Forum:Alumni etc

Andrei has raised good points about categories of people who attended educational institutions. It seems that British ones (at least universities) have categories starting with "Alumni of ..." whereas American ones tend to be "xxxx alumni". Andrei and I prefer the "Alumni of" form. It parallels "Counties of ..." and "Born in ...", for example. Neither of us has gone into the WP history of discussions about those name forms. I doubt if we need to, but that might give some guidance, e.g. whether WP is likely to change one or other soon. -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 07:21, October 19, 2013 (UTC)

Do we need to have them uniform?
I don't think we do. WP could change them in a couple of days leaving a lot of our work wasted. We have better genealogical things to do. As long as we have only a few dozen active contributors, ontological consistency is not high on my list of priorities. We can add quite good content by copying Wikipedia categories just as they come (and linking to the originals with suitable quick templates so that we can easily find when they change), with only rare situations where we feel that a wholesale change in FP is desirable. (See the names we do change on Help:Copying from Wikipedia). -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 07:21, October 19, 2013 (UTC)

Completely different terminology
Andrei also mentioned that some Australian high schools have categories that use phrases like "educated at". See my talk page for the precise wording. I think some British high schools have the same. Again, we could try for consistency but I'd rather not spend time on that when there are hundreds of thousands of genealogical relationships we can work on. -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 07:21, October 19, 2013 (UTC)

Semantic MediaWiki
When we get more orgnised with SMW, I expect we will have a Showfacts education (after we have fleshed out, which may render most of those categories relatively useless anyway. -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 07:21, October 19, 2013 (UTC)