Forum:Person name properties

This thread is intended to pull together two separate threads that are highly inter related. Formerly, this was a concluding note to the thread Forum:Dutch patronyms are not given names. It covers issues discussed in Forum:Middle names as well.

Conventions on patronomics, family, middle and last names
So what are the implications for our documentation:
 * Surname is not the same as family name. (Patronomics, inflected surnames).  This is correctly explained in wikipedia's current article on family names, but our current copy equates family name with surname in the topic sentence.
 * Surname is not the same as sort name. Tereshkova should be sorted under Tereshkov.
 * familypedia convention: "family_name", if present should be used in place of surname for sorting purposes. (This is how we get brothers and sisters from slavic countries into the same surname category).
 * familypedia convention: Surname is a required field. If the patronomic or family_name is filled out, the user must still specify surname even though it may be the same. (This is because possible inflections of the family name or whether the patronym used in place of middle or last name is variable between cultures).
 * No assumption should be made that a surname category is the same as a family name category. It may be a collection of patronyms.
 * "middle name" refers to position only, not the meaning it commonly has in western europe of a secondary given name, nor the practice in slavic countries that it is a patronym.
 * familypedia convention: If patronomic is specified, no assumptions are made about how it is used. If it is intended to be displayed (eg. in showfacts biography) or used as part of a sort sequence, then it must also be coded in the middle_name property.
 * Father's name can be completely different from son's name. eg: Magnús Eiríksson's father was Eiríkur Grímsson.
 * familypedia guidance: Template and bot writers need to understand that assumptions about person names are error prone. Eg- that fathers and children will appear in the same surname category.

Note that encoding patronomic does not affect the display of an article, and this has search relevance only. Users may search for Matronyms or Patronyms by querying the patronomic field.

Encoding family_name does affect the display of the article (sorting eg in the case of Tereshkova).

18:36, 26 July 2009 (UTC)