On 05/05/06, charles matthews charles.r.matthews@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