Talk:List of people by name: Chb-Che

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[edit] Advance creation of pages witn no apparent prospect for population

The world's full of surprises. One for me was noticing that there was no place for a Chb...-thru-Chd... entry to go, when i was so sure that the only names without a place to go were really short ones like "A", "Ad", "Al", and "Alb".

(Just for the record, if a George Alb turns up, he'll fall in the crack between "Akzz" (or some "Akzz..." name) and "Alba". In the case of Alb (altho not every such short-name-crack is provided for, to even this awkward extent), the remedy would be to

1. edit Template:List of people Alb Nm Sw, whose content is

   {{#switch:n|n=|y=Name Alb | }}

   so that the first "n" becomes a "y",

2. click on the Name Alb lk that will appear on List of people by name: Alb (as soon as an up-to-date rendering of it is fetched from the server)
3. paste into the blank edit pane

   {{subst:lopbn-pnmempty|Alb}}

   followed by Mr. Alb's entry, and

4. save the edit.)

I explored a little, and realized that i'd decided, abt 6 months ago, to let stand for a while a rename (and a complementary edit against {{List of people Ch Links}}), mostly waiting against the possibility of a more insightful argument for the change than the summary

no known people with name Chb-Chd, are we anxiously waiting for such people?

(So surprise #1 is that i already knew about the Chb-Chd hole.) In any case, nothing further having developed, i restored the old name and the old lk to it in the template.

I had, probably in response to that April change tho three months later, created a list of 24 LoPbN pages known to have had names added when they were empty; all of these were, to monolingual English-speakers, moderately to highly implausible beginnings of human names. (I've just added to this list 5 additional such pages from the succeeding 3 months.) Chb-Che has never been an empty page, and so does not appear on that list, but its Chb-Chd portion has been empty until today. Out of curiosity or thoroughness, i looked at Category:Living people, where i found Stephen Chbosky (and that's surprise #2 for me). I will not address further whether "anxiously waiting" is intended as sarcasm. But in response to the presumably rhetorically intended question, permit me to draw on my experience cleaning up after the 99% of contributors to LoPbN who fail to even emulate the format of adjacent entries, let alone show any grasp of the hierarchical nature of the pages or even sections: There is no doubt that most of the additions made would have been messes needing cleanup if there had not been pages ready to receive them; there's no way to judge how many inclinations to add them would simply have been abandoned, if those places to add them had not been made clear.

Anxious waiting plays no role here.

• There's need for wider name-page scopes (and in some cases more name pages) than we yet have names to use.
• Efforts to identify which we need, and which not, would consume effort without reason to expect that either false positives or false negatives would be eliminated, let alonge both.
• There is no significant cost to covering all the bases (except the "short-name cracks" ecompassing, at present precisely 99 specific short possible names), ensuring that absence of clear places to put them will never deter users from adding them.

(The 99 figure is found by subtracting 42 Names pages from 141 LoPbN-Links pages; some of the names are more plausible than others; the least credible of them are 15 (hypothetical!) two- to four-letter names "Br", "Cl", "Fr", "Gr", "Kn", "Mc", "Ph", "Sc", "Sch", "Schn", "Sh", "Sm", "Th", "Tr", and "Wr".)
--Jerzy•t 05:23, 5 November 2006 (UTC)