Talk:List of people by name: Ma
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#Followup on Ideas Raised on this Talk Page
[edit] History of the article List of people by name: Ma
The intention of the current design of the "article" List of people by name: Ma was to serve 2 purposes:
- to link users to the 8 (soon to be 11) pages containing people whose surnames have 3 or more letters and begin with "Ma";
- to accomodate, directly on the page, the much smaller number (2 so far) of people with the two-letter surname is "Ma".
I reorganized it bcz it previously contained on one page the vast quantity of people whose names begin "Ma". The list is too big for that single page approach. (900 names, rounded to the nearest 100; in mid-December, 54,492 bytes.) I used the obvious approach for dealing with the names longer than 2 letters, and that should occasion little controversy (tho discussion and experimentation will be needed to settle whether using the automatic ToC feature is helpful).
Clearly the approach i chose for Messrs Ma was not as clever as it seemed to me at the time. The first 8 days brought three edits to this page, and all the additions (there was also a deletion of the section heading; see below) should have been made on other "article" pages that the article links to, to wit,
Of course there are relatively few famous people named Ma (2 of the 900), so 3 erroneous edits landing there and no good ones means nothing. Unfortunately, these 3 are 3 times the number of edits that went to the right place in the Ma-Mz part of the tree structure in the same period -- which does most likely mean something. I've relocated the misplaced ones, and restored the heading (whose deletion in the second edit nearly guaranteed that future edits would be similarly misplaced).
If this is a persistent phenomenon, and not just bad luck, i propose to solve it by moving the two people named Ma out to their own page, probably List of people with surname Ma, tho what i really want there is people with either surname Ma, or named Ma but using no surname. There's probably no harm, tho, in calling it List of people with surname Ma and still sneaking in any oddball Ma who shows up -- probably none will show up. --Jerzy 06:55, 2004 Jan 24 (UTC)
Well, the same problem never recurred. But other bad things, that i hadn't imagined, did. One convention of this list is that it's not just the names that are next to each other on a page that are alphabetically ordered relative to each other. We also keep the links to additional pages in an order that can be followed from left to right and top to bottom to go to pages further on in the alphabet. (And that is supplemented by the ability to back out of a page, in order to go further right or down on that page and thus on to other pages that belong after this page.) I think keeping this visible metaphor assists and reassures the user.
Another convention of this list, which it made me uncomfortable to break, is that there are two kinds of pages in the list: pages with names, and navigational pages. The names pages have some navigational apparatus (just alluded to), but it is segregated at the top of the page, where it also serves more often as the "you are here" map than as an actual source of links to choose one of, and follow it. I was breaking that convention by leaving the two Maos Mas on a page that is primarily a way of reaching the names of people who have names consisting of Ma followed by additional letters.
That got worse when a user followed a suggestion at Talk:List of people by name (one i disagree with for other reasons) by creating a place for names that could have gone on List of people by name: Mb (by creating that page), on List of people by name: Ma. It was inevitable (in the case at hand) that not just a heading, but names would get added there. (So inevitable that i had already listed them (Thabo Mbeki and his father and compatriot) elsewhere on this page.) Not only were the Mas and the Mbekis both below the links to all the Ma... names the come between (not before) them, but they were also cheek by jowl to each other, inviting users to wonder (if, like most of us, they are more attuned to lists of names than to an array of links that don't scream "beginning strings of names") where the MacDowells and Madisons have gone. And to insert them between Ma and Mbeki.
The details of my solution may be open to criticism, at least as to my choice of wording of a page name, and of the links to it. I'll invite that discussion at Talk:List of people by name, and put a more specific link here. --Jerzy(t) 08:22, 2004 Mar 18 (UTC)
[edit] Followup on Ideas Raised on this Talk Page
- I have raised on Talk:List of people by name two issues on which i took positions in contributions, higher on this page, concerning one of this page's article's children, List of people by name: named Ma:
