Template talk:LoPbN Entry

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The template creates a LoPbN entry in the standard format. It will generate a link directed to Fname Lname, but displaying as "Lname, Fname."

Contents 1 Documentation 1.1 Alternate usages 1.1.1 Other naming systems 1.1.2 "fl. XXXXs" 1.2 Unknown Birth/Death 2 Examples 3 Issues 3.1 General 3.2 Misc. Detail 3.3 Documentation 3.3.1 Names 3.3.2 Misc. Doc'n 3.4 Seeing Stars 3.5 Date Formats 3.6 Name Formats 3.7 Constructed Target Override 4 Maintenance 4.1 Exception handling 4.1.1 Single arg specified 4.1.2 Extraneous blank

[edit] Documentation

1- given name
2- surname (blank for single-name people)
3- year born
4- year died
5- nationality
6- occupation
7- alternate article title (alternatively, the named parameter ttl may be used)

{{LoPbN Entry|First name|Last name|born|died|Nationality|occupation|alternate article title}}

Last name, First name (born–died), Nationality occupation

[edit] Alternate usages

[edit] Other naming systems

For those naming systems in which the surname is always the first component of an individual's name (e.g. oriental systems):

1- surname & given name
2- always blank

{{LoPbN Entry|Surname Given name||born|died|Nationality|occupation|alternate article title}}

Surname Given name (born–died), Nationality occupation

[edit] "fl. XXXXs"

If the birth and death date are not known, but the time period of the individual's principal activity is known, an alternate entry is possible:

3– "fl" ("flourished")
4– dates (e.g. 1940s, 1931-42, etc.)

{{LoPbN Entry|First name|Last name|fl|1900s|Nationality|occupation|alternate article title}}

Last name, First name (fl. 1900s), Nationality occupation

[edit] Unknown Birth/Death

An unknown date of birth should be left blank, but may optionally be entered as "?". An unknown date of death should always be entered as "?" to distinguish from living persons. Date of death should be left blank for living persons. See also "fl. XXXXs" above.

[edit] Examples

*{{LoPbN Entry|Stephen|Hawking|1942||British|physicist}}
*{{LoPbN Entry|John|Johnson|c. 1545|1594|English|musician|John Johnson (composer)}}
*{{LoPbN Entry|Archimedes||c. 287|212 BCE|Greek|philosopher}}
*{{LoPbN Entry|Archimedes|||c. 212 BCE}}
*{{LoPbN Entry|François-Marie|Arouet|1694|1778|French|philosopher|Voltaire}}
*{{LoPbN Entry|Voltaire||1694|1778|French|philosopher}}
*{{LoPbN Entry|Voltaire||||French|philosopher}}
*{{LoPbN Entry|Mao Zedong||1893|1976|Chinese|activist & politician}}
*{{LoPbN Entry|Mao Zedong||fl|1950s|Chinese|activist & politician}}

• Hawking, Stephen (born 1942), British physicist
• Johnson, John (c. 1545–1594), English musician
• Archimedes (c. 287–212 BCE), Greek philosopher
• Archimedes (died c. 212 BCE)
• Arouet, François-Marie (1694–1778), French philosopher
• Voltaire (1694–1778), French philosopher
• Voltaire, French philosopher
• Mao Zedong (1893–1976), Chinese activist & politician
• Mao Zedong (fl. 1950s), Chinese activist & politician

[edit] Issues

I'm refactoring including subdividing, including breaking up signed contribs by both of us. Most bullets will lose their original neighbors and misrepresent any original numbering.
--Jerzy•t 18:27, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] General

First thing to say is "what a great idea". It's hard for many newcomers to conform to the predominant format, and this will be an effective aid for instructing them on one hand, and speeding entry construction for all of us on the other: assuming it is not used with the subst option, the markup for any entry illustrates what to do with most future ones in the same section or page; even for those familar with the format, the template saves fiddling with the "fiddly" business of the commas and spaces, the piping, and the choice of date separator.
--14:50, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I was remiss in not promptly offering thanks and praise to User:Eliyak for building this fine and painstaking piece of conditional Wiki-markup! I'm not a barnstar fan, but this is an example of the kind of work that best justifies that practice.
--Jerzy•t 15:22, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm embarrassed to realize how long my attention has been elsewhere, and i think you've been thoro and effective in your documentation enhancements.
--Jerzy•t 04:10, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Misc. Detail

These other things may be worth saying:

1. The dash (i guess it's an en-dash, as specified somewhere in WP:MoS. I have objected to applying it on LoPbN, primarily bcz it is such a stumbling block in editing: IFAI remember, the en-dash and hyphen can't be distinguished in the editing window of either of the browsers i use; mass correction of formats using global replacement would in some cases take double effort (which i admit i have never personally experienced); too many editors have no idea of the (simple) steps needed to generate an en-dash. AFAI can see, the template dissolves all those objections.
2. While i haven't figured out whether it will fit together with the Persondata tag, IMO it would be a tragic mistake to fail to unify these two concepts, probably by naming this one {{Tl:PersondataL}}. (I doubt there is any serious barrier to unification.) This would encourage those who either add the Persondata tag to the article or make the LoPbN entry, to also do the other at the same time, and others who find one to add the other.

