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Individual Entries, or their relationships to near neighbors

[edit] Individual Entries, or their relationships to near neighbors

[Hopefully no one ever used this section name as a lk-target, since it was intended only to refine statement of purpose of the whole page without making the page-title still longer.]

[edit] Got a Name for the List but There's no Page to put it on??

NOTE: This section saw use only by me, when there were links to unimplemented pages, and should see less now that all mentioned within-tree links are implemented. However, the dominant practice here does still occasionally require the creation of a new link and a new page that will have only one person on it, and i should be checking more often in case someone puts one here instead of just ignoring my filing conventions. (I suppose any others who may be silently helping maintain the list beyond adding names should also do so. [smile]) I should also describe the circumstances that can still occur.
--Jerzy(t) 20:46, 2004 Aug 17 (UTC)

As discussed below under Table Structure, some rare letter combinations have no page prepared for them. If you're here because you want to add a name starting with one of those combinations, don't hesitate (according to your taste) to

• follow the table on List of people by name to the blank page and start the page with just that name, but none of the links most of these pages have, or
• copy the top portion of another page for a letter-pair in the same row, and try to figure out how to change it to do the whole job for your combination, or
• just put the name, dates if available, and significance of the person in the sub-section immediately following:

[edit] People Waiting for a Page to be Listed on

E.g.:

• Public, John Q. (born yesterday) - perpetual victim of political figures, and butt of jokes by editorial writers
• The following two entries have been acted upon, producing adequate entries with some advantages over these versions:
  • Mbeki, Govan activist in ANC & Communist Party of South Africa, and father of Thabo Mbeki
  • Mbeki, Thabo activist in ANC & Communist Party of South Africa, and 2nd President of post-apartheid South Africa
• Nhat Hanh, Thich (Thich is a title, not a name) (b. 1926) expatriate Vietnamese Buddhist religious leader and spirituality author

[edit] Order of Entries (and some related entry-format issues)

[edit] People known by Given Name without Reference to a Surname

[edit] Name Formats & Order

[A heading originally intended to help consolidate two related sections without actually changing their headings]

[edit] Name Formats & Order 1

"If someone has an 'of something' placing name they are logged under their first name." -- What does this mean? That Lord Fred of Newton is under FR? -- SGBailey 22:22 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yes; that is how they are being done now. Eusebius of Caesarea is listed under E, not C. A rarer case: If they have a legitimate first and last name, followed by "of", then list them under their last name. Lord Fred Smith of Newton would be listed under Smith, Lord Fred, of Newton. -- Amillar 00:21 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Name Formats & Order 2

What order should numerical people be in? I would suggest that in numerical order is better than in strict alphabetical order. EG:

• Mike I of Anglia
• Mike II of Anglia
• Mike III of Anglia
• Mike IV of Anglia
• Mike V of Anglia
• Mike I of Botswana
• Mike II of Botswana
• Mike III of Botswana
• Mike IV of Botswana
• Mike V of Botswana
• Mike of Zanzibar

Rather than

• Mike of Zanzibar
• Mike I of Anglia
• Mike I of Botswana
• Mike II of Anglia
• Mike II of Botswana
• Mike III of Anglia
• Mike III of Botswana
• Mike IV of Anglia
• Mike IV of Botswana
• Mike V of Anglia
• Mike V of Botswana

-- SGBailey 2003-08-06

That makes more sense to me, certainly. Martin

It sounds nice, but certainly will make automated maintenance of these lists harder. Hmm, how do you automate sorting it?. -- Amillar 23:56, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

A, i bet you've noticed in the last 3 months that a part of the problem that SGB has not pointed out is that the Roman numerals also sort wrong by machine. I have experience doing stuff like this with lists of five-figure quantities of entries, and different but probably comparable irregularities of format to the ones you and i have pointed out. Let's talk, if you're serious about it.

--Jerzy 14:39, 2003 Nov 12 (UTC)

W/o trying to design the software on the Talk pages, IMO it's worth noting the analogy with the prefefence setting for rendering of linked dates. (For those who haven't noticed: i see [[31 February]] [[2525]] as "2525 February 31", and there are surely others who see it as "February 31, 2525", thanks to our preference settings. And all three of those formats are treated equally by MediaWiki, if properly marked up as links, for everyone whose Preference setting isn't "render as written".) My point is not that dates and names are particularly similar, but rather that date links are radically different from any other double-bracket links, and that names of people (fictional ones too, tho that's much less important) could be another.

My 2nd or 3rd thought is that having a People cat-tag in the corresponding article would trigger the special treatment. (This would be in constrast to dates, where recognition of any of several syntaxes, where used, is the trigger. But the trigger would be ignored when the name it implies doesn't correspond closely enough to title of the article in which the tag appears -- or to a bolded name in its 1st sent or 'graph?)

• The People category tag would have extra parameters. These would specify the sort fields.
• Or there would be a special class of category (sub-categories of Category:People-by-name format?) whose members would include categories implying "Surname is last three words", "Surname is first word", etc. (Sadly, the default must of course be the overwhelmingly dominant and stupid case of surname = last name.) They would change the meaning of the People tag in the same article, by specifying where in the alphabetical list on Category:People the article's name should appear. (And might make given-name-first names appear in "Smith, John" format, unlike our current facility.)

Treating names with "of" and its equivalents adds no real complications ("treat like the trailing part of the given name"); the real complications indeed come with the relatively rare names of nobility, hierarchs, and mere ancients, but the increasingly complex schemes needed for increasingly narrow cases don't need to be understood by every user: what i've already outlined would probably cover well over 99% of people in WP. (Hard to estimate by sampling, since most exceptions are concentrated in blocks of names like John and Louis and Leo, not to mention my unwillingness to count the names on LoPbN.)

--Jerzy(t) 20:46, 2004 Aug 17 (UTC)

[edit] Related portion of "Alphabetizing these names" section

[The following excerpt from List of people by name#Alphabetizing these names dates from the first quarter of 20004.

