| Revision as of 02:49, 4 May 2020 editNetoholic (talk | contribs)Autopatrolled, Extended confirmed users39,916 editsNo edit summary← Previous edit | Latest revision as of 03:11, 22 July 2024 edit undoNetoholic (talk | contribs)Autopatrolled, Extended confirmed users39,916 editsmNo edit summaryTag: Manual revert | ||
| (41 intermediate revisions by the same user not shown) | |||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
| 1 | |||
| 2 | |||
| Should surname/last name ]s (examples, {{noredirect|Einstein}}, {{noredirect|Byron}}, {{noredirect|Freud}}) be deprecated? -- | |||
| 3 | |||
| 4 | |||
| ;Editorial principles | |||
| 5 | |||
| # The first mention of a person should be wikilinked to the article about them. Later mentions often don't need to be linked (]) | |||
| 6 | |||
| # The first mention of a person should make use of their full name (ie <First name> <Last name>, or commonly-used name). Later mentions then use only the last name, for brevity (]) | |||
| 7 | |||
| # Most biographical articles have titles in the form <First name> <Last name>, or are some other commonly-used name (], disambiguation aside). | |||
| 8 | |||
| 9 | |||
| I believe these principles have generally strong support. Taken together, we reach this conclusion: | |||
| 10 | |||
| :The first mention of a person should use their full name (<First name> <Last name>, or commonly-used name), based on the title of the article about them and wikilinked to it. Subsequent mentions should use their surname only and not be wikilinked. | |||
| In other words, there should be almost no editorial use case for surname ]s if editors are following good practices. | |||
| ;Searching | |||
| One argument is that surname ]s aid with searching. This is only true for people that use the internal search box and does not apply to the vast majority of readers who visit by using external search engines, which deliver them directly to the right article, ignoring any redirects. The absence of surname redirects will perhaps inconvenience some (slightly, by adding an additional click of a link that will likely be at the top of the ] or ] anyway), but removal will actually aid everyone else who is searching for other content using that term because they will be taken directly to a DABPAGE or NAMELIST . This is the exact same scenario as keeping these redirects (searchers of other topics now have to click a hatnote link to a DABPAGE or NAMELIST) - no matter which direction we go, some internal searchers will be inconvenienced by an extra click, and so this issue is a stalemate and should be minimized from consideration. | |||
| ;Move requests | |||
| On a regular basis, we have ]s related to surname PRIMARYREDIRECTs and disambiguation pages. These RMs have no hard data or other objective standards to determine which biographies should or shouldn't have a primary redirect. Most rely on raw pageviews or ]-style arguments. Among other benefits, deprecating these will have the result of perceptibly reducing the number of RMs going through the system. | |||
| ;Case study | |||
| In preparing this, I took the quintessential ] example of {{noredirect|Einstein}} and reviewed how it was being used. I found 334 ] and ran through them. I replaced first mentions with <First name> <Last name> (linked using simply ]]]) and removed any repetitious links. On first pass, ~272 full name/wikilink replacements were made per the Principles above, and ~19 inappropriate links were fixed (], ], etc.) for a total of 291 (~87% of total) which misused "{{noredirect|Einstein}}". The 43 remaining uses of "{{noredirect|Einstein}}" links were first mentions of Einstein and were found inside quotes or titles. These 43 could (should) be replaced by <code><nowiki>]</nowiki></code> so that when users hover over the link they see the full name and true destination of the link. | |||
| ;Conclusion | |||
| Surname ]s should be deprecated because they promote bad editorial practice related to mentions of people. This would not affect other non-biographical uses of ]s, because this issue is specific to how we handle mentions of personal names in articles. -- | |||
Latest revision as of 03:11, 22 July 2024
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10