Familypedia:Places

Here is a little discussion to get the ball rolling on how to do place names.

Places are a way of grouping people and events. So one could ask, list all the people who were born in a particular place. Genealogy has some difficulties with places as for many people they are not known, or not known precisely. So we may only know that someone was born on the Island of England. Not which country they were born in, let alone know the town.

Another problem with place names is that they change. Some places have different names over time, vis Constantinople which became Istanbul. What changes more frequently is the political boundaries. So the colony of New South Wales became a state in the country of Australia. Here there is also confusion. Australia refers to both the country and the continent. Howver, when the country was first formed, about 1/3 of the continent was not included!

A method I have seen used in wikipedia is to have links. So you can link to the previous or next version. However, I feel that this is too complex for a site that is at the end of the day only using places as a collection method.

We could a hierarchy based on categories. However, we run into a name-space problem. How do we differentiate between say, people with the name Melbourne and places with the person's name Melbourne? As this is a set of pages on people, obviously the name Melbourne has presidence. Prefixing a page name is a real-problem in the creation of categories as all the entries are grouped under the prefix. This means that it is better to have the highest level of entry at the end of the name. (Little endian in computer jargon.)