[Copied to this section by Jerzy•t 19:47, 8 June 2006 (UTC).]

[edit] Separating Surnames from Identical Given Names

Another matter that is implicit in, but not obvious from, the "Mike of Anglia" example above, is that some names are both surnames and given names. (For different people; "Major Major Major" is fictional!) I list all the surname-less people with John as a given name before all the people with John as a surname. (Well, the one guy with John as a surname. I will add here an especially good example, which will help me make it clearer that it must be done in this way.)
--Jerzy(t) 20:46, 2004 Aug 17 (UTC)

[edit] Alphabet issues

[edit] Alphabetizing

[An unhelful heading.]]

(The second & third sections were moved here 23:11, 15 December 2005 (UTC), from Talk:List of people by name#Alphabetizing, by Jerzy.)
--Jerzy•t 07:39, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The "Alphabetizing these names" Section

[The "Section" referred to in the heading appears on List of people by name.]
[Properly, i should note that this section was not present on this page at the time when User:Amillar made endorsing reference to the principles stated on this talk page.
[On the other hand, the following text has been on the LoPbN root page for over 5 months, and the principles expressed have informed my edits (which number since then about 5000, a substantial fraction of them on these pages) for longer than that, and neither has evoked objections (or for that matter, agreement!).
[The heading "Alphabetizing these names" and its text are copied here from List of people by name#Alphabetizing these names, to facilitate discussion of the alphabetizing principles of this list and Category:People. (Note that Category talk:People refers to Talk:List of people by name in this context.) ] IMO, those with comments on the following should feel free to insert them, indented, within it.
--Jerzy(t) 20:46, 2004 Aug 17 (UTC)

These qualifications seemed overly technical to mention on the main-namespace root page, but i am less hesitant to be thorough here on the talk page.

1. In few cases have i added entries in order to "double up" as described here, tho i think i've added some "see also" cross-references that have similar effect.
2. The words von and (presumably) Van mean "of"; de and d' and di (whether capitalized or not) mean, i think, "of the", and (in Arabic) al (and a frightening number of equivalents including an, ar, as, and i think af, apparently used something like "a" and "an" in English, in the cases of different following consonants) seem to mean either "the" or "of the", perhaps depending on context.
3. My impression is that the degree of acknowledging, in English usage, of the preposition and/or article "bonding" to the following name varies with the language involved. This may reflect actual usage in the respective languages, or simply whether the prefix is captitalized or not: von gets separated from Beethoven, but not Van from Van Dyke.
4. I conclude that expecting people to understand the exact rules is futile, and doubling up or cross references are needed.
   --Jerzy•t 07:39, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
   

===== Alphabetizing these names =====

[edit] [Section name TBD]

(There's a discussion at Talk:List of people by name: Hor-Hov that will get named & moved here once it's clear that it has reached a natural stopping point.)
--Jerzy•t 16:17, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

It's now been moved to Talk:List of people by name/Individual Entries#Non-English versions of Latin alphabet, and (for now at least) follows immediately:

[edit] Non-English versions of Latin alphabet

Moved [[ |here]], with some reformatting. --Jerzy•t 19:55, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Headings still need to be fixed!!
KF asks in a summary, at 15:36, 7 April 2006:

adding Christiane Hörbiger -- should it be here, under Horb- OR under Hoerb- OR after Hz-? What is the final word on that?

The implication of a less-than-final word would be a reference (at least in part, and probably entirely) to two discussions involving both User:KF and User:Jerzy, that Jerzy has dredged up:

First, this Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) discussion, retrieved from a revision in the history of its /Archive subpage:

The following consolidates two edits made on User talk:Jerzy, and one (inserted here between them, in accord with the chronology, but in a nested box) on User talk:KF. (Both blocks of text now reside in the users' respective archives.)

I doubt this is important enough to ever get the attention it would take to arrive at the final word. But here's more than i've said before:

1. IMO, the most typical treatment in English is to either drop the diacritical mark or to treat it as if the mark made no difference for alphabetizing. E.g., on the way to naïf in Webster's [eighth] New Collegiate Dictionary, i stumbled onto

   née or nee

   sandwiched between NED and need. Even tho including the diacritic appears to be preferred, the entry appears between two ne... words. WP's en: manifestation is an English-language reference, and even tho it would be valuable to document alph'n practices in other languages, they are irrelevant to this question. These LoPbN pages are here to facilitate access, via English, to bios, and following other than English practice would interfere with that.

2. IMO "after Z" is far too much trouble to put into practice (except in a language that has a sequence nearly universally known to its native speakers). It it is ambiguous without a convention as to the order of, e.g., , ò, ô, ö, õ, ǒ, ő, and ø (and arguably œ), and as to whether ö is closer to ó or to ë. Note that putting ö after Z, rather than between o and p suggests strongly that ö and ó should not be treated as closely related; that is a choice which increases the impact on order of the unintuitive question of which diacritical mark should precede another.
3. There may be a predominant convention among languages that do have extra letters relative to English, but even if that's true, there will be plenty of people using WP who don't know that. (I don't know that, in spite of my having taken (in the case of two languages i don't speak at all) enough interest in the subject to know that at least one Spanish dictionary has separate sections for words beginning with L followed by a vowel and those being Ll, and that at least one Polish dictionary with separate sections for words beinging with L and with Ł nevertheless intermingles words beginning with the same letters, and first differing by whether the next letter is L or Ł.) The many who don't think of looking after Z would mostly give up; many of the few who try it would make bad guesses about the order, and do poorly at inferring the standard, since any after-Z system scatters examples of its use from each other more than the "dicritics don't matter" system does, so that there are fewer "head-to-head" examples where one can see whether and how the diacritic makes a difference.
4. The "diacritics don't matter" system that's in use, on the other hand, is fairly clearly communicated (to those inclined to expect an after-Z system) by the fact that there are neither LoPbN pages named (e.g.) List of people by name: Ö nor following List of people by name: Zx-Zz.
5. I gather there are languages where "after Z" is the standard, but consider Ö, which appears (other than as diaresis) in soemthing like 10 languages. The most familiar of these to native speakers of English is German. Der Große Duden Stilwörterbuch and the American Harper Collins German Dictionary both list tödlich between Todesstrafe and Toilette (i.e., ö is neither before nor after o). (They also both put lässig before läßlich and Koloß before kolossal -- i.e., ß is neither before nor after ss -- in spite of its origin and name indicating it means "SZ".) Using any after-Z system either confuses anyone familiar with either English or German treatment of special letters, or requires users to know or guess what language a name with an ö comes from.

