Surname article pages[]
I see a couple of them listed. I disagree there. See Category talk:Surname stubs. Robin Patterson 06:08, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
You mean like the Putnam surname page itself? -AMK152(talk • contribs) 14:14, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Are you proposing that we create article pages for information on a certain surname? Perhaps a better example is [1] this revision of the Ferguson article. -AMK152(talk • contribs) 15:42, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Category:Glossary[]
Not convinced by the reasoning. Where is this index page that is supposedly easier to look through than a category of similar length? Robin Patterson 09:45, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
- Terms are found here: Help:Editing (for wiki stuff) and here: Help:Genealogy for Genealogy stuff. There are links also. -AMK152(talk • contribs) 13:34, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
- Neither of those links is at present the sort of index page that would be easier to use than a category. The second one has no such list, though it invites the reader to go to "Abbreviations and acronyms" OR "Definitions and methods"; by the time the reader reached that, he or she might be wishing there were a way to find a puzzling word just by entering it in the search box, not having to guess which class of help it belonged to (perhaps wrongly, because the "Genealogy" one includes "HTML"!) and then jump to other pages. Maybe the suggested alternative pages need more work done on them. Until we really have something that's quick to refer to, Category:Glossary is doing no harm sitting waiting to see if it can be useful. Robin Patterson 14:03, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Image:NL - COA.png[]
I'm not convinced we should delete that image. Maybe it needs more checking of exactly what it is - country or Royal House, maybe? Robin Patterson 13:46, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Closer look suggests that the template was on it when PhloxBot imported it. Our evaluation could differ from WP's. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 02:53, September 28, 2009 (UTC)
Firstname Surname (?-?)[]
Don't delete any of those. Move or redirect each to the future or existing "Firstname Surname", a hndis page, where all dateless people of that name can be efficiently listed with some distinguishing info (such as "father of John Surname (1810)". — Robin Patterson (Talk) 01:20, June 29, 2010 (UTC)
Articles that have an error in their names[]
Articles that have an error in their names should be renamed, not deleted. Renaming takes about 5 seconds and preserves all the text and the page history.
If an article is about the same place or person as another with a correct name, someone has made things hard for us (and for himself or herself) by not adequately checking for duplicates. But what's done is done. So in that case you convert the bad name into a redirect, unless 100% certain that there are no links to it from within the wiki or from anywhere else; of course, you can't be certain of that, because anyone might have thought that that was a good page to link to from their own wiki. Delete the page and the interested person may never come back and anyone trying his or her now useless link will think that Familypedia is not worth the trouble.
Something like "birth date corrected to 1717" is therefore never a good reason to delete a page. Make it a redirect if there's already a correct version in place. There's a handy button below the edit box for almost instantaneous creation of redirects.
--- Robin Patterson (Talk to me) 09:18, March 1, 2011 (UTC)
Category:Boreland in County Antrim[]
What's wrong with it? It looks to me as if it follows the recommended format. -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 15:25, August 18, 2011 (UTC)
- First, there were two different categories: Category:Boreland in Antrim and Category:Boreland in County Antrim. Why are both neaded?
- Second. If there was such a locality, it should be Category:Boreland, Antrim. No other locality is defined "X in county Y".
- Third. I have tried to find a locality Boreland in County Antrim. No such locality is listed in Wikipedia:County Antrim or on any other listing of localities in County Antrim.
- If the category does not concern the locality but the family, there are both Boreland and Borland families in Northern Ireland, some of them from Antrim. But then fhe category should be Category:Boreland family from Antrim County. Do we have categories in which families are separated by location? Otherwise the category is useless as it is unclear what it is about. Afil 18:37, August 18, 2011 (UTC)
Your last paragraph gets close. We do have categories in which surnames (and sometimes families) are distinguished by location; very handy for a searcher who knows his ancestors came from a particular place and wants to see them listed without others of the same surname who were probably not from there. See Project:Surname in place; I hope you haven't deleted links to the matching category. Ideally such categories will be unnecessary when SMW is fully functional. However, the suggested Category:Boreland family from Antrim County should not exist, for three reasons:
- The word "family" is unnecessarily exclusive and/or ambiguous; even "families" would exclude individuals who might end up being connected.
