comes first, people (about 50) whose names begin with van or Van as a "prefix" (most of the Van... names) follow, and two dozen with surnames beginning with Van and at least one more letter (but without an intervening space) close the Van... names.

The criteria i see as important are all matters of clarity and convenience to users. (I see no difference here between the needs of readers and editors.) IMO:

  • The Du or "only the letters matter" approach has the disadvantage that, for instance, "du Pont" and "Dupont" disrupt the tendency (even with our proportional fonts) of corresponding letters to line up on adjacent lines, and interferes with eyeball search.
  • The Van or "all the ones interrupted by a blank, apostrophe, or the like precede all those without" approach means the user may have to check both sections of the Van... names, if they are unsure whether the name has "interruptions".

My inclination is to apply the Van...-style approach, to Du next, and eventually to Le, Al, De, Di, von, and others that don't come to mind just at this moment.

I would be grateful to hear others' evaluations of which approach best serves our needs in the context of LoPbN.

--Jerzy(t) 07:36, 2004 Oct 21 (UTC)

Just a preliminary note related to the above; i don't want to think it thru completely yet:
I think i am the sole author of the following:

  • Most other people than these differ by having the word 'of' (or one of several non-English-language equivalents) as part of their names; each of them instead appears
    • closest to any people who also have 'of' in their names, and the same given name (first name);
    • also among any people whose surname is the same as that given name.

It therefore distresses me to note that i don't know what it means.[blush, grin]
I think it should be changed to say clearly that with the exceptions of

  • O'...
  • Mac...
  • Mc...

(even tho, in case of each of these exceptions, the following letter is upper case and may be preceded by a space), such prefixed names should be considered not fully taken care of until they have two identical entries, one of whose immediate neighbors start with the same prefix, and the other among ("as if it weren't a prefix") un-prefixed neighbors whose names' letters have the same initial sequence.
Essentially this would be a policy that we can't predict whether contributors of entries are going to choose the de facto Du approach or the de facto Van approach described above, but we encourage our vast corps of LoPbN maintainers to duplicate such entries using whichever is the other approach for that case.
Comments and wording would be welcome.
--Jerzy (t) 23:09, 2005 Mar 31 (UTC)

Replacing groups of names by surname links on LoPbN

The List of people by name is stated to be (working its way toward being) an index to every article that is the bio of one person. It is also read, and sometimes added to, by automated programs, and this requires limitation of formats.

We can work out mechanisms for cross references, e.g. between Chang & Zhang, but removing from the LoPbN tree the names of individuals who have or deserve articles is not acceptable.

Introducing new formats is not out of the question (and there has been recent work to standardize cross-reference formats); if your needs don't fit into the existing standard, something can surely be worked out, but it must be done in consultation with the many other users of the list.

If you have questions, please copy this section to Talk:List of people by name, followed by your questions, and we can take them up there.
--Jerzy(t) 08:07, 2004 Nov 16 (UTC)

Hi Jerzy, I suppose you understand the complexity of transliteration of family names. The transliteration of Chinese family names are even more complicated, due to the existence of different Chinese dialects. While readers browse the section on Cheung, they might think that there are only a dozen of people with this surname having articles in wikipedia without realize the existence of Zhang and Chang. The situation of Wu is even worse, Wu in mandarin is Ng in cantonese, while Wu in cantonese is Hu in mandarin.
A straightforward solution is to place every name in more than one list. Indeed, it happens before for several names. Another way is a mechanism for cross references as you suggested, but it would be too troublesome. The third way is my way, which replace the groups of names by surname link. There are two reasons for my suggestion: we can avoid unnecessary repetition of names, and that people with the same family name is already listed in the article for that family name.
I notice that you have created a new article List of people by name: People named Li, and it is basically identical to my suggestion, except that you are more conformed to the standard. Perhaps we can create List of people by name: People named Cheung, List of people by name: People named Zhang and List of people by name: People named Chang.
Note that I replaced names with surname link only when I know there are a huge number of people with that lastname will eventually have an article in wikipedia.
--wshun 13:05, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Hi back, Wai-Shun. And let me correct for my terse opening of this discussion (above), putting it more in the context of my appreciation of your willingness to engage this tough problem. (For instance, while there's nothing really complicated about the surname going last in some cultures, and first in the sensible ones like Chinese (and traditional Hungarian practice), things can get pretty tough as people practice mixtures of two cultures. I stick my neck out sometimes and say something like

