Forum:Births in (location)/Deaths in (Location)

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Was just wondering if we want to make categories for births and deaths in certain places? I would suggest just using a state or province. This could aide people looking for certain surnames in states.

Examples : People born in Kentucky, United States of America People born in Lancashire, United Kingdom

etc

Will 03:59, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

I think this is a good idea. Also, I think we can probably automate the creation of these cats, especially if we can get folks to use AMK's person infobox template. As I recall, it explicitly declares birth and death locations. ~ Phlox 06:01, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

I like it too. May need some tweaking of AMK's template, but the idea's great. Some of Will's examples above are longer than necessary: where we have a standard location name, such as "Kentucky" or "Georgia (U.S. state)", it should usually be part of any derived name such as this, so that it can be incorporated and manipulated using "magic words" such as {{PAGENAME}}. See Genealogy:By location category scheme. Robin Patterson 05:04, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Greene County, Ohio gives an example of how such local cats can be generated automagically, and how they will help plug contributors into the local context and local community of contributors. When we have millions and millions of GEDCOM inputted names, state births will not be enough. At that point, we can flip a switch in the Template:info categories which will generate the county events.

Is there a way you can make your info box wrap around? As it is now we have to scroll horizontally to see everything. Thanks Will 00:34, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

• Looking at the top of the page, the navbox has a row People: Click Births and you will see the category for births in that county. Contributor is plugged into the local context, and has all the resources for researching more about the relative in the navbox. Also contributors can ask questions on the forum for that community.
• For the technically minded, this auto generation works because we have extracted and encoded "|Birth county=Greene" for Catherine Price (1809)/info. The WP categories have normalized naming (at least for CAN and USA, they are always of the form "Category:XXX County, STATE/PROVINCE") which we have leveraged, so we can generate the birth category name via algorithm. I don't expect folks to laboriously encode Birth county, Birth state Birth country, and so a Bot will do this for them. Description of the algorithm is on User:PhloxBot/_Proposals#Auto recognition of Place. Contribute on the talk page if you have opinions, or change the description of the algorithm if you have a better way/ enhancements of the means of extracting these.
• We can roll out this extraction without moving folks over to understanding info pages. The bot would simply extract the dates, create the info page, and place an Template:info categories at the end of the article.

~ Phlox 18:20, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Coming along nicely. (We don't need millions of names before dropping to county level!) --Robin Patterson 23:54, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

I hope that county categories for births and deaths will be in addition to the state ones and not replace it. Some families spread out a little, and it would be easier looking up a surname in an entire state than each individual county. Will 00:34, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Will there. Another reason is that a birthplace derived from a census may specify only a state, not a county. Robin Patterson 01:30, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Will before he said it. That's why you will see the example character, Catherine Price (1809) was already Cat'd that way.

Births in or Born in?

I prefer "Born" -

1. a birth was a birth in a place but a person was born in it
2. two characters fewer

If Wikipedia has an equivalent of either, I'd adopt it. Robin Patterson 01:30, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Born or Birth is a question of whether noun form or verb form. Our precedent is Births, eg Category:1991 births. So what kind of consistency is that? Births one place, but Born in elsewhere? Before you start to frown Robin, I'll tell you I'm going to agree with your POV, but I want to give a fair survey the arguments on either side here....

Multilingual Commons, English and French WP make noun form dominant. But consider de:category:Geboren. It's verb form for German (eg. Geboren), Spanish (Nacidos) and Russian. There are Cats for lots of "stuff" by "time period": Births, Deaths, Crimes, Musicals, Actors, Comics- all by year, decade, century. From a literary perspective, active verbal forms enliven a domain- so Born in Ohio, Died in Ohio, Married in Las Vegas... is much less stale than Ohio Births Ohio Deaths, etc. We have a kind of dusty domain here, so anything we can do to breath life into it is a plus. So I agree with Robin's instincts on this- I vote for Verb form wherever possible.

A quick look didn't show any events by location pattern on Wikipedia. The pattern of course for events by time is ("Date" "event"), and I think some folks were following the symmetry of that by catting as "Ohio Births".

This falls into the Placename category scheme, but just to recap:

Pros/Cons:

• "Placename" "Event"
  • Pro:
    • Symmetry with "Time(Century/Decade/Year)" "Event" eg Category:1991 births
    • Species-Genus order for events. Puts the differentiator up front easing visual scans for particulars.
  • Cons:
    • Symmetry is only with the non standard en-wp time scheme. French, German, Spanish- all do Birth in "date" form.
  • Will produce some awkward category names France Deaths seems ok, but France Actors does not.
  • Temptation to use the adjective form if placename is found in this position.

• "Event" "Placename"
  • Pros
    • Can be applied uniformly: Deaths/Died in France "Actors"/Acting in France
    • Is Genus/Species- the more traditional style of ontologies (although the main advantage of this is now obsolete- that this form is convenient for manual lookup and classification systems eg card catalogs/ library shelves that are irrelevant to the internet).
  • Cons
    • Assymetrical with Time schemes "Time" "stuff" order.
    • Creates long names- requiring prepositions in European languages
    • Less convenient for online use, since it is Genus/Species order: the differentiator is buried, making visual scans for the distinguishing feature more difficult.
    • Sometimes preposition choice is not clear- Museums of Russia, but Paintings from Russia.

So this is very longwinded- sorry but we are making some huge ontology decisions here, and I just want to make people aware of that.

Conclusions:

• My opinion is "Born in". "Died in" "Married in".
• For consistency, PhloxBot should move all the time categories to the same form. Born in 1991, following the Arabic/German/Spanish/French/greek/Russian/netherlands/norwegian/portugese WP standard.

We are going to have to do a Cat move though- because I don't think I was the only one making the error of using the Placename Births (Ohio births) form. ~ Phlox 07:19, 11 November 2007 (UTC)