--Jerzy•t 07:44, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

More specifically, as to the person involved you added in the edit: The umlaut belongs in the article title, and i think the entry is good perfect as you did it. The ...oe... version of her name gets some Google hits (about 10%) on English language sites, so i'll add a duplicate entry for that spelling , on List of people by name: Hoa-Hok#Hod - Hoe, with the ...oe... spelling piped to the article title. IMO, it goes w/o saying that some users will the fact that the dropping of the diacritic will occur goes w/o saying and, but an entry under that spelling would be adjacent to the umlaut one, so that only two entries are appropriate all told and thus redundant.
--Jerzy•t 07:53 & 15:05, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

(I think this is the appropriate place to place a comment)

When doing "mergenames", I have taken to using a Perl package called "Text::Unidecode" (from CPAN) as my "asciifier", and then sort in ASCII order on the output of that. This means that the umlauts will be stripped (most of the time), ß will be mapped to ss, and 北京 gets mapped to "Bei Jing". The advantage is that I can avoid having to make those decisions for myself - and the results look consistent, which I consider a Good Thing for anything done with the help of a machine.

Note - the sort order of "non ASCII" characters is VERY MUCH culture dependent - here in the English Wikipedia, I think doing something that makes sense when "thinking in English and ASCII" makes sense. --Alvestrand 21:16, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Your "unidecode" measure sounds wise to me, but i hope you'll say more about "thinking in English and ASCII". Are we safe in presuming this has nothing to do with the broken ASCII A-Za-z collating order, and everything to do transliterating down to the English 26-letter alphabet? I certainly agree that this is specific to en:, and i don't think what the other WPs should do follows from our decision - nor do i pretend to know otherwise what they should do.
--Jerzy•t 03:55, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes, in the code that uses it, I first "unidecode" the text to ASCII, then I lowercase it, then I use it for sorting. This gives me the reasonably correct [Aa][Bb][Cc] collating order. You're right that other Wikis need to do their own thing; in Norwegian, the sort order is abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzæøå; in Swedish, it ends ...xyzåæø.... an excellent resource for people who want to get really deep into these matters is the CLDR registry at unicode.org. --Alvestrand 05:27, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Dictionary" versus "Phone-book"

With only the slightest previous discussion (probably in summary fields of some edits, or in my still unimproved partial first draft of LoPbN documentation, on a sub-page), i've made it a firm principle to apply what i call "phone-book alphabetizing" rather than "dictionary alphabetizing" to this list. Without rigorously defining the difference, please note that you expect to find "dark horse" after "darken" in a dictionary, but to find "Smith, Zeke" before "Smithson" in a phone book.

(One big reason for that difference: Most of us consider "head-wall", "head wall", and "headwall" interchangable (in fact, many of us will think, at first reading, that one version appears twice in that list!); in contrast "Dick Smith" and "Richard Smith" are likely to be the same person, while "Dick Smithson" is no more likely to even be associated with either of them than is "Dick Wagner".)

My firm principle is rigid as to consulting the given names only if the surnames are identical. Likewise where a compound surname has two surnames as its components: "Garcia Marquez, Gabriel" follows all of those whose sole surname is "Garcia".

[edit] The Prefixed-Surname Problem

I have been less certain, and less consistent, with compound surnames that are formed by other principles than juxtaposing two surnames. Usually and perhaps always those principles are ordinary grammatical principles. I consider "O'Rourke" to be compound because of both the embedded capital and the punctuation mark, and it means something like "[son] (or is it [grandson]?) of Rourke"; likewise, because of the spaces, with "van den Berg", meaning "of (from?) the Berg". (Despite having the "same spelling", it seems clear that "Vandenberg" is just as much a different (and non-compound) surname, as "Fischer" is from its Anglicized respelling as "Fisher".)

Such surnames are arguably a special case:

• Single-word given names and surnames are independent units; you can refer to people by their given names, or their surnames; many surnames are other people' given names, and vice versa; and it seems any surname can become a given name if the family involved is sufficiently determined to assert the importance of their female ancestors' families;
• The units of a double surname are other people's surnames, and could make another double surname by reversing their order, or by substituting a third surname for either of them;
• Yet the "O'" or the "van den" of our examples are so subordinate to what follows them as to be ineligible to function as surnames, even tho what follows them usually could stand alone as a different surname.

Two approaches to such names are possible:

• At List of people by name: Du, the presence or absence of the space following du or Du does not affect order.
• At List of people by name: Van, one person with surname separate Van comes first, people (about 50) whose names begin with van or Van as a "prefix" (most of the Van... names) follow, and two dozen with surnames beginning with Van and at least one more letter (but without an intervening space) close the Van... names.

The criteria i see as important are all matters of clarity and convenience to users. (I see no difference here between the needs of readers and editors.) IMO:

• The Du or "only the letters matter" approach has the disadvantage that, for instance, "du Pont" and "Dupont" disrupt the tendency (even with our proportional fonts) of corresponding letters to line up on adjacent lines, and interferes with eyeball search.
• The Van or "all the ones interrupted by a blank, apostrophe, or the like precede all those without" approach means the user may have to check both sections of the Van... names, if they are unsure whether the name has "interruptions".

