I see that when I categorise a page "Foo" with, say [[Category:Test]] it will create a category page Categories:Test with an entry T Test.
If I do it like [[Category:Test|Bar]] I'll get an entry like B Test. That's irritating.
Couldn't it be done that it shows the modified search. Like B Bar. That example might not be a very good one but it is more clear when we use Albert_Einstein like on meta.
A page Albert_Einstein gets categorised as [[Category:Albert_Einstein|Einstein, Albert]] and shows up as E Albert_Einstein where it shoud be E Einstein, Albert. That's weird.
Cheers Manfred
I see that when I categorise a page "Foo" with, say [[Category:Test]] it will create a category page Categories:Test with an entry T Test.
Of course that entry will be F Foo on page Category:Test
If I do it like [[Category:Test|Bar]] I'll get an entry like B Test.
And this will accordingly be B Foo
That's irritating.
Couldn't it be done that it shows the modified search. Like B Bar. That example might not be a very good one but it is more clear when we use Albert_Einstein like on meta.
A page Albert_Einstein gets categorised as [[Category:Albert_Einstein|Einstein, Albert]] and shows up as E Albert_Einstein where it shoud be E Einstein, Albert. That's weird.
I hope there's not more errors in that post :)
tic@tictric.net wrote:
A page Albert_Einstein gets categorised as [[Category:Albert_Einstein|Einstein, Albert]] and shows up as E Albert_Einstein where it shoud be E Einstein, Albert. That's weird.
It always shows the actual title. The sort key isn't necessarily very legible; it may be numeric, encoded, or otherwise funky to force a certain sort mechanism.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion Vibber wrote:
tic@tictric.net wrote:
A page Albert_Einstein gets categorised as [[Category:Albert_Einstein|Einstein, Albert]] and shows up as E Albert_Einstein where it shoud be E Einstein, Albert. That's weird.
It always shows the actual title.
I think the point in his posting was to say that it *should not* always show the actual title, and I agree with him. We shouldn't have "Albert Einstein" under E, we should have "Einstein, Albert".
I always thought this was going to be done, and I actually thought that the fact that it used the string only as a sort key but not for display, was a bug. Personally, I think it should be "fixed". :-)
Timwi
On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 10:36:39PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
tic@tictric.net wrote:
A page Albert_Einstein gets categorised as [[Category:Albert_Einstein|Einstein, Albert]] and shows up as E Albert_Einstein where it shoud be E Einstein, Albert. That's weird.
It always shows the actual title.
I think the point in his posting was to say that it *should not* always show the actual title, and I agree with him. We shouldn't have "Albert Einstein" under E, we should have "Einstein, Albert".
I always thought this was going to be done, and I actually thought that the fact that it used the string only as a sort key but not for display, was a bug. Personally, I think it should be "fixed". :-)
"Einstein, Albert" is ugly - it looks like a paper encyclopedia. There's nothing wrong with displaying grammatically correct "Albert Einstein", even when its ordered by family name.
On Mon, 21 Jun 2004 23:49:13 +0200 Tomasz Wegrzanowski taw@users.sf.net wrote:
On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 10:36:39PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
I think the point in his posting was to say that it *should not* always show the actual title, and I agree with him. We shouldn't have "Albert Einstein" under E, we should have "Einstein, Albert".
I always thought this was going to be done, and I actually thought that the fact that it used the string only as a sort key but not for display, was a bug. Personally, I think it should be "fixed". :-)
"Einstein, Albert" is ugly - it looks like a paper encyclopedia. There's nothing wrong with displaying grammatically correct "Albert Einstein", even when its ordered by family name.
I agree, I want "Albert Einstein" there. On the other hand, there are also cases when I _do_ want something different to stand there: I want [[George III of the United Kingdom]] to be in [[Category:British monarchs]] as "George III" and [[Deposition (Chemistry)]] in [[Category:Chemistry]] as "Deposition". But how we get a syntax for that without making things too complicated again, I do not know either.
Andre Engels
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
There's nothing wrong with displaying grammatically correct "Albert Einstein", even when its ordered by family name.
"Einstein, Albert" is ugly - it looks like a paper encyclopedia.
Some people may very well consider "Einstein, Albert" to be ugly, but it's not grammatically incorrect. There are languages (like Hungarian) where it's considered normal.
Ec
Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net writes:
Some people may very well consider "Einstein, Albert" to be ugly, but it's not grammatically incorrect. There are languages (like Hungarian) where it's considered normal.
No, in Hungarian it is "Einstein Albert".
