People probably identical[]
So I was thinking that as we grow there would eventually be a need for a template along the lines of "this person is suspected to be synonymous with this other person" I picture it being something like Wikipedia's merge tag. I haven't been able to find anything like it, and was wondering what you all thought. Plcoffey 13:03, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
- Good idea! See what you can devise. How about calling it Template:poss duplicate? Robin Patterson 05:49, 4 June 2008 (UTC)
- How about this for the picture.
Plcoffey 14:51, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
- How about this for the picture.
- Done. Thank you! Robin Patterson 01:27, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
Identical names but different people; hndis[]
We will get more and more "ambiguous human names". Some turn out to be duplicates, as above, but most do not. We have (after much discussion) instituted a category and a standard page format for "human disambiguation" so that:
- search engines will have a good chance of sending you to this wiki if you search for a plain name with no dates etc;
- when you get to that page (e.g. Mary Brown) you will see links to most of the possible candidates (probably with a lot of detail about some of them, in the same way as you get searching Rootsweb).
To help you create one of those pages with all desirable templates and categories in 30-60 seconds, there is a model you can copy and paste at Category talk:Similar person names. Requires changing "Mary" and "Brown" to the target names at four places each and replacing links to actual pages that have the chosen names.
Shortcut to it is hndis, which is short for "human disambiguation" (and may be familiar as a Wikipedia template because it's very like our template that has a longer, more obvious name). Please use it. In case it gets improved, please use it, not your own copy, unless you can be sure of keeping abreast of changes. (One of our clever people may be able to convert it to a template for even faster use. Watch this space and/or hndis.)
Robin Patterson 12:50, 25 July 2008 (UTC)