My inclination is to apply the Van...-style approach, to Du next, and eventually to Le, Al, De, Di, von, and others that don't come to mind just at this moment.

I would be grateful to hear others' evaluations of which approach best serves our needs in the context of LoPbN.

--Jerzy(t) 07:36, 2004 Oct 21 (UTC)

Just a preliminary note related to the above; i don't want to think it thru completely yet:
I think i am the sole author of the following:

• Most other people than these differ by having the word 'of' (or one of several non-English-language equivalents) as part of their names; each of them instead appears
  • closest to any people who also have 'of' in their names, and the same given name (first name);
  • also among any people whose surname is the same as that given name.

It therefore distresses me to note that i don't know what it means.[blush, grin]
I think it should be changed to say clearly that with the exceptions of

• O'...
• Mac...
• Mc...

(even tho, in case of each of these exceptions, the following letter is upper case and may be preceded by a space), such prefixed names should be considered not fully taken care of until they have two identical entries, one of whose immediate neighbors start with the same prefix, and the other among ("as if it weren't a prefix") un-prefixed neighbors whose names' letters have the same initial sequence.
Essentially this would be a policy that we can't predict whether contributors of entries are going to choose the de facto Du approach or the de facto Van approach described above, but we encourage our vast corps of LoPbN maintainers to duplicate such entries using whichever is the other approach for that case.
Comments and wording would be welcome.
--Jerzy (t) 23:09, 2005 Mar 31 (UTC)

[edit] Multi-version names

What do we do about duplicates in the lists. Is this intentional or an error? EG Josef Stalin and Joseph Stalin, also Richard Stallman and Richard M Stallman. -- Should these be pruned to a single entry each, albeit with alternate forms of the name listed on the one line? -- SGBailey 22:22 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)

For major name variations on the same person, such as Lovelace, Ada and Byron, Ada, yes, they should be listed twice (in this example, once for "L" and once for "B"). For minor variations such as Josef and Joseph, or Richard and Richard M, it is an error and they should not be listed twice; one of them should be removed. If one entry is a redirect to the other, remove the one that is a redirect and keep the primary one. If one entry does not point to an article but the other one does, make a redirect. (Note: Over two thirds of the entries in these pages have been added through automation because they showed up on another list, such as in the List of historical anniversaries pages or list of people by occupation pages, etc. There are many variations among these separate lists and it simply will take work to clean them up.) -- Amillar 00:21 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Pseudonyms

For persons with one or more pseudonyms, should both the given name and the one or more pseudonyms each have an entry here? For instance, consider KRS-One. I added [[KRS-One|Parker, Lawrence Krisna]]; however, entries could be made in addition as [[KRS-One]], [[KRS-One|Parker, Kris]], [[KRS-One|Blastmaster, The]], and [[KRS-One|Teacha, The]] if one were to want to be exhaustive. My thinking about appropriateness is that [[KRS-One]] would be OK to add; [[KRS-One|Parker, Kris]] should not be added but that the original entry be changed to [[KRS-One|Parker, Lawrence Krisna (Kris)]]; [[KRS-One|Blastmaster, The]] and [[KRS-One|Teacha, The]] should be excluded. Does this fit with the overall impression of what should be done with pseudonyms? Also, though I've considered cross-referencing the pseudonyms to be a good thing, that would not help someone much if most or all pseudonyms exist in the listing and would be redundant with the target Wikipedia article itself. Thanks for confirmation or correction of my interpretations. Regards, Courtland 03:39, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

_ _ Reformating that, i think you said:

• Entries
  • KRS-One [the article title]
  • Parker, Lawrence Krisna (Kris)
• Non-Entrities [chuckle]
  • Parker, Lawrence Krisna
  • Parker, Kris
  • Blastmaster, The
  • Teacha, The

_ _ Treating it as an example (rather than going so far as to look into the details), i think that sounds like a good set of decisions. If i had made the same choices, criteria that i would justify them with include:

• being the article title justifies assuming that "KRS-One" has already qualified as the best known name for him;
• there is usually some interest in celebrities' "real names" (if only for understanding insider references to them and pursuing tough crossword clues or trivia games), so some such entry is IMO welcome;
• if there were separate "Parker, Lawrence Krisna" and "Parker, Kris" entries, they'd likely have at most one or two other entries between them, and be essentially redundant; in such situations (and assuming as here that there's a clean way to piggy-back one on the other) i usually look at what's currently between them, create both entries, but make one do double duty as you suggest, and put the other inside a comment (for future editors' attention) saying something to the effect of "use this entry only if enuf intervening entries get added that two entries are justified";
• to me, proliferation of nicknames screams (justly or not) "self-promotion" ("The artist formely known as Prince" being the prototype for the genus, and IMO a name no one would ever look up except out of morbid curiosity or to win a bet) and discourages me from being suckered in; on the other hand, where the self promotion is more successful than i think (or hope) Prince's is, it probably deserves documentation. IMO it's a grey area, where it's hard to be sure you've done the right thing; in this case, of a person i've never heard of, i'd omit the two nicks that you omitted, but neither rv nor complain if someone else had already entered them or added them later.

_ _ Ultimately, IMO, the criterion is "will the additional entry ease the path to the bio article for enough users to counterbalance the interferance with other users' access to other bios that results from the increase in clutter?" That criterion is in theory perfectly objective, but in practice pretty damn subjective, so i'm quite happy with the application of common sense that i detect in your choices here.
--Jerzy•[[User talk:Jerzy|t]] 17:45, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Here's another example: Barbie Griffin. The article title is an alias; the person's real name is "Michelle McCurry" and six additional pseudonyms are listed in the article. I'll add two entries, one for the 'primary alias' as evidenced by the title of the article, and a second for the 'real name' as indicated in the article. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:15, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Format of Entries

See also the discussion of order and format of entries for people known by given name without reference to a surname.
Examples:

Madonna (entertainer) (surname generally omitted),

Thomas Aquinas (Aquinas/Aquino/of Aquin being kind of a proto-surname),

Thomas of Chobham

[edit] Commas

Is there a reason for having commas before the parentheses, like "John Smith, (1902-1988), ..."? That seemed incorrect to me, but I was advised against changing it. Margana 21:30, Apr 8, 2004 (UTC)

I think that was my advice, on User talk:Margana:

Your idea that the commas following names are undesirable is interesting, but it may be they are there for specific reasons that you don't understand. My guess is that they were put there when enormous numbers of names were added by an automated procedure, and it is likely you obstructing future use of such methods.

