Talk:List of people by name/Whole list

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Contents

[edit] LoPbN List as a whole

[edit] Relationship to Rest of WP

[edit] Name of page

Isn't a name like Index for list of people by name better, so that you know whether a page has actually names of people? The same applies for the subindexes and for other lists. We have already sometimes "list of lists". - Patrick 11:37, 3 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Some of the lists are titled Lists of rather than List of to express this, but I'm not sure if it's worth changing this. As for List of people by name: T is it a list of people or an index?
An alternative would be Category:List of people by name, as eventually that new feature may replace these lists.
-- User:Docu

[edit] Purpose of LoPbN Tree

I'm sure this has been asked before, but what purpose do these lists serve? I can not imagine someone saying, "Oh, I wonder whose name's start with Ca"? In contrast, I can imagine someone wanting to know more about most other article topics. Can someone explain the use of these lists? Superm401 | Talk 23:59, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

  • Start of retrofitted intro
_ _"Name lists" and "these lists" could refer to all the alpha lists of people that are lk-ed at the top of List of people by name, including lists that are organized alpha-by-name within nationality, within occupation, and within various other schemes for subdividing the concept of "people". This talk page's article-name-space page and Lists of people, and the Cat system, are probably the only logical collective access points for them.
_ _I confess to not thinking much about those lists of people that have names beginning other than with the five words "List of people by name". And thus for me "these lists" means (at first, second, and at least third thought)
the page LoPbN, and the hundreds of sublist pages that justify mis-titling that page with those five words, by, collectively with it, fulfilling that function via a tree-shaped implementation of such a list.
_ _The response i made below this "retrofitted intro" never gets beyond that meaning.
_ _Beyond that meaning, probably much that i say below can apply to each of those "other lists of people", with these qualifications:
  • I never get around to task of making sure people on the other lists are also on the LoPbN tree, which someone has to do if this list is to fully succeed in what, some hours ago, i described below.
  • Nor do i worry about whether the other lists are complete enough to do their job. (I do, however, in the rare cases where i remove vanity and other apparently non-notable entries here, usually make some corresponding change (remove, move to talk, strike thru, unlink) on other list pages that also red-lk to the same name. This is intended as a complete list of bio articles, and no one should be on it who neither has nor should have a WP bio article. So taking someone off this list means i think there should be no lks to them elsewhere.)
  • To the extent that names get migrated (copied, generally not moved) "up" into this list (which has been done systematically at least once), it does the job i describe better. To the extent that they don't, the necessity of the others is sharpened. Only one of the converses is true: To the extent that names get migrated "down" into specialized alpha lists, they do their job better. But that migration does nothing to obviate this list, bcz no collection of lists can adequately serve the person who, e.g., is not sure if a reference to "Kant" (WP e.g. makes 140 unpiped via-redir surname-only refs to him, abt 3 times our combined piped or full-name ones) or to "Emmanuel Kant" is to a politician, a musician, or a philosopher. (And while collections of lists may succeed in covering adequately those who clearly belong on several of them, they are unlikely to work well if they try to include all borderline cases of people who are notable primarily for X but also slightly notable as a Y -- especially if they are notable as a Y primarily bcz not many Ys are so notable as Xs.)
  • Even before the dawn of the features i imagine in Advanced Categories, Cats may be adequate to replace many or all of the "other" alpha people lists (other than lists of fictional people, who are specifically excluded here). But i am certain that Cats cannot yet supplant LoPbN's functions.
End of retrofitted intro
--Jerzy·t 17:00, 2005 July 13 (UTC)
_ _ This is a sensible and IMO also valuable question. I'm going to take the liberty of first noting what it/they are not for:
  • Not to directly give information on the people.
  • Not to pay tribute to notable people.
  • Nothing related to either non-notable people or "people who should be notable in the future", nor to fictional people.
  • Not for finding people sharing a given name or middle name (unless their surname is less well known).
_ _In contrast to those non-purposes, one can see at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/List of people by name: Db-Dd an implicit consensus that it is needed. In fact, that even a page (in the tree that the list has now turned into) that has no names within its range, and probably never will have any, is acknowledged by a better than 3-to-1 margin (a margin that strong in the other direction is generally required for deletion) as having value. I summarize and freely expand upon points made there:
  1. It's not hard to write a bio-stub, and tag it as such, encouraging others pick up where you left off (e.g., in order to continue writing the article during whose composition you discovered that three people who deserve bios (and lks from your article) don't have their articles yet). But if your stub states just the name and their field of notability (and even if it has an external lk to further info), it could get speedy deleted. If you create a red-lk on LoPbN, there's something like a 50% chance someone else will do a stub in the next 6 months (tho it's not obvious that the LoPbN entry makes the difference, as opposed to a coincidence of interest in the person). I've made a list of red-lks for A thru F, with a plan of putting them on the corresponding portions of the Wikipedia:Requested articles list, (tho i've decided a related LoPbN project deserves higher priority), so that tactic may become still more effective
  2. You may have read the name of the person you're looking for, but not remember the precise spelling, or the given name
  3. You may have only heard, or misheard, the name, and have only a phonetic spelling. (Cole or Kohl? Hale or Kael? I went around for a time using Carnot maps effectively without learning how Maurice Karnaugh spelled his name. I just now interrupted this long enuf that he now has an LoPbN entry; later i'll put in a [[Maurice Karnaugh|Carnot, Maurice]] one.)
  4. You may be reading outside your field of specialization, and the author you were reading may have used an unfamiliar surname with no given name.
  5. Especially on the Web and the various interactive 'Net media, an author may have misspelled a name.
