I think we need to have some more focussed policy guides about surname lists. Firstly, I feel it is clear that we should get smarter about surnames. Biographical articles are created at a rate of hundreds every day. These include some of the most problematical articles of all, when it comes to: stubbiness (yet another bass guitarist in a virtually unknown band); poor writing style; lack of good sources; copyvio; potential defamation and intrusion; vanity, hoaxes and other detrimental things. A notional worst 10% of articles on the English Wikipedia would probably contain a high proportion of such pages. So, main point, searching out and listing articles by surname has the prime virtue of making navigation to our 'dark matter' or near-orphans much more easy and likely. But if you go into it, as I have been doing in 2006, you see issues that are not helpful. For example whether a surname, say out of the 1000 most common, has indeed a dedicated page seems to be pretty much a random thing. And if there is such a page, it may be several years maintenance short of being complete. I have no solution to the maintenance issue, other than to note that raising the profile of surnames will help, and that where lists do exist there are editors who will find them and add to them incrementally. It's the usual situation, that there is inertia to overcome, and if [[Jamison]] doesn't exist, it may continue not to exist. (It does now, but [[Jamieson]] doesn't.) This may not be the most fascinating discussion for all, but for me it does go to the heart of one big issue: what can be done to make the English Wikipedia have more the look-and-feel of a finished product? I think good lists by surname do give that impression, that reference material is here and has been worked over. What would be great would be to have a standard format for a surname page. As usual, standardisation can lead to some future automation. But it would solve a bunch of niggling issues I'm going to outline - It seems that the historic accident, that 40000 pages on U.S. places were created early on, has rather skewed perceptions (as if the Johnson City dab issue was more important than the Johnson surname dab issue). That is not right, but many, many pages still start off disambiguating places named after people called X, when the more obvious thing is the people called X. - Generally speaking, subordinating surname dab pages to [[Wikipedia:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)]] seems the wrong way to go. I have issues with what the MoS says about piping (don't - but how can that be right for readability of long lists?), about subdisambiguation (I want all the John Smiths on the Smith page, rather than elsewhere, though in two places seems right to me, not merging). And probably a few more things, that get taken too prescriptively. The fact is that dab pages in general are never going to be neat and tidy: it's a catch-all idea. Surname dab pages on the other hand should be important reference pages, for example for someone wondering which Watson was a sixteenth century commentator on Senecan drama (Thomas, as I found a couple of days ago). Some fresh thinking, taking into account the current balance and trend of articles on the site, seems urgently needed. Charles