- The word "from" before a place name is too ambiguous for a serious genealogical publication, despite its use on Wikipedia in that context.
- Antrim, the county that contains the town of the same name, is "County Antrim", matching most other county names for Ireland and a few for the UK. I may check whether the one with "Antrim" was a duplicate or a reference to the town.
-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 12:04, August 19, 2011 (UTC)
Info pages[]
I see some info pages coming up for deletion. Are they random, with errors, or are they part of a wholesale removal? If it's the latter, there should be serious discussions: some still contribute to hndis pages, and all contribute to our number of "total articles", a number that keeps us impressively close to the top of Wikia's list of big wikis and therefore probably getting more attention than a little wiki might (and a number that will soon reach six digits and therefore be even more impressive). -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 03:08, August 23, 2011 (UTC)
- So far, I have marked a few, when I know that the information they include is out-of-date. I don't think we should rely on them for hndis pages, because they will fall out-of-date all the while. Thurstan 04:03, August 23, 2011 (UTC)
- By "out-of-date" I trust that you mean "inaccurate or incomplete, and superseded [sic] by an SMW page". That's OK if you're giving them individual attention. (The most recent one I noticed was a "Lees", which looked like one of my wife's relatives, but I see that it's mostly yours or Phloxbot's.) -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 04:32, August 23, 2011 (UTC)
Empty categories[]
In a growing wiki, the following is unlikely to be an adequate reason for deleting a category that someone has created:
This page is a candidate for deletion. The reason given is: Empty category.
Categories that are expected to be used when more content is added to the wiki, particularly if there are similar categories they should match or run parallel to, are often created with standard wording and/or standard parent categories, so that there is no need for head-scratching and inconsistencies when the content for the categories finally arrives.
-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 23:35, November 26, 2011 (UTC)
If that is what you think, then I suggest that you revert the edits of User:Afil that made these into uncategorized categories. Alternatively, now that they have a category, we could leave them as they are until we need them. Thurstan 00:54, November 27, 2011 (UTC)
I may have some responsibility but not for all.
If you look at the existing ones, some definitely should be deleted:
- some are simply carried over by copying from Wikipedia, such as "Articles lacking in-text citations" simply because Wikifamily does not require in-text citations. This is also valid for "Articles with obsolete information" , "Articles to be merged", "Articles with trivia information", "References cleanup" a.o. If there are no articles for which these categories are used I do not see any reason for keeping them,
- some are hardly required and have been carried over mostly from wikicommons with various images. Such as "Chicken in heraldry" or "red, blue, white flags".
I really think that such categories are not useful in Familypedia.
- Some are incorrect, such as People from Switzerland which should be People of Switzerland (which is the form applied by Familypedia for all other countries and which exists already in Familypedia.
They should be deleted, but I cannot do it myself as I do not have administrator privileges.
Some are remains of the discussion we had about naming the categories simply Settled (or established) in... or Settlements established in .... or States or Territories established in... My understanding was that the acceptable categories for Familypedia were Settled in .... or Established in .... But I agree that the discussion has not led to any conclusion.
There are however categories which need further categorization such as Churches in Bulgaria, Marginal Seas of the Atlantic Ocean or others. There are however many uncaracterized articles which are not categories.
I was trying to put some order in the categories. But I have not been active in this field recently, because I do not want to disturb anybody. Just tell me what you want me to do, if anything, or tell me to keep away and not touch categories.Afil 02:26, December 19, 2011 (UTC)
Gedcom to Wiki at Familypedia[]
Gedcom to Wiki at Familypedia is something we want to have working eventually. Unless we have another page with essentially the same name, it's silly to delete this one.
Deleting or substantially qualifying its current content is quite another matter. At least 99% of us don't want a procedure that produces info pages, for example, even though that was an improvement on the original procedure by User:Yewenyi. I'd like to see someobody with programming skills examine the page and set out ways in which Fred's considerable work might be the basis of an eventual solution, producing facts pages each with three standard subpages (or, where duplicates are found or suspected, producing additions to existing pages).
User:rtol spent some time evaluating this sort of thing. His input here would be very welcome.
-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 01:30, January 11, 2012 (UTC)