Person talk:Greetje AEdes (2)

Dutch surnames [9 July 2016]

In response to Pkeegstra's comment on my User page, I want to say, first of all, that I am not an expert in Dutch surnames, and I am not trying to step on toes with the re-titling of these Dutch pages with the Æ-ligature surnames. I am aware of what it is and how it is also acceptable to write it as "Æ" or "AE" or "Ae".

My bold decision to re-title came mainly from a page management standpoint and as the result of a massive undertaking to address the lingering backlog we have with categories that need attention from our main list, WeRelate:Categories. It was on this list that the "AE*** surname" and "AE*** in Place" categories stood out and used to exist in red with only a few members, before I did the re-titling to move the pages into the respective Ae*** categories.

As an aside, I am not a big fan of using Categories for Surnames here anyway, as I have yet to see a situation in which a simple Search couldn't return the same or better results (ex. Category:Aedes surname vs Search for Aedes surname ). BUT that was not my decision, so now we are left with a massive manual clean up list for orphaned surname categories for single variant and single variant-in-multiple Places, etc. More are auto-generated every day, and I am not sure we will ever catch up. There really should be a bot in place for the clean up now and programming on the front end to prevent this from occurring any further.

So anyway - since it is my understanding that auto-generated surname categories are established based on page title as opposed to Surname Field entries, since they are case-sensitive, and since "Ae" is also an acceptable form of the Æ-ligature, I made a bold decision to re-title the AE*** pages, so that they would show up in the Ae*** category for those interested in Surname Æ/AE/Ae***.

As I got halfway through the re-titling, I realized that I should probably leave an AE or Æ variant on the page. From that point on, I did so. I planned to go back to the first ones I missed today to cover that aspect. I think it is also important to point out that most of these pages had no citations on them to any Sources showing any form of the variant - hence the addition of the Sources Needed template. I don't think folks should get offended when that template is added. It is simply a flag that there is more work to be done.

I hope this explains why the re-titling was done. I hope it also serves as a reminder that the Page Title is mostly a page management tool and that it does not have to represent whatever preferred name you wish to use in your page presentation. We all know that different records can show many different variations of a name, so one record does not always mean that the person always spelled their name that way - if they knew how to spell at all :). Folks can get too hung up on spelling sometimes. What is mostly important is that the person is connected to the correct people and events and that these connections are provable.

Having said all this, I also want to add, that my interest in these pages is only from a site maintenance standpoint and from the desire to create meaningful and effective pages for our readers. If this is a case where those interested in the AE*** pages want to insist on separating those pages into their own surname category, my efforts can be reversed.
Respectfully, --cos1776 14:29, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for such an extensive note explaining your reasoning. I guess I was under the mistaken impression that these automated categories had been deactivated for precisely such reasons as the fact that these are not surnames. I didn't see any in the category that were anything but patronymics, and it is not obvious to me that there is value in aggregating them. (I may have made a suggestion at one point that each name should have two checkboxes "is hereditary surname" and "uses East Asian surname order" but neither suggestion ever got any traction. BTW, this should probably be discussed (or at least linked) on the talk page for the Dutch Portal. P.S. Apparently at least in modern Dutch it is OK to write "Ae" and "Oe" (in contrast to the 19th century Dutch I learned growing up in west Michigan), but for sure it is still mandatory to case the IJ-ligature as a unit. --pkeegstra 15:09, 9 July 2016 (UTC)