Category talk:Surnames

Recent CfD of all the Surnames by country cats

This decision is not acceptable for many surnames which are from a specific country or language. Having to search/browse through well over 12,000 surnames is not an acceptable way to handle this, and I think this upmerging is making things even more difficult. Instead of having "Surnames by country", I propose having "Surnames by language" as it is generally (not always, but generally) much easier to determine a language origin for names (especially Asian names, which is what I generally deal with). ···日本穣^? · Talk to Nihonjoe 04:52, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

• That conforms with many of the !votes on the discussion. Let's propose a reasonable structure, and a reasonable means of achieving it.
  --William Allen Simpson (talk) 16:41, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

• I agree with Nihonjoe - it's not acceptable to just delete the whole scheme. This is a poorly thought out decision that has led to a mess. If a better structure was needed then one should have been worked out before everything was deleted. Haukur (talk) 20:33, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

• As noted, that was tagged on June 6th and 7th (taking over 12 hours of my time), and not closed until June 24th – 11 more days than the normal 7 days. There was plenty of time for discussion, and lots of discussion. There were several ideas on how to proceed. It was a well-thought-out decision, with an extensive closing rationale. It reached the same conclusion as a previous nomination. Two for two!
  --William Allen Simpson (talk) 05:04, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

I should also note that in many/most cases, Cydebot's removal of Category:Japanese surnames has removed the only Japan-related category on the article, which is also not acceptable. There should be some Japan-related category on all of them, so if not Category:Japanese surnames, what do people propose? This poorly-thought-out decision is causing a huge mess. ···日本穣^? · Talk to Nihonjoe 05:06, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

• You don't link to "the article". It's certainly acceptable for articles that aren't Japanese-language. It's actually a well-thought-out decision, the second in a series (fooian names was deleted some weeks ago).
  --William Allen Simpson (talk) 16:41, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

But all of the ones where the Japanese surnames category were removed were Japanese surnames, and now there are no Japan-related categories on them, making them that much harder to locate. Having appropriate categories on articles is perfectly acceptable, and the aftermath of this decision is that there are no longer all the appropriate categories on the articles. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nihonjoe (talk • contribs) 2009-06-24 17:46:18

Another concern: this discussion from a little over two years ago eliminated the "List of X surnames" articles, and now this discussion has eliminated the categories into which they were sorted. We need to figure out some way of indicating the origin of these names and make it easy to find all of the names with the same origin, but if we can't use lists and we can't use categories, what other ways are there? ···日本穣^? · Talk to Nihonjoe 05:20, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

• Those lists were moved cross-wiki to en.wiktionary. There's no reason to keep the same lists in two projects. So, you should use the lists there. Should all the surname articles be moved to en.wiktionary, too?
  --William Allen Simpson (talk) 16:41, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

You're missing the point. The only two methods of organizing the articles have been removed (categorization and making a list of them). There's plenty of reason to have the same lists on two projects, the main one being that people who come here aren't very likely to go to Wiktionary to search for what they want. And no, the surname articles should not be moved to Wiktionary as they aren't definitions generally (which is all that should be on Wiktionary). ···日本穣^? · Talk to Nihonjoe 17:46, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

User:Good Olfactory has kindly pointed out that the recently deleted information about national surname categories is still available in the contribution history of Cydebot. This is welcome news, but still not very easy to use. I just searched it for the Hungarian surnames, as an example. There were 59 entries. Nearly all of these were unambiguously Hungarian-language names, with perhaps 5 exceptions. So would it be possible for a bot-writer to use an existing or new bot to reinstate these as some "category:Hungarian-language surnames" or the like? (I would then willingly deal with the exceptions). If this could be done, it would allay my misgivings about recent changes, and we could attempt similar processes, where necessary, for the other languages affected. SamuelTheGhost (talk) 13:08, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

One concern I have in implementing an automated process (and one reason I didn't go forward with a straight rename) is precisely because of the exceptions. These articles really do need to be gone through one by one and the ones that are not applicable to "by language" do need to be removed from the applicable categories. Users should also be checking for reliable, verifiable sources, etc. in each article, which are lacking in a large number. I agree that it's a large task, but it's one that needs to be done to resolve the pre-existing problems. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 21:57, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Let's continue to consider the specific case of the Hungarian names. I'm not clear exactly what you are suggesting I should do. I can't deal with the exceptional cases at the moment, because the categories have all been flattened to "surname". As for references, I don't know how to add them to categories, so I'd be grateful if you could advise me on that. SamuelTheGhost (talk) 22:17, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Match wiktionary categories by language

Since the above discussion mentions that the lists of names were moved to Wiktionary, it seems that matching the category scheme there would be best for finding related information.