I'd suggest you start a discussion at Talk:List of people by name, and i'm likely to go thru rapidly reverting what you've done, since doing so is easier if done earlier. --Jerzy(t) 20:02, 2004 Apr 7 (UTC)

I made that response on seeing User talk:Margana had gone thru all (or virtually all) of the pages in this List of people by name that cover names beginning with "Ha", about 12 pages like List of people by name: Hai-Hak and List of people by name: Haa & Hå. I did revert them, believing that

• we need to be surer about any function the commas serve;
• doing them by hand is likely to end up half done; and
• automating the process would mean any hand effort would be wasted.

--Jerzy(t) 05:08, 2004 Apr 23 (UTC)

While the commas look bad, i think they are likely to be valuable to any future automated procedure for adding entries in the proper places for bio pages that have Person category tags (IIRC the terminology). Crucially, they can distinguish parenthesized disamb info or other comments and qualifications on the name that may belong outside the link-markup brackets, from the parenthesized DoB/DoD data, without requiring each date or date-pair to be parsed.

IMO, such lists belong in the article name space, but are not full-fledged articles, much as dabs are not. In particular,

• the esthetic standards are different (i've made a point of removing links to graphics of the subjects; IMO even double commas would be tolerable if useful), and
• the use of formats that keep it feasible for both automated procedures and casual editors to add entries is mandatory.

--Jerzy(t) 18:57, 2004 Apr 23 (UTC)

• I'm not sure i would drag people into it from Wikipedia:Village pump (policy), but i hope i can elicit some comment here.

Somewhat sporadically, my screening of new entries and extracting of red-lks (for WP:RA) include providing one or even both of the commas separating the three top-level fields of the entry (name, DoB&DoD, description), sometimes on a whole section and sometimes (on the theory that some editors will notice their non-conformance as a result) just on and perhaps adjacent to new entries.

I believe that the easiest signposts for automated processes are the double close-bracket and the close-paren (or the absence of the open paren, when there are no dates), making the two commas a redundant (and unreliable) annoyance. (Does that still matter? The alphabetization has become human-friendly enough by now that (sadly) it probably requires at least several times more effort to set a program to work adding entries without making a hash of the existing sequencing; i've seen nothing that suggests any automated additions have been made in the last 18 months. Nevertheless, some automated extraction has apparently been at least attempted.)

And IMO Margana (who went away after getting no prompt response here, and no response at all but mine) is right that (considered as a fragment of an English sentence) the first comma is out of place. (Nicholson Baker actually had a character, in one of his novels, denounce any prose comma/open-paren sequence!)

IMO

<Name> <optional parenthesized date>, <description (preferably nationality and occupation)>

(without troubling to specify spaces completely) is probably ideal, but i'm not prepared to start shifting that direction based solely on my own & Margana's opinions.

What say you? Do practices on relevant Dab pages matter? Is better English tolerable for this? Should some other format be encouraged? IMO, anything with a better warrant than the page's early history would be an improvement.

--Jerzy·t 21:01, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

_ _ I intend to start, about the first of the year, gradual conversion of all entries with dates from the format

Bloe, Joe, (1980-2005), American non-entity

to that of

Bloe, Joe (1980-2005), American non-entity

Note that this is common-sense- (and simple-formal-grammar-) compatible with the dateless case

Bloe, Joe, American non-entity

and is more logical than keeping the comma, which appears to no longer be used for whatever original purpose it was intended for.
_ _ If someone has a bot that will do the job with a new-error rate of less than about 5%, that would probably be a big help, but i will otherwise simply be using a global replacement on every LoPbN-tree page that i edit, and eventually going back for the pages that i haven't already had occasion to edit. (And from this moment forward, i am ceasing adding the "missing" commas.)
--Jerzy•t 17:05, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

I was skeptical about the change at first, the only real issue here for me is readability, but looking at your examples, it looks fine to me, for whatever that's worth. I don't object to changing it, though there should be an obviously placed transitional notice, so people will hopefully stop adding in the old format.

As for automation, it might not be that difficult. You might talk to the guy who ran User:Bluebot, as that bot performed a similar function (detect non-compliant string, replace it with compliant text), and indicates that he's willing to help if needed. --W.marsh 22:38, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] What Belongs in an Entry besides the Link?

This discussion includes material that originated on this article-talk sub-page, and other material moved from user-talk pages and sub-pages. IMO, the original section headings are no longer accurate guides, and i have converted them to bolded text that records that temporary context.

Material originally headed Year links in entries
In individual entries, should the birth and death dates be linked to the corresponding year pages? I have added few hundred entries to LoPbN in last few days and have noticed some pages use links, others don't. If yes, how to handle approximate dates? What about dates for terms of office, etc. in the "occupation" field? Is there somewhere a set of examples how the entries should be formatted? jni 16:06, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I can't recall whether i responded directly to Jni about this contrib, which they pointed out to me months ago.

In any case, there has been a general trend of removing these in particular, tho i have not tried to figure out who adds and who removes. In a slow sweep, begun after my having forgotten about Jni, and still in progress, i am removing them systematically (as part of the systematic removal of all links to anything other than

• the one link to a bio that every entry requires, and
• notes, outside of any entry and intended to direct users to some list of names (including other portions of LoPbN) containing names they might have expected to find in the section containing the note).

