Surname in place articles or categories have a form such as Coker in Alabama. (Please avoid creating wordier or other longer variants such as Coker families in Alabama or Cokers in Alabama; they may lead to time-wasting duplication.) For a common surname over a large area, such as Brown in England, such pages may become unworkably large and might be best just as categories used only for collecting subcategories; but we have no space limitations, so such articles can be created and may be useful. That policy may change if we see that there are too many or that some are too large to be useful.
The "place" name should be exactly as on the article for the place, so as to minimize the chance of wasteful duplication.
Categorizing such pages[]
Put each such article in:
- the category for its surname (with piped link for the place using an asterisk)
- the category for a larger area (with piped link for the place the article is about)
- the category for "Resided in ..." (with piped link for the surname)
- Category:Surnames by place
The above example could thereby have this:
[[Category:Coker (surname)|*Alabama]] -- (the "*Alabama" at the end will list all places before individuals) [[Category:Coker in the United States|Alabama]] [[Category:Resided in Alabama|Coker]] -- (the "|Coker" will list a "surname in place" article before Coker individuals' articles) [[Category:Surnames by place]]
Such articles can link to articles for similar names in the same or nearby places.
You can keep them as articles rather than categories until they get big, at which time there should be enough items to show which "subdivisions" of place could be useful and justify the creation of a category.
Any such category should ideally have an article of the same "pagename" potentially covering all individuals and families who are in the category, but to minimize confusion the article should be only in its primary category, not the other categories that that category is in.
Categories can have parent categories for larger areas following a similar pattern.
Where the articles and categories are down at or below county level, they should integrate with some of the three dozen pages that are linked from each county navigation box (as discussed under Category:County navigation templates.
Suggested basic format[]
Copy the following straight off this page (not the edit box) and paste it into the article page as a starter:
<!-- replace the dot trios with the surname --> {{TOCright}}
This page collects information about people with surname ...
who were known or believed to have lived in [[]].<!-- placename
inside those brackets-->
''Interested logged-in users are welcome to sign contributions
on this article or its Talk page,
''for ease of contact
(four tildes - ~~~~
- or hit the signature button).''
==Individuals or families==
<!-- show links to individual or family group pages on this wiki-->
*
==See also==
<!-- this may link to other "surname in place" pages on this site with
variant names at the same place, or the same surname in nearby areas -->
*
==External links==
<!-- links outside this wiki, e.g. Wikipedia "family" articles -->
*
[[Category:... (surname)|*]] <!-- add the place name after the star,
to collect the places before the individuals -->
[[Category:... in ''larger area such as country''|''placename'']]
<!-- In THIS link, replace the dot trio with the
place name -->[[Category:Resided in ...]]
[[Category:Surnames by place]]
How Semantic MediaWiki may affect these pages[]
Ideally we will be able to dispense with these when SMW is fully functional; see Help:Concepts and http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Surname#Searching_with_Semantic_MediaWiki.
We can already create pages similar to Bdm subpages. See {{Show surname in county}}.