Wiktionary uses names by language, given names by language, and surnames by language. Is everybody agreed that we can/should use "by language" here, too?
--William Allen Simpson (talk) 17:59, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

I think that will work, as long as someone doesn't get it into their head that we can only have one category with 13,000+ articles in it (the problem we currently have). ···日本穣^? · Talk to Nihonjoe 18:27, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

• A single category is still needed, as that aggregates the population from the template.
  --William Allen Simpson (talk) 20:29, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

We can keep this category as the main category, but I think we need subcategories to diffuse this category into more manageable chunks. ···日本穣^? · Talk to Nihonjoe 21:19, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

• No, the main category should have (and has always had) the whole set of surnames, and the others will be "distinguished subcategories" according to the guidelines. Folks shouldn't have to guess which subcategory has the names, and some names will be in more than one subcategory.
  --William Allen Simpson (talk) 04:49, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

I propose that we begin creating categories named "Barian-language surnames". That should be more clear, and avoid the utter chaos that ensued with combination "nationality", "ethnicity", "culture", and "regional" categories. Not to mention that there were some languages already mixed in, too.
--William Allen Simpson (talk) 20:29, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

I don't think we need to hyphenate it. ···日本穣^? · Talk to Nihonjoe 21:17, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

(Such categories are typically hyphenated b/c the phrase is an adjectival. See, e.g., Category:Japanese-language media, etc.) Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 21:42, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Well, I guess it's a stylistic thing. I subscribe to the "let's lose the hyphens whenever possible" theory. ···日本穣^? · Talk to Nihonjoe 21:45, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

I see. I think it's actually more of an English thing, but whatever. If they are lost, they will likely just be added in again as speedy rename "spelling error" corrections. Carry on. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 23:19, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

• Any progress on Category:Japanese-language surnames?
  --William Allen Simpson (talk) 04:49, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

"By language" head category

For all the reasons I'd previously expressed in that marathon CFD discussion, recently closed, the "by country" cat structure had to go, and be replaced with "by language" structure. I'd also agree with including explicit reference to 'language' in the subcat names, so there'd be much less chance of misuse/misinterpretation. So "Barian-language surnames" seems sensible and succinct enough.

Since the Category:Surnames by culture structure is still retained, there should probably also be in parallel a "by language" head category, which would contain all the Barian-language surnames subcats. Question is, what would be the best name for that head category: Category:Surnames by language, Category:Surnames by language origin, Category:Surnames by linguistic origin, or some other..?--cjllw ʘ TALK 04:52, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

• I'd prefer the simpler Category:Surnames by language. We should specify "linguistic origin" in the category headers, rather than the title. I'd like to parallel wiktionary:Category:Surnames and wiktionary:Category:Surnames by language, so the interwiki sister templates (and searches) work better. (Category:Surnames by culture is messy and ill-defined. Wiktionary has nothing "by culture".)
  --William Allen Simpson (talk) 05:31, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

• I made Category:Surnames by language, with a cross-wiki link to the parallel wiktionary category. Linguistic is a disambiguation page, so I've changed to "language origin", but that seems stilted. Could somebody clarify the text wording there?
  --William Allen Simpson (talk) 06:16, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

I noticed the cats at Wiktionary are divided even further. wiktionary:Category:English surnames is subdivided into cats named liked wiktionary:Category:English surnames from Arabic and so-on. This looks good to me and easy for editors to understand. So a surname like Gregory, which i assume can be classified as an 'English surname', would be categorised as wiktionary:Category:English surnames from Greek. And all the variations from different languages listed, would follow along the same lines (example: Grégoire would be categorised wiktionary:Category:French surnames from Latin. So we just follow what our sources tell us of the linguistic origin of the name. If we don't have a good source for the linguistic origin then i suppose we just use a cat like wiktionary:Category:English surnames. This way of doing it looks good to me. I think that some 'culure' cats could be quite useful, but over time i suspect they could just devolve back into 'country' cats. So they should be watched. It is already happening, see how today someone just created Category:Vietnamese surnames and Category:Japanese surnames. Those ought to be deleted re-named per Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2009 June 25#Surnames by language.--Celtus (talk) 08:28, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

DRV on categories

• See Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2009 June 25#Category:Surnames by country. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 22:22, 25 June 2009 (UTC)