Sorting by family or last name by default and switching the sequence of the parts of the name is a western stupidity. Stay away from it and lot a lot artificial problems disappear.
At http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/HTML/ we are sorting translator names as supplied by the translator and nobody complained ever.
On Tuesday 22 June 2004 06:06, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net writes:
Some people may very well consider "Einstein, Albert" to be ugly, but it's not grammatically incorrect. There are languages (like Hungarian) where it's considered normal.
No, in Hungarian it is "Einstein Albert".
Sorting by family or last name by default and switching the sequence of the parts of the name is a western stupidity. Stay away from it and lot a lot artificial problems disappear.
How do you mean western stupidity? We on east are doing it as well!
Karl Eichwalder wrote:
Sorting by family or last name by default and switching the sequence of the parts of the name is a western stupidity. Stay away from it and lot a lot artificial problems disappear.
You are suggesting we sort by first name?
How are people supposed to find a celebrity if they only know their surname (which is more common than knowing only their first name)?
Timwi
Timwi timwi@gmx.net writes:
You are suggesting we sort by first name?
Yes.
How are people supposed to find a celebrity if they only know their surname (which is more common than knowing only their first name)?
A full text retrivial system would surely help.
The (western) concept of first and surname is just one system and often it is pretty obscure. In some countries the "van", "de", "von", etc. predicates are part of the surname (prefix, suffix?), in other countries they are an appendix to the first name.
The surname often changes - tell me the surname of Ludwig Tieck's sister ;) Okay, men an women devoted to a religious life tend to change their name as well - but they give up on their old name completely.
Esp. since we are an online-medium we are free to ignore the "official" writing system. Readers can find the info easily (even if they are forced to use an external search engine).
Karl Eichwalder wrote:
Timwi timwi@gmx.net writes:
You are suggesting we sort by first name?
Yes.
How are people supposed to find a celebrity if they only know their surname (which is more common than knowing only their first name)?
A full text retrivial system would surely help.
Certainly, but designing for what you don't have is not always productive. Meanwhile, as we are holding our breath . . .
The (western) concept of first and surname is just one system and often it is pretty obscure. In some countries the "van", "de", "von", etc. predicates are part of the surname (prefix, suffix?), in other countries they are an appendix to the first name.
Prefix. (A suffix comes at the end of the name; as in the feminine Petrova.) The prefixes will always be a problem. If we aren't sure between Beethoven and von Beethoven, how will the user know that he should look it up under Ludwig.
Medieval names will continue to be listed under the "first" name, but that's because they didn't use family names then.
The surname often changes - tell me the surname of Ludwig Tieck's sister ;) Okay, men an women devoted to a religious life tend to change their name as well - but they give up on their old name completely.
The custom varies. In practice we use the name by which they became famous
Esp. since we are an online-medium we are free to ignore the "official" writing system. Readers can find the info easily (even if they are forced to use an external search engine).
Using you as an example Eichwalder gave me 22,000 Google hits, Karl gave me 10,000,000 hits. If I want to find you I'm not going to start by searching for Karl. Maybe the "online medium" you are thinking of is a fortune teller. :-)
Ec
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?
Lars Aronsson wrote:
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?
No, but I know plenty of *non*-wiki sites that do (h2g2.com and imdb.com spring to mind). I think it's kind of central to the concept of a wiki that it uses real page names as the unique identifier for an entry - the whole idea of "accidental linking", and linking to pages that don't exist yet, arise from the fact that you can predict the location of a page without having to look it up. That's not to say we have to do it just because it's always been done that way, but I think there are genuine advantages that outweigh the disadvantages of doing it this way.
This is one of the key points I've been meaning to raise on meta: in response to the various biography / family tree / etc proposals that have turned up there. If your ideal database includes 500 people called "Dave Gorman", you can no longer use the advantages of the name-as-ID convention; you could use an arbitrary ID and still have the pages editable, but it wouldn't really be a wiki any more (IMHO).
Rowan Collins [IMSoP] wrote:
it's kind of central to the concept of a wiki that it uses real page names as the unique identifier
Imagine that the software had a way to recognize disambiguation pages. When a page is saved and contains the {{disambig}} tag, the software could set cur.cur_is_redirect = 2. Then assume that [[Napoleon]] is such a disambiguation page.
Now, when I write an article and link to [[Napoleon]] and preview my edit, the system consults the cur table to see if the link should be red or blue. But in the case of a disambiguation page, it could instead harvest that page for links and insert an HTML form selector (a drop down menu) where I can select which one of the people I want to link to. In the next step (save or preview), the edited text would be disambiguated to [[Napoleon I of France | Napoleon]].
