On 05/05/06, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)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