A few weeks ago one of our main templates was upgraded significantly. Form:Person used to put pages automatically into the appropriate category for the surname. Now it does the same for births and deaths by year and by locality.
The new "year" assignments are no problem. Nobody argues about what to call the page for 1789.
The localities, however, can be a problem. If I fill in a form saying somebody was born in "Tiverton, Devon", then, as soon as the page or edit is published, the page will be in a real or wanted Category:Born in Tiverton, Devon. Looks fine on the surface?? The problem is that "we" may not want that category because we may have decided (following Wikipedia) that that locality in Devon should be just "Tiverton", so that the matching birth category pagename should be "Born in Tiverton".
If our most enthusiastic processors of wanted categories jump on that possibly new category and give it parent categories, there may be much duplication and waste of time.
One solution, proposed by one of our most prolific and knowledgeable contributors, is to insist that localities for birth and death must use the correct Familypedia place name right from the start. So what do I have to do with my form for a new person with birth and death localities? I have to open a new window (slowing my computer even further) and search for each name in Familypedia. If the search box always worked properly and was absolutely up-to-the-minute, that would work and might be tolerable - until I proposed a locality that was not in Familypedia, at which time I might remember that for most countries in the world we use the Wikipedia name, so I might try to find the locality in Wikipedia. OR - I might decide "Bother this: I'm just an ordinary genealogist, trying to record my family history for the benefit of my parents' great-grandchildren, and I want to create a page with the facts as I understand them. If you programmers want to waste your time giving parent categories to a category I did not actively create, that's your problem, and I'm not going to fluff around trying to fit into your scheme of things when I just want my page created as fast as convenient. Maybe you programmers can check the page when I'm done, and create a category redirect to your preferred category name, so that other people like me won't innocently give you the same problem again. Then you can politely post to my talk page requesting that I use the "correct" name in future, and maybe I'll remember. If you ask very nicely I may even "correct" it next time I edit the page I've just created, but I suspect that you can organise a bot to do batches of such corrections with much less work for all of us."
-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 09:35, December 19, 2013 (UTC)