My logic (re both date links and other removals) is that none of the kinds of links i am removing contribute to the purpose of finding bio articles by using or approximating their subjects' names: the stated purpose of the list. It also helps to counteract the pathology whereby some entries are exploited as micro-bios, adding info that might occassionally substitute for the bio but do not facilitate finding the right bio of a person whose name is known. The description should have only info that clarifies whether the entry covers the name that got you to the page, rather than someone else with the same or a similar name.

In summary:

• The dates often do that, but links to year articles never do.
• Nationality and occupation (but not "first [person who was...]" or names of relatives who wouldn't be confused with them) are reasonably likely to serve that purpose and extremely likely to obviate any further info.
• Exceptions can be recognized by inspecting the neighboring entries, where there is need for further description or a note about likely mispellings or mishearings of it and confusably similar names.

--Jerzy~t 21:35, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

A block of material (w/ each contrib date-stamped earlier than 05:03, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)) has been moved here from User talk:Jerzy/LoPbN, in some cases after originating on talk pages of those involved in the discussion and being moved to the subpage.
Material originally headed Terse, Unlinked Descriptions in LoPbN Entries

Jerzy opened discussion by posting on Slambo's talk page, under a new hdg "LoPbN":

Please talk to me abt the list, or at least look at the summaries of my recent LoPbN entries, before doing further work there.
--Jerzy·t 19:30, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• Got your note, scanned contributions. Looks like our ideas of specificity and consistency are a little different; while I've been noting where a person is significant in the railroad industry, that's been a little too specific. So, going forward, what are the guidelines that I should follow on adding people significant to rail transport? As one of the main contributors in Wikipedia:WikiProject Trains and the current maintainer of Portal:Trains, I'm bound to find more and more significant personalities in this industry.

slambo 20:58, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)

• Indeed, and i'm assuming yr focus of interest there is valuable for WP rather than a problem.

Probably my biggest focus is this list, and my understanding of it has changed a lot over the months i've worked on it.

Actually, the most involved suggestion i have is not really re LoPbN. And i need to say that IMO no one should try to tell a WP editor what to work on, before saying that IMO all the LoPbN info you've included on rail prexies would be appropriate as content of corresponding stubs. I realize a stub takes (significantly but not enormously) more work (and i may have missed where someone else has been creating articles in response to these entries) but i speculate that you are the most likely person to start the articles, and there's little reason to put them off. As i say, that's your decision, but i also think the naturalness of that approach would tilt the RfC process in the direction of not duplicating so much info between LoPbN and the prospective article if we disagred to that extent about how to proceed.

But let me focus back on LoPbN, and state some assumptions, most of which i have heard from others before i adopted the corresponding view, and have seen little or no disagreement about:

• the justification for the existence of LoPbN is to provide a means of eyeball search for bio articles
• for that reason, everything is an impediment, if it is not likely to assist a reader with a name in mind in finding the WP version of the article corresponding to that (accuate, alternate, or garbled) name. E.g.
  • what i call "LoPbN micro-bios", e.g. those you've provided, increase the size of the page, the opportunity for distraction, and the fear that jumping straight to the article instead of reading the whole description means missing something;
  • lks other than to the bio (i.e., on dates or terms within the description) are lks that should be within the bio, and are thus redundant info that complicates the visual impression that should be supporting the unconscious grasp of the fundamentally necessary and simple format of "article-lk, then virtually all you need to know be sure it's the one you have in mind";
  • (not relevant to you, but contributes the context) if the bio is Cary Grant, a

    [[Cary Grant|Leach, Archie]], actor with pseudonym "Cary Grant"

  • entry is no more valuable than

    [[Cary Grant|Leach, Archie]], actor

  in getting the reader there (after reading an inside joke that says "And who would go to an Archie Leach film?");

• the use of LoPbN as a means of in effect requesting creation of a bio is IMO less harmful than suppressing the practice, and occasionally helps rule out an article on a similar name that does have an article;
• it is rare for more than this to be useful:
  1. "vital statistics",
  2. nationality info (usually one word, but for people like Ruth Prawer Jhabvala limiting to one word may cause confusion), and
  3. one occupational term (or, rarely, two) that makes them notable,

     but IMO including that much even when not needed is a good hedge against unanticipated future ambiguities, and a clear example that's likelier than either the current diversity, or a hypothetical range with that as the upper end, to suggest a standard maximum.

  4. I could rattle on about the structure on a scale larger than the single entry (which in fact i mention only to compliment you on expanding a section-heading range correctly without instruction, where so many others have been clueless!)

Take a look at List of people by name: Ar (once i succeed in saving the window i currently have open!). I worked that page over since writing to you, but i think i had conceived the use of comments in this fashion a few hours earlier than when i noticed the edit of yours that i reverted. I kept info in comments on entries even tho the may have articles already, but i've been worrying for several weeks about how to avoid discarding "unwelcome" info that would be useful to someone starting the corresponding article for a red lk. The extra examples actually may serve to flesh out the concept by providing extra test cases within one file. Feedback welcome, especially on that approach, but in general. Tnx.

--Jerzy·t 22:19, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• Thanks for the rather extensive feedback. I've added an article for one of the names that I added to the Str page yesterday, and just went back to reformat that entry (and the other next to it) that I added according to your guidelines. I've got a rather large amount of other bios that I'd like to see written (many of them are listed on User:Slambo/Railroaders, more are on Wikipedia:WikiProject Trains/Todo), so I'll probably be back to add more. slambo 20:56, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)

• Thanks for your patient attention to this; i hope my reasoning is more persuasive than simply my thoroughness. (Part of the point of replying extensively, tho, is that what has gotten clear enough in my mind to do so is useful with more than just you -- e.g, widening this discussion to include the LoPbN talk page.)

And of course it's great that you're getting to any of the corresponding articles.

