Person talk:Mary Stewart (140)

Incorrect use of alt_fact - question mark? [17 March 2022]

(directed to User:DataAnalyst who I will notify) Regarding the history diff → https://www.werelate.org/w/index.php?title=Person%3AMary_Stewart_%28140%29&diff=27021223&oldid=27020486

I understand the desire NOT to use "Cal" for non-exact dates. I see from Help:Conventions/Date#Calculated that "The modifier "Cal" should be used when a date has been calculated by adding or subtracting an exact number of years, months and days from a precise date." I don't 100% agree, but can understand the logic.

I'm less sure about the dropping of "Mary E. Stewart" as an alt_name ... looking at Help:Conventions/Person_name#Alternate_names would seem to not strictly exclude the type of alt_name I added. My rationale, though -- I do not know whether either the WeRelate search or other searches elsewhere will find "Mary Ellen" if "Mary E." is added as a search term. For sure, if one adds "Mary E.", then I'm pretty sure that it will find "Mary Ellen", but I'm not sure of the other way around. That is why I've added that type of alt_name. Not sure what the meaning of "should not be confused with a source" means. My logic with respect to search capabilities extends to "let's represent all the ways the name has been represented in valid sources"; not "let's put all potential permutations" — I do only put variations that appear in sources. --ceyockey 00:52, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Hi. I didn't think about searching, only about the actual data. And in fact, WeRelate is not good at interpreting middle names as middle initials or vice versa. In other words, WeRelate doesn't find or prioritize (depending on the search option selected) "Mary Ellen" when you search for "Mary E" or "Mary E" when you search for "Mary Ellen". But the proper way to handle this isn't to enter every possible variation of someone's initials, because that is just noise on the page and obviously you're one of the few to think that way. I'll have to look at how Search is coded to see if it can be improved, but I'm not sure how feasible it will be. Also, I'm not likely to get to this any time soon. In the meantime, the appropriate approach is to minimize using the middle name/initial when searching. I know that is less than ideal.--DataAnalyst 18:02, 17 March 2022 (UTC)