Forum:County-based categories

(First paragraphs here have been moved from Forum:County Pages and slightly updated.)

Main category
Some of you may have noticed that many of those U.K. and U.S. county pages your people now link to have no corresponding categories yet. There will eventually be lots of useful pages and subcategories collected in those county categories (as illustrated at Category:Greene County, Ohio).

See http://genealogy.wikia.com/index.php?title=Category:Fresno_County%2C_California&action=edit for how easy it is to create the category page for any U.S. county:

Exactly the same group of three templates in the top line, and only the state name varies in the bottom line.

At present we have to do it manually. Only a few of thousand to go! Any keen contributor with many interests in a particular state can fill his or her clipboard with the standard block of category page content for that state and get to work on that state's "List of counties..." (usually found as the top article in the category "Counties of ..."). I have done a dozen or more. I'd better volunteer for Washington because I have relatives there, but it's an easy one so I should find others after that.

Canada can probably use exactly the same model, but its pages have not been bulk-copied yet. Very similar process for U.K. counties (which do have most county pages in place), but with a different first template (mainly because the English-speaking history is many centuries longer). India has hundreds of districts done (though that may be only the tip of the iceberg?) and a slightly different template. Australia and New Zealand are under construction.

Related categories
"Born in ...", "Married in ...", "Cemeteries in ...", and so on. They can all have the county navbox at the top, but it needs a little tweak using "mainpage=" (as described in its instructions) and it should be followed by Template:Catmore+ to lead contributors to the creation of articles. The "Resided in ..." and "Born in ..." categories may also have a link to a roughly-corresponding Wikipedia page usually called "People from ...". Some of the cemetery categories and others may have WP near-equivalents worth linking to.

See an example at Category:Resided in Greene County, Ohio.

Thurstan has suggested we devise templates to simplify creation. Any volunteers?

Robin Patterson 06:57, 24 September 2008 (UTC)