[WikiEN-l] Getting smarter about surnames

[charles matthews]

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