_ _In each of these cases, either an insightful redir or a Dab may save you a lot of trouble, but it may not yet exist; try the WP search function as if you mis-recalled the classical composer as Fred Bridge, then compare it to looking at Bre-Bri#Brid. (Or reach that spot from List of people by name#Direct links to pages of names.) I haven't read Eyeball search, but i agree with the VfD voter who cited it, that automated searches (or Cats) can't completely displace that method and thus LoPbN. While i regret LoPbN's undermaintained state, and hope that "Advanced Categories" (whose proposed specs i have only imagined but not investigated) may obviate LoPbN, i think we need this for now, and that improving and maintaining it in various ways can only ease the transition to an eventual replacement, by validating and populating it.
_ _Hope that helps some; if not, please ask more questions here.
--Jerzy·t 08:58, 2005 July 13 (UTC)
I notice i failed to state the scope of my answer -- and that doing so requires guessing at the scope of the question. I'm inserting a "retrofitted intro" above what i've already writ.
--Jerzy·t 17:00, 2005 July 13 (UTC)
Most of your reasons seem to involve either aiding people in looking up a person or encouraging the creation of articles. Both of these seem more appropriate for a Wikipedia name space than the main article space. Would you object to moving the lists there?
Superm401 | Talk 17:21, July 13, 2005 (UTC)
  • _ _Very much so; details follow shortly.
    --Jerzy·t 17:37, 2005 July 13 (UTC)
    • I would still like to discuss why you don't want the lists in the Wikipedia namespace.
      Superm401 | Talk 17:49, July 13, 2005 (UTC) [relocated per topic by Jerzy·t 22:06, 2005 July 13 (UTC)]
  • Let me start by swizzling your description some:
  • Aiding people in looking up a person's bio is the justification for this list's existence.
  • Encouraging the creation of interlinked articles is a pervasive aspect of what makes Wiki & WP good ideas; visibly distinguishing rd-lks, & the fact that following one starts the edit of a new page, are important design decisions in support of that; the fact that every list is a high-intensity article-requesting mechanism is not entirely beneficial, but inevitable in practice given other benefits that we don't want to give up, and IMO we'd be foolish not to make the most of it.
_ _ That being said, creation of new pages (primarily within the same namespace) is an aspect of nearly all pages, so it would be at least odd to have a namespace dedicated to it.
_ _ Specifically as to the project namespace (Wikipedia:, of course, on this wiki), its domain is organizing the work of the Wiki in question, beyond what is efficiently managed via talk pages and subpages of the corresponding main-name-space pages -- in the WP case mainly articles. So my objection is not rooted in any unsuitability of the WP: namespace to supporting that function.
_ _ But navigation is the purpose and new pages are a valuable side-product, as are also new pages arising from true article pages. Could that purpose be served just as well (or near enough to as well) from another name-space?
  • The fact that navigation is a function of virtually all Wiki pages, even tho some have that as their sole function, makes it likely that No is not a completely absurd answer.
  • In my mind, there are three kinds of navigation-specific main-name-space pages: Dabs, Rdrs, and lists. The first two cannot function without being there (or without reconceptualizing the Wiki namespace specs, e.g. with pure-navigational sub-name-spaces); the third is far less clear.
  • I was about to argue "a little less emphatically than before" that both
  • Google hits and
  • Wik-search-tool hits
on lists are probably valuable, but we prevent Google-crawling of most or all namespaces other than the article one, and the value probably holds even to users who de-configure their Wiki-search tool from hits on the project space. And that this value is especially likely to emerge with rd-lks that may not yet appear in a real article, and where the lead sentence is klunky, e.g. Al-Khwarizmi, for which Googling
"Al-Khwarizmi" site:wikipedia.org
produces no helpful description but only
Al-Khwarizmi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Abu Abdullah Muhammad bin Musa al-Khwarizmi (خوارزمی in Persian, أبوعبد ... AF Faizullaev, The scientific heritage of Muhammad al-Khwarizmi ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Khwarizmi - 32k - Cached - Similar pages
But i am embarassed to discover that that search
  • does produce some WP: and User talk: hits, and
  • even restricting to English and displaying similar hits doesn't produce a hit on the List of people by name: Alf-Alk#Alk page whose
Al-Khwarizmi, (780-850), (Al-Khwarazmi) founder of Algorithm algebra, mathematician, astronomer
entry has gone unchanged for over 12 months. I'm a little relieved at this point that our internal search turns up, as hit 36,
List of people by name: Alf-Alk
*Al-Khwarizmi, (780-850), (Al-Khwarazmi) founder of Algorithm a...
Relevancy: 0.4% - 5.8 kB (631 words) - 21:21, 2005 July 13
  • At this point, i think even the sparse and incidental subject matter info on lists (or at least this particular one) is more like article info than project info (and far from being as ugly as that on talk pages), and since we can't foreseeably ethnically-cleanse the Rdrs and Dabs from the article space, it would be superfluous to do so with the lists. But i would rather leave off speculating why you want to get this or any list out of the main namespace. Have i missed a good reason?
_ _ I apologize if that fairly exhaustive response seems excessive.
--Jerzy·t 22:06, 2005 July 13 (UTC)
Wikipedia article space is used to organize editing the wiki. However, there are also pages devoted to helping people use it. Therefore, I think it would be very appropriate to move the lists there. Your main points against that seems to be that people would not find the lists if they searched in the Wikipedia space and that they provide concrete factual information, and therefore should be in the article space. Your first point is less than convincing because it is easy to search all of Wikipedia using Google or the internal search. The second is more convincing now because of the small snipppets of information that are included next to the name. You rightly ask why I am reluctant to have such lists in the main article space. The reason is that I do not see them as encyclopedic content, but rather meta-content, or content describing content. In other words, they are like indices, which would be inappropriate in the chapters of a book. In a way, I see the article space as the chapters, or main content, of Wikipedia. I do not see lists as primary content. However, I feel they do deserve to be in Wikipedia. Therefore, if this is the best place for them I will support them here. [Per Page history, this is an unsigned contrib 22:25, 2005 July 13 by User:Superm401; this portion of it moved here from Talk:List of people by name#Purpose of name lists by Jerzy·t 23:56, 2005 July 13 (UTC)

