Genealogy:Page names
From Genealogy
In theory, you can name an article anything you want. In practice, it's a good idea to conform to certain conventions about these titles. The following are suggestions to help minimize confusion. You are not obligated to follow them, but it's a good idea for a number of reasons.
The main reason for conforming to these conventions is because it helps folks find articles. Having a standard set of conventions for titles makes it easier to find an existing article about a person or place that interests you. And if you've written an article, you DO want others to find it. Otherwise, they will probably think there isn't one, write one of their own, and reinvent the wheel, giving you both bother when you try to merge the articles.
Here are some things that you are urged to do.
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[edit] People articles
If the person has a Wikipedia article, it is generally a good idea to use Wikipedia's page name exactly. If not, please observe the following standards.
- Use a full name to the extent possible (e.g. First Middle Last), but maybe no more than one middle name
- Indicate a life range in years (YOB-YOD)
- No spaces between dates and hyphen.
- No day and month unless essential for disambiguating.
- If you don't know the YOB or YOD, use an approximate date if possible e.g. "(bef1795-c1856)", with no spaces before years.
- Use 'c' for circa, rather than "About" or "Abt"
- use "bef" for "earlier than" and aft for "later than" (because "less than" and "greater than" symbols don't work well in web titles). Thus, you might write a date "(bef1795-aft1856)", NOT "(<1795->1856)".
- if you are really stuck, the convention this site has adopted is to indicate an unknown date with a "?" as in (?-?). Do not use "Unknown" or "Unk" for dates. For a person known or presumed to be still alive, do not use a closing hyphen or question mark: thus Robin Forlonge Patterson (1940).
- If you want to insert a nickname or byname, put it at the end of the title, after the years (so as to minimise confusion of alphanumeric order), rather than between first and last names. Thus
- John Walker (c1735-c1818) aka "Indian Killer", not "John 'Indian Killer' Walker".
- However, a semi-official addition to a name should precede the dates, eg John Pollok of Balgray (c1690-aft1720).
- If there is series of people with the same name (grandfather, father, son, grandson), you may want to insert a Roman numeral to help distinguish between them. That works best between the surname and the dates. Thus, John Walker IV (c1735-c1818) aka "Indian Killer". If known, use the symbols they or their immediate family use(d).
- This site generally uses a single person as the basis for an article's name. (If you want, you can add the spouse's name to the title, but then you run into the problem of what to do with multiple spouses. It seems to work better if only one person is in the title, with their spouse being written up in a separate article of their own, and linked back so people can follow their lineage. The use of "/info" pages will minimise duplication of work for listing children.) In addition you may have a page for the couple/family or clan, with links to the individuals. See Category:Clans and Category:Families. Polish up your "copy&paste" skills and there won't be much duplication of effort. We may one day introduce "couple" pages with standard ways of linking: watch this space!
In short, article titles are (among the few) things you should be fairly precise about. The title "John Walker (1795-1856)" is not the same as "John Walker (1795 - 1856)", in the computer's "mind". The extra spaces may seem subtle differences, but if you type in something in the search box, once with and once without spaces, you may get different articles or miss the article you are searching for.
[edit] Multipurpose names, such as "Adam"
[edit] "Rule" - PERSON has the simplest page name
Let the person have the simple page name. Following one of the Wikipedia principles, calling something by its common name, we give the individuals precedence. So we leave Adam the progenitor as "he" is, not even adding the standard "dates" that would make him "Adam (?-?)".
Those of us who are adding names of biblical figures are creating "single-name" pages like that. Where a possible duplication is known in advance, such a person can be given a distinguishing page name from the start, styled, eg, "Anah (son of Seir)". One day you may find there are two people called Anah (son of Seir); so you can change one or both of them for a different distinction, eg "(first king of X)"; it's easy enough to change page names. If one of them is much better known, he or she can keep the original name as long as the page starts with a link to the other one. If neither was much better known, it is preferable to have an ordinary disambiguation page linking to both under distinctive names.
Rarely, a single-person name, such as Salmon, is used much more commonly in a very different context. These are rare enough to be discussed at the help desk when they arise.
[edit] Articles about personal names, not individuals
We may eventually (when we need to) create (linked from the Adam page by a disambiguation note) a partly explanatory page called "Adam (given name)". It will be the same sort of page as "Adam (surname)".
In the long term we might want a category for people whose only name was Adam: logically, to match our other conventions, it might be category:Adam (given name). We will cross that river somehow if we come to it. Changing a page name is not difficult.
(If there were only a single famous person named "Khan", we would thereby need to change our current "Khan" page to "Khan (given name)". Maybe we should do it anyway to minimise confusion. Do it as a redirect so that users can still just type Khan for a link. Then if that single famous "Khan" person ever materialises and needs his or her own page we can just rewrite the redirect page so that it covers him or her but has a "disambig" "hatnote" just as for Adam (and we gradually rewrite the links that said "Khan" meaning the family or the name). )
[edit] Places
If any possible confusion with other places or a surname, add a distinction such as county, state, or country. Use Wikipedia's pagename if in doubt (but note that it favours places for the single word, such as Wellington, whereas we favour names). See below.
[edit] First names that are also place names
Here we differ from the policy on multipurpose names: some places (such as Virginia) are overwhelmingly more commonly discussed than the personal name and are therefore given the simple page names (matching Wikipedia's usage).
Georgia has the added complication of being a well-known U.S. state as well as a not too unknown country east of the Black Sea (very prominent just before the 2008 Olympics); we follow Wikipedia's distinctions there too:
- Georgia (U.S. state)
- Georgia (country) (which was from 1919–1921 the Democratic Republic of Georgia).
An exception to the following of Wikipedia is Victoria (Australia), where we have decided that its 5 million inhabitants far outweigh any other Victoria (much as those of Virginia give their state the simple name) - see Wikipedia:Victoria and discussion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Victoria_%28Australia%29#Requested_move.
[edit] References
Can be simple, such as Scharf, 1888. Use of the comma and single date distinguishes references and sources from person pages. (Add a colon and a number to indicate a specific page, as in Scharf, 1888:114to indicate that the information contained in Scharf, 1888, was found on page 114.) See discussion of possible problems on Category talk:References.