--14:50, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Documentation

[edit] Names

1. The documentation should reflect the imprecision of the expressions "first ..." and "last name". I would do that by
   • mentioning the "official" specification first:

     #- given name

     #- surname (blank for single-name people)

   • using "first..." and "last..." only in an example, and
   • including a well known example of the predominant and most sensible format, such as

     suname= Mao

     given-name= Zedong

2. "Profession" and "Occupation" are both commonly used as synonyms for "job", but the corresponding field in the LoPbN entry (which i sometimes summarize as "area of notability") is occasionally an amateur activity. I would prefer "occupation" as the field name: this is consistent with the usage of occupational therapists of including brushing one's teeth, making one's own coffee, and hobbies that are never jobs, in their realm; it also avoids the modern connotation of "profession" as "paid work" rather than as "calling, even if unpaid".
3. The conventional and most valuable layout for the sensible CJK (and traditional Hungarian) format is

   Mao Zedong

   not

   Mao, Zedong

   IMO, the comma must be avoided. The (non-sensible) Western format will long continue to predominate in en: WP, and the layout of the markup should preferentially accommodate it. Probably the means of doing that should be keeping the current content of the template, but using as an example

   *{{LoPbN Entry|Mao Zedong||1893|1976|Chinese|activist & politician}}

   * Mao Zedong (1893–1976), Chinese activist & politician

   with an explanation that implies (either)

   {{LoPbN Entry|Full Name that is not subject to inversion||born|died|Nationality|profession}}

   or

   {{LoPbN Entry|Full Name that is not subject to inversion||born|died|Nationality|profession|(optional) alternate article name}}
   

--14:50 & 15:03, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

• I have incorporated your ideas for CJK names (etc) in the documentation above.

--Eliyak T·C 01:18, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Misc. Doc'n

The "English" and "British" examples are IMO correct, but deserve clarifying commentary: English was a nationality in the WP sense in the 16th century, and British became the corresponding nationality in the 17th, with the union of Scotland and England as the two components of the British state. (The modern criterion is "what is on your passport?", whence in special cases i make entries for what i could state as "nationality and relevant regionality/ethnicity": Pau Casals is IMO well described as a "Spanish Catalan musician", and i favor "American Puerto Rican", "American Sioux", and (for politicians who represent Scots, and writers whose notable subjects are distinctly Scottish) "British Scottish". -- However, i find "British English" to be so unremarkable as to always be pointless.)
--14:50 & 15:03, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Seeing Stars

I don't see any purpose to not building the "*" (for the bullet heading) into the template. Building it in would avoid the occasional entry where the * is omitted, and the name appears at the left margin instead of bulleted and indented. --14:50, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

On second thot, including the * in the template content probably prejudices against schemes (which i favor and have created some experimental examples of) for subdividing sections by use of multi-level bullet headings. So i favor, after all, keeping the * in front of the braces used to invoke the template.
--Jerzy•t 15:03, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

What finally has brought me back here (i confess i haven't been using the template, tho i think i should start doing so) is the prospect of incorporating a variable number of asterisks into the entry template. I haven't gotten beyond the "i can see the general concept, and there must be a decent way to implement it phase", and i may be smoking something i shouldn't, as it were, but for the moment i'm going to use LoPbN Entry inside my prototype mockup stubs and see whether it gels into anything. At the worst, i should get some practice with your template that'll probably get me over the hump of familiarization & into using it routinely.
--Jerzy•t 04:10, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

_ _ Yet another opinion from me: the variability of aster count should not be a function of this template, and the real issue here is whether including a single aster would be compatible with varying the number of asters in front of the template-transclusion. My guess is that an experiment will show that an aster provided by a tl will combine with asters immediately to the left of the transclusion markup to provide the proper total indentation.

_ _ In the event that this is eventually exploited, two options would be:

1. Change every transclusion of {{tl:LoPbN Entry}} (over about 25 pages) by removing the aster before it
2. Stop using the Tl, except within another Tl that adds the aster & perhaps sets up some of LoPbN Entry's args for it -- e.g., see my next contrib here, to #Name Formats below.