[edit] Structure that Integrates Pages into List

I may be the first to have "hit the wall" (the 32kB one) on a List of people by name: Xx page (where X and x are any two letters of those respective cases.)

I'd be grateful for critques of the pages of form List of people by name: Hax and List of people by name: Hax-Hay (where x and y are various lower case letters) that i've created, out of List of people by name: Ha-Hd. Convenient access is via List of people by name: Ha.

(Please beware: List of people by name: Ha-Hd is presently a confusing redirect; it may get deleted, or linked primarily to List of people by name: Ha with an explanation of why the other three links to List of people by name: Hx pages are pointless to follow. I'm waiting for a VfD discussion on this to hopefully wind down before editing it.) --Jerzy 14:39, 2003 Nov 12 (UTC)

My nomination for VfD of List of people by name: Ha-Hd reflected my cluelessness about the general policy of retaining nearly all rename-created rdrs. After some uniformly "Keep" discussion, i understood & IIRC at least offered to withdraw the nomination. It remains a rdr to List of people by name: Ha ... and like its now many analogs, still potentially confusing.
--Jerzy•t 18:43, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Imputation of Design Rules for Structure

In the context of my [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=List_of_people_by_name:_Ma&dummy=1&diff=2828199&oldid=2813615 recent subdivision] (and rename) of List of people by name: Ma-Mb, i asserted that

... 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.

I.e.:

  • Explicit and Implicit Alpha Order Convention:
    • If
      • Name 1 is earlier in the alphabet than Name 2, and
      • Link 1 leads to a page containing Name 1 (or a further chain of links to it), and
      • Link 2 leads to Name 2's page (again even if by any corresponding chain), then
    • Neither Name 1 nor Link 1 belongs, relative to Name 2 or Link 2,
      • to the right of it in the same line of the same page, or
      • below it on the same page.
  • Page-Type Dichotomy Convention:
    • The pages of the List of people by name (other than the "Root" page bearing that title) each include "up" links to pages higher in the tree of pages, and "lateral" links to sibling pages, but are of two types:
      • Names pages, which contain no other links to pages in the tree, and
      • Navigational pages, which contain no name entries.

I assert (and invite discussion of my assertion) that both of these conventions are reflected with overwhelming consistent in the list at present, and that both of them are desirable enough for clarity and other usability issues, that deviating from them deserves discussion here.