*Changling, Wang, (probably mistaken filing of "Wang, Changling", retained for accessibility:) poet

but even for such relatively simple problems, any bilingual contributor willing to tackle these and related problems is an especially valued colleague.

As you suggest, all transliterations involve problems; and yes, my lack of imagination had kept it from occurring to me the relationships among common ideograms and the diverse forms of what Westerners usually blindly call "Chinese" would ("obviously") extend to surnames (and IMO surely to given names as well).

Partly because i have other commitments today and partly because i'd like to hear more of your thinking about what problems we are out to solve, i won't try to address that at this point: IMO we have discussed complications, and my guess is that the problems you are concerned with go beyond ending up with an undercount of the number of notable Cheungs. And i doubt i have thought of all the goals it is worth having WP support, among those that we might consider assigning to the LoPbN structure.

What i will make a point of saying is what led to the creation of List of people by name: People named Li. There is no reason we can't have a page for each of these frequent names that in English become "polymorphic". (IMO: our colleagues have yet to speak clearly to a simmering issue of where headings should or not be used in LoPbN, and it is not clear that some IMO naive ideas about when to create pages have been entirely laid to rest.) But IMO neither a page nor a heading devoted to such a name solves in itself anything related to polymorphism. The reason for segregating people with Li as surname from others beginning Li is that there are too many names like Lincoln, Lindberg, Lindgren, and so on to group them (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=List_of_people_by_name:_Lin&oldid=6749146) as i think is effective, on the same page with all the other names that begin "Li...". (And a section, or a page, labelled "Li - Lim" undercuts too much the clarity of where some names belong. (Early experiments on these pages, with two-letter surnames, IMO demonstrated the need for such clarity.)

It's important to say -- because i can't see how you would think "... named Li" and similar pages are helpful, without misunderstanding -- that pages like List of people by name: People named Li have titles in that format in order to fit in, as closely as possible, with the rest of the structure, and that even tho that title format differs slightly, the formats of the name entries and other content still has have to conform to the same standards as the pages with the more common title format, both for clarity to readers and editors about what is or belongs where, and for algorithms that use the page content as input.

On the other hand, i wonder (perhaps prematurely) whether something similar to existing deviations from strict alphabetic order may be helpful here: i have been (often using headings) putting all the hierarchs (popes, patriarchs, etc.) monarchs named "Michael" together, before all the monarchs hierarchs (popes, patriarchs, etc.) named "Michael", then others (mostly scholars, nobles, and artists) with given name "Michael of ..." or "Michael the ...", then all those with "Michael" as surname. I can't see any problem with headings (or in some cases pages) to separate "People named Wu (as transliteration from Mandarin)" (with a cross reference to "People named Ng (as transliteration from Cantonese)") from "People named Wu (as transliteration from Cantonese)" (with a cross reference to "People named Hu (as transliteration from Mandarin)"). And even for monolingual readers, IMO there is curiosity value at the very least, and perhaps more serious value, in sections or pages titled something like "People named Cheung (with rising tone)" and "People named Cheung (with falling tone)". (Of course, my ignorance has probably kept me from choosing the right examples, but hopefully i am close enough to communicate the possibilities that you can apply realistically.) And your choice not to move

Liu, Lucy, (born 1968), US actor

makes me wonder whether a section or page for "People named Liu (with Western intonation)", if she or others are so assimilated as to treat the name as having only a Latin spelling -- just as some heavily assimilated European-Americans never pronounce their surnames as they sounded "in the old country", and may not know the other pronunciation.