--Jerzy•t 19:33, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

There is another option: an additional (named) parameter could be used to specify the existence of an asterisk(or more than one). For example:

{{LoPbN Entry|A=1|John|Smith}}

to produce

• Smith, John

It could also be coded to output an arbitrary number of asterisks:

{{LoPbN Entry|A=5|John|Smith}}

would produce

• • • • • Smith, John

Of course, those extra asterisks would not show up if it was actually used in an indented list.

In this way, nothing would need to be replaced. --Eliyak T·C 05:25, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Date Formats

_ _ As to

An unknown date of birth should be left blank, but may optionally be entered as "?". An unknown date of death should always be entered as "?" to distinguish from living persons.

i would not argue in all cases against the use of q-marks in the vital stats of bio articles, but the sole purpose of the info on LoPbN is navigational, and informing a user about the unknowability of vital stats is highly unlikely to be helpful in being sure they are being lead to the right bio article. Thus discussion of it should be left to the bio article, which has room to avoid confusion about what the question mark means. (Wiki-theory frowns on error msgs, and i know of only one template that uses one. But coding the template to ignore "?" in those fields by treating it like the absense of an argument, and an explanatory note in the documentation (in a no-include passage within the template or on this talk page), would IMO be an enchancement.)
_ _ (As to date of death in an article, i would argue that a question mark for "unknown" is insufficient: it should be used only where WP knows that the date is accepted, essentially univerally, as being unknowable (e.g. George Mallory's depends on whether he survived into the day following the one when he was last seen); in such cases the distinction should be made clear within the same 'graph. Where WP eds have merely found no date of death -- even if the fact of death is explicitly known or implied by being born over 120 years ago -- but we lack evidence of unknowablility, the word "was" in the lead sentence suffices to make the distinction between dead and living. But the lack of both a date and a statement about unknowability indicates that the article remains incomplete, awaiting evidence either of a DoD or of its unknowability.)
--Jerzy•t 19:08, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

• For an unknown (but not unknowable) date of death, how do you feel about "????" ? My concern is that there should be some distinction on the list between dead and living persons, especially in cases where the implication that the person is alive would be ridiculous.

--Eliyak T·C 01:18, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

_ _ As to "????", i think it's worse than "?" bcz it's more distracting, conveys no more info, and suggests urgency re replacing them w/ a date that may be undeterminable, which is BTW again a concern more suitable to the bio article than to this navigational structure. I don't think we're going to find a common view on this, but on one hand your attempt to do so is admirable, and on the other failing in it is no problem: your scheme is valuable despite my fault-finding, and my opinion is probably far less important than i try to make it sound.
--Jerzy•t 04:10, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

• One other issue: what about (fl. XXX0s) type dates? Is this an option that should be available? I think it should be possible to code for it in a user-friendly way if necessary...
  --Eliyak T·C 01:18, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
  • I may be missing your point: why needed? Is this about avoiding

  (fl. XXX0's)

   ?
  --Jerzy•t 18:29, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
  

After the above comment, I included the possibility of using the arguments "...|fl|1960s|..." as an alternative to dates of birth and death, since this is useful information when specific dates of birth/death are not readily available (and this convention is already in use on LoPbN). --Eliyak T·C 05:05, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Name Formats

_ _ I've taken to routinely using the Tl when adding names from Category:Living people or piping others' contribs to LoPbN, and i find it excellent for the purpose: much quicker than the cutting & pasting otherwise involved. There remain two minor unremedied annoyances:

1. Dab'n suffixes
2. Middle names/initials

The first is straightforward, while the 2nd involves a design decision that we should carry to Talk:LoPbN. But i can illustrate both together, choosing without prejudice one design. Assume that George W. Bush becomes so reviled that "George Bush" is usually used to stand for him and becomes a Rdr to his article, which would have a top Dab for his forgotten father, to (say) George Bush (father) (a better title than George H. W. Bush, since he is called "George Bush" more often than "George H. W. Bush"). If all that were true, i'd like to be able to markup the father's entry thusly:

{{LoPbN Entry|George|M= H. W.|Bush|D=father|1924||American|politician}} -- father

