Familypedia

We could create an article using these, consisting of a table showing (for each decade we care to list) the total numbers of births and deaths (and marriages) we have facts pages for. It would be a rough guide to which periods our numerical strengths are in.

Easy way could be just to count the items in the "year" subcategories of each category, but our categorization probably isn't consistent enough for that to be a good guide. SMW, with slightly different coding for each decade, is desirable. If one of our experts could provide the basic coding, one of us plebs could do the donkey work.

Each decade category or article can use the same numbers, but assembling them in a table will let readers see the whole picture faster.

-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 11:16, November 6, 2017 (UTC)

I would think that the first thing to be done is it check that we all agree about the labelling of decades, since we see (for example) that Category:Born in the 1940s runs from 1941 to 1950, which is not what I thought was generally understood by the "1940s". Then there is the question of what do you think that SMW will do that the categories don't do. Thurstan (talk) 19:03, November 6, 2017 (UTC)
Were you thinking of something like this:
start year end year births deaths 1st
marriages
2nd
marriages
3rd
marriages
4th
marriages
1821 1830 2244 1112 1437 163 19 3
1831 1840 2458 1218 1642 203 28 3
1841 1850 2579 1421 1711 348 82 24
1851 1860 2676 1523 1995 392 109 38
1861 1870 2628 1650 1877 285 73 16
We could create a template like {{Surname report entry}} for generating a line in this table, with the start and end years as parameters. We could also query the page counts in the categories, for the birth and death counts, rather than using an SMW query. Thurstan (talk) 04:54, November 7, 2017 (UTC)
That's excellent, my friend - better than I could have hoped for. I had looked at some of the decade and year categories and found a few irregularities, such as individuals placed in decade categories. They might complicate the apparently simple counting, but maybe that needs more study. As for the definition of decades, there is indeed a bit of variation. I too felt that the 1940s went from 1940 to 1949 in common parlance. not matching the correct endings of centuries. That could be checked too. Wikipedia should be followed for simplicity if there is doubt. -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 06:54, November 7, 2017 (UTC)