Whether these are sufficient to eliminate a need for duplication elsewhere is not clear to me; nor have we yet discussed the costs of duplication.

Of course, besides your responses, i am hoping others interested in these pages will participate; few editors pay anywhere near the attention that i do to the structure issues here, but you and i are not the only ones whose opinions on this are worth hearing.
--Jerzy(t) 19:58, 2004 Nov 16 (UTC)
(The lk named "Michael" added above as an afterthot; order of monarchs & hierarchs corrected; relevant red lks converted to Tone name; & minor typos fixed. --Jerzy(t) 23:04, 2004 Nov 16 (UTC))

Our opinions are not that different after all. About Liu, Lucy, the reason I singled her out is much simplier then you think. I don't really know who she is, and at that time nothing in the article indicating that she is a Chinese. As Liu is about the chinese name and I am not sure whether Liu is also an European name, so I simply single her out. I had made such an error in real life before, so I want to be more cautious.
Indeed, the best solution is a "list on the fly". That is Wikipedia automatically generate LoPbn without human interaction. But it might require a very complicated makeup language, a bad idea for an open content encyclopedia.
--wshun 16:29, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I would like to see us proceed with the hand-built list, making it work better for readers in ways that make sense without new markups but using some new headings. I'm working on a new section on this page for discussion of the long-term aspects of that, especially automation compatibility.

As i say, i don't know how to describe the Cheungs to distinguish their different ideographic characters. I presume they have different tone names (for me an old concept but a new term). Perhaps these correspond to the tonal properties of common nouns, much as "smith" (metalworker) and "tailor" (cutter and sewer of cloth garments) and adjectives like black and white, are the sources of, and correspond to, the surnames Smith, (probably) Taylor, Black, and (probably) White. Perhaps referring to what the names would "mean" if translated into English would be sufficient to make the distinctions.) IMO, readers who don't already know about tonal languages mostly won't want to learn much about them, but that doesn't mean we have to use some other distinction; even without that understanding, it can communicate what they may nevertheless want to know, e.g., that the possibility of confusion between Liu Shaoqi's and Liu Zongyuan's surnames never occurs in either ideographically written Chinese or accurately pronounced oral Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. And IMO a link to Tone name, or some more specific article, is a good mechanism for those who do want to take the occasion to broaden their knowledge.

(I don't know if you realize that there are two reasons that i don't suggest use of Unicode ideographic characters. Perhaps it's obvious that few Westerners can grasp much more than those for "middle" and "three"; it may not be obvious that on many (and my guess is most) terminals outside Asia, the ideographs display simply as square boxes -- which don't even convey the sense of "recognizably different from each other"!)

I'm trying to convince you to resume boldly editing with this discussion in mind; i am too ignorant to succeed at it, though i'd be willing to do the work and defend the results if you'd prefer just educating me a little, instead of getting involved again.

Ms. Liu's background (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005154/) is at IMDb, FWIW. IMO your caution is admirable: i have never seen that surname arise from Euro culture, and don't expect to, but i'd not be surprised if someone said "Lucia Liu" was Italian-derived; i believe Viola Liuzzo's (BTW, 3 syllables in the surname) ethnicity was Italian-American. (With other Euro languages and given names, i'd be harder to convince.)
--Jerzy(t) 23:07, 2004 Nov 18 (UTC)

What Belongs in an Entry besides the Link?

A discussion whose topic is

LoPbN

and which concerns what, besides the link to the bio, belongs in an LoPbN entry,
appears on User talk:Jerzy/LoPbN; the following points describe the discussion:

  • 9 msgs, 19:30, 1 thru 12:53, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • 4 participants (counting an article's talk page): Jerzy·t·c·*; Slambo·t·c·*; readership of Talk:List of people by name·*; Aecis·t·c·*.
  • general topic(s): Links to non-bio articles; lengthy description of bio's subject; purpose of LoPbN
Retrieved from "https://academickids.com:443/encyclopedia/index.php/Talk:List_of_people_by_name"
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