Karl Eichwalder wrote:
The (western) concept of first and surname is just one system and [...] The surname often changes - tell me the surname of Ludwig Tieck's sister
This problem is bigger than Wikipedia's category system. Personal names, especially in older times, are both ambigious and have different versions of spelling, leading to the need for disambiguation pages (where one name leads to many people) and redirects (where many names lead to one person). I'd be interested in learning about any wiki that uses a different approach (than Wikipedia's) to this.
One approach could be to assign unique numbers to each person, e.g. Winston Churchill = [[person 17]], Napoleon = [[person 18]], and always to link to these, e.g. [[person 17 | Winston Churchill]], [[person 17 | Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill]] or [[person 18 | Bonaparte]]. This approach would not be user friendly, but it would be free from ambiguity. I don't know any wiki that uses this particular approach. Do you?