Template talk:List of people St

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1 Revision of the MediaWiki Page
2 Pages Known to be Affected by Changes in the Division of the Tree Page

[edit] Revision of the MediaWiki Page

[edit] What

This talk page is part of a set of 4 corresponding pages:

A Link page ("Lp", beginning "MediaWiki:List of people...") and ending "... Links"),
an Expansion page ("Ep", this talk page, with a title beginning "MediaWiki talk:List of people ..."),
a Message page ("Mp", with a title beginning "MediaWiki:List of people ..."), and
a Tree page ("Tp", with a title beginning "List of people by name: ...".

The rest of the titles of the four pages are common among them; they are the final characters of the Ep, Mp, and the Tp, and the characters between the last two spaces and before "Links" in the Lp; these may be called (for reasons explained below) the corresponding prefix.

For instance, the four and their prefix could be

Lp: MediaWiki:List of people Ste Links
Ep: MediaWiki talk:List of people Ste
Mp: MediaWiki:List of people Ste
Tp: List of people by name: Ste
prefix: Ste

[edit] Why

The Tp and other pages of the tree whose root is List of people by name (LoPbN), and whose other pages all begin "List of people by name: ...", can each be described as a parent or a leaf. (The trunk or trunks of the tree are branches sprouting from a common root; each branch may be a "parent" to several thinner "child" branches, but the leaves are "childless" growths off the ends of branches, since no further branches grow from them.) In the tree's design as of 2003, the leaf pages contain names that are links to biography pages, while the parent pages link only to their children and include no names directly. The prefix used in the title of an LoPbN page

The life cycle of a LoPbN page is from leaf to parent to grandparent; as leaf, it invokes (as a msg) its parent's corresponding Mp; when its first children come into existence, it acquires its own Mp, which is the Mp of its parent appended with links to its children. Its Mp changes both as its children increase (from at least two to possibly 27), and as its various ancestors acquire more children. An additional aspect of acquiring new grandchildren is that each child of it that becomes a parent ceases to directly use the Mp and instead uses its own new Mp that has the same links plus links to its children.

The Lp consists solely of links to the children of the Tp; only a parent Tp has a corresponding Mp (and possibly an Ep and Lp), which comes into existence when the Tp ceases being a leaf and its names are divided among its newborn children; each of those children will invoke (as a msg) the parent's Mp until such time as it becomes a parent and instead uses

and

The Mp page" (i.e., this talk page's corresponding MediaWiki page) is intended in part to provide links among the children, in the List of people by name tree, of its corresponding page. (That corresponding List of people by name-tree page is the page whose title begins with "List of people by name: " and proceeds to its end with the exactly same characters that follow the last space in the title of the MW page. Therefore, the approach being used to implementing those links requires the MW page to reflect which of those pages are respectively

a "single-prefix" page (i.e., cover all the potential names that have a specific number of initial letters in common, and no names that do not), for example List of people by name: Mb or
a "multi-prefix" page (i.e., one that could consistently (but not necessarily desirably) be divided into several single-prefix pages), for example List of people by name: Kb-Kd -- which at this writing lacks any names -- (but not List of people by name: Ka-Kz, which would be a mistaken name for the single-prefix page List of people by name: K).

Both multi-prefix and single-prefix pages are subject to division, especially as they grow by addition of names, into several smaller pages. Division in these cases means

deciding on a new subdivision of the names on the page into a combination
removing
creating at least one more page

of a multi-prefix page

each such division requires revision of each of these MW pages (the ones with names beginning "MediaWiki:List of people...") in which the old name appears.

Besides any MW pages that correspond to siblings of the divided page (which normally invoke "the MW page" as a "message", the change in this information needs to be reflected in any MW pages corresponding to descendants of either the List of people by name-tree page being divided, or of its siblings. This page's sections "Revision Mechanism" and "Pages Known to be Affected by the Same Division" are intended to facilitate making the needed revisions on any other affected pages.

[edit] Procedure for Revision

More details to follow, but at this writing, the expansion of the code in the "Quasi-Source-Code for the MW Page" subsection, following, apparently must be done by editing a page outside the MediaWiki name space, e.g. by editing it into the "Most Recent Expansion of the Above Quasi-Source" subsection one subsection yet further on.

[edit] Quasi-Source-Code for the MW Page

{{subst:List_of_people-Top}} {{subst:List_of_people-Separator}} {{subst:List_of_people_S_Links}} {{subst:List_of_people-Separator}} {{subst:List_of_people_St_Links}} {{subst:List_of_people-Bottom}} <br> --~~~~