This link harvesting would only take place on preview, and not during the normal display of an article. I think this could be implemented without compatibility problems. In fact, the same link disambiguation during preview could also be performed for links to redirects. In a way, a redirect is merely a disambiguation page with just one link.
This is how I imagine that the editing user interface to IMDb works. I don't think the IMDb editors open a separate browser window to find out that Pierce Brosnan is "nm0000112" before creating a new link. I think such ideas can be incorporated into a wiki without killing the wiki spirit. At one time, some people said that CamelCase was an essential part of a wiki, and we proved that they were wrong.
(Today in the English Wikipedia, [[Napoleon]] is a redirect to [[Napoleon I of France]], and the disambiguation page is called [[Napoleon (disambiguation)]]. That disambiguation page contains a lot more than links to the non-ambiguous terms.)
On Wednesday 23 June 2004 18:44, Lars Aronsson wrote:
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.
If a person (or anything else) is known under multiple names, is it be possible to add it to categories with them and will it appear there multiple times? If not, should it be possible?
Nikola Smolenski wrote:
If a person (or anything else) is known under multiple names, is it be possible to add it to categories with them and will it appear there multiple times? If not, should it be possible?
It is possible to add a redirect to a category, and the redirect still works.
On Mon, 21 Jun 2004 16:41:51 -0700 Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
There's nothing wrong with displaying grammatically correct "Albert Einstein", even when its ordered by family name.
"Einstein, Albert" is ugly - it looks like a paper encyclopedia.
Some people may very well consider "Einstein, Albert" to be ugly, but it's not grammatically incorrect. There are languages (like Hungarian) where it's considered normal.
It would be "Einstein Albert" not "Einstein, Albert". And if in a language it is felt that this is correct, the logical way would be to call the page such, not to call the page something else but have it that title in a category.
Andre Engels
tic@tictric.net wrote:
A page Albert_Einstein gets categorised as [[Category:Albert_Einstein|Einstein, Albert]] and shows up as E Albert_Einstein where it shoud be E Einstein, Albert. That's weird.
It always shows the actual title.
I think the point in his posting was to say that it *should not* always show the actual title, and I agree with him. We shouldn't have "Albert Einstein" under E, we should have "Einstein, Albert".
I always thought this was going to be done, and I actually thought that the fact that it used the string only as a sort key but not for display, was a bug. Personally, I think it should be "fixed". :-)
"Einstein, Albert" is ugly - it looks like a paper encyclopedia. There's nothing wrong with displaying grammatically correct "Albert Einstein", even when its ordered by family name.
I don't think it matters whether it appears ugly or not ugly to the one or the other. People are different :)
What does matter is, that especially in a Wiki one should also have the freedom to choose for himself what way he would like to have it. Still others have the freedom to change it again.
Maybe like [[category:People|:Einstein, Albert]] would sort it as E Einstein, Albert and [[category:People|::Einstein, Albert]] would sort it as A Albert_Einstein AND E Einstein, Albert. (I don't know if that makes sense. It just came to my mind.) On BIG Category pages I can imagine that there might occur the need to list on thing twice. I can't think of an english example but in german we got to common notations for joiner. "Tischler" and "Schreiner". Both of them describe the very same thing. A Joiner. If he comes from south germany he'll look for Schreiner, if he comes from up north he'll look for Tischler. The official notation is "Tischler".
So we need on the page "Tischler" [[category:professions|::Schreiner]]
Cheers Manfred
On 2004.06.21 17:36, Timwi - timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
tic@tictric.net wrote:
A page Albert_Einstein gets categorised as [[Category: Albert_Einstein|Einstein, Albert]] and shows up as E Albert_Einstein where it shoud be E Einstein, Albert. That's weird.
It always shows the actual title.
I think the point in his posting was to say that it *should not* always show the actual title, and I agree with him. We shouldn't have "Albert Einstein" under E, we should have "Einstein, Albert".
I always thought this was going to be done, and I actually thought that the fact that it used the string only as a sort key but not for display, was a bug. Personally, I think it should be "fixed". :-)
Brion went on to say:
"The sort key isn't necessarily very legible; it may be numeric, encoded, or otherwise funky to force a certain sort mechanism."
I just wanted to add that I, for one, was expecting to use odd sort keys exactly for this reason, and I am very glad that this mechanism is available. I think it is unfortunate, in a way, that you can not ask to see them, but I am sure that, in my case, it is better if they are not visible by default.
Jim
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