Familypedia:Page names

From Familypedia

Contents 1 Standards (for all articles) 2 Standard for People articles 2.1 Additional proposals 3 Biblical and single first names 4 Places 5 Census 6 Notes, Rationale elaboration 7 See also

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 Familypedia's conventions for names. In a nutshell, our system is to affix suffixes to standard Wikipedia names where available, and to follow Wikipedia naming conventions for places, people and things when they are not.

The main reason for conforming to these conventions is because it helps folks find articles, and provide interlinkage with other data sources. If every database uses a different name for a place and for people we are on more unsure footing about the who what and where's that are being referred to.

Wikipedia names take precedence in all cases: Fortunately, the world already has a multilingual juried vocabulary on the names of persons, places and things, where discussions about the proper name of a place can be sensibly argued with subject matter experts. That knowlegebase is called Wikipedia. Familypedia adheres to names used by Wikipedia, and any disputes about names may be refereed there. After Wikipedia's name for the person place or thing has been changed there, then Familypedia shall adopt the change. To do otherwise is impractical since there are well over a million place names alone. It simply won't do for Familypedia to have an idiosyncratic set of names whose relationship to other knowlegbases would have to be manually defined. With such large numbers of names, it very quickly would become impractical to manage how our names correspond to the names in other databases. Wikipedia achieves that mapping for us, to all languages it covers.

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.

The following examples illustrate the naming convention for person articles. Refer to the descriptions below for details and further explanation.

	Gladys Jean Edmonds (1911-1975)		Typical article name
	Enrique I de Inglaterra (1068-1135) (.es)		Non english articles use language codes. People with wikipedia articles must use the name used for the article for that language
	Thomas Sewell (1865)		Names may omit middle name and year of death
	Иван Лемзин (1941) (.ru)		Names should use characters corresponding to the page language

[edit] Standards (for all articles)

• If the individual has a Wikipedia article, then use Wikipedia's page name exactly with (YOB-YOD) postpended.
  • other languages: The wikipedia used should be that corresponding to the language of the article and should always be last. For example the spanish name for Henry I of England would be Enrique I de Inglaterra (1068-1135) (.es) because the name in spanish wikipedia is wikipedia:es:Enrique I de Inglaterra.
  • Use Wikipedia suffix terms. Place Familypedia suffixes after. For example, the familypedia article on John Pope would be John Pope (military officer) (1822-1892)
  • Observing this convention means that place names may have disambiguation suffixes, eg: Victoria (Australia). However these are stripped when displayed to users in infoboxes or in biographical narratives.
  • Employ wikipedia naming conventions for names not in wikipedia. Any divergences are listed below.
• Non english articles.
  • Character set: Characters used for the name should correspond to the language. A french article would use accented characters, the english would not. This is done for ease of use by those searching for articles who may not be able to type characters inaccessible from their keyboards.
  • The language code must be indicated in the name the article. This must be postpended to the end of the article in parens with a period preceding (Example: Иван Лемзин (1941) (.ru)). These codes must correspond to wikipedia language codes EG: ru=russian, since russian wikipedia is ru.wikipedia.org.

[edit] Standard for People articles

The standard format for articles that deal with a single individual is:

Name (YOB-YOD)

• There should be no spaces on either side of the hyphen.
• Name should be at minimum first name and surname. The order should conform to the convention observed by the person. For example, Yao Ming is actually in surname, first name order.
  • Surname must be as at birth (e.g. maiden name), not married name. (This is a divergence from wikipedia, but if the person has a wikipedia article, the wp name is used not one using the maiden name.)
  • Middle name is optional, and it is reccommended to use only one middle name, if any.
  • If first name or surname is unknown, use "Unknown" instead of leaving it blank or using a question mark. (e.g. John Unknown (1833-1902) or Unknown Smith (1833-1902) )
  • If contributors agree, roman numerals may be included between the name and opening parenthesis; ideally, these should match how the individual was (or is) actually identified.
  • Official (or semi-official) additions to a name should precede the dates. For example: John Pollok of Balgray (c1690-aft1720), NOT John Pollok (c1690-aft1720) of Balgray.
  • The name must be properly capitalized.
• YOB & YOD are years of birth and death, respectively. For example: (bef1795-c1856).
  • Use "?" if year of birth or death is unknown; don't use "unk" or "unknown".
  • Use "c" (circa) if year of birth or death is approximate; don't use "c." or "abt" or "about".
  • Use "bef" if year of birth or death is before the indicated year.
  • Use "aft" if year of birth or death is after the indicated year.
  • Do not include spaces between "bef," "aft," "c," and "?," except for separating BC years. (e.g. Gaius Julius Caesar (100 BC-44 BC) )
  • For living individuals (or individuals who are presumed to be living), use only birth year in parentheses (with no hyphen).

[edit] Additional proposals

The following guidelines are proposed:

• To extend wikipedia's principle of suffix terms in parens disambiguation, use locality of birth in parenthesis. EG: John Smith (1857-1899) (Philadelphia) if there are multiple John Smiths born around 1857.

[edit] Biblical and single first names

Some names of articles can be very short and could create confusion due to their ambiguity. Examples are articles on single first names or Biblical names. Wikipedia's article on the given name Virginia is Virginia (given name). Our article would be the same. The wikipedia name for father of Abraham is Terah, so our article would be Terah (?-?).

[edit] Places

Note that wikipedia disambiguates place names.

• Georgia (U.S. state)
• Georgia (country) (which was from 1919–1921 the Democratic Republic of Georgia).

The wikipedia article for Victoria Australia is wikipedia:Victoria (Australia), so our article is the same. When displayed, paren terms are stripped, so all the user will see in an infobox is Victoria.

[edit] Census

Use the wikipedia names for censuses. EG: "1790 United States Census". For a list of US censuses, see wikipedia:Category:Decennial federal censuses of the United States. For the names for canada, see Category:Censuses in Canada

[edit] Notes, Rationale elaboration

[edit] See also

Given Names, Surnames, Genealogy:People Template