Forum:Question-marks in page names

This is one maintenance task, easy enough for a beginner, that will definitely improve the site. We need to remove question-marks from page names (because we discovered, a bit too late, that wiki software can't process them properly - often it wants to create a new page with a name stopping just before the question-mark).

Any person-article with a question-mark in its name should be moved/renamed (along with all subpages) to delete the question-mark (or replace it with a birth or death year if the article now contains one), leaving a redirect. Example: Joe Blow (?-1967) becomes Joe Blow (-1967). If it has two, e.g. "(?-?)", the same applies. When I do that, I just put "?" as the Edit Summary. I got tired of typing Remove "?" after the first few hundred. So any time you have a free ten minutes, please have a look at the lists at the bottom of our front page (or in any surname category or Project Charlemagne subpage, for example) and click any live link to a page that has a question-mark and rename it.

Then for full functionality they usually need a final "Edit" and "Publish". Please look at the page before editing, to see if any RED links on the page contain question-marks: cut those question-marks out as part of the edit. Blue links are best left alone unless you know that the target page has been fixed (and it may have been given a year instead of just a deletion).

-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 00:59, October 31, 2013 (UTC) (40,000 edits, fortunately not all "maintenance"!)