[edit] Toward Exhaustive Enumeration of Title Formats

I have asserted in section #Pilot Project: Rework of B Row of the table that two types of page are traditional in the List of people by name tree:

(I also advocate the replacement, by these, of a couple of variants in the syntax of these names, but that does not bear on the current subject.)

I assert now (if i did not already do so in the section named) that Pair-spanning pages are actually a natural sub-species of a needed species constituting N-tuple-spanning pages, of which i introduced, about 2003 Nov 12, 8 instances including List of people by name: Has-Hat. (Note that in my terminology, these are still only two species, one old species being subsumed into a species that is broader for including the subspecies.)
Finally, i assert that three species needed to support the tree are

  • Native pages,
  • N-tuple-spanning pages, and
  • Common-name pages.

The third of these presently has one instance that i know of, which i have tentatively named

List of people by name: named Ma

(It includes for now two people, both with the surname Ma. I had earlier proposed the name List of people with surname Ma.)

The distinction between Native pages and these prospective pages is this: a Native page contains, and/or links downward to, names that have one initial N-tuple in common; in contrast, the string named in the title of a Common-name page is the whole of the name. (To be precise, the whole of the surname, or of the portion of the name that serves the same role that surnames usually serve in alphabetizing.)

I assert that a third species is required by the conventions i have asserted in #Imputation of Design Rules for Structure. (I suspect this third species is in practice adequate, but that it is insufficient to theoretically preclude need for any fourth species.)

I welcome discussion of

  • whether three species of page are needed if the conventions are followed and two species are as stated
  • whether these three suffice for theoretical purposes
  • my suggested naming convention (which certainly has shortcomings but may be optimum nevertheless).

--Jerzy(t) 10:52, 2004 Mar 19 (UTC)

[edit] Statistics about this article's data structure

For various reasons, i'm not going to rename this section by editing the heading, but it should have read:

Statistics about the data structure of this article's tree of pages

--Jerzy(t) 01:17, 2004 Mar 19 (UTC)

The data structure i speak of is a four-level one, consisting of

  1. List of people by name (with a 26x26 table)
  2. "One-letter" pages with names List of people by name: A (generally with a pair of 26-item indexes)
  3. "Two-letter" pages with names of the form List of people by name: X? or List of people by name: X?-X? (generally with a pair of 26-item indexes)
  4. A few "three-letter" pages, (so far) with names of the form List of people by name: Ha? or List of people by name: Ha?-Ha? ((so far) with three 26-item indexes))

[edit] Large pages

The table is as of 2003 Dec 19; struck-through items have been drastically reduced by division of their content among smaller resulting pages.
As of 03:43, 9 April 2006 (UTC), they all have been subdivided.

  • Ma (54492 bytes) (split 8 ways, 2004 Jan 15)
  • Ba-Bd (44227 bytes) (split into Ba & Bb-Bd, then Ba split 4 ways, 2004 Mar 15)
  • J (42207 bytes) (split 10 ways, 2004 Mar 16)
  • Ca (38434 bytes) (split 4 ways, 2004 Mar 22)
  • St (34582 bytes)) (split 12 ways, 2004 Mar 24)
  • Co (33622 bytes)) (split 4 ways, 2004 Mar 23)
  • Be (30350 bytes) (split 3 ways, 2004 Mar 15)
  • Br (28150 bytes) (split10(?) ways, 2004 Mar 20)
  • Bo-Bp-Bq renamed to Bo-Bq (27220 bytes)
  • Mo (26494 bytes)
  • La (25250 bytes)
  • Ch (24456 bytes)
  • Pa-Pd (24127 bytes)
  • Wi (24001 bytes)
  • Le (23794 bytes)
  • De (23635 bytes)
  • Al (23543 bytes)
  • He-Hh (22978 bytes)
  • Sa-Sb (22873 bytes)
  • Wa (22442 bytes)
  • Ho (22222 bytes)
  • Da-Dd (20614 bytes)
  • Ro (20376 bytes)
  • Sc-Sd (19309 bytes)
  • Go (19178 bytes)
  • Fr (18879 bytes)
  • Pe (18630 bytes)
  • List of people by name (18468 bytes)
  • Me (18283 bytes)
  • Ga (17722 bytes)

[edit] Name-bearing pages and Index-only pages

As of 03:43, 9 April 2006 (UTC) (based on counting Template:List of people by name exhaustive page-index (sectioned)), there are 105 index-only pages, and 675 pages either with, or intended for, name entries. --Jerzy•t 03:43, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Articles about names that aren't part of LoPbN

Does LoPbN make articles of the type "List of people named X" unnecessary? If I'm cleaning up a disambiguation page, and it has a bunch of entries for people, should I move them to a new page, or just into the appropriate LoPbN leaf? --Smack (talk) 03:52, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

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