and get

Bush, George H. W. (born 1924), American politician

or better yet

Bush, George H. W. (born 1924), American politician

The point of the "H. W." is (as i've often insisted) not to make LoPbN function as a name authority, but to assist with navigation, while using (double-)small type to warn users that (altho some of them may recognize the initials and use them as dab'g aids), this is the guy they would probably call "George Bush" rather than someone less notable, in whom (like George P. Bush) they have no interest. (Since the main visibility of the "HW" for those of another era was Tom Harkin's chanted taunt of "George Herbert Walker Bush" as, implicitly, enough of an upper-class twit to have two middle names, others might find the HW only a reason to assume the entry is not for "the George Bush who was the father of the famous one".)
_ _ I think i favor using names not usually included only where there are at least two people generally known by the same name, hence John F. Kennedy is the article, with John Fitzgerald Kennedy a Rdr to it, and (probably; haven't looked there for namesakes) just the initial should be used on LoPbN.
_ _ Part of the issue here is that we don't follow the Dab-page convention that the unpiped name (or piped only for the sake of punctuation) should appear, not only piping for order of names, but often a shorter (or longer) version of the name; i'm aware of no applicable standard -- other than the option of arguing (as i do not) "well, it's a nav page and should follow the style of most of the other nav pages, i.e., the Dabs".
--Jerzy•t 21:01, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
_ _ (That was not a disastrous save, but not a great one either. Continuing with neglected aspects:)
_ _ Part of the design issue is that the decision abt how much of the name belongs in the LoPbN entry's piping can mean there should sometimes be less there than in the article title, instead of more as i assumed above. For thoroughness with some entries under some design decisions, forget that i used the name M for that argument in my example above, and the argument name serving that function could be called instead MP (Middle name(s) or initial(s) for use in Pipe only). For some other bios, that role would be complemented by ML (Middle name(s) or initial(s) for use in Link only. This could be carried further, using e.g.

FP meaning Front addition to the name for use in Pipe only, and

B, Back addition to the name for use in both pipe and link rather than in only one.

Then

{{LoPbN Entry|FP= Sir|John|MP= Algernon|Murphy|B= Jr.|1924||British|actor}}

would render as

Murphy, John Algernon, Jr., Sir (born 1924), British actor

(Note that this B is one of two arguments beyond FP, FL, MP, ML, BP and PL, namely B and F -- back and front, respectively, for use in both link & pipe. F and B are not redundant, bcz (in contrast with a given and middle name) what comes directly before a given name, or directly after a surname, does not stay in that relationship, when the name is inverted in a fashion that logically reflects the natural hierarchy of the elements' syntax.)
_ _ It's worth noting that there are three functions for the Tl:

1. Promoting adherence to the predominant punctuation & abbreviation style.
2. Reducing keystrokes in adding new entries.
3. Maintaining consistency when bio titles are updated (the benefit comes mostly when the update is a spelling correction, i suppose).

I think your focus has mainly been on 1, and mine on 2, but i would hope that all three can be accommodated comfortably.
_ _ Finally, (in contrast with the inclusion of the asterisk, which could be implemented as a new version of the Tl only if all entries already using it are changed), it would be straightforward either to add these name and Dab features to the existing Tl, or to create a meta-Tl "front ending" for {{LoPbN Entry}} to accomplish equivalent functionality.
--Jerzy•t 05:50, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Constructed Target Override

Easier to implement, and almost as valuable:
I'm finding it slows me down a lot to avoid errors when i do dump jobs (no vital states, nat'ty, or occ'n) from Cat LP: i tend to miscount the pipe chars between the surname and target title, and it would be worth it me to use an alternate syntax:

Connick, Harry, Jr.

could be coded as now by

{{LoPbN Entry|Harry, Jr.| Connick|||||Harry Connick, Jr.}}

but also by the less finicky markup

{{LoPbN Entry|Harry, Jr.| Connick|ttl= Harry Connick, Jr.}}

I think it involves the same coding i've used elsewhere; shall i go ahead and give implementing it a try?
--Jerzy•t 07:08, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

I'll go ahead and add that functionality now. I'll also give some thought to your other suggestions above about optional prefixes/suffixes. Something along those lines does seem useful. --Eliyak T·C 04:11, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Maintenance

[edit] Exception handling

[edit] Single arg specified

Bug or feature?
I find that with non-inversion names, the minimal format

{{LoPbN Entry|Li Po}}

makes a mess

Li Po

that wants solving with an extra pipe char:

{{LoPbN Entry|Li Po|}}

with a nice, if excessively sparse, result:

Li Po

I think this would be avoided by using, in the first usage of arg 2, the "default to null" syntax that you use elsewhere in the Tl. But were you perhaps intentionally prohibiting my "dump job" usage, perhaps bcz you've thot thru a new-user's careless mistake that deserves alarm bells?
--Jerzy•t 05:10, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

It's a bug, now gone. I just didn't consider the possibility of not having a last name argument when I first wrote the template. --Eliyak T·C 04:52, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Extraneous blank

I expect nothing can be done abt this (even tho leaving the blank on the other side of the pipe), except developing the habit i now have, of back-arrowing before adding the pipe (or backspacing away the extraneous blank).

• Stagg, Amos Alonzo , American football coach

--Jerzy•t 01:03, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I can't think of any way to make MediaWiki ignore the space. Personally, I find it easiest to "replace" the space by shift-selecting it and writing over it. --Eliyak T·C 04:49, 3 January 2007 (UTC)