[WikiEN-l] Getting smarter about surnames

[Sam Pointon]

On 05/05/06, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> There are projects and projects.  What is most urgently needed is to get
> under control the most common names on the wiki.  There are inevitably
> 'Anglo': Smith, Jones, Brown, Robinson, lots of Irish and Scots names as
> found all over Canada and Australia, that kind of thing.  Almost the first
> discussion would have to be what to do about these.  For example Smiths are
> listed under [[List of people by name: Smi]].  We don't really want to start
> off with a schism between people who think that the [[List of people by
> name]] pages should be maintained, and those (like me) who think that that
> is the wrong approach, that writing it "Smith, Adam" is to be deprecated
> because it confuses search engines, and anyway with biographies into six
> figures we have to do something other than 1000 pages averaging more than
> 100 names on.

Crazy idea, but could we possibly autogenerate these lists? If, say,
we have a template "person", used like {{person|Smith|John Smith|An
ordinary man who works in an office}} (that is,
{{person|<<surname>>|<<name>>|<<short desc>>}}) on page [[John Smith
(person)]], it automatically adds the line:

*[[John Smith (person)|John Smith]] - An ordinary man who works in an office]]

to [[Smith (disambiguation)]] in the appropriate place.

Slightly more formally, it'll add
*[[<<page name>>|<<name>>]] - <<short desc>>

to [[<<surname>> (disambiguation)]] at the alphabetic, proper place.

Like I said, crazy idea out of left field, but it would help solve the
syncing problem. Possibly even a, say, {{brother}} or {{mother}}
template to specify relations between people on these disambig lists.

--Sam