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 template {{SPN}} - "Similar person name" (which redirects to {{SimilarPerson}} ), 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 {{PAGENAME}} with {{BASEPAGEAME}}. I have checked the coding to see whether that would completely solve it. I think changing to BASEPAGENAME in that template would solve it; one included template contains {{PAGENAME}}: ((T|Similar person names}}, but in harmless contexts; {{Same name}}, the SMW insert, does not contain PAGENAME.
One problem with making the subpage the new standard would be the need to recode the existing pages a bit. Bot job.
Thoughts on renaming and recoding?
-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 23:42, June 16, 2016 (UTC)