In rereading, i find i failed to note that my strong views on the length of the description portions of LoPbN entries lead me to re-write descriptions, but i have very relaxed views on the specific words. E.g., i've tended to use "business manager" (or "entrepreneur", when the guy has a big piece of the action), but "railroader" and "industrialist" also seem to me to capture the meaning adequately; don't imagine you'll offend me by replacing wordings i've provided.

I also noticed that i never referred to my preference (which may be evident) for general terms over specific. You might just guess my reasoning: not everyone is interested in William Howard Taft because of his chief source of notability, the presidency, and some may respond to

• Taft, William Howard, (1857-1930), President of the United States, Chief Justice of the United States

with the thought that having a law degree and having been president may sufficiently qualify one for the Supreme Court; some of those, looking for Judge Taft of the U.S. Court of Appeals might go away thinking that being such a judge doesn't make you notable and not look into WH Taft's bio. Or, maybe a little more to the point, what about the surely more common situation of someone who's been mayor of a major city, a member of Congress, governor, VP, and a CEO or college president? Or a colonel who gets a general's star by doing somthing more notable than becoming general, or doing anything as a general? I think readers are better served by getting used to listings of "politician", "jurist", or "soldier" for those whose greatest notability is much more specific, and seeing specifics only when, say, two similar names from the same period have the same generic description, so there is a hazard of choosing the wrong one. (I'm thinking of the three boxers who could each be referred to, or remembered, as "J. Chavez".)

--Jerzy·t 03:29, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Material originally headed Widening Discussion to the LoPbN Talk Page
The issues Slambo & i discuss above are really concerns about LoPbN entries in all areas, and perhaps referencing our discussion on the talk page will draw others into it. Some may fault the standard i've suggested, and discussion is bound to be worthwhile.
--Jerzy·t 04:05, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Material originally headed Individuals Later Invited into This Discussion
To Aecis (talk · contributions):
While your eye for detail is laudable, your instinct for a small biography addition is at odds with my own recent, broad, & fairly well thought through tersification of that entry. My reasoning, in a discussion with another editor, now linked into Talk:List of people by name#What Belongs in an Entry besides the Link?, will clarify why i've reverted the addition, beyond this in-a-nutshell logic:

Like a Dab, LoPbN is a navigational tool rather than an article (and its purpose is not as a sequence of tens of thousands of micro-bios). His Nobel prize is presumably in the lead of his article. No one who knows his last name accurately enough to find his entry is going to be helped in getting to the article they seek (or even profit otherwise) by also knowing, just before clicking, that that lk leads to a laureate. Therefore the addition is useless clutter that interferes (however slightly) with the purpose of the page.

Your participation in this discussion is welcome.
--Jerzy·t 04:37, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• I agree with you that any "biographical description" of the people mentioned in LoPbN needs to be as brief as possible. I most strongly disagree with you, however, when you say that the mention of someone as a Nobel Prize laureate is useless clutter. I think it's a very valuable part of a person's description on the LoPbN (otherwise I wouldn't have added it ;) ). But any edit by me would probably lead to an edit and revert war between you and me, which is not worth it, so I'll just leave it as is.

Aecis 09:43, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Well, i solicited your input in hopes of working toward a consensus, among editors who care enough about LoPbN to edit existing descriptions, on how to recognize a good or bad one. I assume we'd agree that the prize info is useless to anyone who knows only that he worked on polio, and roughly what his name is. But at this point i'm unsure whether to think of you as

• believing that failing to mention the Nobel is disrespectful, or as
• too busy to explain how its mention actually changes the searching behavior of someone who is looking for a medical Nobelist that he thinks is likely to be in the List of people by name: En#Enb - Enf section.

--Jerzy·t 12:53, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• The latter, and at the same time neither. Allow me to explain. I don't think that not mentioning a Nobel Prize has anything to do with disrespect, or that mentioning a Nobel Prize is a sign of respect, regard and esteem. So the former doesn't apply. This is what I think a reference in the LoPbN should or could contain:
  1. The name (obviously)
  2. Year of birth, year of death
  3. Profession
  4. If available and/or relevant: a small elaboration

The elaboration is the key to this discussion. When you look at the listing of politicians on the LoPbN, it hardly ever simply says "politician" as a profession, but "president of <country>", "prime minister of <country>", "governor of <state>", "senator for <state>", "representative for <state>", "member of parliament for <constituency>", etc. It is an elaboration of the profession, indicating in which field and at what level they play. Winning a Nobel Prize to me (as a layman, and most Wikipedia visitors are probably laymen) works in a similar way. It indicates that the person is important and notable in the profession. Therefore I think that making mention of a Nobel Prize (which is an honour not many people have been bestowed with) is relevant in the LoPbN. Aecis 15:33, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• • Thanks, that's valuable. --Jerzy·t 15:49, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • That about sums up what started this discussion in the first place. On entries for railroad presidents I was adding the railroad name and years of the subject's presidency. Now for some entries, such as for Ralph Budd (president of GN and CB&Q) or for John W. Barriger III (president of Monon, P&LE and MKT) or more recently for Mike Haverty (president of ATSF and KCS), this description could get quite lengthy as the managers moved around to different railroads. For links to bios that have not yet been written, this information could be helpful for a potential editor to find information on the subject in order to write the bio. However, after reading the comments above, I'm more inclined to agree on a minimalist description to keep the list uncluttered. Separate list pages (such as one I'd been thinking about creating, List of railroad presidents) can go into more detail listing the information that we would otherwise have put into this list. Personally, it doesn't matter much to me, but since a convention has been described, it's easy enough to follow. slambo 16:32, Jun 3, 2005 (UTC)
    • _ _ Which format? Aecis's

    1. The name (obviously)
    2. Year of birth, year of death
    3. Profession
    4. If available and/or relevant: a small elaboration

    _ _ as your indentation suggests, or my

    1. Name (linked, and the only lk)
    2. Vital dates
    3. Description:

    1. Nationality {One principal one, usually)
    2. Occupation {One principally notable one, usually)

    _ _ as your endorsement of "minimalist description" suggests?
    --Jerzy·t 06:46, 2005 July 15 (UTC)

• _ _ While i was glad to have some small clarification from Aecis, i still don't find their position convincing, or have a reason for their desire for more information than i have been leaving in entries.

