[WikiEN-l] Getting smarter about surnames
charles matthews
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
Fri May 5 15:40:44 UTC 2006
"Guettarda" wrote
> Do you think that a WikiProject Surnames might be in order?
There is certainly enough to do - an essentially unlimited field, you could
say.
There are projects and projects. What is most urgently needed is to get
under control the most common names on the wiki. There are inevitably
'Anglo': Smith, Jones, Brown, Robinson, lots of Irish and Scots names as
found all over Canada and Australia, that kind of thing. Almost the first
discussion would have to be what to do about these. For example Smiths are
listed under [[List of people by name: Smi]]. We don't really want to start
off with a schism between people who think that the [[List of people by
name]] pages should be maintained, and those (like me) who think that that
is the wrong approach, that writing it "Smith, Adam" is to be deprecated
because it confuses search engines, and anyway with biographies into six
figures we have to do something other than 1000 pages averaging more than
100 names on.
That's one issue. Another is that WikiProjects can appear much better at
prescribing rules to do the work, than at actually doing it.
On the other hand, if there's a chance of getting together people who know
their onomastics, with those with theories on how to integrate and present
some genealogical information here (for example the boxes turning up on
[[Arnold J. Toynbee]] to show the relation to [[Polly Toynbee]]), and others
who want to 'add value' to raw lists of names, it could be interesting. I'm
pretty much a 'raw list' man myself; but a template for a surname page ought
indeed to take into account a bit more.
Charles
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