WeRelate:Source renaming project

From WeRelate

We have nearly 1 million Source pages in the wiki, and most of them pre-date our new source page titling rules. Because of this, we need to rename them. Renaming will be done automatically, but it will require some human help to review the proposed renamings to ensure they are correct. This is a huge project, and we need your help to complete it.

Renaming the existing sources will be a big help for new users. Having so many sources that don't currently follow the titling rules makes learning how to create new source pages correctly very difficult. Renaming the sources will also make finding sources and identifying duplicate sources easier, and helps prepare the way for automatically generating source citations.

Contents

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New source page title rules

The new rules construct the source page title from various fields in the source depending upon the source type:

Source type Source page title
Books and Articles Author. Title
Government / Church records Place covered. Title
Newspapers Title (Place issued)
Periodicals Title (Publisher)
Miscellaneous/Unknown Author. Title


Ultimately source citations will be generated from various fields in the source depending upon the source type. It is important for source pages to have the correct field values so that the generated citation texts will be correct.

During the automated renaming, for sources of type "Miscellaneous" (the majority of the sources) the system will attempt to guess the correct source type by looking at the source author and will rename the source page accordingly.

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Review process

We would like to start the automated renaming by the end of August, hopefully starting sometime August 24-28. Below are links to lists of page renamings, where you can see the current and renamed source page titles. The lists have been created based upon the last person to modify the source.

If you see your name in the list, would you please

If you do not see your name in the list or if you finish your list and would like to help out, would you please

For each source, the lists contain a link to a source page showing the current title, followed by the new title underneath. If the new title is incorrect, please edit the source page and set the source type, title, author, place covered and/or place issued fields so that the new title will be generated correctly according to the rules in the table above. You don't need to (and shouldn't) rename the source. It will be renamed according to the rules in the table above next week.

The lists will be refreshed every morning so you will be able to see the results of your changes from the previous day.

If you have general comments or questions on the process, or if you notice any systemic problems during your review, please leave a message on the talk page.

Thank you!

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Renamings to review

Sources that other people have edited or someone links to:

these lists used to contain 1000 sources each; they have been split in half so that each list now contains 500 sources to review.

Sources that are neither human-edited nor are linked to:

You may notice that User:Dallan, User:Solveig, or User:Taylor have already fixed some of the sources in your list. This is because we are working on separate lists that show likely problems or show sources with a source type of something other than "Website" that are linked to rootsweb or other websites. These lists overlap somewhat with the lists above, but they don't include all of the potential problems. That's why we need people to review the lists above.

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Duplicates

It's likely that the renaming process will attempt to rename several sources that currently have different titles to the same title. Dallan will post a list of these "possible duplicate" sources on Friday, August 21. We'll ask people to review and possibly merge these sources once the list is posted.

Ok, this project is much larger than I originally thought. I'll hold off on the duplicates for a week. Once we get the sources reviewed we can start renaming the non-duplicates, which are the vast majority. We can then figure out what to do with the duplicates the beginning of September.--Dallan 00:01, 21 August 2009 (EDT)
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More on duplicates

I've narrowed the duplicates list down to roughly 600 sets. I don't expect the list to change from here on out. Each set of duplicates will need to be resolved one way other another, either by:

The duplicates list is refreshed each morning, so duplicates that have been resolved will be removed from the list the following day.

I'd like to divide the duplicates list into the following segments so that multiple people can work on it without stepping on each others' toes. Could someone please sign up for each segment below? Thank you!

The last list has some authors with really long names; if you shorten the author name the system will be able to include enough of the source title in the page title that the page title will become unique

--Dallan 18:28, 31 August 2009 (EDT)

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Various source lists

Website sources

Which of these should we delete, and which should we change to a source type of Miscellaneous?
Many of these should be changed to "Repositories" rather than remain as "Sources" (even as "Finding Aid" sources) --BobC 14:29, 27 August 2009 (EDT)
Due to the length of the notes previously here I transferred the discussion relating to this Other Subject list from the project page to the talk page --BobC 12:47, 21 September 2009 (EDT)


Miscellaneous sources having a human author and a record-oriented subject (10% sample of all Misc sources)

We're considering titling these sources using place-title format.
We're planning to title these sources using author-title format.

Manuscripts

Should we remove the Manuscript collection source type, or rename it to Manuscripts?
I am surprised during my review of LDS holdings during the source renaming project review how much of their collection is identified as manuscripts. Since the Manuscript source type was removed in the past couple weeks I have been saving them as Miscellaneous sources instead. Maybe in the broad scope of source documentation, true documented manuscripts are a miniscule percent and can be considered Miscellaneous source types. You decide. --BobC 16:44, 1 September 2009 (EDT)
I think Miscellaneous is alright for them. I wonder how many of the things the FHLC calls "manuscripts" would be classified as "records" in our nomenclature. I don't know. I think that reducing the number of source-type options is worthwhile if we can remove something that isn't used widely overall.--Dallan 22:17, 1 September 2009 (EDT)
I think many of the Manuscripts are actually private records that were microfilmed at historical societies or some similar path, at least the ones I've seen lately. So they're probably closest to books (well, really, to the websites we've deleted since a lot of them are like 4 pages, but that's too hard to figure out).--Amelia 00:51, 2 September 2009 (EDT)

Periodicals

Will be titled using "title (publisher)" format

US County Censuses

Should we title these using "NNNN U.S. Census Population Schedule"?
Retrieved from "http://www.werelate.org/wiki/WeRelate:Source_renaming_project"
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