_ _ The "small elaboration" "If available and/or relevant" certainly amounts to no useful guidance to me, and my understanding is that information is relevant when it guides a user to a bio that they might not reach without that info. Nothing done here makes any sense if it ignores the fact that no one can use LoPbN to find a bio without already having a name in mind at the beginning of a process. If there are two William Millers from the same half century and both are British politicians, i'd like to know their office or constituency, and perhaps both, to tell them apart. If they are one politician and one physical scientist, it's either obvious which one i'm thinking of, or i have so little information that i have to read both bios and scratch my head, no matter how much detail you pack into their LoPbN entries. In that case, any additional infomation is just an encouragement to editors to load every entry up with as much information, useless here, as they can stomach.

_ _ Taking a cue from the existing entries is especially unwise. The main resemblance among entries is surely due to people following the example of entries that were blindly dumped into almost-alpha order after being mechanically generated from special purpose lists. Governors have their state and often term in office bcz that info was needed either to make sense of the list they were one, or was in the title of the list. The existing entries are fairly undisciplined, often motivated by the desire of an editor to elevate the status of the person they've added, and not based on a analysis of how users are going to make the list useful.
--Jerzy·t 06:46, 2005 July 15 (UTC)

[edit] Rm Micro-Bios ("world champion")

This can be considered another version of the opinion of Aecis, above, that the inclusion of a reference to the Nobelist status of an entry's person improves an entry; the difference is that Antonio has shown more sustained interest, offering a possibility of pursuit to consensus. On List of people by name: Hom-Hop:

* 2004 September 21th 11:53, User:Dale Arnett added

• Hopkins, Bernard (born 1965), boxer

* 2005 July 4th 11:57, User:AntonioMartin said

Maurice Hope, Bernard Hopkins:world champion boxer (anyone can be just a boxer, just like anyone can be just a politician, but not everyone can be a president)

in adding Hope, and modifying Hopkins and one further entry

* 17:50, Jerzy said

- micro-bios, including "world champ", "Pres", & "general". This page does not document exceptionality, but is just a navigation aid, & while "boxer" is an enorm'ly valuable signpost, +2wds adds litle

in removing WC twice among a total of some 30 entries changed (mostly shortened)

* 21:32, A. w/o comment restored both instances of "world champion"

* 5th 00:45, J. said

Reverted edits by AntonioMartin to last version by Jerzy

in doing precisely that

* 12th 18:55 A. w/o comment restored "world champion" only to the Bernard Hopkins entry

* 23:52 J. said

rv world champ tag, losing info that distracts w/ significantly Dab-ing. This is a navigation device, not an testimonial. So few non-champs are notable boxers as to make that useless to get right one.

* 15th, J. has pressed A. to join this discussion.

In summary, to date, Antonio explained his initial addition of "world champion" to his own satisfaction, but has not responded to either of my rebuttals, nor acknowledged there is disagreement. I assert that what User:slambo and i have said earlier in the section containing this sub-section, and my responses to A., adequately state the case that identifying the notable occupation (or two) is so often helpful as to be worth striving for in every entry, and documenting notability or clarifying degree of notability, with further occupation-related information, is so seldom helpful to navigations as to be worth removing from every entry where there is no demonstrable need, in the LoPbN context, for further disambiguation.
--Jerzy·t 05:58, 2005 July 15 (UTC)

• I have moved here Antonio's gracious and conciliatory response on my talk page, since it does further this discussion (& reformated slightly to preserve clarity while saving some white-space:

_ _Hey Jersy:

_ _Whats up? Thanks for your kind words about my articles on my talk page. Im very flattered every time someone says something good about my articles. It says a lot about each of us responsible wikipedians as well, because I have learned from you and everyone else a lot of things about life and about writing just by reading wikipedia articles.

_ _Well, about the world champion boxers, its just that I was an amateur boxer myself when I was 12-14. I didnt make it, and let me assure you for everyone that wins a world title, there are , well not 1,500, but I can tell you none of the twenty five guys that trained at my gym ,and these included two world ranked boxers, became a world champion, thats why I feel that the status world champion is a special one so thus should be put next to the boxer's name, just like Presidents are not merely mentioned as politicians next to their names.

_ _I'd guess the ratio is about 500/1 to 800/1 as far as the kids who fight as amateurs and those who go on to become professional world champions.

_ _BUT, I'd hate a revert war and furthermore, I'd hate to have you an enemy, as a mater of a fact I mean to become friends with everyone here if possible. So Im not gonna put world champion again unless for some reason I forget.

_ _Thanks for everything and God bless you!

Sincerely yours,

Antonio Curiosity Martin

• _ _As can be seen, my thrust is not to disparage boxers, but to facilitate navigation, and it would be silly to avoid citing the champs as such in their bios. The comparison to presidents is, IMO as well, relevant, and the diff above, IIRC, documents that i contend that "president" also does not enhance a LoPbN entry.

_ _I think i've already mentioned on this page the case of William Howard Taft, the American politician and jurist, and i'm a little shocked to realize that i've failed to mention "the only American who used the Presidency as a stepping-stone to greatness": Jimmy Carter, American politician & activist", whose work overseas on dispute resolution and especially election monitoring has done far more for his legacy than his time as president: labeling him or Millard Fillmore as "president" is in fact disparaging, a reminder that even if not everyone can become president, any president can be an insignificant footnote. Carter has escaped Fillmore-like status and (besides not helping find his bio) labeling him "president" serves no purpose on this page but to taunt him for his presidency.
--Jerzy·t 15:28, 2005 July 15 (UTC)