Forum:Wikipedia person-names

We are seeing a growing number of person-pages with names that match Wikipedia pages except for details such as dates. There will be more.

Several years ago the consensus was that each such page should have a redirect from a Familypedia page that matched the Wikipedia name exactly. Two reasons:
 * SEO (Search Engine Optimization) - people searching the web are more likely to find our page if it (or its redirect) has the name they search under
 * Internal help and minimizing of duplication - when an editor wants to create a page for a WP figure, the presence of a page named exactly as on WP will minimize the chance that the editor may unwittingly create a page in our style but with a slightly different name and do a lot of unnecessary work because there is no warning of duplication

The resulting pages such as Barack Obama are a little at variance with our standard hndis pages, such as Mary Brown. Our preferred solution is to create a page such as Barack Obama (disambiguation), in the same style as Wikipedia. Sometimes that does not match a WP disambiguation page, a common reason being that WP has only one person of that name whereas we may have several. It is not hard to adapt the standard SPN ("Similar person name") template to cater for a " (disambiguation)" page, but it is irritatingly fiddly to have to do so. The proliferation of such pages suggests to me that a simpler solution is desirable and may be available. Could our experts devise a variation to SPN that ignores the "(disambiguation)"? One approach could be to change the standard to "/disambiguation" so that the coding could merely replace with  ; but I haven't checked the coding to see whether that would completely solve it.

Thoughts on renaming and recoding?

-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 23:42, June 16, 2016 (UTC)