Given the recent discussions on how to deal with person names in
Wikidata (e.g. how many properties to use, how to handle scripts,
automatic vs. manual labels/aliases/descriptions...) and the importance
username display has in MediaWiki (e.g. gendered namespaces, log system
restructure since 1.19, ...), it may be useful for someone to read this
thesis and summarise it to our benefit. :)
http://ulir.ul.ie/handle/10344/3450
«If a system does not possess the ability to capture, store, and
retrieve people names, according to their cultural requirements, it is
less likely to be acceptable on the international market.
Internationalisation of people names could reduce the probability of a
person’s name being lost in a system, avoiding frustration, saving time,
and possibly money. This study attempts to determine the extent to which
the human name can be internationalised, based upon published
anthroponymic data for 148 locales, by categorising them into eleven
distinctly autonomous parts: definite article, common title, honorific
title, nickname, by-name, particle, forename, patronymic or matronymic,
surname, community name, and generational marker. This paper provides an
evaluation of the effectiveness of internationalising people names;
examining the challenges of terminology conflicts, the impact of
subjectivity whilst pigeonholing personyms, and the consequences of
decisions made. It has demonstrated that the cultural variety of human
names can be expressed with the Locale Data Mark-up Language for 74% of
the world’s countries. This study, which spans 1,919 anthroponymic
syntactic structures, has also established, through the use of a unique
form of encoding, that the extent to which the human name can be
internationalised is 96.31% of the data published by Plassard (1996) and
Interpol (2006). Software developers, localisation engineers, and
database administrators may benefit from this paper, through recognition
of this problem and understanding the potential gains from accurately
handling people names within a system. The outcome of this study opens
up opportunities for future research into cultural name mapping that may
further enhance the Common Locale Data Repository.»